The theme for Week 33 is “Strength.” Strength comes in many forms: physical, emotional, spiritual, just to name a few. What ancestor do you think of when you think of strength?

My G GrandUncle John Johnston 1831-1909 was born in Glasgow, the second-last of seven children. His father was a shoemaker as was one of his brothers, the others were a master tailor, a carver and gilder, a cabinetmaker, a tobacconist and later commercial traveller and then Court officer. John, initially a warehouseman, married Benjamina “Jessie” Leckie in 1856, according to the forms of the United Presbyterian Church. Soon after the birth of their first child they moved to Edinburgh where he studied for the Congregational Ministry at the Edinburgh Theological Hall. This was a little surprising seeing the Johnstons were strong Presbyterians with several Reverends in the immediate family. But religious differences did not split the family –
for example in 1875 John travelled from London to Glasgow to officiate at the marriage of his niece Elizabeth Jane Johnston to the Rev. Adam Gray, Minister of Sutton United Presbyterian Church in Cheshire.

John must have preached for a time in Edinburgh, but his little family were soon on the move, first to Stirlingshire, then Aberdeenshire and finally to Stoke Newington in London where John became the long-serving minister of the Raleigh Memorial Church (nowadays the Abney Reformed Church). Along the way four more children were born. Jessie died in 1871 aged 38 and John remarried, another, younger Jessie with whom he had another child in 1874.

Between 1886 and 1903 Charles Booth did an important survey into life and labour in London, and it includes 27 pages devoted to an interview with John Johnston.

John’s obituary, which appeared in the Congregational Year Book for 1910, includes the following:
“Mr Johnston twice underwent imprisonment for non-payment of the education rate, being an ardent Passive Resister. “

The ‘education rate’ was a locally-collected tax fixed on property values, collected from everyone in the parish to support Church of England institutions such as a National School, and other schools were not allowed to share this money but had to depend on voluntary contributions, so no wonder a Congregational minister would be against it.