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Captain Johnson lived in Little Knowle from 1900 until his death in 1922 and was very active locally during that period.  He was born in 1840 at Dovercourt in Essex the son of Henry and Esther Johnson.  His father was in the navy and died before the 1851 census because his wife Esther is described at that time as being an annuitant living with her family in Whitby (her home town). 

Johnson’s naval record (1) shows that he served on no less than seventeen ships during his time in the Service.  He joined in November 1855 as a Master’s Assistant on HMS Perseverance.  He was at the start of his training to become a Master responsible for the navigation and sailing of a vessel (at the quickest this would have taken eight years depending on vacancies but it was in fact eleven years before he attained the rank). 

Perseverance was a troopship and seems to have been rather an unlucky ship because in January 1855 it had turned turtle in Woolwich Dockyard on its maiden voyage.  It was refitted and used to send troops for colonial service.  However in February 1856 the boat ran aground at Portland Bill and the Commander was replaced and court marshalled.  In April the ship took part in a Royal Review at Spithead in honour of the end of the Crimea War and of the ships that had served in that theatre.  

The ship was then sent back to the Crimea and picked up soldiers of the 82nd Regiment in July before returning to Gosport in August.  However the bad luck continued because, during the return journey, on leaving Malta after picking up 410 invalids from the East, it ran onto Senglea Point Rocks (luckily without incurring serious damage). 

Johnson left the ship in October 1857 and spent a short time in HMS Urgent a sister ship of Perseverance (and equally accident prone!), before moving in January 1858 to HMS Buffalo, a Government Transport which sailed in February for Ascension Island.  Buffalo was at Cape Coast Castle in August waiting to carry the deputy Governor to arbitrate on differences “between the natives” of Apollonia & Assinee.  It was on the West Coast of Africa in 1860 and one of their functions seems to have been to report on the state of trade in the areas they visited. Another function was to prevent slave trading and they took charge at the end of the year of the barque Clara Windsor that had been arrested off Ascension carrying 750 slaves by HMS Espoir.  In November 1861 Johnson was made acting 2nd Master.  

Buffalo arrived back at Gravesend from Sierra Leone in January 1862 and on January 26th he transferred to HMS Victory at Portsmouth.  This was for a course and he passed an examination in February which confirmed his promotion to 2nd Master; in March he moved to his next post on the frigate HMS Tribune. 

In late 1862 HMS Tribune was part of the Pacific Squadron and at various times was at Valparaiso & Callao, and there were reports of fever, VD and injury on board.  In November 1862 the ship was at Alexandria (possibly en route home).  One subsidiary function of these naval vessels seems to have been to temporarily store and pass on freight because when a Royal Mail Company Steamer docked in England in July 1863 it was carrying cargo “ex HMS Tribune”.  

The ship was back in the Pacific in 1863 and made a social round of Pitcairn, Tahiti and Hawaii in July (2) ostensibly to look for evidence of slavery but the trade had ceased in that area by then.  In June 1864 she was in the China Sea when a long serving senior stoker from Colyton called William Green fell overboard and was drowned (3).  Later, in November, Johnson was transferred to HMS Charybdis also on the Pacific Station, but moved yet again to HMS Linnet in August 1865.  He was promoted to Master in March 1866, and his captain (Commander Bushe) described him on his record as “most careful and trustworthy”. 

HMS Linnet was a small gunboat and was ordered to the Paraguay River in February 1868 to bring away British subjects unlawfully detained by the war between Paraguay and the Triple Alliance of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.  Sir Richard Francis Burton visited the ship in August (4) and noted that she: 

“was the only neutral ship present .. and several of the crew suffered from fever” ... “all were tired of the service – no wonder, after a monotonous diet of salt-junk, tired beef, half-baked bread, and now and then wild duck and partridge”. 

It was a frustrating time as the combatants would not allow the ship up the river, although later they must eventually have done so because Commander Bushe noted in Johnson’s record that he showed “zeal and ability up the Paraguay River”. 

