While doing some research for a query which seems to be getting increasingly hopeless, I tried using Google to give me some inspiration.

The query in question is about a cutting depicting Hewlett Johnson carrying a suitcase marked with ‘Havana’, ‘Peking’ and ‘Moscow’, with a tag line something like ‘Some Deans stay at home, while there are others who roam’. After some talks with Nick Hiley, Head of the British Cartoon Archive, we suspected that if this cartoon was published in Punch, then it would be part of ‘The Big Cut’ series in the journal. So, in an attempt to find out more, I typed ‘The big cut hewlett johnson’ into the search engine and didn’t even have to wait for the results, now that Google updates as you type.

Unsurprisingly, considering how much I’ve been banging on about Hewlett Johnson lately, the first result to come up was the blog post I wrote about John’s talk a few weeks ago. The second result, however, looked much more interesting:

Canterbury at War…starring Hewlett Johnson…. These were big productions, with full scale orchestras, evil villains, courageous heroes ….. At midnight, still cutting their way through the jungle, they had a narrow escape …

Perhaps it is just me, and just because it’s Monday morning, but that seemed worth sharing with everyone!

Sad to say, it’s actually a conglomeration of several different posts from this very blog. No, Johnson didn’t have a play or film produced about his life (I’m not sure whether he would have been the evil villain or the courageous hero), nor did he go on any midnight excursions into the jungle, as far as current research has shown. But I suppose it just goes to show how many exciting stories we have here in these archives, just waiting to be uncovered.

And, let’s face it, the moral of the story is don’t take results from Google literally!

By the way, if anyone has any thoughts on the Hewlett Johnson cartoon I mentioned above, please do let us know!