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Chapter 3

Awakenings

Gibraltar

Sir George had been appointed Governor General of Gibraltar but, because of his poor health after the siege of Ladysmith, he was not able to take up the position until well into 1900. He appointed his son as an aide-de-camp (ADC) when Jack had returned to the Gordon Highlanders’ barracks at Aberdeen after his own campaign had finished in 1902. White described himself as an ‘invitation ADC; managing the invitation list, making out the plan of the table, writing the menus and dancing with the plain women’.1 Gibraltar was a port of call for the northern European aristocracy who might be heading for the Mediterranean by sea for their vacations and for more important diplomatic missions in North Africa. In fact, Sir George’s autograph book for that period is filled with illustrious signatures and provides a comprehensive list of mainly British but also some European members of the dominant elite of the time.2 His daughter Rose, along with her three sisters and her mother, Lady Amy, provided in-house diplomatic services for visitors, and Rose describes a visit by King Edward VII when he commented on what a fine looking woman Lady Amy still was. The king had a penchant for inviting ladies to dinner specifically without their husbands, ‘to equalize the party a little’ according to the innocent Rose.3

France and Germany at that time had been wrangling over the benefits they wished to bring to Morocco, and although the conference of Algeciras did not take place until 1906, the year after the Whites left, there was much activity and sabre-rattling in the meantime. Even the British Royal Navy, whose country had even less business in the proceedings, was occupied in steaming up and down in battle formation through the straits and carrying out various naval manoeuvres. Here Jack White, so reticent in his criticism of his military commanders in Africa, emerges in full iconoclastic regalia. He maintained that ‘the royalties were the business agents to get their countries a place in the Moroccan sun, and Gibraltar was the jumping off ground’. He goes on to critique generally and analyse specifically some of these people, with a particular emphasis on the ‘courts’ that accompanied them:

My experience included Edward VII of England and William II of Germany and one or two minor lights. It would be presumptuous to say I had seen through them and what they stood for; but they no longer interested me. I was inoculated against that particular form of hypnosis. They were no different from other people. They were the summation of, shall we say, the most ordinary and least interesting side of other people. Their function, I had seen as invitation A.D.C., was to bring out in strong relief an aspect of other people which at other times lurked in decent concealment. Far be it from me to claim that I was exempt from this undesirable aspect myself. I was as big a snob as the rest; but with one eye open.4

This development in perception he claimed had come about through a transformative experience, Damascene in its suddenness and scope. He described it as something that ‘changed the very mechanism of my consciousness and the whole course of my life’.5 It will have to be examined in greater depth later because it remains as a continuing theme through the rest of his writings, in particular those at the end of his life. However questionable his powers of perception may be in analysing the types of individuals who made up the two principal entourages in Gibraltar, it is compensated for by the colourfulness of his descriptions:

I was struck with the greater naivete and greater sincerity of the [Germans]. That the Kaiser was a bit of a mountebank I could see even then. I am convinced that his gentlemen could not. When the Kaiser would summon one of his suite to be presented to my mother with an ‘Ach, you have not met my Admiral von Tirpitz’ even that bewhiskered old pirate evidently became ‘the proudest man that ever scuttled a ship’. These immaculate military or naval chromographs, hung with decorations principally for lunching with people, literally glowed with pride at any sign of this Imperial notice. And they spoke of the Kaiser with a reverence, watched him with a henchman’s tenderness, that was obviously genuine.

Edward’s atmosphere was quite different. His inner circle, or the men I saw nearest to him, were either intimate or privileged jesters like Lambton or Charlie Beresford, or very well bred superior flunkies like ahem! some others. Certainly there was nothing naïve about either themselves or their attitude to their master. The flunkies could and did demand from others the reverential attitude they assumed themselves, but one felt it was an assumption. The jesters in their intimate gossip constantly undermined it.6

The analysis of the latter is probably the more accurate; there seems to have been affection in his portrayal of the Germans that possibly biased his outlook.

