Bondarenko

In Ukrainian the bondar is the cooper: the man who builds a vessel out of separate lengths of shaped wood and makes it hold. Bondarenko is his son. The ending marks the son and fastens to whatever the father did, and what it fastened to here was not a farm or a given name but a container.

England and Scotland did the same thing in their own words. Cooper comes from the Middle Dutch or Middle Low German kuper, from kupe, a cask; Hooper comes from the assistant who fitted the hoops, work the coopers took over themselves. Wherever and whatever goods were traded, casks carried them, filling the role cardboard boxes took later, and on land that sent out grain, cured fish and tar, nothing left the district except inside something a bondar had built.

The craft is one problem solved over and over: a watertight vessel made from nothing but timber and pressure. Staves were heated or steamed until pliable, bent into the belly of the cask and drawn together by hoops of wood or iron, with flat ends, called heads, seated in a groove cut round the inside. The trade divided by what the vessel had to keep in or out: white coopering made pails, churns and ladles, slack coopering made casks that kept moisture away from flour and tobacco, and tight coopering, the hardest of the three, made the ones that held water, wine, whiskey and oil.

Sizes carried their own vocabulary, running in England and Ireland from the firkin at eight imperial gallons through the kilderkin at sixteen and the barrel at thirty-two to the butt at a hundred and four. The tools have barely changed: Alastair Simms, at Theakston in Masham, works with a croze he reckons is over 250 years old.

At sea the cask was larder, water tank and cargo hold at once. Stowing them was a stevedoring skill of its own, sizes chosen to fit the sloping walls of the hull and packed tight so nothing could shift under way. Whalers needed casks for salted meat, provisions and water before they started on the oil, and carried a cooper aboard to build up shooks, barrels stowed flat in pieces; sperm oil was so viscous that oil coopers were reckoned the most skilled tradesmen in pre-industrial cooperage.

Salt and the barrel worked as a pair, because salting was one of the main ways of preserving food, and preserving is what freed a cargo from its season and let it travel. That made salt a great trading commodity, and taught governments they could tax it. Munich exists because of a toll on it: in 1158 Henry the Lion, Duke of Bavaria, decided the bishops of Freising no longer needed their salt revenue.

The great mines of the region were the Polish ones. Wieliczka and Bochnia were worked from the 13th century, in good years supplied up to a third of the treasury's income, and did not close until 1964. The trade itself then shifted, because it grew more profitable to sell salted food than pure salt, so the salt went to the fish and the meat rather than the other way about. What curing did is in the numbers: herring carries 67 mg of sodium in a hundred grams, kippered herring 990. A cargo like that needed a vessel that would not weep brine.

Coopers in Britain were organising as early as 1298, and the Worshipful Company of Coopers became one of the oldest London livery companies. An ordinance of 1420 required every cooper to stamp each finished cask with a mark unique to him, so his work could be told from an interloper's, and the practice held well into the 20th century. The company fought the brewers too, winning coopers the right in the 16th century to stand independent of the breweries they supplied.

Brewing was where the largest workshops were. Guinness kept up to 300 highly paid coopers of its own and used wooden casks for close to two centuries; aluminium arrived in 1946, the count was down to 70 by 1961, and the last wooden cask went into service in March 1963. What saved the craft was drink, because in wine and spirits the wood is part of the product rather than the packaging.

Valentin Vasilyevich Bondarenko was born in Kharkiv on 16 February 1937. His father volunteered for the front in the first days of the war, leaving the boy and his mother to years of hardship; it was his father's example that turned him towards the air force. He joined the aviation club while at Kharkiv's Higher Air Force School and qualified as a pilot at Armavir in 1957, the year Sputnik 1 was launched. On 28 April 1960 he was chosen for the first group of twenty Soviet cosmonauts, the youngest man in it, and his colleagues remembered a mild-mannered man with a good singing voice who played a hard game of table tennis.

On 23 March 1961, the tenth day of a fifteen-day endurance experiment in a low-pressure chamber at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow, in an atmosphere at least half oxygen, a discarded alcohol-soaked cotton ball fell on the hot plate he had been brewing tea on. The pressure difference held the door shut for nearly half an hour. He died sixteen hours later, and what he said was that the fault was his and no one else was to blame. Nikolai Kamanin, who directed the crewed flight programme, blamed the Institute's organisation and control of the experiment. On 17 June 1961 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet awarded him the Order of the Red Star.

Then the state removed him. The death was never announced, and he was airbrushed out of the official 1961 photograph of the first six cosmonauts, one of the erasures James Oberg later described. The story reached the West only in 1980, and Soviet readers only in 1986, when Yaroslav Golovanov set it out in Izvestia, which is why the name is missing from the plaque the crew of Apollo 15 left on the Moon in 1971 for the fallen. The correction came from the same place: a crater on the Moon's far side is named Bondarenko.

Svitlana Bondarenko was born in Zaporizhzhia on 12 August 1971 and swam breaststroke for Ukraine from 1991 to 2010, going to three Olympic Games in 1996, 2000 and 2004. Through the 1990s she took the silver medal in the 100 metres breaststroke at every European Championships in turn, in 1991, 1993, 1995, 1997 and 1999. The gold came at the European Championships of 2004, in the 100 breaststroke. She was still racing in 2010, the oldest contender at that year's Europeans.

Three sisters of the name played tennis for Ukraine: Valeria, born 1982, the eldest, then Alona, born 1984, and Kateryna, born 1986; Alona and Kateryna partnered each other in doubles. Bohdan Bondarenko, born 1989, is a Ukrainian high jumper, and Olga Bondarenko, born 1960, ran long distance for the Soviet Union. Football takes the rest: Artem, born 2001, and Taras, born 1992, in Ukraine, and Roman, born 1966, capped by Turkmenistan.

Andriy Ihorovych Bondarenko was born in Brovary on 22 June 1978 and trained at the Lysenko special music school in Kyiv and the National Musical Academy of Ukraine. His symphonic poem 2004 was written for the Orange Revolution. He wrote the first Ukrainian textbook on the theory of digital sound and music software, Musical Informatics, published in 2011, and in 2012 he founded World Classics in Ukrainian, which mounted nine concerts of world vocal music sung in Ukrainian, among them Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in a translation by Olena O'Lir.

He also turned the name on itself. At the local history conference in Makariv, in Kyiv oblast, in November 2011, he gave a musicological survey of the haidamaka songs about Ivan Bondarenko sung in that district. A second Andriy Bondarenko, born in 1987, sings opera in Ukraine, and Joseph Bondarenko, born in 1936, works as a Ukrainian author, theologian and public speaker. None of them descends from one cooper. What they share is the word for the man who could make a thing that held.