Where have all Garysthe gone?
Hollywood made it one of our favourite names. But now it’s on the brink of extinction . . .
Do you know anyone under the age of 40 named Gary? yes, there are plenty of middleaged Garys, from former footballer Gary Lineker, 54, to Take That’s Gary Barlow, 44, but the name has gone out of fashion for newborns.
of the 700,000 boys born in the uK in 2013, there were only 28 little Garys.
Now, in a challenge to this tide of anti-Garyism, a young couple from Gloucester are doing their best to save the endangered species. They have called their baby son Gary, in a calculated attempt to revive the name among their contemporaries, not least because the little boy’s late grandfather was a Gary.
‘We wanted him to have a unique name and he will have a name fewer people have nowadays,’ said the boy’s supermarket worker dad Scott. ‘It could start a new trend of people being called Gary. It would be a good thing if that happened. It is a really nice name.’
The rise and fall of Gary is an object lesson in the changing popularity of British first names. Just like cars, food and music styles, first names go in and out of fashion for long periods.
Gary reached a peak in 1964 (thus all those middle-aged Garys) when it was the 16th most popular name in the country. Its years of popularity prove the idea of people naming their children after celebrities of the day is nothing new.
Gary is thought to owe its 20th century popularity to the great Western star Gary Cooper who died in 1961, aged 60. When his hit film, High Noon, came out in 1952, there was a Gary boom in America — with the name even being given to some girls.
Cooper’s real name was Frank but his agent borrowed the stagename from her home town of Gary, Indiana, called after an American industrialist, Elbert Henry Gary.
Britain followed where America led and the copycat factor kept Gary in vogue for a couple of decades after Cooper’s demise.
In fact, the name goes back centuries, as far as the Normans, nearly 1,000 years ago. According to The oxford Names Companion, Gary ‘is probably derived from a Norman personal name of Germanic origin’. It is ultimately derived from ‘gar’, meaning ‘spear’. The word is also the root of the names Garret and Gerard.
BuT, just as quickly as a name comes into fashion, so it can suddenly drop out of favour. A name like Gary, so trendy and cuttingedge in the Sixties and Seventies, suddenly seems as naff as perms and flared jeans.
Gary has had a particularly sudden, steep fall from grace. undoubtedly, convicted paedophile Gary Glitter rang the death knell for the name. Glitter, who was born Paul Gadd in 1944, changed his name first to Paul Raven then, in 1971, to Gary Glitter, when Gary was still hovering near the top of the uK name charts.
But Gary is by no means the only monicker to have fallen from grace in recent times. Parents are now much keener on unusual names than longstanding ones such as Nigel or Kevin.
In 2013, English and Welsh parents plumped for just seven Kevins, 17 Roys, 15 Keiths and three Traceys.
This desire to be original meant that strange new names suddenly broke into the top 100 uK names between 1996 and 2013. There were 1,275 Harleys born in the uK in 2013 (presumably in honour of the motorcycle), 1,055 Jensons ( after the Formula 1 driver Jenson Button) and 1,019 Dexters (surely not after the TV series about a serial killer!).
The problem is, when the parents who give their children unusual names are also famous, then odd names become all too common as the rest of us follow suit.
Would Sienna really be the 20th most popular girl’s name in Britain if it weren’t for the prominence of the actress Sienna Miller?
In 2010, the name Harper never got near the top 1,000 girls’ names. Then, in 2011, the Beckhams called their daughter Harper. In 2013, nearly 200 Harpers were born in the united Kingdom.
Popular choices, too, have been Leo (after the film star Leonardo DiCaprio) and Romeo (as in the Beckhams’ second child). In 2013, there were 3,264 Leos, 167 Romeos and 2,211 Siennas.
While the Garys all but disappeared from the 2013 list, there were plenty of Rihannas ( 60), Hermiones ( 77) and Parises (107); thanks to the pop star, Hermione Grainger in Harry Potter, and the socialite Paris Hilton.
I can speak from experience about the celebrity effect. Born in 1971, I had no other Harrys in my year at school. Then, from 1984 onwards, younger Harrys popped up everywhere — because Prince Harry was born that year. It was still the seventh most popular boy’s name last year.
Harry may seem long established but, like Gary, it was originally a popular pet-form of a much more ancient name.
It comes from the Latin Henricus. The name became Harry only in the Middle Ages, when the English started mispronouncing Henri, the French version of Henricus.
There is nothing new about the cult of fashionable names and there is nothing new about them suddenly going out of fashion.
Even royal names, often considered a failsafe option, go out of fashion — when was the last time you met a Canute or an Ethelred?
TREVoR and Kevin have gone the same way as Gary. They, too, were intensely fashionable in the Seventies, not least thanks to the footballers, Trevor Francis of Nottingham Forest ( born 1954), West Ham’s Trevor Brooking (born in 1948) and Kevin Keegan (born 1951).
Keegan was so popular in his years playing for Hamburg, from 1977-80, that there are still lots of Kevins in their 30s living in Germany.
Also, much to the consternation of sociologists, in France, one in ten boys born in the country during the early Nineties was also called by that very unFrench name (pronounced Kiveene) there. Girls’ names are just as vulnerable. In the Sixties, the unusual spelling of Barbra peaked, thanks to the popularity of Barbra Streisand. It is now on the verge of extinction.
The Welsh name, Llewellyn, popular in Britain and America until the Forties, is almost extinct, too.
Creating original names for your children is not just a new fad, either.
That seemingly ancient name Fiona was actually made up by the Scottish writer James Macpherson in the 1760s.
He used it in his epic ossian poems, which he pretended were ancient Gaelic works, written in the third century AD.
‘Fiona’ was then borrowed as a pen name by William Sharp who wrote romantic books in the second half of the 19th century under the name Fiona Macleod.
Fiona soon took off as a popular name. It is now low on the list (842nd most popular girl’s name in the uK in 2014) but lingers on. Some names disappear altogether, after a very brief spell in the limelight. When Tony Blair sent British forces to Sierra Leone in 2000 to stop the 11- year civil war, he became a local hero.
There are plenty of 15-yearold boys called Tony-Blair in Sierra Leone today.
The same is true among Kosovo Albanians, who were saved from Serbian attacks in 1999, thanks to Nato intervention backed by Blair.
For a brief moment, the name ‘ Tonibler’ became extremely popular for Albanian boys.
Funnily enough, Tonibler is yet to appear in the top 1,000 names in the uK and it makes Gary seem positively distinguished.