Anglicising your name is not always the best move if you are in business (Letters, 15 March). A friend of mine, now dead, whose family came from Switzerland decided, with the second world war looming, to change their name. Johann Schmid became John Smith. After the war he started his own heating and plumbing business and, to avoid being lost among the thousands of Smiths in the London directory, prospered by changing his name back to Schmid.
Peter Bird
Fakenham, Norfolk
• Some immigrants simply adopted the name of whatever town they found themselves in. I understand this worked pretty well for a family called Saxe-Coburg.
John Cregan
Farnham, Surrey
• Good to see that, underneath it all, Tony Blair still cleaves to his socialist roots (The former prime minister’s family has built a £27m property portfolio, 15 March).
Malcolm Brown
Kingston upon Thames, Surrey
• John Richards (Letters, 14 March) is mistaken. The Indian railways were not built mainly to transport plundered raw materials. They were built to transport troops.
John Batts
Banbury, Oxfordshire
• Andrew MacGregor (Letters, 15 March) raises the question of loose-bottomed baking tins when calculating quantities with water rather than mathematics. At school I was taught to calculate how long it would take to fill a bath, with the plug out. I forget the formula, so when I have this problem, instead of using water, I refer to my Good Housekeeping Complete Book of Cake Decorating, which has a handy conversion chart.
Elaine Hope
Darlington
• When I did my O-levels in the 60s in Scotland, I achieved separate passes in both mathematics and arithmetic, exactly as proposed by Jeanne Warren (Letters, 15 March). Another one-up to the Scottish education system?
Jill Wallis
Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire
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