the Soviets in Britain declined dramatically after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Johnson's pro-communist activities were especially troublesome for the British government since foreigners tended to confuse Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury, with the Archbishop of Canterbury. According to Ferdinand Mount, "What infuriated his critics, from Gollancz on the left to Fisher on the right, was that there was no evidence that Johnson had made any but the most superficial study of the issues that he spouted on with such mellifluous certainty, from famines in the 1930s to germ warfare in Korea". The headmaster of the King's School, Canterbury, Fred Shirley, manoeuvred against him. One year, Johnson put up a huge blue and white banner across the front of the Deanery which read "Christians Ban Nuclear Weapons". By way of riposte, some of the boys put up a banner on one of the school's buildings which read "King's Ban Communists". Johnson's adversaries have called his endeavours to unite Christianity and Marxism–Leninism a "heretical teaching concerning a new religion". Johnson denied those accusations and argued that he knew very well the difference between religion (Christianity) and politics (Marxism–Leninism). His religious views were in line with mainstream Anglicanism. His support for Marxist–Leninist politics was derived, in his own words, from the conviction that "[capitalism] lacks a moral basis" and that "it is the moral impulse [of communism] ... which constitutes the greatest attraction and presents the widest appeal." His biographer Natalie E. Watson, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), wrote: "Communism, for Johnson, was not an anti-Christian force, but rather a natural result and a practical outworking of the Christian gospel. ... His extensive writings on Soviet Russia reflected a naive and romantic perspective on the transformation [of Russian life] after the 1917 revolution. Until the end of his life he ignored the realities of mass persecution and the extermination of political opponents, as well as the anti-religious aspects of Marxism and Stalinism." Personal life Johnson was twice married. While still a student at Oxford in 1903, he married Mary, daughter of Frederick Taylor, a merchant of Broughton Park, Manchester. The couple had no children and she died of cancer in 1931. He remarried in 1938 to Nowell Mary (1906-1983), daughter of his cousin George Edwards (another Anglican priest), with whom he had two daughters. Later life Johnson retired as Dean of Canterbury in 1963, the year of