Clan Johnstone

The name is habitational: the genitive of the personal name John joined to tone or toun, the Middle English word for a settlement (Old English tun), so literally John's town. Scotland holds several places built on that pattern, and Perth itself was once St John's Toun, so more than one could have put the name on a family. The one that produced the fighting Border kindred is Johnstone in Annandale, Dumfriesshire, where the surname is first recorded in 1174, in one John of Johnstone.

The English-side history of the same name runs through medieval Northern England, where Johnston appears in Yorkshire and Northumberland, and where the Johnstons near the River Tweed mattered during the Wars of Scottish Independence. The name took shape as the Anglo-Scottish border itself was being drawn, which is why it is so closely associated with the Border country. Johnstone and Johnston are the same name; the chiefly house spells it with the e.

The first of the kindred on record is a Jon whose son, Gilbert de Jonistune, appears in documents after 1194. A descendant, Johan de Joneston, was a knight of the county of Dumfries, and in 1296 he set his name to the Ragman Rolls, swearing fealty to Edward I of England. The family's own tradition traces further back, to Norman and Anglo-Saxon descent and to Siward, Earl of Northumbria, the Norseman who married Aelfflaed of Bernicia; the documentary spine, though, starts in Annandale.

In 1388 Johan's great-grandson, Sir John Johnston, Laird of Johnston, was appointed Warden of the Western Marches. For more than six hundred years the Johnstones held wide possessions in the west of the Scottish Marches, and the western warden's job was to keep watch against England and answer for every raid that crossed his stretch of the line. The motto the chiefs carry, Nunquam non paratus, Never unprepared, is a warden's motto rather than a courtier's.

The Warden's son Adam Johnstone, reckoned the first Laird of Johnstone, fought at the Battle of Sark in 1448. Adam's son took the Crown's side in the desperate struggle between James II and the Clan Douglas, and was instrumental in putting down that rebellion. The king paid for it in land: the Johnstones received Buittle and Sannoch, near Threave Castle, which had belonged to the Douglases of Galloway. Backing the throne against the greatest magnate house in the south is the decision that lifted the family out of the ordinary lairdly rank.

Auchen Castle tells the same story in stone. Probably built by the Kirkpatricks in the early to mid thirteenth century, it commanded the valley of the Annan to the east and the ravine of the Garpol Burn to the south, its walls ringed by a broad ditch. By the fifteenth century it belonged to the Douglases of Morton, and from them it passed to the Johnstones of Corehead, possibly during James II's campaign against that house. Its curtain walls and a rounded corner bastion still stand, scheduled since 1937.

For a Border kindred, the Johnstones kept an unusual rule. Where most Border names raided each other as readily as they raided the enemy, the Johnstones raided England, and left the neighbouring Scottish surnames alone. The Scottish Parliament's act of 1587, dealing with the chiefs and chieftains of all clans, as well on the highlands as on the borders, names the Johnstones among its Border families alongside the Maxwells, the Carruthers and the Turnbulls: legal recognition that the Border kindreds were clans in exactly the sense the Highlands were.

The exception was the Maxwells, and it was the bloodiest feud on the Western March. In 1593 the two names met at Dryfe Sands, where Lord Maxwell was killed along with a great many of his men. The victor was Sir James Johnstone of Dunskellie (c.1550-1608). His brother William Johnstone, known as the Galliard, who died about 1610, belongs to the same fight and survives in the family's own store of Border story.

The feud did not end on the field. In 1608, at a meeting arranged so that the two houses could reconcile their differences, Lord Maxwell treacherously killed Sir James Johnstone. Maxwell was later captured and executed by hanging.

The family's reward for the Royalist side came in titles. In 1633 Charles I created James Johnstone, chief of the name, Lord Johnstone of Lochwood, and ten years later Earl of Hartfell. He joined the Marquis of Montrose after Kilsyth in 1645 and was taken at Philiphaugh. His son James was held prisoner in turn in Dumbarton, Glasgow, St Andrews and Edinburgh castles, and Charles II afterwards created him Earl of Annandale and Hartfell.

