It was a source of great amusement in international cricket circles in the 1990s when fans of the game around the world noticed that three of the most famous cricketers playing at that time were called Lillee, Dilley and Willey. Dennis Lillee was an Australian, while Peter Willey and Graham Dilley were Englishmen; but all three of those rhyming surnames had their origins in England.
Willey was almost certainly originally the hypocoristic or pet name version of William, Willy, although there is a Shropshire village named Willey which could also have played some role in the development of the surname.
The name Lillee has a similar number of possible origins, including a connection with the woman’s given name Lily, though just as likely would be a derivation from the name of the Hertfordshire village of Lilley, which lies between Hitchin and Luton, just off the A505 following the line of the ancient Icknield Way.
The village name itself comes from the Old English toponym Lin-leah, meaning a lea or grove where flax (linen) was grown. One of Lillee’s male ancestors at some stage might have left the village of Lilley and, ending up somewhere else, come to be called, let’s say, John of Lilley.
Dilley is a more difficult name in terms of its etymology, but experts at the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland suggest that it comes from the not-very-common Old English male given name Dylla.
The splendid climax to this surname story occurred when, to the great delight of many sports journalists, at one point during the Australia v England Test match in Perth, Western Australia, on December 18, 1979, the scoreline actually read “Lillee, caught Willey, bowled Dilley”.
These days none of those three men is still playing cricket; Dilley died tragically young at the age of 52, and Lillee and Willey are both now 75. Willey became a first-class umpire after his retirement; and his son David played more than 100 matches for England in the limited-overs format of the game.
But we do currently have the consolation that there are now three male England players called Foakes, Stokes, and Woakes – Ben, Ben and Chris respectively – which opens up the exciting possibility of another agreeably rhyming headline appearing in print at some point in the not-too-distant future.
The surname Stokes comes from one of the many places in England which bear the name Stoke, including Stoke-on-Trent.
It has been suggested that Foakes and numerous similar names such as Foulkes derive from the old Norman or Germanic given name Fulco: we do know of a “Fulco of Ireland”, an Irish soldier who during the 800s AD travelled to France with 4,000 Irishmen to serve under the christianising Emperor Charlemagne. Fulco is apparently still revered in Pavia in northern Italy as San Fulco.
But it is the surname Woakes which is particularly interesting linguistically. It comes from the West Midlands dialect form woak “oak tree”. It was common in traditional dialects from that area of England for words beginning with an o sound to add an initial w. In fact, influence from this dialect probably explains how the numeral “one” came to be pronounced with a w at the beginning. And it is of course appropriate that Chris Woakes himself is from Birmingham, in the West Midlands, and plays cricket for Warwickshire.
TOPONYMS AS SURNAMES
Many of us have family names which are derived from place-names. The current England men’s cricket squad has players called Bairstow, Overton, Stokes, Livingstone and Crawley, which are all family names derived from English or Scottish toponyms. The women’s team has an Ecclestone and a Dunkley, which were also originally toponyms.
