OLD AZURIANS
ASSOCIATION
J JOHNSON
Subjects Maths & Physics
Mr Johnson was one of the eight members of staff to have been with the school at the very beginning. He was educated at the Crypt Grammar School in Gloucester and then at St Edmund Hall, Oxford.
One Old Boy, who subsequently returned as a master, Mr C S Harridge, has recalled his first meeting with JJ in 1925 in what was then the Practical Maths Lab., a place of schoolboy wonder, with lots of shiny pulleys, festooned with chains hanging from the ceiling, and yards and yards of thin yellow string. To boys of eleven all adults appeared to be aged, but JJ seemed young and boyish despite having been old enough for some military service in WW1.
He was popular because he was fair, amusing, and not usually depressed by his pupils’ shortcomings, but that did not prevent him from once putting the whole class on Saturday detention picking flints out of the rugby pitch with iron spikes feebly gripped in numbed fingers. Later on JJ turned to Physics which he continued to teach for the rest of his career.
JJ was a keen sportsman too, often to be seen on the field playing rugby, soccer, or hockey, or supporting his House, the Angles, for which he was the deputy Housemaster under Mr Turner until the latter became Headmaster. He was a very able rugby referee too, and a member of the Sussex Referees’ Panel.
He was also an active player in school dramatics: Capulet in “Romeo and Juliet” was a part he enjoyed most, and for a long time he produced plays, first with Mr Turner, then with Max Fuller.
Outside school he was connected with the Old Azurians from the very beginning, serving as Vice President of the Association, President and Chairman of the Cricket Club, and Vice-President of the Rugby Club. On a different tack, he was a founder-member of the School’s Parent-Teacher Association, and helped to found the Worthing and district Federation of PTAs. During WW2 he acted as a Civil Defence Warden and as a Flying Officer in the Air Training Corps.
From 1948 onwards he was Second Master, a post in which his fairness, sympathy, and imperturbable good nature were shining characteristics.
He was in the first group of masters to join the school and the last of that group to leave it when he retired at the end of the summer term in 1964