His powers of satire were generally recognised as being highly formidable, and masters as well as boys sometimes felt the keen thrust of his rapier. In a school book, Nuces, written by him for the use of the lower forms, was to be found a sentence which Etonians universally agreed was a hit at a somewhat unpopular master, conspicuous for the length of his flowing beard. This ran: “Formerly wise men used to grow beards. Now other persons do so.”
THE BOATING SONG
Though the poetical masterpiece of Mr. Johnson is the small volume entitled Ionica, which contains some beautiful verse, a more generally known composition of his is the Eton boating song, which has been carried by old Etonians practically all over the world. An interesting account of how this song came to be written is given by the Reverend A. C. Ainger in his admirable work on Eton in Prose and Verse. It would seem to have been composed in the winter of 1863 for the 4th of June of that year. Some little time later the words were printed in the third number of a periodical called the Eton Scrap-book, of which Everard Primrose was one of the joint-editors. A copy of the words were sent in 1865 to a subaltern in the Rifle Brigade, Algernon Drummond by name, who was then with his battalion at Nowshera, in India. This young officer, who, four or five years before, had been one of Johnson’s pupils, was haunted by the words till the tune came to them, and eventually, owing to him, a number of officers who had been at Eton made a practice of singing it nightly after mess. Gradually guests learnt it, with the result that old Etonians in other regiments took to singing the song which recalled to them their old school in distant England.
The composition of this boating song, it should be added, cost William Johnson much trouble and some sleepless nights; nevertheless, its final form contains some lines which are scarcely worthy of an author who, in Ionica, has shown himself a true poet. It must, however, be remembered that the song, as we have it, was never intended for the wide publicity which it so speedily attained. No doubt its popularity has been in a great measure caused by the charming tune to which it was set, whilst the whole-hearted and somewhat touching devotion to Eton expressed in the words makes an irresistible appeal to all true sons of the school, particularly to those who remember the days when, free from care, they passed many a happy hour
Skirting past the rushes,
Ruffling o’er the weeds,
Where the lock stream gushes,
Where the cygnet feeds.
The fact that “the rushes” are now no more, having been entirely swept away by the great flood of 1894, will not cause Etonians of a later date to sing the words less heartily, and many a generation yet to come will probably continue to accord this boating song the appreciation which it first obtained nearly half a century ago.
No man, perhaps, ever expressed better the true Eton spirit than Mr. Johnson in some words he uttered a few months before his death. He was a sufferer from heart disease, and realised that his end might at any time occur. Declining a friend’s invitation, he said, “I think it unmannerly to drop down dead in another man’s grounds.”