Joe Bennett: What's in a name?

The Reliant Robin was a car that begged for derision, symbolising the decline of Great Britain as an industrial nation. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION:

I have a question for you. Is it prophecy to predict an event that happened 60 years ago but that you had no way of knowing about? If so I have the gift of prophecy. And the giver of this gift, and just in time for Christmas, was a reader whom I shall not name because I have not asked his permission but to whom I shall be forever grateful. He made me grin from ear to somewhere over there.

As retentive readers will recall I wrote last week about William Shakespeare, the 81-year-old Englishman who was the second person in the United Kingdom to receive the Covid vaccine. In the column I wondered whether his parents had christened him William in the hope of engendering amusing conversations with people in authority, and I went on to invent a hypothetical conversation between Mr Shakespeare and a traffic cop. And that was where I left it.

But within hours of the column being published I got an email. Such a conversation had indeed taken place, said the email, and it had been all but word for word identical to the one I had transcribed. And the evidence my correspondent had for saying so was the testimony of none other than William Shakespeare's son himself.

(The 16th century Shakespeare also had a son, named Hamnet, who died in 1596 at the age of 11, possibly of bubonic plague. Scholars have speculated that Hamlet, written several years later, was at least in part informed by Hamnet's death, but scholars have speculated on many things concerning Shakespeare, and often to no account.)

Happily the son of our present-day Shakespeare has survived into adulthood and travelled as far as Melbourne which is where he met my correspondent some 20 years ago. And it was there he told the tale of his father's encounter with the police.

The incident took place in the 1960s, which seems likely because having been born in 1939 young William would then have been in his 20s, an age of high spirits when run-ins with authority are more common. (It is said that the original William Shakespeare, at about the same age, got into trouble for poaching deer on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy.)
Today's William Shakespeare was stopped for speeding on the on-ramp of a motorway. What makes the story all the more delicious is that he was driving a Reliant Robin.

If you are unfamiliar with the Reliant Robin, picture a wedge of cheese on three wheels powered by a lawn-mower engine. It was a vehicle that somehow symbolised the decline of Great Britain as an industrial nation. It begged for derision and got it from all sides. It was a joke on wheels, impotent, shoddy and inherently unstable.

However, with a following wind and a downhill on-ramp, young William Shakespeare managed to work his Reliant Robin up to a speed sufficient to draw the attention of a passing police officer, who duly pulled it over, cleared his face of an unprofessional grin and asked the driver his name.
"William Shakespeare," said William Shakespeare, just as I supposed that his parents had hoped. To which, as per script, the officer replied that he was delighted to meet Mr Shakespeare and that he himself was the Queen of England.

And if that doesn't make you happy this holiday season then let me add another story which this one has just prompted and which I throw in free of charge in the spirit of Christmas.
Some time in the late 1970s my friend Mark was driving to visit his girlfriend. She lived in Dagenham in the east of London. Dagenham was renowned for one thing only in those days, the vast Ford factory which employed most of the local population. Mark's car was a Renault 4.

Unfortunately, as he neared his girlfriend's house, Mark was involved in an accident. He was unhurt, though shaken up, but his car was written off. The police arrived in the form of a young local constable.
'Well now, sir,' said the constable, taking out his notebook and walking slowly around the remains of Mark's car, 'what sort of car would this be?'
'It's a Renault,' said Mark.
The policeman paused with his pencil raised. 'A Ford What, sir?'
'No, no,' said Mark, 'not a Ford at all. A Renault.'
'I see sir, and how would you spell that?'
'R E N A U L T,' said Mark.
'Shall we start again, sir?' said the policeman.