Guess What's (Ultimately) Named After This Stream.
Concerning influential watercourses; a family of whalers; pre-emptive device-rage and rabbit-sized dinosaurs.
Last week, I visited a pleasant village near, or arguably part of, Harrogate. It’s named after the stream that runs through it, which looks like this.
The stream is named the Star Beck: from Old Norse ‘bekkr’ meaning stream; and ‘stor/r’ possibly meaning ‘large’ or possibly meaning ‘with sedge plants’. I wouldn’t say the stream is remarkably large, so I lean towards the sedge, but what do I know? Perhaps it was bigger in Old Norse days. Or perhaps the Old Norse were easily impressed. Or given to sarcasm.
Anyway, the stream gave its name to the village, and the village gave its name (give and take a vowel) to a family of people who came from it - and if you haven’t finished the guesswork you were invited to do by the title, get on with it now, because the name of the family may possibly give the game away.
The Starbuck family, or at least some of them, were Quakers, and in the 1630s they emigrated to live their peaceful Quaker life in Nantucket. Peaceful as regards other people, that is; but not at all peaceful regarding whales. The whole clan were extremely bad news for whales. For the next couple of centuries, generations of Starbucks sailed round the world killing whales and discovering islands, but mostly killing whales.
Quick tangent though: one of the islands was discovered by Valentine Starbuck, who noticed it when he was sailing the King and Queen of Hawaii on a state visit to London. This island was named in Valentine’s honour by Lord Byron’s cousin, who confirmed its existence when he sailed the King and Queen back again… though sadly, in between the two trips, their Majesties had both died of measles. Starbuck Island is now uninhabited, unless you count sooty terns, in which case it is very inhabited indeed.
Anyway, the point is the Starbucks were such famous Nantucket whalers that in 1850, when Herman Melville needed a name for the first mate of his fictional Nantucket whaling ship the Pequod, he called him Starbuck. Even though it was supposed to be his job to think of pretend names for the people he made up. Lazy, lazy Herman Melville.
Then in 1971, three people started a coffee shop, and the one of them who was a writer, and really into American literature, wanted to call it ‘Pequod’, to evoke Moby-Dick. Whereas the one of them who was a marketer, and really into coffee shop names not having the syllable ‘pee’ in them, wanted to call it ‘Starbo’, because it sounded cool. So, once they noticed their surprising luck that there exists a Moby-Dick themed name that sounds a lot like Starbo, they compromised on that.
Then, as you may have noticed, Starbucks become a multi-national giant, with over 35,000 coffee-shops all over the world.
Although not, I discovered, in Starbeck. Starbeck has a Costa.
Hang on, there’s more.
Meanwhile, in 1840, a grocer in the spa town of Harrogate came up with a sweet designed to take away the unpleasant taste of the water Victorian invalids came to Harrogate to drink. By 1887, these sweets were being sold as 'Farrah’s Harrogate Toffee’, in the distinctive blue and silver tins in which they’re still packaged today.
The company is still based in Harrogate, but in 1999 production moved to a factory in what is now a suburb of that city: Starbeck.
The upshot of all of which is that in Starbeck, North Yorkshire, you can’t get a Starbucks coffee… but you can get a Starbeck’s toffee.
NEWS AND ADS
John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme
The 2025 edition of my Radio 4 sketch show has now been recorded, in an un-air-conditioned hall during a heatwave- thank you to all who came, and thank you for somehow continuing to laugh whilst essentially being gently steam-baked.
The show will be broadcast on Radio 4 on 25th August. Hope you like it!
John Finnemore Among Other
The next performance of my two-person live show will be at the Trinity Theatre in Tunbridge Wells on September 12th. (I notice they seem to think it will be two and half hours long, but I don’t know where they got that idea. Two and a half hours of my nonsense would surely be a near fatal overdose. It’ll be more like one and a half.)
Experimental Subscriber Chat
One of the things I really miss about olden-days Twitter is how I could ask quite specific research questions, and someone would always know. I have loads of such questions at the moment, and no Twitter to ask them. So I thought I’d give the Subscriber Chat feature on Substack a whirl, and see how that works. I’m not 100% how to do it, but I think all I have to do is decide that at 12 midday, this Friday the 25th July, I’ll be here for one hour, asking and answering questions. But maybe it’s more complicated than that. Let’s find out.
WELL, MIGHT ONE?
I recently read The Machine Stops, an early speculative fiction novella by E.M.Forster. It’s a fable in the now-familiar Black Mirror genre famously described by Daniel Ortberg as “What if phones, but too much?” Forster is absolutely furious about how everyone is glued to their damn devices all the time, and wishes they’d just go outside once in while. What makes this more remarkable, though, is that it was written in 1909 - well before any of the devices in question were invented. He does a surprisingly good job of describing them, though. Here, for instance, is the antihero essentially turning her wifi back on after a facetime call:
Vashti’s next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas?
“Might one tell you one’s own ideas?” would be a good slogan for Substack.
If one might, then do by all means subscribe above to read even more of them; including, just beyond the approaching paywall, an entire new sketch I wrote for this year’s Souvenir Programme which I was in the end forced to leave out because it has a strong thematic overlap with another sketch.
Otherwise, we leave you here, with, as ever
Love
The Airport.