Friday, March 24, 2023
Nominative determinism - A marketer's dream
I rarely pay much attention to the adverts on television, but one from the Ford Motor Company recently caught my attention, simply because it was using historical footage of a female motorist and explorer whose name seemed to be made-up to create a form of nominative determinism. A little bit of googling soon dispelled that notion.
For yes, Aloha Wanderwell really existed, and she did a fair bit of wandering.
As Wikipedia relates, Idris Galcia Welsh was born on October 13, 1906, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to Margaret Jane Hedley and Robert Welsh. When her mother married Herbert Hall in 1909, her name was changed to Idris Hall.
She began her adventuring career when she met her travelling companion, Walter "Cap" Wanderwell, in 1922. They married in 1925 and had two children. As they continued to travel the world, Aloha Wanderwell performed on stage, giving travel lectures against the backdrop of a silent movie, Car and Camera Around the World. The Wanderwells made films of their travels on 35mm nitrate and 16mm film which are now held in the archives of the Library of Congress and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
During the 1920s, Wandeerwell visited over 80 countries and six continents, and drove over 500,000 miles in Ford vehicles. She became the first woman to drive around the world, beginning and ending her journey in Nice, France, between December 29, 1922, and January 1927.
The story of her life is quite extraordinary, ending in June 1996 when she died at the age of 89.
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That commercial immediately brought to mind Tony Vandervell, the successful British industrialist and producer of surely the most attractive of our Formula 1 cars. Is there perhaps an ancestral connection?
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