A few more responses have come in on recent topics. Maxine Gordon contacted me about the convention of incorporating a maiden name into a child’s given name: “Both my sister and I and my best friend from Kirkcaldy have this tradition. We have our grandma’s maiden names as our middle names…I think it was unusual and raised some eyebrows at school etc, so probably dying out even in the 1970s. We might have been a last generation – my mum doesn’t even have a middle name.”
Maxine mentioned something which had not before occurred to me: “As kids you don’t want to stand out, so when they read your name at primary school and people laughed, that wasn’t so nice.” An unusual name certainly could make you a target for mockery among your childhood peers.
Until Fiona White contacted me, I had only come across the maiden name used as a middle name. But her family did something different: “My brother was given my mum’s maiden name as his first name – Innes.” Like Maxine’s family, the name Innes is Scottish. Are there more maiden names given as first names in that part of the world I wonder?
A couple of weeks ago I told the story of Lynn Catena’s Uncle Arthur, who was killed at age 24 while serving in the North Africa campaign in WWII. The war generation are notably reluctant to talk about their experiences. While Clare Proctor was watching the recent Remembrance commemorations, she was particularly captivated by the recollections of a veteran who, like her own father, had served in Burma (now Myanmar). “This veteran was saying that when returning from that war zone they were instructed by their superiors not to go home and talk about their war, because the people of Britain had suffered enough! So, he said, they never talked about it. My father certainly didn’t.”
She adds: “My cousin (30 years older than me) said our family did not celebrate VE Day because her Uncle Allan was still at war in the Far East. Their big day was VJ Day.” It’s satisfying to see that VJ Day is now being suitably commemorated, considering how many of our soldiers fought and died out there.
Robert Carter contacted me after seeing my piece about the Alamein Memorial a couple of weeks ago. Robert visited the Commonwealth, German, and Italian memorials and the Al Alamein Military Museum.
He says: “I was particularly interested to see the number of joint graves which were the last resting places of mainly armoured vehicle crews who presumably could not be separated because of the circumstances of their deaths. As a former soldier I thought it very apt that as they had fought and died together that they should be buried together.”
He adds: “The German and Italian memorials were built in the fifties which involved collecting the bodies from both nations that were widely distributed across the former battlefield and as a result many are listed as ‘Unknown’. The Italian memorial is, as you might expect, a tall very elegant building whereas the German is more sombre and fortress-like. Interestingly, inside the German building is a ring of sarcophagi, each one dedicated to each of the German states, ie Brandenberg, Mecklenburg, and so on, with a list of the servicemen from that state who died during the course of the battle…The museum was an excellent tribute to all of the nations involved with each being given equal status and range of exhibits.”
It is a sombre reminder that ordinary families on both sides of the conflict suffered equally with the loss of their loved ones.
When Lynn told me the story of her Uncle Arthur, I was saddened that I didn’t know what he looked like and assumed that I was unlikely to ever see a picture of him.
But I was wrong. Lynn found a photo and explains: “This is an old photo of Arthur Pearce that I took from my mum’s collection. She told me he wanted to be a career soldier. I believe, in this photo, he’d taken part in a military tattoo. RIP to the uncle I never met.”
Using his picture here is my small tribute to just one of the many young men who never came home.
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This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 5th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 3rd Dec 2025
The Countryman's Daughter 