Certainly the purpose of the visit of Edward, father of the empire, positioned there only for the convenience of the likes of Admiral Charles Beresford, resonates with a very probable reality. Beresford combined his employment as a sailor with the political duties of a member of parliament and the commercial interests of a representative of the Associated Chambers of Commerce.7 In fact, the visitors’ book from that time, apart from the signatures of both Edward and the Kaiser and minor royalty like Charles of Denmark, the various princesses, daughters and granddaughters of Victoria, ladies of the bedchamber (Charlotte Knollys), and minor foreign figures (Admiral Valois), also includes those of a considerable number of what could be at best termed entrepeneurs.8 The copperplate signature of Hedworth Lambert (1856–1929), described by White as an intimate jester, is there.9 He, apart from a dilettantish career in the Navy, inherited a considerable estate on condition that he assume the name of Meux on the death of Lady Meux who, childless, had taken an inordinate fancy to him which was unlikely to be maternal – they were roughly the same age. He died, also without issue, so her manoeuvre was unsuccessful, and the title died out.10 Another, less elegantly autographed name, was Horace Farquhar, First Earl,11 described by Burke’s Peerage as ‘a cavalier financier [… lucky to have] escaped prosecution for fraud while alive’ and certainly an undiscovered bankrupt who was extremely unpopular ‘despite his wealth and his honours and his generous hospitality or perhaps because’.12 White had few illusions about these people. Interestingly he makes no comment on one of the purposes of the king’s visit at that time (8 April 1903), which was to promote Sir George to the ‘highest rank a soldier can attain’, field-marshal. The king remarked to Lady Amy, ‘I do hope that Sir George will now desist from risking his life in point to point races’, yet nearly a year later, at the age of almost seventy, he finished tenth in a race which Jack won.13

In Jack White’s summary of the change that had begun and was taking place in him, he writes that he ‘had seen two people too close – God and the King’, and this was also to play a part in another seminal moment in Gibraltar, his enchantment with Dollie Mosley. A short story by White, published in 1912, has survived, entitled ‘A Ride in Andalusia’. It describes a journey on horseback from the coast to Ronda, nowadays a well-known tourist town high in the Spanish hills.14 There is little to recommend the story, but it is of interest because Sir George’s biographer, Sir Mortimer Durand, records a visit by him and Lady Amy to Andalusia for one weekend where they stayed overnight in Ronda with Mr and Mrs Mosley, the parents of the same Dollie. Leonard, the father, was later to become estranged from the Whites over their son’s betrothal to her.15 It was inevitable that Dollie would appeal to the king’s ‘predilection for pretty women’, and, as White wrote, ‘half of me was proud of the notice’ taken by Edward.16 Rose White also makes note of it in the aforementioned letter to her Uncle John: ‘Mrs Pablo Lorios and Miss Dollie Mosley (the king more or less hinted that he would like to have the latter two ladies both of whom are very pretty and one or two ladies without their husbands)’ to his private dinner party.17 White’s fidelity to king and country was undermined: ‘This pimping for princes might have its limitations’,18 and was probably further damaged by an incident related by Rose on the same night:

‘What did you put in that?’ asked the King when Jack handed him a whiskey. ‘Oh’ said Jack, ‘My father’s whiskey is very white, Sir, there’s more there than it looks’. ‘It’s not the look, it’s the taste’ said the King. ‘And you a Gordon Highlander!’19

The inevitable laughter must have rankled with White and the anger probably still lurked deep within him when, a couple of years later, he was swearing two young recruits in Aberdeen to ‘an allegiance to their liege Lord Edward, his heirs and successors’. This was all ‘irrespective of Lord Edward’s moral condition’, of which he did not approve, so it became the actual moment that precipitated White abandoning his military career.20

White at this stage of his life was living what can only be described as a sybaritic existence. He was the governor’s son with duties of the pleasantest kind and a licence to indulge in his passion for horses. As an old Wykehamist, a graduate of Sandhurst, a decorated war hero, on familiar terms with most of the military powers of the moment, including Kitchener himself, and clearly intelligent, he was set for a very successful career. He had dined with royalty and had become familiar with the affluent power-brokers that accompanied Edward. He was an ideal product and future custodian of the British Empire, the greatest socio-economic structure the world had ever seen. Although it would be another two years before he left the army and formally began to part ways with almost everything he had been bred for, White, according to his autobiography, had already abandoned the values of this society to pursue what he could not articulate.

