Dulwich OnView

After Ian Dejardin wrote on DOV about how the current exhibition of Chinese photographs came to Dulwich, all sorts of wheels started turning. Shiona Airlie, who played a key role in getting the exhibition together, explains what happened next.

As your esteemed director observed recently, exhibitions are strange beasts. Little did I realise when Ian and I first sat down and discussed The Lion and the Dragon exhibition appearing at Dulwich just what it would lead to.

Although I have been researching British-Chinese history for thirty years, I did not realise until the exhibition appeared at Dulwich that the lineal descendants of Confucius are alive and well, and under the clan head in China, Kong Deyong, still updating their awesome family tree and continuing to perform ceremonies at Qufu as they have done for two and a half thousand years.

Now, thanks entirely to the exhibition being on show in the gallery, I have been put in contact with the family. Tomorrow, I have the honour of meeting the descendants of Confucius in my own home. It is going to be a struggle not to be completely awed by their quite extraordinary heritage.

I thought it could not get better – but it did.

A week or so after the gallery staff put me in touch with the family of Confucius, I got another e-mail from Ian Dejardin. This time, it was someone asking to be put in contact with me. The gentleman in question had googled Reginald Johnston’s name, and Dulwich Onview had come up, with the article Ian wrote about the exhibition. He mentioned me in it, hence the request.

Quite often, one does not know with an e-mail where the sender lives in the world. It took a couple of mails before I discovered I was now in contact with Australia. The person in question was a Mr Rod Lancashire, who for some years has been trying to discover the origins of a booklet he had found in a local auction. The British Library had no record of it, so it was obviously a rare oddity.

When I wrote my biography of Reginald Johnston, I knew he had published a volume of poetry in the mid 1890s. But in Mr Lancashire’s possession was an even earlier publication. I spent ten years researching Johnston’s life, and so thought I knew it all, but this was complete news to me. The generous Mr Lancashire offered to scan pages of the booklet to me, and I was dumbstruck when they appeared through the ether!

What I saw was a lovely little book displaying Johnston’s poetic flair and romantic bent. In November 1892, Reginald Johnston wrote the libretto for a children’s operetta called ‘The Queen of the Fairies‘. Even better, his brother Charles wrote the music. From the research I have done so far, it was almost certainly privately published in Edinburgh by the two young brothers. Just 48 pages long, it is a wee gem.

While Reginald was the writer of the family, Charles was a gifted musician. He became church organist and choir master of an Episcopal church in East Lothian at the same time that his big brother was travelling to Hong Kong to begin his career in the East. But his work is now forgotten. The life of the Johnston children was blighted when their father died in 1902. A prominent Edinburgh lawyer and bon vivant, it was revealed when he died that he had used his client’s money to fund his lavish lifestyle. The resultant scandal was the talk of Edinburgh for many a month. His estate was declared bankrupt and the family’s belongings sold at public auction.

Reginald, understandably mortified, took himself off to the wilds of China for a year and then hid himself in Weihaiwei. Charles was less fortunate. A respectable congregation simply could not countenance having as their head of music the son of a bankrupt, albeit a dead one. He was asked to resign and later died in penury in the States.

So, thank you Dulwich OnView and Mr Lancashire. Without you, I would not be in the process of rewriting Chapter One of the Johnston book. It has been one of the most exciting and invigorating few weeks of my life, and I can’t help feeling that Stewart Lockhart and Johnston are up there, smiling down on me benignly.

The exhibition is on for another six weeks. I wonder what it is going to turn up next…