Alan, Jack White’s second son, believed Sir George was indulgent, particularly because he was both an absentee father and one who came to parenting rather later in life.14 It is possible nevertheless that Sir George saw something in his son that was not going to respond to any direct discipline, that is, an intransigence in the face of authority. Of course another perspective could see Sir George, faced with an obdurate son and an adoring mother, as taking the path of least resistance.
White certainly served his father loyally in his own way; there is not a single critical word about him anywhere in White’s writing, but the same cannot be said for his mother. In a letter to his niece, Pat English, he said that it was ‘the force of female suction that killed Rosie [his eldest sister]’ and implied that it was also responsible for his ‘father’s stroke’.15 This seems to be a reference to his mother, which is borne out by his niece who remarks that ‘from what I remember of her (and I was very fond of her) she would by any normal standards have been called a greedy selfish woman and a very powerful vampire’.16
It appears that Lady Amy White was a dominating woman who lived into her eighties. Certainly she was a very energetic woman; her diary in 1935, the year of her death, is filled with entries of social meetings and household tasks: ‘today I did out the boudoir cupboard, a long and tiresome job which I had not finished by luncheon […] after which I rested for one hour, […] I then dressed for Mrs MacGregor’s tea party’. She goes on to fill an entire foolscap diary page with details of people met and discussions had, before going back to finish the cupboard before dinner.17
At the end of his account of his Sandhurst days, White mentions two revealing incidents. The first describes the company he kept while awaiting his commission: he ‘gravitated towards the higher ranks of the aristocracy’. Their appeal, he conceded frankly, was ‘a certain recklessness’ and his ‘whole hearted snobbery’. This frankness runs right through all his writings and was the very essence of his disposition. Although at times endearing, it also provokes suspicion about its sheer manipulativeness. On a number of occasions he confesses to some unattractive behaviour on his part and it seems as if he is using it to forestall later criticism or in some way make it excusable. Certainly it adds weight to his credibility, and incredulity about some of the incidents related is often put in abeyance by the honesty he has demonstrated elsewhere.
In recalling his days mixing with ‘aristocratic friends’ he refers to his ‘unexpected bit’ as preventing his success as a snob. Having dressed immaculately to dine, he could not find a properly fitting top hat and so wore a bowler hat, which would appear to have been a deliberate social faux pas and probably looked ridiculous as well – ‘an outrage’. He wrote presciently, ‘I was never secure against this latent anarchist. He kept cropping up until he got me altogether in the end.’18 This was written at least six or seven years before his experience of Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War convinced him that he was an anarchist, at least politically. However, he seems to have been aware of his ‘unexpected bit’ long before that and it formed an explanation of sorts to himself for the various adventures he found himself involved in.
He finishes his account of his experiences in Sandhurst with another revelation of recalcitrance. He had been ‘gazetted to the 1st Gordon Highlanders then quartered in Edinburgh Castle’ and claims:
I did not like my brother officers and they did not like me. […] I disliked the self effacement which was the tradition for newly joined subalterns. I disliked being drilled over again. […] I disliked the salt I was obliged to eat with my porridge. I disliked everything and every one.19
He seems to have missed entirely the point about military training, which demanded a monastic-type obedience and submission to the will of whatever the soldier perceived to be his ultimate authority. He was completely unable to comply with any kind of subordination demanded of him unless he could establish an acceptable reason for it; orders for the sake of orders were a nonsense. His resistance was such that when his colleagues performed a mock court martial of him he was prepared to rebel to the point of killing someone: ‘the light irresponsible feeling had come to me,’ is how he describes the murderous emotion as if it was some kind of possession or even insanity over which he had no control.20
This was the autumn of 1899 and White, born into privilege and educated and trained as an executive of empire, now found that the time had come to support all that he had been conditioned to hold dear. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori was a concept that he would almost automatically question, but there was a generosity to his character that would have found him complying with the demands being made on him. Although his ideology, complicated though it was, found its allies in peoples and movements that were fundamentally alien to him, his friends formed a bond with him that he never quite abnegated despite his differences. Even in the experiences which he was now about to undergo for the next couple of years, and in which he could never have believed in, there is a striking lack of bitterness or even critical comment about most of the characters he met.
The Second South African War
The Second South African War, more commonly known as the Boer War, began on 11 October 1899. Although it would be another twenty years before the British empire had reached its apogee in terms of territory, in South Africa there occurred the first indications of fragility in what was, up to then, a belief in the inalienable entitlement of the British people to govern more than one quarter of the entire globe. Thomas Pakenham described it as ‘the most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 and 1914’.
Although E.P. Thompson’s ‘enormous condescension of hindsight’ can readily perceive the inevitability of war, it is presumptuous to pick on one specific casus belli. For all that, the fact that an independent sovereign Transvaal, run by Boers, had discovered gold in 1886 has to be of especial significance. By 1898, the year before war started, it had become ‘the largest single producer of gold in the world’. A Cecil Rhodes inspired adventure, the ‘Jameson Raid’, had attempted a few years before that to win back the mines from the Boers. According to Pakenham, Dr Jameson, the eponymous leader, was going ‘to lick the burghers all round the Transvaal but instead had been humiliated by having to raise the white flag and weeping … was led away in a cart to the gaol at Pretoria’.21
The conventional opinion (conventional as in any enterprise that begins in the early autumn) that the war would last until Christmas indicates the general lack of awareness of the task Britain had set for itself. The Jameson Raid itself seemed almost a harbinger of what awaited the British Army in their encounters. Arthur Conan Doyle, while working as a medical doctor with the army, wrote an account of the affair with an immediacy that is impressive even by today’s standards. He stated that ‘Napoleon and all his veterans have never treated us as roughly as these hard bitten farmers with their ancient theology and their inconveniently modern rifles.’ 22
The criticisms that White had about the practices at Sandhurst were further compounded by his accounts of what was, at its least, a marked inefficiency by the military in the field.
But there were other aspects of the war that would later have enormous relevance to White’s thinking. It is unlikely his political consciousness had started to develop as early as this, but, the dominant elite that he was to encounter in Gibraltar a couple of years later would have been representative of what J.A. Hobson wrote about in his critique –Imperialism: A Study. Completed in 1902 and although writing more generally on imperialism Hobson’s remarks are very relevant to the Boer War – and, it has to be noted, almost eerily appropriate to today, post Iraq.
The vast expenditure on armaments, the costly wars, the grave risks and embarrassments of foreign policy, the stoppage of political and social reforms within Great Britain, though fraught with great injury to the nation, have served well the present business interests of certain industries and professions.23
Although tainted with anti-Semitism, Hobson’s Marxist analysis, where he saw the whole exercise of imperialism being of heavy economic cost to the nation but hugely profitable to a very tiny minority, is acknowledged even today for its validity.24 In South Africa,