APOLOGIES for returning yet again to odd names, but it seems some people just belong together. I'm indebted to several readers who have drawn my attention to a Belfast printing company called "Reid Wright". When management consultants talk about achieving "synergies", it must be partnerships like that they have in mind, writes Frank McNally.
On a similar note, thanks to Declan Fahy - now living in Australia but once of Sligo - who tells me that in his home town there used to be a drapery shop owned by the East family. Directly opposite was a bakery owned by the Wests. When the sun finally set on the Easts and the business was sold, symmetry demanded that its ownership went West. And so it did.
Things don't always work out so neatly. Paul Kenny informs me there used to be a company in Dublin's Coombe called John C Parkes: "Its directors were Mr Fox and Mr Bird." Hard to see any synergies being achieved there.
An even less fortunate combination featured in a study commissioned a few years back by the British National Health Service. The paper was titled: "The Need for Surgeons in Rural Areas". Fair enough. But people might have got the wrong idea from its authors, who included Messrs "Black" and "Decker".
As previously noted, the tradition of married couples retaining both partners' names can make for happy and unhappy situations. An example of the former is a Tokyo restaurant owner called Jane Best, who married a man called "Cook", thereby becoming Jane Best Cook.
By stark contrast, I am reliably informed that, even though it sounds like something from a Carry-On film, there really is in north London a hyphenated surname suggesting that, at some point, two people called "Duff" and "Dick" got married and decided in their wisdom to retain both identities. You'd think their friends would have said something. (Thanks again to Donal Kennedy for that one, and for mentioning that North London also has a dentist called "Dr Screech". I wonder if the latter is related to "Mrs Screech", the unfortunate singing instructor from British Columbia?)
Dubious name combinations are not confined to accidents of business and marriage. From Melbourne, Mary Dalmau writes to me about one of the world's most unfortunately titled monuments, a public swimming pool known as the "Harold Holt Memorial Pool".
Harold Holt is a former Australian prime minister, and naming the pool in his honour - it's in his old Melbourne constituency - was a sincere tribute. The problem is he died (in 1967) from drowning. Or so it is generally assumed.
The known facts are that he went swimming in very rough conditions near his home and disappeared. Despite a massive search, the body was never found, leading to the usual conspiracy theories. These range from simple suicide, to staged disappearance, to (I swear) kidnap by a "Chinese submarine".
In any case, the pool was already under construction and, after a debate about questions of taste, it was duly named after him. Architectural critics might see a certain aptness in the situation. The pool was built in the "brutalist" style then fashionable (with architects if not the public). Its name appears to be from the same school.
(Of course, the Australian sense of humour is famously robust. Mary Dalmau also tells me that a bank robbed by Ned Kelly is sponsoring a re-enactment of the event for a festival next month, at which other events will include a road-race with the slogan: "Run like you stole something". Not only that, the Bank of Melbourne has exhibited Sidney Nolan's famous paintings of Kelly. The fact that the Ned was hanged in real life has obviously helped Australian bankers to achieve closure on the whole issue.)
It was the QE2 that started me on the apt-and-inapt names thing, when on its final voyage it got stuck on a sandbank, and a spokesman called Eric Flounders had to explain the delay. It turns out that the great ship was finishing its career as it began. Veteran journalist Paddy McGarvey tells me that the maiden voyage in 1969 was also inexplicably delayed - for a lot longer - even though construction appeared complete. The company was saying nothing at the time, so the leading shipping newspaper sent its man - Paddy - up to Glasgow to investigate.
He subsequently told the story in an article headlined: "How to steal an ocean liner". What had happened is that, just as the "finishing trades" went on board to administer the final touches, workers started helping themselves to bits of the ship. As Paddy discovered: "Gone: 1700 Phillips bedside radio tape-decks. Gone: thousands of cabin-wall Formica panels in pale-blue fleur-de-lis, now thought to be lining hundreds of back-yard khazis all over the Clyde valley. Gone, repeatedly, the central power core of copper cable, thick as your wrist, running the length of the ship on all decks for the tradesmen's building tools, uncoiled and dragged out by thieves in power boats."
According to a BBC report, there was vandalism as well as theft. Workers who feared that when the ship sailed, so would their jobs, had tried to delay the evil day by breaking things. Even so, Paddy was facing libel writs over his story until, on the ship's eventual arrival in Southampton, Cunard announced that it had failed safety tests: "All the brasswork junctions of the fire hoses had been stolen."
Whether the then chairman of Cunard saw the funny side of the situation is doubtful. He was a man called "Sir Basil Smallpiece".
fmcnally@irish-times.ie