Inner Life and the ‘Liqueur Sensation’

From a young age White displayed an inability to accept any instruction or diktat without questioning and examining the alternatives. Although his life took a course that seemed to have cancelled out his earlier misgivings and unease, and he had found himself as successful as any other young officer in his position, there lurked under the surface a rebelliousness or an unwillingness to accept the ready path laid out before him. This seeming perversity led him on a road to self-destruction. That is, of course, if the conventional criteria of success being wealth and fame are applied. White’s daemons appeared to urge him to pursue matters beyond the mundane; he had little interest in the social aspirations of his peers. R.B. McDowell, biographer of Alice Stopford Green, the nationalist historian, wrote that White ‘was in many ways a most unworldly man’ and this is probably as perceptive an observation as has been made about him.21 While in Gibraltar White had a transcendent experience which he maintained justified the path he took and somehow blessed his eccentricities despite his friends’ and family’s misgivings.

Displaying what must have been at times an unnerving certainty, White never shrank from the challenge of confronting himself, even in his most egregious behaviour. John Cowper Powys, commenting on a piece of White’s writing, now lost, said it was ‘the most honest attempt he had ever read of a man or woman attempting to explain themselves’.22 This seems to have been the hallmark of White from his time in Gibraltar. His autobiography is replete with musings over the conundrum that he saw himself to be. Unlike many autobiographies, White’s makes no attempt at justifying his actions, which he spelled out, sometimes in their sheer indefensible ugliness. It is doubtful, for example, that many other writers would recount the incident where he had an Indian whipped whose only crime was the irritation he caused White.23 A review of his autobiography in 1930 described it as ‘the most egotistical work which will be published this year’, arguing that

It would be difficult to admire Captain White. Probably he does not admire himself. But, despite certain shocking errors of taste, despite borderland vanity, and despite a blindness to the interests of others which simulates cruelty, there still emerges from this acute and witty monograph the shape of a man whom many have loved and followed, a figure not without grotesque heroism, and a soul that followed its star all dismayed.24

While some comments are disputable, the acuity of these observations leads one to suspect that the writer John Still had an insight into White based on more than the book itself. The next period of this ‘soul that followed its star all dismayed’ began in a wandering both geographical and psychological, that, for all his subsequent adventures, was primarily spiritual.

White’s enthrallment with Maria de las Mercedes Ana Luisa Carmen Dolores (Dollie) Mosley coincided with the first occurrence of the ‘liqueur sensation’ that he placed so much emphasis on for the rest of his life, or at least until the time of his autobiography in 1930. There are few references to it in his late letters, but it is not unreasonable to accept that as a seminal experience it served to give a coherence to his inner beliefs, which remained more or less consistent to the end. Although caution must be adopted by recalling that the only records of substance of his inner life were not written until he had reached the age of 50 or thereabouts, questioning their reliability too much would be to cavil unnecessarily.

White described this phenomenon for the first time as a ‘most pleasurable sensation in the middle of my chest, as if I had just drunk a strong liqueur’.25 It seems to have lasted at least an hour or more and reached some kind of intensity as he was reading a telegram about the Russo-Japanese War, which, oddly, was the topic that initially sparked the experience. Whatever it was, it served White as a satisfactory explanation for later behaviour that contributed to his reputation for incorrigibility; he believed it was the driving force that lead him ‘out of the army, to Canada, in to various prisons and awkward predicaments beyond number’.26 When he left India, barely avoiding a charge of desertion by getting the personal permission of Kitchener to return temporarily to Europe in order to pursue Dollie, White gave this sensation as the justification for what appeared to be a ‘mental aberration’. He developed it into a kind of personal spiritual guidance which, although not as dramatic as the ‘absolute faith […] that is reported of Joan of Arc’, still was ‘wonderful evidence of intelligent guidance’ beyond the ordinary. He did not lay claim to ‘actual clairaudience or clairvoyance. The impulse to action was always this sensation in my chest accompanied by a mental sensation of co-operation with a scientific law beyond my formulation or comprehension’.27

