I’m rereading Jonathon Bardon’s History of Ulster, and I’ve just got to Kinsale and the Flight of the Earls. Kinsale, as every skoolboy noe, was where Red Hugh O’Neill and MacDonnell and a hesitant force from Spain got thrashed by Mountjoy, Clancey and Docwra. Yes, I know Kinsale is not in Ulster. It was “Ireland’s Culloden”.
When the road is being mended around where I live, often the contractor is Docwra (or, indeed Clancey Docwra). A few years back they were in the news in a court case for mistreating their employees. I can’t remember any televised or radio mention of it.
How do you pronounce “Docwra”?
The internetweb is good for a lot of things, but rotten in others. Yahoo answers votes that the pronunciation is “Doc-ra” by an overwelming 100% of votes. It’s less whelming when you see that that comes to exactly one vote. Some clever-clogs proposed that it was pronounced “D-o-c-w-r-a” which is not helpful. Is it Welsh? Is it English?
For a few years, I lived in Culloden, WV on Bryn Mawr Way too. Anytime I gave anyone my address, I had do spell that whole sucker out. In West Virginia, Culloden is pronounced Cloden, long O.
Only a little bit of info out there, nothing specific on pronunciation so far, but I’m siding with “Dock-ra” at this point. Cursorily I found two sites on Google that had any info at all approaching the kind you’re asking about, one of them The Docwra Family Research Project (under some reconstruction), the other something called The Guild of One-Name Studies. Both sources agree that the name originates in Cumberland, so it could be said, I.B., that your question as to whether the name is Welsh or English might remain forever unanswered! The Guild (a much nicer abbreviation of the site’s whole name than GoONS is) page on the subject lists these names as variations: Dockwray, Dockwra, Docra, Dockera, Dokra, Dockerill, Dockerell, Dockrill, Dockrell, Docray, Dockray. So, yeah. “Dock-ra” it is for me.
Uh-oh. And then there is actually an Irish Docwra as well, but it is synonymous with Harden among others and no relation to the Norse/English name variants aside from a coincidental similarity, or a possibly convenient borrowing for the original Irish name, from among their forms. We’re no better off! Better ask yer man where he comes from.
In Bryn Mawr it’s “Brin Mar” (rhymes with car, with rhotic American “r”).
If from Cumbria, the spelling (and spelling variants) could be influenced by Cumbrian, the now-extinct Welsh-like Brythonic substrate language. The language is long gone (except for Yan Tan Tethera counting). But I can confirm that they still talk awful funny up there. When I first heard the locals around Windermere, they sounded Norwegian to me.
The Irish spelling Docwra would doubtless be an imitation of the English/Cumbrian, since that would not be a normal Irish anglicization of the underlying Dochair / Dochraigh.
I even had to spell out my first and last names because they’re uncommon around here. No one had a clue what I was saying when I said “Bryn Mawr”. Half of that was my out-of-state accent. The only thing that was OK to just say in my address was “West Virginia” and the zip code. Culloden is not a big town.
In West Virginia, we pronounced the “r” in Mawr. Don’t ask me how but we did.
Riding the bus from Carlisle to Windermere, a couple of older chaps seated behind me rabbiting away. Norwegian tourists, I guessed, not at all strange. Except that after 20 minutes I suddenly understood them. I’m a quick language learner, but for a moment I’d thought I’d been struck by a miracle of second language acquisition.
A bit like Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come, which is subtitled for the first 10 minutes or so. By the time the subtitles disappear, you’ve stopped needing them.
Thank you Nano, and everybody. I’m going with “Doc-ra”. I don’t know anyone called Docwra, or I would ask them.
I never had any difficulty with Cumbrians. It’s the Geordies I have trouble with. In Newcastle I asked for directions, and got them, and could not make out a single word.
