Following the brouhaha between Stewart Lee and @TomTugendhat, I'm going to tell you the story of my own family name. A thread:

First, some background. Lee wrote his Observer column about Tugendhat, and mocked his name - the piece has now been changed and given this slightly vague corrective note but here's that and the quote in question:

Many, including Tugendhat, condemned this as anti-semitic - his family, like mine, changed their name from an Eastern European Jewish name to a more anglicised one in order to assimilate into the UK.

But in my great-grandpa's case it was because of a gangland assassin.

My original family name on my dad's skde is Lipsky (or possibly Lipski - spellings were not set back then really). But when my family fled the pogroms in Russia for England back around the turn of the 20th century, they discovered that name was going to be a real problem.

The family didn't move all at once. Some cousins of my great-grandpa had left a bit earlier to get the lay of the land. But there had recently been a grisly and high-profile crime committed by a Lipski, and they were finding life increasingly difficult.

The way I was first told the story, the Lipski in question was a contract assassin for the East End mob. Like many Jewish immigrants at the time, my family was to settle in what was then called the Jewish colony in London's East End around Brick Lane and Cable Street.

I've since done some research and I think the famous criminal Lipski was in fact Israel Lipski, who was executed for the murder of his wife in 1887. The controversial case was a media sensation.

The cousins who had already moved to London wrote a letter to my great-grandpa who was preparing to emigrate, to the effect that "if you give your name as Lipski, you aren't getting through at Dover." They themselves had changed their name to the more English-sounding "Fox".

So when my great-grandfather arrived at Dover with his family in 1904 and were asked for their name, they decided to go for "Woolf" - essentially just to one-up cousin Fox with an even cooler animal. The extra O is a spelling mistake by immigration officials.

(Alright, so not literally a gangland assassin. That's how the story was originally told to me, but I'm fairly sure Israel Lipski is actually the right one. Lipski was a common name at the time among Jewish immigrants, but after the case it became a general slur term for Jews)

Lee is hardly the only one to mock immigrant names, by the way. I'm an enormous @iamjohnoliver fan, but I found his bit from a while back about how Trump's family name was originally "Drumpf" to be a bit off, though defensible as it targets Trump's immigration hypocrisy.