My First Name

I was given the name David when I was born. In 1965 it was the third most popular boy’s name in the UK, behind Michael and John. In the decade as a whole it was the top baby name in the UK. As a result there were a good sprinkling of Davids everywhere I went. It is a ‘classless’ name in that you can’t tell where a David might come from in the social hierarchy. There would have been as many Davids in the comprehensives as there were in the Public schools. Interestingly, if I had been a girl I would have been given the name Jane, the 7th most popular name for girls during the decade.

David is a Hebrew name meaning Beloved although I never really lived up to that! I am interested to find out that it also means ‘to boil’ more appropriately as I often found myself boiling over! I think it’s interesting how having a common name makes you one of the masses. Now, obviously there have been famous people called David throughout history, but its ubiquity means that you are much more likely to fade into the background of life.  In the Scout movement and in Polytechnic I was almost always called Dave but I am not a fan of the shortened version. To me, Dave sounds quite common – in the class context rather than its ubiquity – and indicates a person who is in some way trying too hard to fit in. I never went as far as telling people not to call me that, but I never really took to it.

Funnily enough, it was my middle name that attracted the most attention, generally negative, because I was given my Dad’s name for my middle one, as was common at the time, so I was David Gerald. Unlike me, he disliked the full version of his name and called himself Gerry from very early on. That suited him far more than Gerald would have done because he was always at the centre of everything in social terms.

As a name, David is OK and I have just accepted it over the years without question, but I wonder what would have happened if I had been given a more unusual name. Would I have been a different person? It’s an interesting thought experiment but how would you go about pursuing it?