I’m taking a leaf out of Lord Norton’s book here and setting a quiz. Why should he have all the fun?. I was spurred onto this by noting that the Earl of Sandwich, whose photo appeared behind Lady Boothroyd in my last post, had an ancestor noted not only for his gastronomic genius but also had several islands named after him (the Sandwich Islands, Montagu and Montague Islands). There are quite a lot of our elected hereditary peers whose ancestors had islands named for them. Can you name five others?
No you can’t count Murphy Island in Pennsylvania, it was sadly not named after any ancestor of mine.
Falklands (Viscount Falkland) is the only one that springs to mind.
There are two hamlets in Wiltshire called Straight Soley and Crooked Soley. Do these count!
http://www.localmouth.com/go/crooked-soley
PS I tried to get my photo taken for the election address back in the 1980’s but my agent vetoed it – no sense of humour!
With a picture of a traffic island perhaps?
I’ve racked my brains for the baroness but came up with no leads at all.
Crooked Soley?! What an idea!
Russell Island, Queensland, named after Lord John Russell, later 1st Earl Russell
Lord Howe Island, named after Richard Howe, 1st Earl Howe
Norfolk Island, named after the wife of the 9th Duke of Norfolk
I can’t verify this last one, but there is a Cholmondeley Islet on the Great Barrier reef, Queensland.
Norfolk and Cholmondeley are strictly invalid answers as you ask specifically for elected hereditaries!
Sorry, I’ve realised Earl Russell is not a mamber of the House. His father was a member until 2004.
Islands named after people may abound;
but be not nearly so abundant as the land-areas named after a traveller, for a very-large economy-supportive company, intimately known to me as I took-to or was cajoled into British-citizenship as I grew up,
my father Leonard Alfred Sydney Miles (later a retired Major from the British Army RASC).
(“Miles and Miles …” see ?) !
1652F24.jsdm.
Then there is Lord Howe Island. Tasman Sea, Aus.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Howe_Island
Seriously, shouldn’t naming be the other way round ?
Any-thing of (‘permanent’) collective-lifesupportiveness, such as geographical-areas, industrial-infrastructure, buildings, and skills, should have a name describing that ‘good’ ?
An individual’s financial ‘ownership’ is not sufficient to describe the ‘common-lifesupportiveness fact’, of any-thing, not even of a tiny desolate island, nor of a Foot of pathway.
2249Sn260611.jsdm.
Jonathan, you caught me out. Of course the Marquess of Cholmondeley (Cholmondeley Islet) IS an excepted hereditary but is NOT an elected one. He is ex-officio a Member of the House of Lords as Lord Great Chamberlain. So too is the Duke of Norfolk (Norfolk Island) as Earl Marshall. But I think we can count their islands? You can’t count Russell Island as Earl Russell is sadly now deceased (2004). Yes, Lord Howe Island was named for the First Earl Howe although genealogical purists would point out our very own Earl Howe is from the second creation of that title although for the same family. And Chris K is right about Viscount Falkland (the Falkland Islands, named from Falkland Sound, the channel between the two main islands, which was in turn named after Anthony Cary, 5th Viscount Falkland).
There are also: Berkeley Island, NJ; Carrington Island, Utah; Swinfen Island (a cheat this but it’s a junction on the A38), Glasgow Island, Canada; Peel Island, Cumbria; Luke Island, Nova Scotia, Lucas Island, NW Australia; Lindsay Island, Victoria, Australia; the Isle of Arran; Home Islands, Canada; Bridgeman Island, South Shetland; Reay Island, Canada, Grenfell Island (a leisure and shopping complex in Maidenhead) and Greenway Island, Connecticut but these names are coincidentally the names of peers.
In case Jonathan points out my errors again, I should say that Berkeley, Carington (one r please note) and Grenfell are not elected hereditaries but hereditaries who were appointed life peers in the wake of the 1999 Act.
So I guess Jonathan wins, congratulations. The prize is a head full of truly useless information.
It’s very disappointing that Lord Soley doesn’t tell us if he’s from Crooked or Straight Soley; it’s information clearly in the public interest. I always thought he came from Seven Kings (a place I have some fondness for as it was part of my first consultant job community catchment area) but now I’m having doubts about his origins.
I found Peel Island in Coniston Water. This is said to be the island in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, which was a childhood favourite of mine. However, I couldn’t find anything to suggest this was named after an Earl Peel.
I have, however, now found a Peel Island in Australia, apparently named after Sir Robert Peel, who is an ancestor of the present earl.
“The prize is a head full of truly useless information”
exactly as are the ‘prizes’ doled out, but not admitted as such, by quizmadam-Baroness Murphy’s arch-opponent quizmaster-Lord Norton
and is precisely the reason why I keep on asking for a ‘People-Democratising-Quiz’
or preferably for a wider, more participatorily-democratising, and innovatively-educational Blog or separate E-site in its own right;
specificly to help and interest every level of the British People.
———–
1721T28June.JSDM.