Thompson

Tyne, Tees and Yorkshire cluster Thompson; spelling and shipyard culture carried the name across the empire. The medial -p- is the dialectal hint of an English rather than Scottish formation: parish-clerk handwriting from County Durham and the North Riding ran the patronymic with an intrusive bilabial between the medial Thom- and the -son suffix. Across the Tweed the same patronymic kept its more economical form, Thomson. The Thompson distribution map is a coal-and-shipyard map of the north: the Northumberland-Durham coalfield, the Tees ironworks belt, the Sheffield-and-Rotherham steel district, the West Riding wool-cloth towns. The patronymic compressed into a surname by the late fourteenth century and was, by 1700, among the dozen most common surnames in the English north.

The industrial diaspora carried the name out. Tyneside shipyards (Swan Hunter, Vickers-Armstrong, Palmers of Jarrow) launched the steam-and-armoured fleets of the late-Victorian and Edwardian Royal Navy with Thompson riveters, platers and shipwrights on the slipway gangs. The Jarrow March of October 1936, the two-hundred-man unemployed-workers' walk from the closed Palmers yard to Westminster, included a substantial Thompson contingent in the marching ranks. The same Thompson names ran into the colonial-emigration patterns of the late nineteenth century: Cape Colony and Natal South Africa, the New South Wales and Victoria gold-rush districts, the Ontario shipbuilding towns. By 1900 the patronymic was among the twenty most common English-language surnames worldwide.

The Thompson literary, sporting and political register across the twentieth century has been one of the strongest of any English patronymic surname. E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) is the foundational text of post-war British social history; Daley Thompson's two Olympic decathlon gold medals (Moscow 1980, Los Angeles 1984) are the British track-and-field achievement of the post-war decades; Emma Thompson's two Academy Awards (Best Actress for Howards End 1992, Best Adapted Screenplay for Sense and Sensibility 1995) sit alongside a substantial post-Cambridge Footlights stage and screen career. The American Thompson tradition has been equally productive: Hunter S. Thompson on the Las Vegas-and-Kentucky political journalism, J. Walter Thompson on the early Madison Avenue advertising tradition, Bobby Thompson on the 1951 Shot Heard 'Round the World baseball home-run.