The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 50 No.1 | June 2023

Member’s article

The Hampshire Chronicle and association

The history of the JOHNSON family of Gosport, and others associated with the Hampshire Chronicle , first published in 1772, has been researched by a local historian in collaboration with the HGS help-desk in the Hampshire Record Office. In 1790, William JOHNSON I (bap. 16 June 1780, died 23 November 1850), son of George established printer and bookseller, James ROBBINS of Winchester. Two years later, William JACOB (March 1779 – January 1847) was also apprenticed to the same man. So it was that later, in 1813, the two men bought the Hampshire Chronicle from Robbins, and in 1820 formed the Jacob and Johnson partnership that in name continued until 1958, when it became a limited company, which was only finally dissolved in 2017. William Johnson I was baptised in 1780 on the same day as his brother George and sister Mary at Holy Trinity Church, Gosport, probably at the age of 2, which would mean that when he was apprenticed he had reached the usual age of about 12 or 13. On 27 January 1805 he married Mary Jacob (1774–1843), a sister of his fellow apprentice. They lived in Gosport (parish of Alverstoke), where, in 1813, he set up a publishing office of the Chronicle . It has been claimed that William Johnson I printed the paper in Gosport, as well as distributed it, but this is unlikely; it seems rather that his colleague William Jacob printed and published the newspaper in Winchester. What is known, however, is that when William took on the Chronicle and Mary Johnson from Gosport, was indentured as an apprentice to a well

partnership he had already been in business for some while, variously as a printer, with a circulating library, and as a bookseller and stationer. By the early 1800s he was in partnership with George CRUICKSHANK (Hampshire Telegraph, January 2, 1804, pers. comm., Philip Eley), who had previously partnered Joseph WATTS (J. Oldfield, Printers, Booksellers and Libraries in Hampshire, 1750–1800, Hampshire Papers , No.3, p. 21). By the end of 1804 he was on his own, not only as a ‘bookseller’, but also selling sheet music and patent medicines and offering a ‘Navigation Warehouse’ for sextants and the like ( Salisbury and Winchester Journa l, December 10, 1804). William and Mary Johnson had three children: Ann (1805–1884); Henry (1809–1891), who was to become a co-owner of the Chronicle; Charles (1811–1818); and William Johnson II (1814–1875), who created a brewing business in Gosport. William II was baptized at Holy Trinity Church, Gosport, on 29 June 1814, married Ann GODWIN in March 1844 in Winchester and with her had nine children (the first two born in Winchester). The brewery site derived from a property called ‘Bunches’, bought in 1841 by William Johnson I and settled on his namesake son two years later, 38M48/82/). Why he went into brewing is not clear; there is likely to be a family link of some kind, according to Philip Eley, author of Brewers and Breweries in Gosport (gosportpapers@yahoo.co.uk). The 1851 census shows William Johnson II as as detailed in a source that give more information about the family (HRO,

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