On June 1st 1867 he was involved in an act of bravery that earned him the Silver Medal of the Royal Humane Society.  Linnet was at Monte Video and a cargo boat was wrecked near the harbour, and several crew members assisted in the rescue but Johnson particularly distinguished himself when he swam out and fastened ropes around some of the crew who were then hauled to safety.  He was also given a gold medal by the local Masonic Lodge and a gold watch by the townsfolk for this act (5). 

Johnson left Linnet in July 1870 and in September of that year married his first wife, Sarah Frederica Martin the daughter of Francis Martin who was Chief Constructor at Pembroke Dockyard.  

In July 1870 he was posted to the frigate HMS Immortalite as a “Navigating Lieutenant”. This was a new rank that replaced the term “Master” and these men were now considered to be Officers equal in rank to naval Lieutenants; this change occurred probably as the result of a recommendation by a Committee set up to address the issue of discontent about the status of Masters, one of its members being Rear Admiral May who later lived at Lee Ford in Knowle (5). Johnson’s seniority in this rank was back-dated to 1866 when he had become a Master. 

Immortalite was part of a squadron that left Plymouth in January 1871 bound for Lisbon, Madeira, Barbados & Jamaica.  In April they sailed to Havana and after returning in June they left Halifax for Gibraltar and joined the Mediterranean and Channel squadrons for exercises.  They then cruised in the North Sea before returning to Portsmouth in September via Queensferry in Ireland.  In December the ship left again for Rio de Janeiro via Madeira and they were at the Cape in February 1872, Bombay in April, Mauritius in June and then returned to the Cape. This grand tour ended with a trip to St. Helena followed by Ascension Island, the Azores and finally back via Plymouth to Portsmouth by the end of September 1872. 

After several years of sailing the world he then began a quieter life for a short spell.  He spent five months at the Royal Naval College in Portsmouth in 1873 and from January 1874 to March 1875 he was in HMS Royal Alfred which was on harbour duty in Portsmouth.  His wife gave birth to two sons, Harold in 1873 and Kenneth in 1874, and a daughter Alice in 1875 (all three in Pembroke in Wales where her parents were living due to her father’s post at the docks).  The couple had previously lost a daughter at the age of four months in 1871. 

Johnson’s next ship was the cruiser/corvette HMS Rover although the officers were housed on HMS Pembroke.  He joined in April 1878 and later in the year he and his fellow ward-room officers put an unusual notice in the London Standard to the effect that “having taken Mr J. Beal as Messman that they are NOT RESPONSIBLE for any DEBTS he may incur”, which makes one wonder what Mr Beal had been doing!  

Johnson himself left under a cloud in May 1879.  In his naval record it is recorded that he refused to attend divine service and “Their Lordships considered it subversive to discipline and found fault with the flippant manner in which Lieutenant Johnson treated the whole affair”.  He subsequently apologised but the Board considered he should be left unemployed for at least one and a half years after he was paid off from Rover.  This proved to be the case as he joined his next ship the battleship HMS Neptune in April 1881.  He had previously in April 1878 been promoted to Staff Commander (6).  

In February 1882 his wife Sarah died while he was still in England. Neptune was at Portsmouth having modifications to its armament and other equipment as it had originally been built for the Brazilian Navy. These modifications were completed by September but the ship wasn’t commissioned until March1883 after Johnson had left it in January of that year to join the cruiser HMS Northampton, the flagship of the North American and West Indies Station.  Northampton was at Newfoundland later in September and in December arrived in Bermuda.   

The ship seems to have been as accident prone as some of his earlier ships because in Bermuda it dragged its anchor in bad weather and went aground on a coral reef.  Johnson doesn’t seem to have been implicated in the incident.  Nor was he involved when in July 1886, as the ship was on its way back to Portsmouth down the Channel, it ran into and badly damaged a steamer off Portland.  He was transferred from the ship in November 1886. 

