Chapter and verse on Keats’s real name

QUESTION Is it true that John Keats’s father, changed their name from Keast? BEST-KNOWN for Ode To A Nightingale, John Keats (17951821) who died at just 25, is one of the English language’s most revered poets. His father Thomas (1768-1804) was a West Country lad who moved to London, and while a teenager was head ostler at a stable in Finsbury, now in London.

In around 1795, he married his boss’s daughter, 20-year-old Frances Jennings, and had five children: John, George (b.1797), Tom (b.1799), Edward (b.1801), and Frances Mary (b.1803).

Frances Mary remembered hearing as a child Thomas came from Cornwall, and a Thomas Keast is registered as having been born in 1768 in the parish of St Agnes. A Thomas Keast was baptised at Sennen near Lands’ End in 1776. Keast is a purely Cornish name and it seems quite possible it would have been changed to the more common Keats in London.

Amy Whittaker, Dorset. QUESTION Who has saved the most penalties in a football match? THE previous answer referenced four keepers who’d saved three penalties in normal time of a competitive match. One omission was Dundee United’s Cammy Bell who saved three penalties in a 3-1 win against Dunfermline. In September 2016, the United keeper saved three first-half penalties and kept opponents at bay after a United player was sent off.

Alex Christie, Dundee. QUESTION Does James Joyce have any famous quotes? FURTHER to previous answers, Joyce’s father famously offered this pithy observation on hearing that his son had run away from Ireland with a Miss Nora Barnacle. ‘Barnacle?’ sniffed John Joyce. ‘She’ll stick to him…’

A. Doyle, by email.