Author: Nancy Man

Here’s a baby name explanation I’ve never come across before: in-flight magazine!

British property developer Charles Hamar Delevingne — talking last month to the Irish Times at an event celebrating the centenary of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (which his father, Hamar, helped negotiate) — let it slip that he’d named his famous fashion-model daughter Cara Delevingne after the Aer Lingus in-flight magazine Cara:

I remember I used to go backwards and forwards to Dublin a lot, and the name of the Aer Lingus magazine was Cara. I loved the name.

Cara was first published in 1968. The magazine’s title comes from the Irish word cara, meaning “friend.” Cara was discontinued in December of 2020 due to “the impact of Covid-19,” but the airline plans to re-introduce it as a digital publication in the future.

Cara Jocelyn Delevingne (pronounced DEL-ah-VEEN) was born in 1992. Her middle name presumably honors her maternal grandfather, Sir Jocelyn Stevens.

And let’s not forget the distinctive name Hamar. According to one source, Hamar’s birth name was Thomas Hubbard Hamer Greenwood, but he chose to go by “Hamar” — an altered spelling of the maiden name of his Welsh paternal grandmother (Mary Hamer, 1795-1838).

Sources:

• Families of Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiators come together to mark centenary (Irish Times)
• Cara Delevingne’s father suggests she was named after in-flight magazine (CNN)
• Aer Lingus cuts Cara – much-loved magazine put to flight by Covid (Independent.ie)
• MacLaren, Roy. Empire and Ireland: The Transatlantic Career of the Canadian Imperialist Hamar Greenwood, 1870–1948. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015.

Image by U.S. Embassy London from Wikipedia