Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Johnson

Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Johnson was the British Army officer who administered Lahore under martial law after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919. Dawn describes him as the Martial Law Administrator, with extensive powers, under whom civil authority was effectively subordinated to military command. Martial law in Punjab brought arrests without warrant, indefinite detention, summary trials before military officers, restricted appeals and military tribunals in place of the civil courts. It was introduced at midnight between 15 and 16 April 1919 and ended on 9 June 1919.

Orders attributed to him

The columnist Majid Sheikh, writing in Dawn and drawing on the report of the Hunter Committee and the archives of the Civil and Military Gazette, attributes these measures to Johnson:

• All cars owned by Indians were confiscated, and horse-drawn carriages and carts were banned. He told the inquiry he wanted to teach Indians a sound lesson.
• A night curfew, and orders that outside curfew hours no two people could walk abreast and no more than ten could gather, even in a private house.
• After a notice was removed from the wall of Sanatan Dharam College, all the male students and teachers were arrested and marched to Lahore Fort. About 500 were held for 30 hours without food.
• Students and teachers of seven major colleges were ordered to report for roll call every day at a place 16 miles from Lahore. More than 1,000 students were punished, barred from study or expelled. The column says the inquiry was appalled by the order. Johnson told it that 16 miles was nothing for able-bodied young men and that he would do it again.
• At Dayal Singh College, when students did not stand for him, the six tallest were each given six lashes.

The inquiry

The Disorders Inquiry Committee, known as the Hunter Committee, was appointed on 14 October 1919 and presented its report on 8 March 1920. Its British majority held that martial law was necessary. Its Indian members, in a minority report, condemned it as unjustified. The humiliating punishments of that spring were dubbed "fancy" in the inquiry's own report. The best-known of them, the crawling order, was Dyer's, in Amritsar, and not Johnson's.

Dawn's columns by Majid Sheikh differ on one point. His April 2017 column says Johnson had barbed wire put across the crossing at Nila Gumbad and made people crawl under it. His July 2017 column credits Captain Doveton's unit with the wire, so this page attributes it to neither man.

He is remembered in the record of 1919 as the officer under whom the measures above were applied in Lahore.