Captain James Robert "Jack" White, DSO (1879–1946) was an Irish republican and libertarian socialist. After colonial service in the British military, he entered Irish politics in 1913 working with Roger Casement in Ulster to detach fellow Protestants from Unionism as it armed to resist Irish Home Rule, and with James Connolly to defend the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in the great Dublin lock-out. White rallied to the defence of those condemned for the 1916 Easter Rising, but the combination of his socialism and anti-clericalism placed him at odds with the principal currents of Irish republicanism. Until experience of Republican Spain in 1936 convinced him of the anarchist critique of the party-state, he associated with a succession of communist-aligned groups. His last public appearance was in 1945, at an Orange Hall in his home town of Broughshane, County Antrim, where he proposed himself as a "republican socialist" candidate in the upcoming United Kingdom general election.
Early years
Jack White was born on 22 May 1879, at Richmond, Surrey, to Amelia Mary White, daughter of Joseph Baly, Anglican Archdeacon of Calcutta, and her husband Captain—later Field Marshal— George White V.C., an Anglo-Irish landowner and distinguished soldier. The family home was Whitehall, outside the village of Broughshane, County Antrim, where an English Presbyterian ancestor had found refuge from Cromwell's Commonwealth.
An only son, he initially followed in his father's footsteps. He boarded at Winchester College and, despite being expelled (on charges ranging from gambling to pyrotechnics), won a cadetship to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.
British officer and veteran
In 1899, White, commissioned as a lieutenant with the 1st Gordon Highlanders, was shipped out to South Africa for service in the Second Boer War. While his father's command was besieged at Ladysmith, he took part in the Battle of Magersfontein and the relief of Kimberley. Passing into the Orange Free State he saw action at Paardeberg, Poplar Grove, Driefontein, Vet River and Zand River. From May 1900 in the Transvaal, he took part in the engagement at Doornkop (where he threatened an officer who ordered him to shoot a shell-shocked prisoner), the occupation of Johannesburg and Pretoria and, in August 1900, in the last set-piece battle of the war at Belfast-Bergendal.
For his war service, White was mentioned in despatches, received the Queen's South Africa Medal with five clasps, and was decorated by Lord Kitchener with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).
In 1902 he was appointed aide-de-camp to his father, General Sir George White, now Governor of Gibraltar. In this capacity he met Kaiser William II, and King Edward VII (who, of the two, made the dimmer impression). While at Gibraltar he courted Anna Mercedes Dolores (‘Dollie’) Mosley, a society beauty and devout Roman Catholic. Despite family objections on both sides, and after White had (with Kitchener's leave) returned from a posting in Peshawar, India to press his suit, they were married in a registry office in 1905.
In 1907, responding to the tedium of Territorial duties in Aberdeen; the brutality of his wartime experience; and the belief that in the wake of Russo-Japanese War that the days of the empire he had served were numbered (he describes receiving news of Japanese victories with "something like ecstacy"), White resigned his commission. He relayed his decision to his father, who thought him mad; to H.G. Wells, who, appalled, said he would like to "thrash" White's governesses and schoolmasters; and to Leo Tolstoy, who returned his blessing.
Tolstoyan
Finding himself adrift—teaching English in Bohemia was followed by a succession of farm-labouring jobs in England—White sought to conform to Tolstoy's Sermon-on-the-Mount vision of a simple life. While from the start remaining "clear" of teetotalism, White concluded that attempts to codify the ideas of the great Russian writer (whose first injunction was for each to follow his own conscience) were a mistake. In 1911, attracted by the government promise of free farm land, White left for Canada.
After enduring the rigours of a logging camp, he returned to England early in 1912. The Whites moved into a back-to-the-land community, Whiteway, in the Cotswolds, an early breakaway from a Tolstoyan community at Purleigh in Essex. Associated with Francis Sedlak (who had visited Tolstoy in Russia and returned to England on foot), it prized individual expression and freedom from convention. It was from here that White was recalled to Ireland by the death of his father in June 1912.