Mortensen

Behind Mortensen stands Morten, and behind Morten stands Saint Martin of Tours. Denmark did not leave that saint on a calendar page. His feast-eve, Mortensaften, falls on the tenth of November and is still kept in Danish houses with a roast goose, and the bird is there because of the tale attached to him: Martin wanted no part of being made a bishop, hid himself among the geese, and the geese made enough noise to give him away.

That is how Morten stayed in use as a given name, parish after parish, and a Danish father called Morten made his son a Mortensen. Those children would have taken a fresh name from their own father's, until the state ended the practice in 1856 and every household kept the word it was holding that year. Mortensen is now the twentieth most common surname in Denmark; Sweden turned the saint into Mårtensson, and emigrants often came out the other side as Mortenson.

Hans Christian Cornelius Mortensen, born at Jonstrup on Zealand on 27 August 1856, was the first person to use bird ringing for scientific purposes. He went to the University of Copenhagen in 1874 to read theology, switched to medicine, switched again to zoology and finished none of the three. He taught in schools around Copenhagen instead, and in 1888, with no university degree at all, was made a master at the High School of Viborg in Jutland. He never left, and was senior master there from 1909 until his death in 1921.

The ringing began in 1899 with common starlings taken in nest boxes fitted with an automatic closing mechanism, and went on to storks, herons, gulls and several species of duck; he is said to have ringed more than 6,000 birds. He cut most of the rings himself from aluminium sheet, stamping each with an address and its own number. His wife Ingeborg Lemming (1858-1938), a fellow teacher and a feminist, worked at the ringing with him, and in 1906 he founded the Danish Ornithological Society with Eiler Lehn Schiøler.

Ole Theodor Jensen Mortensen, born at Harløse near Hillerød on 22 February 1868, became professor at the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen and gave his working life to sea urchins. He collected on expeditions between 1899 and 1930, among them a research voyage into the Pacific from 1914 to 1916, and handed an enormous marine collection to the museum. He wrote A Monograph of the Echinoidea, and the frog Sylvirana mortenseni carries his name.

Two Danish naturalists of one surname, born in 1856 and in 1868, with nothing in the record tying them by blood. The name keeps turning up in the professions the same way: Svend Aage Mortensen (1942-2015) worked as a Danish cardiologist, Dale T. Mortensen (1939-2014) as an American economist.

Thomas Peter Thorvald Kristian Ferdinand Mortensen was born on 16 August 1882 at Skårup in Fruering parish, near Skanderborg, to a tailor called Jens Karl Martinus Mortensen and his wife Maren Therkelsen Thybo. He was baptised in Fruering Church that December, confirmed in 1896 and counted in the censuses of 1890 and 1901, and it is that parish paperwork that lets the rest of his life be stated as fact rather than claim.

He was apprenticed to a tailor at sixteen, worked as a farmhand, and in 1903 landed at Ellis Island aged about twenty. He settled in Chicago, where he had relatives, and worked as a milkman, a restaurateur and a factory hand. At ninety-six he moved into Aldersly, a retirement home for Danish immigrants at San Rafael in California, arriving by bicycle and telling the staff he had come to stay. He died there on 25 April 1998 at 115 years and 252 days, the longest verified male lifespan then on record.

William Herbert Mortensen was born at Park City, Utah, on 27 January 1897, son of Agnes and William Peter Mortensen, who had come out of Copenhagen in 1883. He served as a private in the 13th Infantry from August 1918, studied illustration at the Art Students League in New York, was told after two years that he had no talent for drawing, then borrowed money and sailed for Greece to make etchings of the monuments of Attica instead.

He came back to Hollywood and made his name on portraits of actors and film stills, taking his settled subjects from the horror pictures the studios were turning out: witches, dancers, demons, peasants, Shakespearean actors. In 1931 he moved to Laguna Beach and founded the William Mortensen School of Photography, working the bromoil process over with pens, paints, pumice and razor blades. That put him at war with the realists: he and Ansel Adams argued it out at length in Camera Craft, Adams taking to calling him the Devil.

He wrote nine books on technique with George Dunham, and the Royal Photographic Society gave him its Hood medal in 1949. The argument has since turned his way, his former student Robert Balcomb publishing Me and Mortensen on the Laguna Beach years in 2013.

Jesse Philo Mortensen, born at Thatcher, Arizona, on 16 April 1907, played four sports at Gila before transferring to the University of Southern California in 1928 and taking eight varsity letters there: three in basketball, three in track and field, two in football. He played left halfback in the USC side that beat Pittsburgh in the 1930 Rose Bowl, captained the 1930 NCAA championship track team, won the NCAA javelin title in 1929 and set a world record in the decathlon in 1931.

He coached for the United States Navy during the war, then at Denver and at West Point, and returned to USC as track coach in 1951. In eleven seasons to 1961 his teams took seven NCAA titles and never lost a dual meet at all: sixty-four of them, no defeats. He is one of only three men to have won Division I outdoor track and field team titles both as an athlete and as a coach.

Stanley Harding Mortensen was born at South Shields on 26 May 1921, grandson of a Norwegian named Hans who had emigrated there, and went to war in 1939 as a teenage wireless operator. His RAF bomber crashed and he was the only man aboard to survive. Blackpool signed him in 1941, and on 25 September 1943, sitting as England's reserve against Wales, he went on for the injured Ivor Powell and finished the match playing against his own country.

He scored 197 league goals in 317 games for Blackpool, all in the top flight, and was the club's top scorer every season he was there. He scored in fifteen consecutive league matches in 1950-51 and in twelve consecutive rounds of the FA Cup, and in the 1948 final became the first man to score in every round of one Cup campaign. In 1953, in a third final, Blackpool went 3-1 down to Bolton and Mortensen struck twice more, the second a twenty-yard free kick with two minutes left: the only hat-trick ever taken in an FA Cup final at Wembley.

For England he scored four on his debut against Portugal in 1947, and on 25 June 1950 at the Maracana he put away England's first goal at a World Cup, against Chile, finishing with 23 goals in 25 caps. He died on 22 May 1991, the day Blackpool reached Wembley for the first time since his final, and a statue of him went up outside the Bloomfield Road stand that bears his name in 2005.

The best-known bearer now is Viggo Mortensen, born in 1958, the Danish-American actor, poet, musician, photographer and painter, and the name reaches well past him. Malene Mortensen sings and Lars Ulrik Mortensen plays the harpsichord and conducts; Finn Mortensen (1922-1983) composed in Norway; Peder Mortensen (1934-2022) dug as a Danish archaeologist; Erling Mortensen is a Danish chess master; Carlos Mortensen plays poker for Ecuador.

Where the record shows kin it says so plainly: the journalist Chris Mortensen (1951-2024) was father to the football coach Alex Mortensen, and the Danish basketball players Daniel and Sarah Mortensen are brother and sister. The rest of the column is unconnected households that were holding a name built from a father called Morten when the law stopped the clock, and each of those fathers was a real man, named for a saint Denmark still remembers once a year at a table with a goose on it.