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

Member’s article

with the Johnson family of Gosport a ‘brewer employing 3 men’ and the 1861 and 1871 censuses confirm him heading the family and living at Stoke

Brewery, Stoke Road, Gosport, with his wife Ann born in Winchester. The brewery was built in the grounds of his house, ‘The Elms’, renamed Bourton House, which still stands. Another glimpse of William’s life as a brewer comes from a letter of 1870 in the HRO (21M92/21/10) from his brother-in-law ‘A.

The site of William Johnson I’s print works at 65 High Street, Gosport, blitzed in the last war, an office of the Hampshire Chronicle 1813–c.1855

Godwin of the Temple’ to another, saying that he had sold William property in Southampton, which was probably the Alton Ale House . William Johnson II died on the brewery premises on 4 May 1875. The business then passed to his son Charles, baptized on 11 April 1855 in Gosport, where the family worshipped at the St John the Evangelist Chapel, Forton. In 1881 he is shown as ‘brewer and maltster employing 8 men’, and living in Stoke Road with his 66-year-old widowed mother. In that year his life was

SHENTON and William John LAURENCE , and details legacies for his sister Marian (b. 14 March 1857), as well as ‘one calendar month’s wages’ to all his men, and additional amounts of £50 to Charles STARES and 19 guineas to Thomas DOBBS . He left arrangements for his mother Ann to receive an annuity of £200 funded by the sale of the business. By the time of Charles’ death in 1881, the Johnson family in Winchester had taken over the Jacob and Johnson publishing partnership. Henry Jacob – the last of his family to be involved with the newspaper – had been dead six years; he never married, and so that was the end of the Jacob family link. The paper was run by Henry Johnson, son of William Johnson II, assisted by his two sons, Henry Godwin and Herbert Edward. In 1889,

tragically cut short at the age of 26, apparently from cholera. His will was

executed on 2 January 1877 and proved at Winchester on 14 December 1881, with an estate valued at £6,789 (re-sworn at £5,828). It gives his brothers-in-law as William

33