Baby Name: Byrni

In October of 1983, the miniseries All the Rivers Run premiered on Australian television.

The program’s main character, a free-spirited young Englishwoman named Philadelphia “Delie” Gordon (played by Sigrid Thornton), was orphaned in a shipwreck off the coast of Victoria in 1892. She was taken in by extended family living near Echuca, a port town on the Murray River, and eventually began a relationship with a paddle-steamer captain named Brenton Edwards (played by John Waters).

All the Rivers Run proved very popular and, as a result, many expectant parents in Australia decided to name their baby boys Brenton in the mid-1980s. The name reached peak usage in both in New South Wales and Queensland, for instance, in 1984.

Actor John Waters remembers meeting young boys named Brenton. He said,

The fact that [Brenton Edwards] was a popular character and the name was also new to people was probably one of those deciding factors — “I’ll call my kid Brenton, he’ll be the only one in his class.” Little did they know there’d be five of them.

In January of 1984, several months after its initial broadcast, All the Rivers Run aired in the United States.

The miniseries had a similar effect upon expectant parents in America; the name Brenton more than tripled in usage nationally in 1984, and the name Philadelphia appeared for the first time in the U.S. baby name data the same year.

Brenton, a Cornish surname, can be traced back to any of various place names, all of which derive from Bryningtun, meaning “settlement associated with Bryni” in Old English. Byrni, a personal name, is based on the word bryne, meaning “burning, fire.”

(Interestingly, while Brenton became a top-100 name for the first time in several regions of Australia in the mid-1980s, it had long been been a top-100 name in South Australia specifically. Why? Likely because of the relatively high number of Cornish Australians in South Australia.)

Philadelphia Gordon’s first name was inspired by the U.S. city of Philadelphia. In the 1958 novel upon which the TV miniseries was based, Delie explained: “Father was always planning to go to the States, before he ever thought of Australia.”

Sources:

• Wikipedia: All the Rivers Run, Cornish Australians
• Curator’s notes – All the Rivers Run (1983) – Australian Screen
• Boisvert, Eugene. “Curious Adelaide: Why is the name Brenton so popular in Adelaide?” ABC News 16 Aug. 2018.
• Popular baby names – NSW Government
• Top 100 Baby Names – Queensland Government
• Hanks, Patrick. (Ed.) Dictionary of American Family Names. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Cato, Nancy. All the Rivers Run. Scarborough, Ontario: Signet, 1979.
• SSA

Images: Screenshots of All the Rivers Run