Interesting Facts

A difficult decision for any new parent will be choosing the right name to suit your child, so here is the top ten list of most popular girls names in Wales for 2017.

1. Olivia – 294
2. Amelia – 230
3. Ava – 181
4. Isla – 179
5. Ella – 154
6. Emily – 136
7. Sophia – 133
8. Evie – 127
9. Mia – 124
10. Poppy – 122

Olivia, Amelia, Ava, Isla and Ella were the top five most popular names in Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics.

There are six new girls names that now appear in the top 100 list for girls and these include Aurora, Orla, Edith, Bonnie, Lyla and Hallie. These names have pushed out the names Lexi, Zoe, Maddison, Sarah, Felicity and Lydia.

There isn’t much regional changes of popular girls names throughout England and Wales, with Olivia coming top in every region.

The only place that Amelia didn’t come second in a region was the South West, whereby Isla took second place instead of fourth.

Some of the names that have declined include Ruby, Grace, Jessica and Chloe, which have been given to 50% less babies over the past 10 years.

For the first time ever the name Sarah dropped out of the top 100 most popular girls names since records began back in 1904. Whilst two new names entered the top 100, and they are Aurora and Hallie.

Sir Nicholas Winton has become known as the humanitarian who helped devise a plan to rescue 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in 1939 at the dawn of World War II.

He was born Nicholas George Wertheimer on 19 May 1909 in London. He was the son of Jewish German parents, Rudolf and Barbara Wertheimer, but the family decided to change their surname from Wertheim to Winton to blend in, in Britain.

His father was a successful banker and the family lived in a 20-room mansion in West Hampstead, London. Sir Nicholas attending Stowe School in Buckingham, and afterwards followed in his father’s footsteps and became an apprentice in international banking. He worked in banks in London, Berlin and Paris and returned to England in 1931 to begin his career as a stockbroker.

A planned skiing trip to the Swiss Alps in December 1938 was skipped when Winton decided to visit his friend, who was working with refugees in Sudetenland in the western area of Czechoslovakia. It has fallen under German control and it was here that Winton witnessed first hand the dreadful situation in refugee camps there. The camps were overflowing with Jewish families and other political prisoners.

Upset by what he saw he went back to England and started organising a rescue effort to evacuate Jewish children from Austria and Germany to England. He organised a tight group of trusted people and worked under the guise of the British Committee for Refugees where he began taking applications from Czech parents at a Prague hotel. As you can imagine thousands lined up outside the hotel.

Winton found adoptive parents, secured entry permits and raised funds to cover the costs of the children’s travels. If the donations didn’t cover these costs then Winton paid for them out of his own pocket.

On 14th March 1939, just before Adolph Hitler and the German Nazis took Czechoslovakia, the first train carrying Jewish children left the country. During the course of five months, Winton and the small team he’d assembled managed to successful evacuation seven more trains, bringing a total of 669 children to safety.

Unfortunately, as the ninth train was set to leave on 1st September 1939, with another 250 Jewish children, it never left the station as on that day, Hitler invaded Poland and closed off all the borders under German control.

This was the start of World War II and regrettably brought Winton’s rescue work to an end.

Only the small group of people knew of Winton’s great work, that is until in 1988 his wife, Grete Gjelstrup, whom he’d married in 1948 and had three children with, found an old scrapbook stuffed with letters, pictures and travel documents, regarding his efforts to bring Jewish children to safety.

Winton was initially reluctant to discuss his rescue operation, but his wife Grete Gjelstrup, with his consent in the end, turned the scrapbook over to a Holocaust historian.

Winton became known as the British Oskar Schindler, who was the German businessman who saved some 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

After news broke of Winton’s rescue mission in 1939, he received an American Congressional resolution and also an honorary citizenship of Prague, the Czech Republic’s highest honour.

Not only were streets named after him, and statues erected in his honour, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2003 followed by a Hero of the Holocaust medal in 2010. There is also a Czech school named after him and a small planet.

On 1st September 2009, Winton whom by now was 100 years old, greeted some of the original evacuees as they came into London on a special train marking the rescues from Prague to London.

The rescued children call themselves ‘Winton’s Children’ and they often visited his house to thank him.

Winton decided to celebrate his 100th birthday by flying in a small plane which was piloted by the daughter of one of the Jewish boys rescued all those years ago in 1939.

Nicholas Winton has been awarded the OBE and the Pride of Britain Award. There is a Czech school named after him, as well as a small planet.

Sadly Sir Winton is no longer with us having died in Slough, England, on 1st July 2015, aged 106 years old.

One of the hardest decisions to make as a new parent is choosing the right name for your baby.

So here are a few helpful hints from the top ten most popular names for boys in Wales for 2017.

Boys Top Ten Names are:-

1. Oliver – 367
2. Noah – 258
3. Jacob – 252
4. George – 226
5. Theo – 215
6. Jack – 199
7. Charlie – 197
8. Leo – 197
9. Alfie – 194
10. Harry – 188

Oliver, Noah, Jacob, George and Theo are the most popular names in Wales but some counties buck the trend. In the county of Ceredigion, Jac and Osian are top, whereas in Gwynedd, Hari and Efa were top the list.

There are two brand new boys names that have entered the top 100 list and they are Hunter and Ralph, these two names have now replaced Aaron and Jasper. However, Oliver has been consistently popular in every region across England and Wales.

Some of the past most popular boys names like Thomas and Daniel have declined in popularity, with at 50% fewer babies in 2017 been given these names than they were around 10 years ago.

And finally, Leo entered the top 10 for the first time and also the name Hunter entered the top 100 for the first time reaching an impressive number 78.

Most people will know the lady known as Hedy Lamarr as one of Hollywood’s greatest actresses back in the Golden Age of film in the 1940’s, starring in films with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jimmy Stewart to name but a few.

However, Hedy Lamarr was also a genius inventor, so here are some interesting facts about this lady’s life.

She was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler on 9th November 1914, in Vienna, Austria. She was of Jewish decent and came from a wealthy family with her father Emil Kiesler being a banker from Lember.

Hedy always dreamed of becoming an actress and first entered the film world in 1931 in Czechoslovakia, which included a controversial film named Ecstasy in 1932.

Hedy was married to a wealthy Austrian ammunition manufacturer named Fritz Mandl at the time.

In 1938 after MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer had signed Hedy to a contract, she made her American film debut in films like Algiers, White Cargo and Casablanca, with her last movie being The Female Animal in 1958. She then retired to Florida.

During her time as an actress Hedy Lamarr also had a secret workshop where she liked to experiment with inventions. During the Second World War it was known that US Navy torpedoes were easy to signal jam, causing them to go off-course.

Hedy and the composer George Antheil realised that a radio signal could change frequencies with the same technologies that a piano player changes his notes, which would then make the signal impossible to jam.

They came up with the FHSS – frequency hopping spread spectrum and although Hedy received a patent for it in 1942, the US military did not use the technology until 1962 when the Cuban missile crises hit. Hedy’s technology was used to control torpedoes and communication between multiple electronic devices.

These days FHSS is the technology used to service Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS.

Hedy was married and divorced six times and had three children – James Loder, Anthony Loder and Denise Loder.

Hedy Lamarr died on 19th January 2000 in the city of Casselberry, Florida.