In tennis, the top prize in Britain is £2.35 million. In golf it is £1.4 million. The stakes were of a different order yesterday in a match of croquet, involving simply a case of regional pride.
Northampton and Peterborough were competing for the right to determine which was right in a centuries-old dispute over the pronunciation of the River Nene.
Those from Northampton, 40 miles upstream from Peterborough, insist that it is “Nen”. Their downstream neighbours across the border in Cambridgeshire will consider you an outsider unless you say “Neen”.
The Oxford University Press A Dictionary of British Place Names states that 1,050 years ago it was called Nyn. So in the absence of an authoritative justification for either option, two teams decided that the
