Talk:Baldwin Wake Walker

Change of Article Name

Copied from Salmanazar talk page

I notice that you have moved Baldwin Wake Walker to Baldwin Wake-Walker. Do you have any evidence that his correct name was Baldwin Wake-Walker?--Toddy1 (talk) 17:10, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Modern British practise is to hyphenate such names to prevent the penultimate surname being mistaken for a middle name; his son and grandson used the hyphenated version [1]. Earlier C19th usage can vary wildly with names being listed with and without. See also here

I think Wake was originally a middle name, not a surname. Walker was his father's surname, and Wake his mother's maiden name. The use of the surnames of relatives as middle names was not uncommon. I fully accept that there is evidence that his children seem to have adopted the surname Wake-Walker.--Toddy1 (talk) 17:39, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree. I'll move it back to Baldwin Wake Walker. Salmanazar (talk) 13:06, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Surname

It seems reasonably clear that the subject of this article was born with the surname "Walker" (his father was plain John Walker), that by the time he received a peerage, he preferred the double surname "Wake Walker", and that his descendants adopted the surname Wake-Walker (e.g. Frederic Wake-Walker) to avoid confusion as explained above. So how should he be referred to in the article? Different historians have taken different views on the matter:

• Walker
  • John Francis Beeler, British naval policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli era, 1866–1880
  • Alastair Wilson, Joseph F. Callo, Who's who in naval history: from 1550 to the present
• Wake-Walker
  • Roger Parkinson, The late Victorian Navy: the pre-dreadnought era and the origins of the First World War
• Wake Walker
  • Stanley Bonnett, The price of Admiralty: an indictment of the Royal Navy 1805–1966

Beeler quotes a letter from Disraeli to Lord Derby: “The Admiralty is governed by Sir B Walker who has neither talents, nor science—& as I believe—nor honour” showing that he was plain "Walker" as late as 1858. Gdr 16:06, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Other sources

• Walker
  • Frederick Manning, The Life of Sir William White
  • Andrew Lambert, Battleships in Transition and The Last Sailing Battlefleet
  • David K Brown, Before the Ironclad
  • John Fincham, A History of naval Architecture
  • James P Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship
  • CJ Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power 1815-1853

--Toddy1 (talk) 18:50, 17 November 2009 (UTC)