The Earl of Cottenham’s surname is Pepys. He doesn’t pronounce it peeps, like the diarist, but peppiss, stressed on the first syllable. It’s almost impossible to know how to pronounce English family names. The former deputy editor of this magazine, Andrew Gimson, pronounces his with a soft g. Jeffrey Bernard stressed the second syllable of his. James Michie, the late Jaspistos, rhymed with sticky. Christopher Fildes’s name rhymes with wilds.
The BBC booklets on pronunciation published in the 1930s, about which I have been writing this month, had reached number seven by 1939, ‘Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some British Family Names and Titles’, still edited by Arthur Lloyd James. ‘There is probably nobody in these islands,’ he wrote, ‘who can pronounce “correctly” — whatever that may mean — all our family names.’
So Featherstonehaugh, may be fanshaw, but others call themselves fee-sun-hay, or fear-ston-haw, or simply feather-ston-haw.
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