Jack White (labour unionist)
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Captain James Robert "Jack" White (1879 -1946) is known as the man who was along with James Connolly, co-founded and drilled the Irish Citizen Army.
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[edit] Early life
Jack White was born in 1879, at Whitehall, in Broughshane County Antrim. An only son he initially followed in the footsteps of his father, the British Sir George White, being educated at Winchester Public School in England and later at the Sandhurst Military Academy. At the age of eighteen, White saw service with the 1st Gordon Highlanders in the Boer War in South Africa and was decorated with a DSO for his role.
White started to develop a dislike for the British Ruling Classes while in South Africa. It is said that at the battle of Doorknop he was one of the first to go over the top. Looking back he saw one 17-year-old youth shivering with fright in the trench. An officer cried "shoot him". White is said to have covered the officer with his pistol and replied "Do so and I'll shoot you".
Between 1901 and 1905, he served as aide-de-camp to his father who was then Governor of Gibraltar, and it was here that he met Mercedes 'Dollie' Mosley, the daughter of a Gibraltar business family and a Catholic. Despite family objections (on both sides), the couple married. White continued his military service in India and Scotland.
[edit] Departure from the Army and return to Ireland
White resigned his commission in 1907 citing disaffection with the army and its role. During the next number of years White travelled to Bohemia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire), lived in a 'Tolstoyan' commune in England and then travelled and worked in Canada.
Arriving back in Ireland he found Sir Edward Carson's campaign against Home Rule was beginning. This was the time when the original Ulster Volunteer Force was created to threaten war against the British government if Ireland was granted any measure of self-rule.
Jack organised one of the first Protestant pro Home Rule meetings, in Ballymoney, to rally Protestant opinion against the Unionist Party and against what he described as its "bigotry and stagnation", that associated Northern Protestants with conservatism. Another speaker at that meeting, and coming from the same sort of social background, was Sir Roger Casement.
As a result of the Ballymoney meeting Jack was invited to Dublin. Here he met James Connolly and was converted to socialism. Very impressed by the great struggle to win union recognition and resist the attacks of William Martin Murphy and his confederates, he offered his services to the ITGWU at Liberty Hall. He spoke on union platforms with people such as Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World, and James Connolly.
[edit] The Irish Citizens Army
In 1913, he put forward the idea of a workers militia to protect picket lines from assaults by the Dublin Metropolitan Police and gangs in pay of the employers. This proposal to create a Citizen Army, drilled by him, was enthusiastically accepted. Its very appearance, as White recollected, "put manners on the police".
He later put his services at the disposal of the Volunteers, believing that a stand had to be taken against British rule by a large body of armed people. He went to Derry where there was a brigade of Volunteers who were largely ex-British Army like himself. But he was shaken by the sectarian attitudes he found. When he tried to reason with them and make the case for workers' unity they dismissed his case as merely sticking up for his own, i.e., Protestants.
When Connolly was sentenced to death after the 1916 rising, White rushed to South Wales and tried to bring the miners out on strike to save his life. For his attempts, he was given three months imprisonment.
[edit] The Republican Congress
When he returned during the Irish War of Independence he was left in the political wilderness. He moved towards the newly founded Communist Party, however he had his doubts about them and never joined. He returned to England and became involved with Sylvia Pankhurst's anti-parliamentary communist group, the Workers Socialist Federation.
In 1934, a special convention was held in Athlone which was attended by 200 former Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers and a number of prominent socialists, Communists and trade unionists. It resolved that a Republican Congress be formed. This was a movement, based on workers and small farmers, that was well to the left of the IRA. White joined immediately and organised a Dublin branch composed solely of ex-British servicemen.
The Congress later split between those who stood for class independence, those who fought only for the Workers Republic, and those - led by the Communists - who firstly wanted an alliance with Fianna Fáil to reunite the country. After the bulk of the first group walked out (many of them later joining the Labour Party) White remained in the depleted organisation.
[edit] The Spanish Civil War and death
In the late 1930s, he went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War there and became an anarchist. After the war White worked with a Liverpool-Irish anarchist, Matt Kavanagh, on a survey of Irish labour history in relation to anarchism. In 1946 White died. His family, ashamed of Jack's revolutionary politics, destroyed all his papers, including a study of the Cork Harbour 'Soviet' of 1921.
[edit] References
- http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/anarchists/jackwhite/bio.html A biography of Jack White.
