In November 1905 at age 18, Johnston travelled alone aboard the CPR vessel Lake Manitoba from Liverpool to Montreal with just 10 sovereign coins.
He worked on farms near Burford, Ontario and in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan before moving to the Kootenays region of British Columbia.
[1] In August 1911, at age 24, Johnston moved to Duncan on Vancouver Island to edit the weekly newspaper Cowichan Leader.
[3] In November 1915, Johnston enlisted with the 88th Battalion (Victoria Fusiliers), CEF of the Canadian Expeditionary Force along with 1,150 Victorians.
After being sent to Europe in 1916, Johnston fought at Vimy Ridge in April 1917, Passchendaele in November 1917, Amien in August 1918 and was mentioned in dispatches January 1, 1919.
Johnston expanded his coverage of politics to international affairs and also wrote about his journeys throughout British Columbia's rural areas.
In May 1928 he was appointed the chief correspondent in Europe for the Canadian Southam News agency and established a working relationship with The Times of London.
In 1931, Johnston met with Ernst Hanfstaengl, head of the Foreign Press section of the Propaganda Ministry of the Weimar Republic.
Johnston reunited with Robert Keyserlingk, a friend from Vancouver who was now working at the United Press in Zurich and had scored an exclusive interview with Adolf Hitler.
En route to the 1932 Lausanne Disarmament Conference, Johnston used Keyserlingk to arrange and translate an interview with His Highness Victor Salvator Prince Isenburg, special representative of the Czech Skoda munition works.
He did file reports of his impressions of the party's headquarters: "They raised the right hand and said ‘Heil Hitler’ ... the whole atmosphere of the place seemed to me like that just before the curtain goes up on an amateur theatrical show.
"[2] In the following year, he interviewed a social democrat jailed in Lichtenburg concentration camp alongside 1,600 political dissidents and refused to permit the German government to vet his articles.
Ten days before Hitler's election win, Johnston wrote: "Never in history has propaganda been mobilized on such a vast scale or with such crushing efficiency to bend the will of a nation ... opposition parties have ceased to exist, and the watchful eyes of the storm troopers will check voters in thousands of small electoral districts.
[8] Six months prior to Johnston’s disappearance, Captain Cecil Brooks of the P&O steamship line had vanished in a similar way while aboard a ferry to Harwich while returning from an important company mission on the continent.