James Robert (Jack) White was born at Cleveland, Montague Place, Richmond, Surrey, England, on 22 May 1879, the only son of Field Marshal Sir George Stuart White (1835–1912) and his wife, Amelia Maria (Amy), née Baly (d. 1935).1 He had four sisters, Rose, who was older than he, May Constance, Amy Gladys, and Georgina Mary.2 Although the family’s permanent residence was at Whitehall, Broughshane, Co. Antrim, Ireland, Sir George (or, as he was then, Major White), was campaigning in India at the time of Jack’s birth. The later-to-become Lady Amy stayed with her parents for the confinement, and Jack White seems to have been quite influenced by his grandfather, an archdeacon, in those early years. George and Amy had actually met in India when he was first stationed there, and they were married in Simla in 1874.
Joseph Baly, Amy’s father, held an MA from Oxford and had spent a considerable time in India in education before temporarily going back to England as Rector of Falmouth. In 1872 he was appointed Archdeacon of Calcutta. The position was essentially a sinecure, but Baly earned a reputation for social work; he was particularly concerned about the plight of Eurasians. He was a popular figure, being described as an extraordinary speaker in the pulpit, ‘and in the dance hall he was an angel amongst mortals’.3 He finally returned to England in 1883, having been appointed ‘chaplain of the Royal Chapel in Windsor Park’, retaining his post until his death in 1909 at the age of 85.4
Practically the only surviving records for that period concerning White are the reminiscences included in his autobiography. His elder sister, Rose, makes only one glancing reference to him when she mentions that she and Jack were read stories by Sir George from Treasure Island, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Alice in Wonderland, and The Little Red Deer.5
Rose compiled a memoir around 1914 as a kind of family history and this provides invaluable detail on Jack White’s antecedents. The White family, according to their own lore, were originally of English Presbyterian stock, not planters in the strictest sense of the term, but refugees from the English Civil War:
The Family of White is of English extraction, and from the County of York, in the West Riding of which they held considerable property in the reign of Charles the First.
Hudson Hall was the name of their residence there, during the Civil War of that distracted period they espoused the Royal cause, and in the King’s behalf raised and maintained a troop of Dragoons at their own expense, involved in their Masters ruin one individual sought refuge in Ireland, settled in the town of Antrim, and maintained himself and family by teaching a classical school, being a Clergyman of the Presbyterian Church he some time after he was chosen by the Broughshane Congregation of the same persuasion, and near that his descendants still live where he spent his last days. His remains were among the first interred in the Burying Ground at present surrounding the Meeting House at Broughshane. The above mentioned person who spelt his name Whyte was christened Fulke and left two sons, James and Timothy, both preachers.6
That was the year 1716 and this testimony, complete with idiosyncratic syntax, was written in 1829 by Miss Victoria White, great-aunt of Rose and Jack White. Rose goes on to relate that the same Fulke, despite being a Royalist, welcomed William of Orange ‘on his landing at Carrickfergus’. She explains this apparent change in loyalties by noting that the Pope himself had congratulated William after the Battle of the Boyne, adding that ‘I think it would be a fearful shock to most of the Orangemen of today to hear that.’7 It could also indicate an ancestor demonstrating the unconventional behaviour that was to be Jack White’s trademark.
Rose’s elegantly written account of various antecedents does have its share of characters displaying an eccentricity and often obduracy against complying with conventional mores. In passing it has to be noted that Sir Mortimer Durand helped himself to extensive passages reproduced verbatim in his authorised biography of Sir George with only the barest acknowledgment of Rose.8 At one stage she summarises her own perception of the family dispositions:
One of the oldest inhabitants of Broughshane says that ‘the old Whites’ (referring principally to my great-grandfather and his children) were ‘quare people’ but the word queer has a double sense in Ireland and implies quite as much admiration as criticism. To judge my forbears by what I have heard about them and from the characteristics of their descendants I should say they had very marked individuality and idiosyncrasies without any wild eccentricity, great dash and fearlessness combined, in some cases, with considerable indecision, especially in the smallest details of life and almost hypersensitiveness in social relations.9
Written around 1913, after Sir George’s death and prior to the publication of Durand’s biography, these observations could have been applied directly to Jack White himself, and although hypersensitivity is not commonly associated with White, it might explain some of the rash actions he took. Even a detached account like Arthur Mitchell’s from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography comments on White’s temperament; writing about his precipitate departure from the Irish Volunteers, Mitchell notes, ‘characteristically, his involvement was short-lived and ended in his acrimonious departure’.10 There are numerous accounts of White’s disruptive behaviour in relationships, political or otherwise, and the reasons for this may lie in the family tendency to sensitivity rather than the more common attribution of perversity on his part. White acknowledges what he frankly calls his own ‘immaturity’ at various points of his autobiography. In one of his later letters in 1945 to his niece, he mentions that he went to a play with his second wife Noreen (née Shanahan) and admits to an inordinate timidity:
Noreen and I, of course meet, as far as we do meet, on the artistic plane and largely for her sake, I forced myself to conquer the frightful inferiority complex, the sense of being a loathsome worm on which the kindest thing is the stamp [of] the heel.11
Certainly, his grandfather displayed remarkable extremes of diffidence and rashness. For example, on one occasion, having taken umbrage at the attitude of the judge, he precipitately ended his career as a barrister:
[H]e was called to the bar and was always referred to, about Whitehall, as ‘The Councillor’ but he certainly did not do much to earn this title. One story is that he once pleaded in Court and was so much upset by being told by the judge to speak up that he never repeated the attempt. But another story, as told us by the son of the solicitor who sent him his first brief and who thought he had the makings of a brilliant barrister. The brief was returned by my grandfather who said he could not possibly take the responsibility of it. Yet this man when very old and after several periods of feebleness each of which had been supposed to be the beginning of the end, could terrify both his sons by the reckless speed at which he drove a car over a wild mountain road at night in torrents of rain and a heavy thunderstorm. They dared not interfere until at last he suggested himself that it would be well for them to keep a look out as he could neither see nor hear.12
Sir George White
Jack’s father, Sir George, was a remarkable man who achieved the highest level of success in his chosen profession. There was little to distinguish him from other Antrim landowning stock as he languished in various minor military posts from Cork to India. Then, when well into middle age, in an act of madness by any normal standards, he charged up a hill in Afghanistan to attack, single-handedly, a group of Pathan ‘rebels’ and was awarded a Victoria Cross. From there he ended up as a personal favourite of the Queen, and family lore has it that near the end of his life he refused an earldom.
Regardless of his tardiness in joining the ranks of the careerists, there appears no evidence of a willingness to step unthinkingly on others. In fact he seems to have earned a title, most rare among the ambitious, that of a perfect gentleman. Among the more unusual of elegies to him is a letter written long after his death by archive staff employed by his daughter Gladys, who by this stage had become Lady Napier. By the time they had sorted his papers they had come to form an attachment to him that they had not experienced with any other individuals whose papers they had handled before. Allowing even for a certain deference to Lady Gladys (a formidable