It is not within the ambit of this work to theorise on the nature of this experience of his, or the fact that he placed such credence in it, but undoubtedly it is a more common occurrence than is generally acknowledged. From the time of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) there has been a regular academic reporting of similar phenomena. White himself maintained that American transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman experienced this, as had others like the English poet, socialist, and mystic Edward Carpenter. He recorded his attempts to find references to it among the philosophers. Henri Bergson’s perspective on the higher intellect provided him with some insight into his ‘sensation’. He dismissed Richard Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness as too elitist, ‘confined to a handful of notorieties!’28 However, more recently, Alan Watts, Protestant clergyman turned Zen Buddhist, comments on Bucke in a manner that suggests similarities to White’s experience:

The most impressive fact in man’s spiritual, intellectual, and poetic experience has always been, for me, the universal prevalence of those astonishing moments of insight which Richard Bucke called ‘cosmic consciousness’. There is really no satisfactory name for this type of experience. To call it mystical is to confuse it with visions of another world, or of gods and angels. To call it spiritual or metaphysical is to suggest it is not also extremely concrete and physical, while the term ‘cosmic consciousness’ itself had the unpoetic flavour of occultist jargon. But from all historical times and cultures we have reports of this same unmistakable sensation emerging, as a rule, quite suddenly and unexpectedly and from no clearly understood cause.29

White’s penchant for religious conviction and experience lasted all his life, and towards the end, aware that he was dying, there is a continual stream of references to resources beyond the temporal. Characteristically, there are none of the more conventional pleas for relief for his terminal illness or expressions of confidence in being taken care of. He did not appear to believe that the spiritual had anything to do with his personal concerns, which must have been pressing, considering the pain he was enduring. He describes particularly unpleasant experiences to his niece, but without recourse to religion:

returning from […] Ballymena, having weathered the strain, as I thought, pretty well, I was suddenly seized with a violent fit of nose bleeding in Ballymena station. Luckily I had just rang up a cab which I bled over all the way to Broughshane, and the bleeding has gone on at intervals since, making me frightened and weak.30

This was in August 1945, six months before he died of prostate cancer; his own diagnosis of what was happening gives an indication of where his interests lay at that time:

I interpret this as part result, part safety valve for the abnormal strain of the messianic consciousness on the brain, and this rise to the brain of the later stages of it is closely connected with the virgin birth, as I grope for its true meaning.31

There is little evidence of his attending religious services, although he would have described himself as Presbyterian and professed a faith in God, but he seems to have perceived his own spiritual beliefs on a kind of political basis, heavily supported with biblical references and mythology. The concept of messiah had an enduring fascination and, it must be stated, in particular as it applied to himself. This raises doubts about his mental stability towards the end of his life, although the more likely explanation is regular overindulgence in solitary drinking. (His daughter-in-law Jennifer, Derrick’s first wife, informed me that the landlady of the local public house had related that, not only did White do a considerable amount of late night drinking in Broughshane in the 1940s, but that the village was accustomed to the clip clop of his horse in the early hours of the morning going on journeys to

