A North London lifestyle journalist reads about a father threatening to disinherit the Labrador over his son’s new surname and looks at how London couples really handle names now

The Labrador Is Out Of The Will

The London Prat has a story that every wedding planner in London should frame. It asks whether a son should take his fiancee’s last name, and introduces a retired insurance manager from Ealing who threatens to boycott his son’s wedding, withdraw funding and disinherit the family Labrador after the son agrees to take his bride’s surname. The father invokes centuries of family heritage. The heritage, on inspection, begins with a button maker in Birmingham in 1892.

I write about how Londoners live, which this year has mostly meant how Londoners afford to live, and weddings are where both questions collide. The Prat piece made me laugh, then made me think about how many couples I know who have had some version of this argument, usually over a Sunday roast, usually ending with someone’s mother leaving the table to check on the potatoes.

What London Couples Actually Do

The tradition of a woman taking her husband’s surname is still common in Britain, but London couples, in my experience, have become far more creative. Among friends and readers who have married in the past few years, I can count women who kept their names, men who took their wives’ names, couples who double-barrelled, couples who merged two surnames into a new one, and one memorable pair in Stoke Newington who chose an entirely new surname after a street they both liked. Their parents were not consulted. Their parents have, I am told, recovered.

The man taking his wife’s name remains the least common choice, and the one most likely to provoke a reaction like the Ealing father’s. Men who make it often describe two kinds of resistance. The first is family, with all the drama of the Prat piece. The second is paperwork. Changing your name after marriage is a well-worn administrative path for women, and men who take the same route have long reported finding the process less familiar to the organizations they deal with, from banks to employers. A man who changes his name can find himself explaining the concept to a call centre more times than he explains it to his father.

Heritage, London Style

The button maker is the real joke in the Prat story. Most British family histories, when anybody actually looks, are ordinary and recent. The great ancestral line usually runs back a few generations to a farm labourer, a clerk, a shopkeeper or, yes, a button maker. Genealogy websites and DNA tests have made this discovery more common than ever, and many families have learned that their supposed heritage is a story somebody told at Christmas in 1974 and nobody checked.

London is a particularly hard place to sustain an ancestral myth, because almost everybody here came from somewhere else. My own family arrived from the Welsh valleys three generations ago, and my grandfather used to say our surname was common enough that half of Cardiff could claim to be related to us and the other half would deny it. In North London today, a single primary school class can contain children whose families came from forty countries. A surname here is less a lineage than a luggage label.

The Price Of A London Wedding

There is also money in the Prat’s story, because the father threatens to withdraw funding. London weddings are expensive, and parental contributions are, for many couples, the difference between a reception and a registry office followed by drinks in a pub. Venue hire in the capital, catering, photography and the dress can quickly add up to a sum that rivals a house deposit. Couples I know have delayed weddings, shrunk guest lists to immediate family or moved the whole event to a village hall two hours away, where the hire costs a fraction of a London venue and the parents can at least park.

When a parent attaches conditions to that money, such as a surname, the argument stops being about heritage and becomes about control. The Prat’s father is funny because he is so obviously using his chequebook to defend his ego. In real families, the pressure is usually subtler, but it is there.

What The Labrador Thinks

I asked my own dog, a rescue lurcher called Dai, whether he would mind being disinherited over a surname. He looked at me with the profound indifference of a creature whose entire estate is a bed, a ball and a bowl. The Labrador in the Ealing story, I suspect, would feel the same. Dogs understand something that fathers sometimes forget: a family is the people who feed you, walk you and let you on the sofa, whatever their names happen to be.

A Gentle Word To Fathers

If any father in North London is reading this with a wedding approaching and an argument brewing, here is my advice. Your surname will survive. Your son will still be your son. The button maker in 1892 would almost certainly be astonished that anybody remembered him at all. And if you boycott the wedding, you will spend the rest of your life explaining why, which is a much longer and more embarrassing story than a surname. You can find more of my writing about London life on my author page, including a forthcoming piece on the true cost of a London stag weekend, which I am told should be filed under horror.

Sunday In Kentish Town

At a pub in Kentish Town this weekend, I overheard a young couple discussing exactly this question. She wanted to keep her name. He wanted to take hers. Neither wanted to tell his mother. They decided, after two pints, to double-barrel, putting her name first, and to tell his mother after the wedding, by postcard, from somewhere sunny. I wished them well. It was the most sensible piece of family diplomacy I have heard all year, and it was negotiated for the price of two pints, which in London is roughly the cost of a small wedding.