Dates

• Existence: 1858-06-12 - 1927-07-31

Biography

Henry Hamilton [Harry] Johnston was born in London on 12 June 1858, the eldest of twelve children of John Brookes Johnston, secretary of the Royal Exchange Assurance Company, and his second wife, Esther Laetitia, daughter of Robert Hamilton, merchant. At the age of ten Johnston had a year away from school to develop his precocious talents, drawing and painting at the Lambeth School of Art and studying animals and birds at the London Zoological Gardens. From 1870 to 1875 he attended the Stockwell grammar school and in 1876 studied French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese at evening classes at King's College, London. In the same year he entered the Royal Academy Schools to study painting. He made long painting expeditions, to Spain in 1876 and France in 1878, and in 1879–1880 spent eight months in Tunis, painting and contributing illustrated articles to 'The Globe' and 'The Graphic'.
In 1882–1883 Johnston accompanied a geographical and sporting expedition to Angola, serving as artist, naturalist, and Portuguese interpreter. The party travelled slowly from Mossamedes to the upper Cunene, where Johnston left it, making his own way to the Congo estuary. There he was befriended by H. M. Stanley, who was then establishing the Congo Independent State for Leopold II of the Belgians. With Stanley's help, Johnston ascended the river as far as Bolobo, and spent some weeks collecting plants, birds, and insects, and vocabularies of the local Bantu languages. Back in England, he published an attractively written and illustrated account of his journey, which established his reputation as an African explorer and led to his appointment by the Royal Society to conduct an expedition to study the flora and fauna of Mount Kilimanjaro in 1884.
Preparations for the Kilimanjaro expedition brought Johnston into contact with officials of the Foreign Office, whom he alerted to the commercially exclusive treaties being negotiated by Stanley with the chiefs of the Lower Congo. On his return to England Johnston was rewarded with the offer of a double vice-consulship in the British Protectorate of the Oil Rivers, in the south-east of modern Nigeria, and in the adjacent German protectorate of the Cameroons.
Johnston spent two and a half years in west Africa, during which he travelled widely. During the intervals between these journeys he studied the current partition of Africa and speculated about the interior frontiers which were still to be drawn. He embodied his thoughts in a series of dispatches, well-illustrated by maps, which attracted the attention of Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, who, on Johnston's return to England, retained him in London for almost a year as an informal adviser. Johnston's publication of 'The River Congo' (1884) and 'The Kilimanjaro Expedition' (1885) confirmed his reputation as an authority on Africa.
Johnston served as Consul for province of Mozambique in 1888 and from July 1889 until March 1890 he travelled up the Zambezi and the Shire to Lake Nyasa and on to Lake Tanganyika making treaties with African chiefs to increase British claims to territories. In February 1891 Johnston was appointed commissioner and consul-general for the territories under British influence to the north of the Zambezi. In 1897 Johnston accepted the consulate-general at Tunis and used it as a retreat from which to pursue his literary and scientific interests, and in 1899 he took up a two-year appointment as special commissioner to Uganda, to establish civilian administration there after seven years of disastrous and very expensive military rule. At the end of his tour of duty, Johnston got a GCMG, and his book 'The Uganda Protectorate' was published in 1901, following 'British Central Africa' in 1897, but he got no further offers of employment under the crown.
In 1896 Johnston married the Hon. Winifred Mary Irby, daughter of Florance George Henry Irby, fifth Baron Boston, and stepdaughter of Percy Anderson, head of the Africa department of the Foreign Office. In 1902 she was delivered prematurely of twin boys, who both died within hours; there were no more children. In 1903 and in 1906 he stood unsuccessfully for parliament. In 1906 the Johnstons moved from London to Poling, near Arundel where he engaged in ceaseless literary activity, much of it ephemeral.
In 1902 the University of Cambridge awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Science, principally for his contributions to ornithology.
In 1925 he suffered two strokes, which left him partly paralysed. He died on 31 July 1927.

Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

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