BRITISH historian based in Italy Simon Young has just completed some lesser-known Blackburn-related custom dating back to the 1700s regarding an unusual first name given to some baby boys. Here are his findings...

Just imagine that a secret sect of sorcerers was hiding in a British town in the late nineteenth century.

They were identified by a special Christian name and were believed by family and neighbours to have supernatural powers. If I’d read this a week ago I would have rolled my eyes and closed the offending browser.

But I’ve since come to believe that something along these lines actually happened in the last place I would have imagined.

Now ignore all thoughts of hellish villages in the fens or secretive corners of the Cotswolds.

The brotherhood, in question, was based in and around a mill town in Lancashire: Blackburn.

In Victorian and Edwardian Lancashire there was a custom that seventh sons were called, not John, James or Henry but ‘Doctor’: as they were believed to have special healing powers.

This does not appear in any occult or folklore book known to me: after much struggle I’ve found just half a dozen obscure references, most in yellowing newspapers.

More importantly using censuses and baptismal records I’ve tracked the Doctors themselves. Almost 400 children were baptised ‘Doctor’ in Lancashire in the later 1700s, the 1800s and the early 1900s: the last Doctor I’ve come across was brought to the font in 1926.

The English censuses (1841-1911), meanwhile, confirm that, at any one time, between a hundred and two hundred and fifty Doctors were walking about in the country: the vast majority from the hundred of Blackburn; with, curiously, a small pocket in the Huddersfield area.

I was initially sceptical that these were seventh sons: I mean come on… But going through the parish and census records most Doctors turn out to be just that. They are sometimes pure seventh sons (with no girls intervening) and sometimes intermittent with the odd sister sprinkled down the line of succession.

But they are almost invariably the seventh male in the family.

In several cases I was able to trace their fathers, but unfortunately I found not a single case of a seventh son of a seventh son. Blackburn, by the way, had appalling infant mortality in the 1800s and a correspondingly high birth rate: the average working class family there had about six children.

Families with seven sons were not, then, as rare as they might be today.

There is ample evidence, meanwhile, that, well into the 1900s, mystics advertised themselves as seventh sons: something that evidently got the punters in.

And did these Blackburn Doctors have magical powers?

I can only report that one, a Doctor Greenwood, became a legendary Blackburn Rovers player in the later 1800s and appeared in 1882 for England in a 13-0 massacre of Ireland.

n Do you know of any long-lost relatives who went by the name of Doctor? Let us know by emailing bygones@nqnw.co.uk