Mr. Johnson was an Eton master from 1845 to 1872, during which period he showed all the qualifications of a gifted teacher, though at times betraying considerable eccentricity. He was much given to introspection, and amused boys would often regale themselves with the sight of Billy Johnson, as they irreverently called him, standing wrapt in profound meditation all alone in the school-yard, totally oblivious of everything about him. He was very short-sighted, which gave rise to the story that he had been seen furiously rushing down Windsor Hill, making futile grabs at a fleeing hen, which he believed to be his hat, blown off by the wind. In school, owing to this infirmity, he was unable to perceive what boys were doing, and the carving of names and cutting into desks and forms was carried on in perfect safety beneath his very nose. Against positive disorder, however, he could well defend himself, and his paradoxical utterances and epigrammatic sayings kept even the most turbulent spirits in check.
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.”
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.