Edwin Harry Lukin Johnston was born with a halo of flaming red hair to Nellie Johnston and her husband Ted, on August the 8th, 1887. They lived in Surbiton, England, where Ted— more formally the Reverend Robert Edwin Johnston, M.A.— was an Anglican curate. He and Nellie, whose maiden name had been Ellen Jane Lukin, chose to call the baby, their second son, Harry.
As he became old enough to care about such things, young Harry may not have liked this name much but he liked‘Ginger’ even less, the nickname bestowed upon him by his older brother Roy and gleefully picked up by every boy in the neighbourhood.
He was four when the family moved to Folkestone in Kent, whence the name Ginger followed him as closely as his shadow. One afternoon after they had been there for some time, he was with Nellie doing errands in town, when a group of soldiers from the barracks came swinging down the sidewalk towards them. One soldier, also with bright red hair, spotted Rufus as they passed.
“Hallo, young feller,” the red-headed soldier said, cheekily ruffling the boy’s unruly mop.
“What do they call you then, with all that red hair?”
“They call me‘Ginger’,” Harry answered rather crossly.“And I hate it!”
“Ginger, eh?” said the soldier,“that’s what they used to call me till I put a stop to it!”
The boy’s interest suddenly awakened.“What do they call you now?” Harry demanded in his piping voice.
“Why, they call me Rufus like I tell’em to,” the soldier replied with a chuckle, running off after his pals.
“But what does‘Rufus’ mean?” Harry called after him.
The soldier turned and hollered,“Why, red-haired, silly— like the king,” before vanishing round the corner.
Harry remembered Miss Skidmore reading the story of the king William Rufus in the schoolroom.Rufus! That’s a fine name, he thought. That day at family tea, after breathlessly recounting the afternoon’s adventure, he announced,“No more Ginger! Everybody please call me Rufus, like the soldier!” At the time, Nellie may have smiled indulgently at this insistence, but her son’s determination stayed with him and he would get his way— by the time he was six not only did she herself always refer to him in her diary as‘Rufus’ but she sometimes shortened it to‘Rufie’— even to‘Rufe’!
Ted Johnston, or R.E. as he was referred to more formally, was an exceedingly sound man, as he revealed in his huge correspondence with his family. Most obviously, he was a man of faith— no placeman vicar he. His religious belief was the core of his being, and controlled his relationship with the world. This relationship comprised absolute honesty, a humility so complete that his own interests and comfort consistently took a back seat to those of others (of his children in particular), and a fatalism which ensured that his own fairly limited ambition would never raise enough steam actually to improve his circumstances.
Beyond faith, R.E. was a man of intellect who had enjoyed the university education that his children would do without. This was important for Rufus in many ways. His father, for example, seemed so well able to analyze his son’s various distant situations over the years— a tall order from parochial Kent— that he was able to offer advice that was usually wise, sometimes followed, and often even sought. Beset by the needs of his children for relatively modest subsidies over the years, R.E. had the b
