Batey, Nimmo, Guyler, Griffiths, Hatton, Jarman, Jacobi… If your name happens to be Derek, you have a statistically higher chance of becoming famous than if you’re called Gilbert. And that’s a fact.
O’Sullivan, Scott-Heron… See?*
The history of entertainment is liberally sprinkled with great Dereks. In addition to all the real ones there are the fictional ones like Derek Smalls, the self-proclaimed “lukewarm water” between the fire and ice of Spinal Tap, and Dudley Moore’s Derek, oppo to Peter Cook’s Clive, whose body of work represents a masterclass in the art of profanity and will become, like the Lead Codices of Jordan, the ultimate handbook for understanding this particular field of the English language. Sadly, having scoured Derek’s entire panoply of famous quotes, I’ve failed to find any that I can reproduce in the sort of polite company we keep here.
Anyway, the point that emerges from all this with abundant clarity is that Derek the name is spelt D-E-R-E-K. Or at least I thought it was, until I googled ‘famous Dereks’ (don’t you just love the fact that someone has actually created that website?) and discovered a smattering of blokes – mostly American footballers and basketball players – who called themselves D-E-R-R-I-C-K.
I know.
To any right-thinking individual, a derrick is one of those rickety looking towers they use for extracting oil from the ground. But the discovery of all these blokes being named after an oil pump called for further investigation, so I rolled my sleeves up, donned my hardhat and went to work.
It turns out the derrick that does the oil digging took its name from an earlier definition – a crane with a pivoted arm. And it took that meaning from the hangman’s gallows, which became known as a derrick in the 17th century. You can see the evolution. But here’s the explosive bit. Why was the gallows called a derrick? After famous Elizabethan hangman Thomas Derrick.
So, annoyingly, it turns out I was wrong and Derrick is a bona fide name after all, albeit a surname. It is derived from the same German root as ‘Dietrich’, as in Marlene, which means ‘ruler of folk’.
Derrick the ‘killer of folk’ was an interesting character – if ‘interesting’ is an apt description for a rapist who executed over 3,000 people. Alas, time turns monsters into legends. Derrick was forced to become a hangman by Robert Devereaux, 2nd Earl of Essex, in return for his pardon for the aforementioned rape, but he took to the task with inhuman zeal. Not content with stringing up his victims one by one with a rope slung over a wooden gibbet, he invented his own, more efficient contraption, using ropes and pulleys and a longer wooden arm, with which he could despatch them 23 at a time. The judges at Tyburn couldn’t convict ’em fast enough.
In a particularly macabre twist of fate, Derrick even sent his pardoner, the Earl of Essex, to meet his maker after the Earl staged an ill-conceived coup d’état and was convicted of treason. The moral of which is, I suppose, be careful who you pardon.
*If you can think of any other famous Gilberts, we’d love to hear them.
