The place where no one knows its name
Gorffwysfa is the proper name for the home of Canada’s prime minister
Canadians may not know it, the party leaders may not know it, but this is the biggest thing at stake in this election: Gorffwysfa.
That’s the virtually unknown proper name of 24 Sussex Drive, home of the Prime Minister. It is a Welsh word that — because of its tongue-twisting difficulty for English speakers — has been quietly struck from Canadian memory.
“The name Gorffwysfa would be very difficult for non-Welsh to pronounce as the Welsh vowels are pronounced differently to English ... they wouldn’t know that one ‘f’ is a ‘v’ sound and two ‘ffs’ are an English ‘f’ sound,” said Alison Lawson of the Ottawa Welsh Society.
In a national capital filled with official residences, 24 Sussex Drive is conspicuous for not having a name in general usage. The Governor General, for instance, lives at Rideau Hall, and the Leader of the Opposition lives at Stornoway.
Government sources — including the Prime Minister’s official website — claim that Gorffwysfa means “place of peace.”
Welsh sources contacted by the National Post, however, unanimously agreed the translation was wrong. In truth, Gorffwysfa carries the somewhat un-prime ministerial meaning of “resting place.”
The same name adorns several buildings in Wales, but they’re all retirement homes or bed and breakfasts, not grand seats of political power.
Never intended as a state residence, Gorffwysfa was built in 1868 by Joseph Merrill Currier, a Vermont-born lumber baron notable for a life strewn with tragedy.
An 1850s scarlet fever outbreak killed three of his four children, and his first wife died soon after.
Then, only two months after he remarried, his second wife was killed when she became caught in turbines at the grand opening of a Currier-financed flour mill.
“She was sucked in and smashed against a post, dying in front of her husband and all of their guests,” said an e-mail to the National Post by CPAC host Catherine Clark.
As a child, Clark lived in 24 Sussex during her father Joe’s brief time as Prime Minister, and she recently hosted an hour-long documentary on the mansion.
Gorffwysfa, said Clark, was Currier’s gift to his third wife who, fortunately, didn’t appear to be cursed by a tragic end.
Given its current usage, a more accurate Welsh name for 24 Sussex would be “Ystâd y Prif Weinidog” (Estate of the Prime Minister). However, with “weinidog” being pronounced exactly like “whiny dog,” it’s unlikely this Welsh name would have found mainstream acceptance either.
As for Gorffwysfa’s tricky pronunciation, the National Post got assistance from Gwyn Williams, 30, a Manchester-based audit manager who grew up in one of the 10 per cent of Welsh households who still speak exclusively in the country’s native tongue.
“It’s three syllables, with the emphasis/stress placed on the middling one: Gor-FFWYS-fa,” he said.
The first syllable is “ghorr. “With the Rs rolled ... but don’t linger on the Rs either,” said Williams.
Then comes “phoois” (“Again, don’t linger on the S either,” he said). And finally, “va.” Noted Melinda Gray, organizer for a coming Welsh studies conference at Harvard University: “It doesn’t look like an English word, I suppose; from the point of view of an English speaker, Welsh might seem bafflingly full of consonants, not understanding that the ‘w’ and the ‘y’ serve as vowels.”
“At least it doesn’t have any ‘Ll’s in it,” said Toronto-based Welsh speaker Hefina Phillips, writing in an e-mail to the National Post.
As Welsh place names go, though, Gorffwysfa is actually quite easy to master.
The absurdly complicated Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, for instance, has recently become the subject of a pronunciation challenge among TV weather presenters.
U.S. meteorologist Kyle Dennis, for one, recently earned the respect of Britain’s smallest country when he accurately recited the word on a South Carolina broadcast.
Regardless of how Englishspeakers stumble over Gorffwysfa, however, Catherine Clark said the name might simply have died with the house itself.
After the Currier family sold the house in 1902, it sat abandoned and forgotten for years until it was picked up by the Canadian government after the Second World War.
“It was gutted, entirely,” she said. “And thus, it really wasn’t Gorffwysfa anymore, it was just 24 Sussex Drive.”