In February 1887 he went to join HMS Liffey in Chile probably as commanding officer.  It would appear that this ship had been sent out to Coquimbo in Chile in 1878 to be used as a store-ship for the Pacific Squadron (and in fact stayed there in that capacity for a long time, eventually being sold to a private company).  Johnson left her in February 1890 and in June took charge till the following January of HMS Monarch part of the Channel Squadron which at the time was undergoing extensive refit at Chatham. 

His next ship was HMS Imperieuse, a 1st class armoured frigate, which was the flagship of the China Squadron.  He joined in January 1891 and left her in March 1892.  After a period of leave he joined the battleship HMS Hercules in August which was also having a major re-fit.  

In September 1893 Johnson married for a second time to Helen Mainwaring, second daughter of the late Captain Edwin Mainwaring of the 91st Regiment and granddaughter of the late Rear Admiral Mainwaring (8).  

He left Hercules in November 1893 to take command for almost three years of HMS Wye which was a store-ship. During his stay on Wye he was promoted to Staff Captain.  In June 1896 he was appointed to Devonport Dockyard to be Assistant Staff Captain and was in charge of Keyham Dockyard.  

In April 1897 he was appointed to HMS Vivid and the post of Queen’s Harbour Master at Devonport.  Vivid was the official yacht of the Commander-in-Chief, Plymouth.  Johnson’s appointment was extended to 26th November 1900 when he reached retirement age and came to live in Little Knowle, with his wife and two daughters, Kate and Helen.  It is likely they had previously arranged their accommodation because Johnson sent his apologies for not being able to attend the Dinner for the Salterton Detachment of F Company of the R.V. held at the end of November.  

He soon became involved locally.  He was elected to the committee of the Literary Institute (9) in 1904, and prior to that had spoken at several of the debates sponsored by the Institute (10).  In 1904 he suggested that a rifle club be established in the town, although he initially had little success with this venture.  He was also very active in the promoting the interests of the Liberal Party and its local parliamentary candidate, chairing and organising local meetings and entertainments.  There was a particularly large rally of more than 600 people held on Marine Parade in July 1909 under the auspices of the Budget League.  In November of the same year he was on the platform at a well-attended meeting in the Public Rooms of the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies, so we can assume he was in favour of “votes for women”. 

He had been appointed as a Magistrate in 1908 and served in that role up to and including the Great War, mainly at the Exmouth & Woodbury sessions; and on one occasion during the War they fined the landlord of The Feathers for showing too much light at night.  In December 1914 he was elected as representative for Budleigh Salterton onto a committee set up in the Honiton Parliamentary Division to promote recruitment into the Services. 

Socially, he was a golfer, and he seems to have attended many of the annual dinners held in the town by particularly the Salterton Traders, the Salterton Volunteers, and the Sir Walter Raleigh Lodge of the Oddfellows Society.  He was also one of the subscribers to the Cottage Hospital. 

Captain Johnson was living at Brooklet in Little Knowle when he died in February 1922 and his family then went to live in Bournemouth. His wife died in October 1922 shortly after her husband. 

Researched and written by Roger Lendon © 2013 

(1) National Archives Catalogue Reference: ADM/196/73.

(2)“Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Slave Trade in Polynesia” Henry Evans Maude.

(3)North Devon Journal 16 June 1864.

(4)From: “The Tangled Web: A Life of Sir Richard Burton” By Jon R. Godsall.

(5)Johnson’s obituary notice Thursday 16 February 1922 ,  Western Morning News

(6)See OVApedia article: MAY, Rear Admiral Charles, at Lee Ford.

(7)Navy List 1882

(8)Friday 08 September 1893 ,  Portsmouth Evening News 

(9)See OVApedia article: Literary Institute and Penny Readings

(10)See OVApedia article:  Budleigh Salterton Debating Society

Other sources included: Ancestry.com, British Newspaper Archive, & the London Gazette

BS-B-00064  Biography 163 any