John Johnson and Headington
John de Monins Johnson (1882–1956) was born on 17 May 1882 at Brocklesbury Rectory in Lincolnshire. His father then went on to be Vicar of Kirmington in Lincolnshire. He was educated at Magdalen College School, Oxford.
The 1901 census shows him at the age of 18 at Kirmington vicarage, described as an undergraduate at Oxford, with his father John Henry Johnson (60),his mother , Anna Braithwaite Johnson (54), née Savory, and his elder sister Anna (21). The family has a cook, two housemaids, and a groom.
Johnson and read Literae Humaniores at Exeter College, Oxford. He then learnt Arabic and worked in the Egyptian civil service from 1905 to 1907.
Johnson was a senior demy at Magdalen College from 1909 to 1912, and edited papyri during this period; he also conducted explorations in Egypt around this time, and discovered the earliest known manuscript of Theocritus.
Johnson was deemed unfit for active service in the First World War and in 1915 was appointed acting Assistant Secretary to the delegates of Oxford University Press, and later Assistant Secretary. In 1925 he was appointed Printer to the University, and remained in this post until his retirement in 1946.
Johnson is best remembered for the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera held by the Bodleian Library.
Johnson married Dorothea Cannan, daughter of the Secretary to the Delegates of the Press, in 1918, and they lived at Bareacres at 29 Barton Lane from 1929 until 1956. Dorothea’s sister Joanna Cannan wrote scathingly of the development taking place in the Barton area in the 1950s.
Johnson died at the Radcliffe Infirmary on 15 September 1956 and was buried at Headington Cemetery.
There is a
much fuller entry on John Johnson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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