What’s in a Name?

It had been a splendid evening. The wine and chat flowed freely, the food was delicious, and the sun beamed glowingly outside, as dusk settled slowly on the Scottish Highlands. It was full summer, still light at eleven o’clock, so after tidying away the dishes, my hosts and I settled down with a wee dram to watch the moors turn ever more golden.

And then the lady of the house dropped her bombshell.

‘I know we’ve been friends for a long while now’, she said, ‘but I have to admit, I’ve always had a problem with you’.

I shifted uneasily on the tartan sofa. What dreadful calumny had I committed? Were my table manners odious, my opinions otiose? Had I been hateful during the haggis? Noxious during the neeps? Well, quite possibly, but that wasn’t the reason for her opprobrium.

‘It’s because of your name’.

At first I was puzzled. What’s wrong with Paul? He was the hardest-working apostle, and better still, a Beatle. How could anyone hate that name? But then I realised; this was not a Pauline conversion, from first name friend to foe. My last name was to blame.

She explained that at primary school they had a nursery rhyme to which they skipped in the playground, which went ‘never trust a Campbell, never trust a Campbell’. 

‘I really like you’, she said, ‘but I am constantly aware of your name’.

How heavy hangs the hand of history. Three hundred years earlier, another Scottish dinner party had taken place, not far away in the Highlands. The hosts had invited the neighbours round to their glen. They plied them with food and drink, then suggested they stay over, to sleep it off. Then, they murdered them in their beds. Thirty-eight of them.

It was 1692. Different times, for sure; no house prices or school fees to talk about over the sauvignon blanc and Ottolenghi lamb casserole. But like a modern dinner party, this awful event, known as The Glencoe Massacre, did create a hangover. The victims were all members of the Macdonald clan. And, sad to say, the murderers were all Campbells.

I apologised to my hostess, and promised not to commit any massacres in their house. And then I fell to thinking. I am obviously very sorry this happened, just as I am disappointed that the previous year, the Macdonalds did the same thing to the Campbells, which somehow never gets reported; but to be honest, I do not feel all that personally responsible. First, it was a very long time ago. Second, I’m as Scottish as roast beef; I was born and raised in England, and my family has been hanging around Newcastle upon Tyne since the early nineteenth century, which was where my father got stuck when he tried to do the family tree. Blaming me for the massacre would be a bit like cursing everyone called Henry for having too many wives and killing a brace of them. It’s as well the perpetrators were not called Smith or Jones, as billions would be eternally culpable. For, it transpires, the passage of time does not excuse me, a mere Sassenach, the inherited guilt of Scottish thugs who happened to have the same last name.

Far from it. I used to be a member of a ski club in Manchester, travelling by bus to Scotland every weekend. This was in the olden days when they had a thing called ‘winter’ which featured a quaint invention known as ‘snow’. We usually skied on Cairngorm, where the bar in the hotel in Kingussie stayed open awful late (which was awful good, until the next morning). But this time we were off to a different resort, which had a fearsome run called The Flypaper, alleged to be the steepest trail in Europe. Where was this vertiginous piste? You guessed it; Glencoe. 

We were piling up the motorway when the club organiser came up to have a quiet word.

‘Paul, when we arrive in the hotel, sign in under a different name, and don’t pay by cheque’.

‘Seriously?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes’, he replied. ‘They don’t like Campbells in Glencoe’.  

This happened two hundred and ninety-one years after the massacre.

And once I was chatting to a nice Scottish bloke about rugby. England were about to play Scotland, and I was trying to make polite, jokey conversation. ‘It’s tricky for me’, I said, thinking this would be pleasant, phatic communication. ‘I was born in England, close to Scotland, and my last name is Campbell. So when England play Scotland, I never know which team to support’.

‘Aye’, he replied, dourly. ‘The Campbells have always had that problem’.  

See: I’m guilty as not charged. Eternally responsible for the past. Culpable, beyond other people’s grave. The Glencoe Massacre was nothing to do with me, ok? But, apparently, it was. And is. And evermore shall be.

I suppose this deep-seated and irrational enmity for strangers, based on an accident of birth, should not come as much of a surprise. Human beings like to hate, for some reason, and the more atavistic the ‘slight’, the more the ridiculous loathing bubbles over. It’s like the problem with neighbours. People from Newcastle (Geordies) have spent centuries hating those from Sunderland (Mackems), which is a few miles away. And vice versa, of course. The enmity breaks out every derby match in pointless violence. But really, we have masses in common – for example, the way we are always treated badly by southerners. If we were sensible, we would band together to hate everyone from Surrey, what with their swanky cars … and jobs … and nice teeth. But I guess that’s too far away; it’s far easier to loathe, locally; to hate, historically.  

For similar reasons, both proximate and historical, the French hate the English (almost as much as the Scots do), rugby union players are supposed to detest rugby league, north Londoners abhor those from ‘sarf of the river’, and Manhattanites cannot abide Bridge and Tunnel people. Especially from Jersey. Though that’s perfectly reasonable, come to think of it. As an Oxford man I’m traditionally meant to despise Cambridge, call it ‘Fenbog University’, and snort how they stand on the wrong end of a punt. But I went there recently to give a lecture. It seemed rather nice to me. (Don’t tell anyone).

Tribal hatred is of course particularly extreme in politics. Dems hate the GOP (though not as much as today’s GOP hates the Dems), Tories hate Labour, and everyone hates the Greens. This is turning into a song by Tom Lehrer. I used to think people went into politics to make the world a better place, but apparently not: it’s to find someone to despise. As soon as they declare their allegiance, they all join the visceral party.

We should deprecate this modern version of clan warfare. It’s irrational and unintelligent. It amplifies difference on spurious grounds. Why can we not all just listen to each other, politely demur if appropriate, and smile? Forgive and forget the past? Get angry about important stuff, like war and famine and climate change, not someone’s name, or whether or not they hold a scrum, or live down the road?

Having gone through life reviled by strangers, eternally despised because of something that people who bear no relation to me did a million years ago, I decided there’s only one solution. I’ll become a snowflake. Everyone’s doing it, after all. I’ll go around saying ‘Being a Campbell is … well, it’s just not good for my mental health’. These days, that’s the ultimate defence. Warming to my theme, I concluded that to recover from the emotional mauling of decades, I would need many months off work (paid of course), and a long course of therapy, preferably in Bali or somewhere like that. Not England anyway – and especially not this summer.

But then I realised that no amount of ‘me time’, however hot or distant, is likely to make a difference. Why? Because the name in my passport will remain the same. I’ll come home to the same opprobrium. 

So, after much thought, I have decided to change my name. Hereafter, I shall be called Nigel Farage. Then, if people hate me, at least it’ll be deserved.

(Nice tartan though).