You'd be a Nutter to swap your name

The most embarrassing surnames in Britain have been revealed in a study of more than 100 million people's names presented at the Royal Geographical Society's annual conference.

But the names have also been disappearing for more than a century as their bearers change their names to escape the ignominy of being called Cock, Willy, Daft, Nutter or Bottom.

The five biggest decreases were seen among people named Cock, who originate from Truro, the Hickinbottoms from Derby, Handcocks from Bristol, Smellies from Glasgow and Haggards from Swindon.

The academics from University College London found there are now only a quarter as many Cocks in Britain as would be expected, a third as many Smellies, and half as many Dafts and Shufflebottoms. The numbers of Piggs, Nutters and Bottoms has declined by around one third.

The research also showed the first names of the richest and poorest adults in Britain. Tracey, Sharon and Michelle were among the poorest while people named Gillian, Nicholas and Geoffrey were among the most privileged.

People named Riddle, McRae, Granger or Crabtree have the most adventurous ancestors, who are most likely to have emigrated from Britain across the globe over the past 125 years.

But Baggotts, Blewitts and Daines are the least likely to have moved from their roots over the past century.

Richard Webber, visiting professor at University College London, who conducted the study, said that it had important implications as it could enable the Governments to plan public service provision by predicting population trends.

"The idea that different communities have to integrate is not a modern one," he said. "It has been going on ever since towns developed. In medieval times the differences between different British regions were in my opinion as great as those between people working in London today."

The study of more than 100 million people bearing more than 500,000 different surnames was the first-ever attempt to measure the geographical spread and size of the exodus of Britons abroad.

It showed that people named Riddle, who originally came from Galashiels, Scotland, are the most likely to have emigrated from Britain since 1881.

There are now nearly six times as many Riddles living in Kentucky in the United States, 11,839, as there are in Britain, 2085.

Pablo Mateos from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, said: "Most people's names have a very precise geographic origin."

Professor Webber said that the region people originated from usually determined if, where and when they emigrated.

"The least adventurous are Yorkshire people and the Welsh ... Yorkshire was always prosperous, so there was no particular time when there was an imperative to emigrate.

"We think of Britain today being a multicultural country but we forget that Britain has actually always been a multicultural country because people came from different regions. An analysis of names shows whether people came from Viking, Danish, Norman, Huguenot or Irish heritage.

"We underestimate how much of our resident white population is actually a melting pot of different people coming from all over Europe over the past 1500 years."

- INDEPENDENT