and chaplain to the royal family at Windsor, pleaded with him to concede, because ‘his God was as mellow as himself and able to tolerate the most foolish practices in people who hadn’t the discipline of a study of Sanskrit roots’.51 However, White, pleading his ‘fundamental Protestantism’, stated that ‘It is indecision, moral uncertainty, which breaks the spirit’, and going further than Johnson asserted that ‘any fool should be able to face hanging, once he knows there is no chance of a reprieve’.52 Eventually, Dollie ‘accepted’ his conditions, which meant that a ‘church’ wedding was not possible and they were duly married at the ‘Chelsea Registry Office [where] the only representative of the Mosley interest was an uncle […] invited by wire. The uncle replied in kind, “Coming, but absolutely hostile” ’.53
White emerges from this account as domineering and stubborn, but it must be noted that Dollie herself was more than capable of intemperate outbursts, if White’s account of their sea voyage from India after his final stint there is to be accepted:
Somewhere about Malta I was developing Dollie’s intelligence by means of a game of chess with a set of the captain’s chessmen he valued deeply. Suddenly the chessmen were swept off the board and flung into the Mediterranean [by Dollie …] The captain, if he is still alive, may see the humour and pathos of the situation better now than he did at the time.54
Departure from Army
There is little evidence of White’s activities from his marriage on 24 April 1907 up to his return to Ireland after his father’s death in 1912, except for what he chooses to tell himself. A considerable amount of this time was spent in what could be called a ‘grand tour’ but not of a type that resembled the aristocratic perambulations around the culture sites of Europe up to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was a journey closer to that taken by Western school leavers of the 1960s who left for the East in an attempt to fulfil some need to search for alternatives. He described his mental condition at the time:
I read a good deal, especially Tolstoy. My own condition was a good example of his simile of the bird seeing the light through the closed window of a room. It dashes towards the light, encounters the glass and falls back dazed. To me freedom for spiritual adventure was the light, the army and my complete economic dependence upon it, my lack of training for anything else, was the glass.55
Having returned from India, White had been stationed in Aberdeen as a training officer for part-time soldiers in a Territorial Battalion. It was here that he resigned his commission in 1908. This was precipitated by the incident already related of his swearing in a couple of callow recruits, and he concluded that ‘it was simply childish nonsense to seek love and draw a captain’s pay and allowances for teaching people to kill each other’.56 Naturally his father opposed the idea; Jack White, with his war record, had a future and the army was an important career at that time.
In fact, in a line of thinking that his son Jack would never have supported, Sir George believed that the United Kingdom was particularly under threat because of the paucity of its armed forces. A speech he gave to an unidentified audience around 1906 reflects the insecurity of those running the empire at that time (and the subsequent arms race). He argued that in 1805 Napoleon had demonstrated England’s inability to exercise ‘any effect upon the balance of power or on the destinies of Europe’.57 This he believed was because of the inadequate size of the British army itself which at that time had a ‘total number of men under arms [of] about 800,000 or about 1 in 4 of the men capable of bearing arms’.58 In 1905, he said:
the effectives were less by some 50,000 than 100 years before in the United Kingdom. But […] the area of the Empire had increased tenfold and the population 16 fold. [And] our present armed force is still more insufficient if we compare it with the colossal expansion of the continental powers. The armed strength of France is now 7 times greater than it was in 1805, of Russia about 8 times greater, of Austria about 7 times greater and the armed forces of Germany are some 10 times greater than those of Prussia in 1805.59
It must have been incomprehensible to Sir George that his son wanted to leave the army. Jack displayed some filial diplomacy in writing to ask his permission first. Sir George’s response was remarkably mild; he told Jack that he was quite odd enough, adding that ‘I should be a little less odd, if I were you, and go on with your work.’ White himself, even recounting it twenty-odd years later is petulant; it was ‘always the same story “be a little less odd”, “be more like other people” ’.60
When White did finally make his mind up to leave, he typed, as he said, his reasons and gave them to Sir George, having already been told by Gladys, his sister, that ‘it would kill father’. Sir George returned the document ‘with his usual high courtesy after he had read it and said “I don’t deny you a certain skill in argument, my boy, but …”’, and White does not elaborate on what was said after that.61 His uncle John also hinted that there was a considerable amount of discussion of the matter by Sir George but again there is no record of what was said. Sir George’s perspective on authority as expressed in his speech, ‘the first duty of loyal citizenship is to make some sacrifice for the State to which we owe Service and Allegiance’,62 indicates a gulf between father and son that was possibly unbridgeable. For all that, the absence of any record of critical comments by either party indicates an admirable mutual fidelity. White records that he sent the same document to Tolstoy and received ‘a charming letter [stating] that I was one of those nearest to his spirit’.63 White’s family had a different perspective, evidenced by his admission that they paid for his head to be examined by a surgeon, Sir Victor Horsley. White, without saying so exactly, gives the amusing impression that it was some kind of exercise in phrenology, but Horsley was a very eminent physiologist, knighted for his medical services, who ‘founded in Britain the modern study of the thyroid gland’.64
Chapter 4
Wanderings and Home
Peregrinations
According to White, the next four to five years of his life consisted of a peripatetic pursuit of what he believed were Tolstoyan principles, although nowhere does he attempt to articulate what these were except to acknowledge that vegetarianism and celibacy were ideals that he singularly failed to put into practise. He eventually came to the conclusion that Tolstoy’s notion that it was humankind’s lot to live by the sweat of its brow was something at which he was particularly inept. Working for a farmer, White overheard him one day to remark that
he ‘couldn’t turn Mr White out because he was such a perfect gentleman’. This was about as nasty a knock as I could receive. I was training as a farm labourer to become a peasant in the approved Tolstoyan fashion.1
On another occasion he and Dollie set up a chicken farm, and when he carried out a costing exercise discovered that each egg cost eight pence to produce. ‘Luckily we didn’t produce many’, he said.2
During these wanderings he encountered a number of people whom, with a sardonic but affectionate eye, he fashioned into a set of picturesque characters. While teaching English in Bohemia he met Prince Raoul de Rohan, an exotic refugee, ‘a bit of flotsam’, as White would have it, from the French Revolution.3 The prince was a devout Catholic who had married a Mary Agnes Rock in Dalkey in 1888.4 The couple told White he could stay as long as he liked after he had been sacked from his teaching job, but this friendship was abruptly ended after an argument about religion in which Tolstoy was attacked by the prince with ‘that peculiar self-satisfied assurance that the spoon-fed mind uses to the first-hand seeker’.5
In answering an advertisement for the ‘goodwill’ of a school for sale, White met A.M. Cogswell, whom he delicately refers to as C–. His description of Cogswell, though scathing, is not unsympathetic and is worth quoting for its literary content alone. He had, White wrote:
no presence
