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 woman) in this letter, it is still a remarkable tribute to a long dead man. They wrote:
He must have been an exceptionally charming person to have left such an impression behind him. One always gets interested in the people whose papers one’s working on, but one doesn’t necessarily like them in the way we came to like Sir George.13
The goodwill he generated was not due to a charming manner alone; he, with his brother John, were noted for treating their tenants in a most considerate manner. They had to actively persuade these people to buy out their farms when the Land Acts provided for this; the tenants felt they were so well treated that they did not want to take over their own holdings. Earlier still, in 1881, the Belfast Morning Telegraph reported:
Major White, who lately so gallantly distinguished himself in Roberts’ famous march on Candahar, has made a generous abatement in rents to his tenants on his Cushleak estate here – giving 25, 20 and 15 per cent reduction respectively […] Last year his brother Mr John White, of London, gave his tenants here 33 per cent reduction. The White family have certainly shown themselves sympathetic and generous to their tenantry in these depressed times.14
This article was filed under a column called ‘Land Agitation’, and directly underneath it was a report of evictions in County Armagh, indicating that the Whites’ actions were far from conventional practice.
Sir George was not free of the social inhibition seemingly typical of the Whites. Rose recounts an incident where he excused himself ‘for leaving a party early on the grounds that he could not bear to keep his wife waiting up for him and quite making his hearers believe he was married though only eighteen’.15 For all his seeming urbanity, he had considerable problems with socialising, which became more and more a requirement as he rose through the military ranks. Rose again treats of the mannerisms of Sir George and his brother John:
The Whites have an unsociable side to them which is rather hard to explain as they are sympathetic and interested in their fellows. Everyone who met my father and uncle socially seemed to find a peculiar charm in them and they took pains too to make themselves agreeable, but my uncle would hardly ever spend a night under anyone else’s roof (including ours) and Father always had a dread of ‘other people’s homes’ especially in anticipation. When the ordeal was over he would often realise, quite as if it were a pleasant surprise that he had been markedly well received and ‘got on alright’ but, never, even at times when he was being very much lionized did it seem to dawn upon him that his presence would be missed if he sent his womenfolk alone to any social function.
Father liked to meet interesting or lively