no-one-knew-where.)32

Dollie

Allied to White’s spiritual leanings was a conviction that whatever course of action he had decided upon was going to be taken without any consideration for the discomfort – or worse – that he would cause others. According to himself, he wooed Dollie Mosley against the explicit wishes of both families,33 although in the surviving correspondence on the matter there is not the slightest recrimination from either of his parents. This is probably an indication of the indulgence they continually granted their wayward son. White had been posted to India after his father had retired as Governor General of Gibraltar in 1905. When Dollie called off their engagement, he decided, filled with conviction inspired by his ‘liqueur sensation’, to leave India and return to Europe to repair his fractured relationship, a harbinger of the match to come and decades of marital turmoil. (This had been the second such occasion; previously he wrote in detail about getting leave from Kitchener to hurry back and persuade Dollie to change her mind soon after he had arrived at his posting.) This time there was a flurry of letters between Dollie and Sir George and Lady Amy, all written with the spectre of White returning by steamer from the East, undeterred by either the blandishments of his mother or Dollie’s letters. Dollie had been living with the Whites in London when she had changed her mind and agreed to marry White after his first return from India. However, she had once more decided to cancel the engagement sometime in late 1906 or early 1907 and had returned home to Gibraltar. She wrote to Lady Amy on 15 January 1907:

I don’t want my day of arrival to pass away without writing you a few lines. Well here I am! It has been a very sad home coming. […] I could never forget you all and all the kindness bestowed on me when I have been the principal cause of all your anxiety and worry.34

By the beginning of March White was on his way back and Dollie had notified the Whites of her concern because at some stage he had given the impression that he was going to call to Gibraltar. This was, for some reason, totally unacceptable to Dollie’s father, Alexander Mosley. Sir George telegraphed Dollie:

Royal Hospital Chelsea

Miss Mosley, Library Ramp, Gibraltar.

Your letter and telegram received. Jack on Mongolia. We have telegraphed Port Said all we could to prevent him going to Gibraltar but he is intent on learning your unbiased decision from yourself and I recommend your telegraphing decisively to Marseilles your unbiased personal decision about seeing him disclaiming all other influences. We will do our best from here. Show this [to] your father, George White.35

It seems that Dollie then informed her father and came to a decision, because Sir George received two telegrams despatched within minutes of each other. The first, from Dollie’s father, was blunt:

Mar. 6th [1907] At 10.15 a.m. Received 1.00 p.m.

Regret [your] sons proposed action which must inevitably end in grave scandal positively refuse allow him enter my house have done my duty in warning you and am not responsible consequences.

Alexander Mosley.36

The second demonstrated that Jack did not have a monopoly in the future partnership on precipitous decisions:

Mar 6th. Gibraltar at 10.25 [1907]

To: Sir George […] Royal Hospital Chelsea

Have shown your wire to father decided to marry at once against every ones wish nowhere to go will you take me in will wire Jack meet me London – Dollie.37

Sir George replied to her demonstrating the innate kindness of the man together with a commendable lack of animosity towards Alexander Mosley (or Jack, for that matter). He telegraphed her that same afternoon, dispensing with the conventional foreshortened telegram style presumably to ensure that she understood the import of what he wanted to say:

I cannot bear to think you may be taking this vital step to prevent trouble with Jack at Gibraltar without whole heartedly wishing it yourself. Your last telegram suggests this to me. I advise your writing a letter to him here saying exactly what your feelings are as regards marrying him. Wire to him Marseilles that you have written fully here that if he comes Gibraltar you will not see him and he will irrevocably alienate you. If this and what I will wire to him does not keep him from Gibraltar nothing will. Don’t leave your home until you hear from him and also from me from London.

George White – dispatched 6/3/07 5.30p.m.38

Dollie responded in kind in a letter:

I cannot thank you enough for the fatherly interest you have taken in me and for your kind telegrams. […] I am prepared to marry him at once, but I am not disposed to undergo all the worries of another engagement – this would have to be with yours and Lady White’s consent and in your house as my father refuses to have anything to do with it and blames me very much for all the worry I have brought on him and my people. So hoping that we have been successful in stopping Jack at Marseilles and that he has come away with leave and not placed you in worse troubles over me.39