William Johnstone, third Earl of Hartfell and second Earl of Annandale and Hartfell, was raised to Marquess of Annandale in 1701, and held high state office, President of the Privy Council and Secretary of State. The line then thinned quickly. James, 2nd Marquess, held the estates and dignities for only nine years before dying at Naples in 1730. George, 3rd Marquess, was found in 1747 incapable of managing his own affairs and a curator was appointed; on his death in 1792 the titles fell dormant and the estates went to his grand-nephew, James Hope-Johnstone, 3rd Earl of Hopetoun.

The name carried far beyond Annandale. Another branch, the Johnstones of Caskieben, produced Sir George Johnstone, created a Baronet of Nova Scotia in 1626, and the third baronet of that line fought for William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. In the eastern Borders, Hutton Castle above the Whiteadder Water, attacked in September 1544 by Harry Eure, son of Lord Eure, during the war of the Rough Wooing, was the seat of the Johnstons of Hilton from about 1620 until the early nineteenth century.

East of Edinburgh, the Johnstone family were the first owners of Carberry Tower, on an estate whose lands David I had once granted to the monks of Dunfermline Abbey. In June 1567, on Carberry Hill within that estate, Mary, Queen of Scots faced the army raised by a confederation of her own lords, surrendered to them, and went into imprisonment.

The name also travelled in the middle-name form: William Johnstone Ritchie (1813-92), Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court; George Johnstone Stoney (1826-1911), the Irish physicist who introduced the term electron; and William Johnstone Milne (1892-1917), a Canadian soldier of the First World War.

The present Auchen Castle, a country house completed in 1849 near the old ruin, was built by General Johnstone, who had served under Sir Ralph Abercromby against the French in Egypt in 1801. He put the campaign into the fabric of the house, which took the nickname Egypt for it. The castle and estate are thought to be laid out to show the positions of units at the Battle of the Nile, a rule of three runs through the plan, and twenty-one steps climb a stepped-pyramid garden surmounted by two sphinxes.

The Kirkpatrick estates in that country, held by close allies of Robert the Bruce, had long since come under Clan Johnstone as Lords of Annandale, and the chiefs hold that style still. Auchen passed by marriage to Sir William Younger, 1st Baronet, of the brewing family, and now runs as a hotel in thirty-four acres of landscaped ground.

Thomas Johnston was born at Kirkintilloch in eastern Dunbartonshire on 2 November 1881, eldest son of David Johnston, a grocer, and Mary Blackwood. He took a clerk's post in the family grocery, and in 1903 founded with his Kirkintilloch cousins a small weekly socialist paper called Forward, which he edited for thirty years from the back room of the shop and built into the leading Scottish socialist journal of its day. He was returned for West Stirlingshire in November 1922 and sat in the Commons for twenty-three years.

From February 1941 to May 1945 he was Secretary of State for Scotland in Churchill's wartime coalition, and those four years rebuilt the institutional architecture of the country. He persuaded Churchill to let him convene a Scottish Council of State, an informal cabinet of all five surviving former Secretaries of State; he founded the Scottish Council on Industry in 1942 and the Scottish Tourist Board in 1945; and he carried the Hydro-Electric Development (Scotland) Act of 1943, which created the North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board.

He chaired that board himself from leaving politics in 1945 until 1959. It built fifty-four power stations and seventy-eight dams across the Highlands, brought electricity for the first time to more than a quarter of a million Highland households, founded the industrial complexes at Fort William, Kinlochleven and Invergordon, and added roughly a fifth to the agricultural output of the Highland counties through electric milking, electric light and refrigerated storage. Attlee gave him the Companion of Honour in 1953. He died at his Kirkintilloch home on 5 September 1965.

With the titles dormant after 1792, the nineteenth century saw several attempts to revive the Annandale honours, and all failed. Progress came only in 1971, on the strength of a charter of 1662, when the Annandale Johnstones were confirmed as chiefs of the clan. In 1982 the Lord Lyon King of Arms recognised Major Percy Johnstone of Annandale as baron of the earldom of Annandale and Hartfell and of the lordship of Johnstone, Hereditary Steward of the Stewartry of Annandale and Hereditary Keeper of Lochmaben Castle; in 1985 the House of Lords found for his son Patrick as chief of the name and arms.

The chief today is the 11th Earl of Annandale and Hartfell, Lord Johnstone, 26th Chief of the Name and Arms. The name came out of one small place in Annandale, and the people who carried it held that ground, and the watch on the western line, for six hundred years.