Rolls-Royce Motor Cars today in acknowledgement of the marque’s 120th anniversary in 2024 published an overview of the life and career of Claude Goodman Johnson, born 24 October 1864. Johnson was born in Buckinghamshire on 24 October 1864, one of seven children. From London’s St Paul’s School, Claude went to the Royal College of Art. Here, he met Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen, Deputy General Superintendent of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum), where Claude’s father worked. Through him, CJ secured his first job, as a clerk at the Imperial Institute (now Imperial College London). There, he was put to work arranging exhibitions.

“Johnson is celebrated as ‘the hyphen in Rolls-Royce’ but known to all simply as ‘CJ’. A natural showman with an unrivalled talent for generating publicity, he brought an extraordinary mix of skill, dedication and experience to his role as the company’s first Commercial Managing Director; a fascinating, larger-than-life character and a pivotal figure in the Rolls-Royce foundation story,” Rolls-Royce said.

Johnson’s debut effort, the Fisheries Exhibition, was described in W. J. Oldham’s book The Hyphen in Rolls-Royce as the ‘fashionable haunt of London for the summer of 1883’. He followed this with events dedicated to Health in 1884 and Inventions the following year; by the time his Colonial and Indian Exhibition opened in 1886, CJ was managing a workforce of around 200.

“But if his professional life was a model of sober industry, CJ’s personal circumstances were already somewhat more colorful. Soon after starting work at the Institute, he eloped with his girlfriend, Fanny Mary Morrison, much to the distress of both sets of parents. They had eight children, but tragically only the seventh child, Betty, survived. Eventually, the marriage failed, whereupon CJ married his long-time mistress, whom he always called ‘Mrs. Miggs’; they had a daughter known as Tink,” Rolls-Royce said.