The fact that she was concerned that White might have returned from India while absent-without-leave seemed to be of concern to both Dollie and Sir George; it is an indication of their opinion of his intemperateness. It has not been established what aroused Alexander Mosley’s grievous antipathy to White, but it is unlikely that religious differences were the underlying cause, although Dollie was a Roman Catholic, probably from her mother’s side, which was Spanish. She had written earlier to Lady Amy that ‘father is still very, very angry with me and will listen to no reason, he declares if Jack turns up he will hand him over to the police’.40 It is obvious in that letter that her mother, on the other hand, was well disposed to the Whites. Dollie wrote that ‘Mother is so grateful to you for all you have done for me.’ 41 This, of course, would be surprising if it were otherwise; Sir George, as war hero and as Governor General of Gibraltar, would have established the White family as the cream of high society there. It is probably a good example of Jack White’s ability to exasperate people in even the most favourable of circumstances. White himself often appears puzzled at this tendency of his. He describes a meeting on his earlier mission to Dollie and a subsequent contretemps he had over some religious point of dogma with a Reverend Mother in Kensington Square who was Dollie’s spiritual director. He said to himself, that he was a ‘Fool, having gone to such trouble to get the girl, to be obstructive over these premature details’. But he appeared to be pathologically incapable of compromise on certain beliefs:

I was willing to give up all I had gained [Dollie] rather than compromise the right of my hypothetical hopefuls to extend this new consciousness free of dogmatic shackles. Rome too stood pre-eminently for the subordination of the inner light to external authority, individual vision to collective prudence. Rome was the enemy despite this charming and remonstrant lady.42

Although he was describing his new-found enthusiasm for some kind of divine guidance, he reveals his inability to grasp any notion of diplomacy or compromise. When he concedes that he ‘fell in love’ in Monte Carlo but did not admit it to himself until the object of his attentions informed him he had a soul the ‘size of a peanut’,43 Alexander Mosley’s reservations appear to be well founded. White’s honesty in reporting the fact that he could consider a relationship with another woman and, at the same time, cause havoc in his amorous pursuit of Dollie, is remarkable for its frankness. One can only speculate that this dalliance caused the seeming delay in his arrival that the telegrams refer to: Lady Amy complains to him at one stage, ‘have not written or forwarded letters as expecting you daily’.44 Several undated copies of telegrams record Lady Amy’s attempts to contact her son, until she finally writes to Dollie announcing that she had ‘received letter from Jack last night first communication since Sunday saying he expected your answer to his letter sent via Mongolia [the ship carrying him from India] […] wired him previously your letter awaiting him here’.45 White responded, somewhat enigmatically: ‘insist seeing Dollie this condition come home inform Marseille’.46 This appears to say that he is demanding to see Dollie whatever the consequences. In return, his mother tells him that ‘Dollie has written me imploring you not to go to Gib now and appeals to you not to place her in a false position.’ She continues that this ‘would destroy every vestige [of] hope Come home direct’.47 White appeared to finally relent, and Lady Amy reported to Dollie:

Mar. 11th. 8p.m. to Miss Mosley, Library Ramp. Gibraltar.

Yours received. Jack wired from Marseilles Saturday begins. [‘] Never dreamt of going unasked [to] Gibraltar please write removing false impression if created by you. I remain here [’] ends. I then wired again urging him come home. We have heard nothing his movements since. Did you wire to him Marseilles saying you had written to him fully here [?] Amy White [emphasis added to indicate White’s words].48

Lady Amy finished the correspondence by advising both parties that arrangements would have to be formalised before they were admitted to the White household. In a telegram to White she wrote on 16 March 1907:

Captain White care King Company Marseilles.

Your letter wire received. Had expected you here daily. Letter from Dollie for you been here several days. She writes most hopefully for you. But father won’t invite her here till all preliminaries definitely settled with you both. Come wire movements, Mother.49

A similar message was despatched to Dollie. Surprisingly, because of all the concerns, White ‘went home overland from Monte Carlo and stayed’, as he said, ‘with my people at Chelsea Hospital. From there I corresponded with Gibraltar and things began to come right’.50 However, further disruptions had to be faced before matters were completely resolved; the intransigence of the Catholic Church in insisting on the offspring of a mixed marriage being reared as Catholics met an equal obduracy in White. Despite his father’s urgings, White refused to give way. Even his grandfather, the Anglican archdeacon 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