Topic: Worship.

My Great Grand Uncle John Johnston (1831-1909), born in Glasgow, was the 6th son of a shoemaker. His brothers followed various other occupations including tailor, carver and gilder, gas fitter and carpenter. Initially a warehouseman, John married Benjamina “Jessie” Leckie in Glasgow when he was 24, according to the forms of the United Presbyterian Church. Soon after the birth of their first child less than a year later, 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 mostly strong Presbyterians with several Reverends in the immediate family.

John must have preached for a time in Edinburgh, where their second child was born, but by August 1860 they were living in Stirlingshire, then they went to Pitsligo, Aberdeenshire and finally to Stoke Newington in London about 1870 where John continued as a Congregationalist Minister at the Raleigh Memorial Church. Jessie died there soon afterwards, leaving John with 4 living children aged between 9 and 16. John remarried about 1874 and had one more child, a son.

In 1875 John travelled from London to his birthplace to officiate at the marriage of his 23 year old niece Elizabeth Jane Johnston, daughter of his brother George and Elizabeth Jane nee Rae, to Adam Gray, the Minister of Sutton United Presbyterian Church in Cheshire. It must have been a happy family reunion – religious differences did not split the family.

The 1881 London Census shows John and his new wife, another Jessie six years younger than her predecessor, and the family including a new son born in 1874, living in Stoke Newington, London with one domestic servant. John was then 50, and a Minister of the Independent (Congregational) church – the Raleigh Memorial church (nowadays the Abney Reformed Church), at the corner of Milton Rd and Albion Grove. The family were still living in Stoke Newington in 1891, and John finally retired in 1907. Together with two of his sons, he lies in the famous Cemetery of Abney Park.

Between 1886 and 1903 Charles Booth did an important survey into life and labour in London; the original records are held in the British Library of Political and Economic Science. Among these papers are 27 pages devoted to “… an interview with the Reverend J. Johnston, 36 Park Lane, Stoke Newington, Minister of the Raleigh Memorial Congregational Church Albion Road. The interviews followed the questionnaire Form B – Nonconformist Churches. They contain answers to questions concerning the general character of the population, people employed, buildings used, services and meetings held, numbers attending, social agencies connected with the church, education work, visiting work, charitable relief, co-operation with other church institutions, remarks on local government, police, drink, prostitution, crime, marriage, thrift, health, housing and social conditions ..… Sept 1897.” According to a family historian such ‘interviews’ (also) often contained a wealth of personal detail, faithfully recorded by Charles Booth and his cousin Beatrice Potter (Mrs Sidney Webb) even if it was just an incidental joke – the Victorians never said anything in a short way.

John’s obituary, which appeared in the Congregational Year Book for 1910, contained an interesting anecdote near the bottom:
JOHNSTON, John, was born in Glasgow February 8, 1831. Trained for the Congregational Ministry at the Edinburgh Theological Hall, his first pastorate was at New Pitaligo (Edinburgh), 1862-66, removing from there to Cambuslang, 1866-70. It was, however, at the Raleigh Memorial Church, Stoke Newington, London, 1870-1907, where most of his pastoral work was accomplished. When Mr. Johnston accepted the call in 1870 the cause was a mission connected with Hare Court Church, but a separate church was formed in 1872, a new building in Albion road opened in December 1880, with 1,020 sittings, at a cost of £8,000, this debt being subsequently entirely liquidated. In 1895, in celebration of his faithful ministry, Mr. Johnston was presented with a testimonial, and in 1907, on his retirement, with an annuity of £70, a cheque for 100 Pounds, and an illuminated address. Mr. Johnston twice underwent imprisonment for non-payment of the education rate, being an ardent Passive Resister. He died on February 2 1909, at the age of seventy-eight.

The ‘education rate’ referred to 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 (after the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Religion); 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.