His very early years were spent at the family home, The Old Mill House in Langwith,[2] but he soon followed his elder brother to study at the Nonconformist Proprietary School[3] in Leicester (the building now occupied by the New Walk Museum & Art Gallery) and moved into the Leicester home of his uncle (his mother's brother) and aunt, Joseph and Martha Fielding.

[5] This sort of arrangement was not uncommon among the Victorian middle-classes and allowed the wealth earned by successful parents to be passed down the generations and retained within families.

It produced a daughter Agnes Mabel (1864–1942) and a son, Harold Paget (1865–1877) who contracted measles while a boarder at Rugby School and died, aged only twelve.

[10] From 1869 until his death, the family lived at "Brookfield", a large Victorian house standing in its own miniature 'estate' and modelled on the seats of the local gentry.

He was a well-known figure in early Victorian Leicester who was, by the time his nephew arrived, the owner of a successfully established worsted spinning business in West Bond Street.

[5] Fielding Johnson appears to have been a talented but careful businessman who recognised that his best hopes for sustainable success lay in developing an effective business model in one factory and then duplicating it in others.

The factory in Bond Street spun wool sourced in England and later New Zealand and in 1861 two steam engines named 'Juno' and 'Jupiter' were installed to operate new 'Brookhouse' knitting frames.

Like many of the City's emerging middle-class, Fielding Johnson was a religious nonconformist and like John Biggs[16] he attended the Great Meeting Hall in Bond Street (where his marriage to Christiana took place).

Humane in his outlook and a Liberal by conviction, he was nonetheless a firm believer in maintaining law and order and volunteered as a Special Constable during the Chartist riots that followed the 1848 French Revolution.

[17] On 10 June 1919 Thomas Fielding Johnson was introduced to King George V and Queen Mary during their visit to Leicester as 'the Grand Old Man'.