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Chapter 4

Wanderings and Home

Peregrinations

According to White, the next four to five years of his life consisted of a peripatetic pursuit of what he believed were Tolstoyan principles, although nowhere does he attempt to articulate what these were except to acknowledge that vegetarianism and celibacy were ideals that he singularly failed to put into practise. He eventually came to the conclusion that Tolstoy’s notion that it was humankind’s lot to live by the sweat of its brow was something at which he was particularly inept. Working for a farmer, White overheard him one day to remark that

he ‘couldn’t turn Mr White out because he was such a perfect gentleman’. This was about as nasty a knock as I could receive. I was training as a farm labourer to become a peasant in the approved Tolstoyan fashion.1

On another occasion he and Dollie set up a chicken farm, and when he carried out a costing exercise discovered that each egg cost eight pence to produce. ‘Luckily we didn’t produce many’, he said.2

During these wanderings he encountered a number of people whom, with a sardonic but affectionate eye, he fashioned into a set of picturesque characters. While teaching English in Bohemia he met Prince Raoul de Rohan, an exotic refugee, ‘a bit of flotsam’, as White would have it, from the French Revolution.3 The prince was a devout Catholic who had married a Mary Agnes Rock in Dalkey in 1888.4 The couple told White he could stay as long as he liked after he had been sacked from his teaching job, but this friendship was abruptly ended after an argument about religion in which Tolstoy was attacked by the prince with ‘that peculiar self-satisfied assurance that the spoon-fed mind uses to the first-hand seeker’.5

In answering an advertisement for the ‘goodwill’ of a school for sale, White met A.M. Cogswell, whom he delicately refers to as C–. His description of Cogswell, though scathing, is not unsympathetic and is worth quoting for its literary content alone. He had, White wrote:

no presence or training for anything but the lower walks of intellectual slavery, with a genius for morbid self-torture, he was handicapped by birth, by nature, and by circumstance, and admirably adapted to taste the dregs of all three. His soul was a camera obscura, lit by one little window of genius, where his imagination let in the suffering of others and intensified it by his own.6

Cogswell wrote a novel after the Great War entitled Ermitage and the Curate (1922). H.G. Wells, according to White, said, ‘it was one of three war books which would be remembered one hundred years after the war’.7 T.E. Lawrence referred to it as a book that impressed him.8 George Russell (Æ) reviewed it favourably and provides a summary:

The curate who preached war sermons and then felt compelled to volunteer, and the teacher he shamed into enlisting by his sermons, are the chief characters. We can feel the torture of exasperated nerves all through the book, sensitive men bullied, disciplined and yelled at, the vast military machine grinding remorselessly because it must, and yet at the end, for all the agony, we are not certain that the crushed souls are not better for all the torture of mind and body.9

Cogswell, according to White, ‘wanted to be a conscientious objector, not from cowardice but inherent conviction’. He prevaricated about joining the army in 1914, and White, by now his friend, ‘advised him to let himself be shot ten times over rather than go out to the shambles’.10 He did eventually, unlike White, join up and was ‘drafted to a Labour Battalion’, that is a non-combat section often used to employ pacifists. ‘There’, according to White, ‘he descended into objective hell and observed it with his subjective hell.’11 Drawing from these experiences he produced the book, ‘written lying on his bed in a room without a table’.12

Abandoning the idea of owning a school, probably the most inappropriate job that White ever considered, he spent some time tramping the countryside and working as a farm labourer before Dollie and he headed off to Canada. After a week she ‘cabled to her father for funds and returned home’.13 White remained there for another twelve months doing various jobs working as a horseman and in the logging camps. Dollie joined him again and persuaded him to return to Britain. He did not attempt to hide his utter failure: ‘I was not a backwoodsman. I was not a peasant, I was not a farm labourer. In respect to that abortive incarnation, I cursed Tolstoy and died.’ Not relishing ‘the prodigal son business’, he said, on the boat on the way back, ‘Dollie sat at the captain’s table, so I sat there too; but I felt like a slice off Lot’s wife.’14

Probably White’s most significant experience in those years was his sojourn in the Whiteway Colony:

a community of ‘free-thinkers’ which was established on the Cotswold Hills near Sheepscombe in 1898. The colony was conceived as an experiment in practical communism and the original members were strongly influenced by the teachings of Tolstoy with which they had become acquainted through the Croydon Brotherhood Church. However, the colony attracted a diversity of people as no single religious, philosophical or political creed was prescribed and over the years the lifestyle of many colonists evolved away from early principles.15

It has been variously described as an anarchistic community with a particular belief that sexual partnership was a flexible arrangement dogged by authoritative regulation in conventional society – free love, in other words. ‘Rumours of nudity and sexual orgies brought journalists and sightseers as well as hopeful applicants to live.’16 Even White’s description, which leaves the impression of a louche place, was possibly unfair to the sincerity of its members:

It started on a basis of pure Communism, with the usual admixture of pure crankdom. The ‘purest’ specimens debated such points as whether it was lawful to support the State by putting a postage stamp on a letter, or whether the moral legitimacy of gathering firewood in the adjacent landlord’s game-preserves was invalidated by the risk of angering the game-keeper. Meanwhile, the more mundanely-minded did the cooking and washing. [For this, read women]. Ultimately the latter kicked. […] The place had a reputation for looseness that was largely unfounded.17

White formed a friendship with Francis Sedlak who lived with Nellie Shaw ‘in a very adequate shack he had built with his own hands’.18 Described in his obituary (he died in 1929) as a ‘rebel Czech’ and ‘Hegelian philosopher’, Sedlak had formed a ‘free union’ with Shaw.19 White said Sedlak claimed to be ‘married but not legally, my wife objecting to chattel slavery’.20 Shaw was described as an ‘anarchist-feminist seamstress from Penge’, who, along with a number of other young women, was attracted to Tolstoy’s advocacy of ‘non-violent anarchism, the rejection of the state and of private property in favour of a simple and ascetic life lived on the soil. The aim was freedom for the individual’.21 Nellie Shaw saw

the founding of the Tolstoyan community at Purleigh in Essex in 1896 and visited it frequently. Aylmer Maude, translator of Tolstoy and a friend of Russian exiles, was living near Purleigh at Great Baddow and, under his influence, the colony provided a home for members of the Doukhobor sect and other Russians. Nellie Shaw and other young women found Tolstoy’s ideas compelling enough to abandon their lives in London and pursue the ideal of commune life. In 1899 Shaw, however, rejected Purleigh and, along with a few others, took part in the founding of Whiteway.22

According to White, Aylmer Maude ‘had apparently interpreted the master’s negative attitude to sex too severely. The more vital spirits had kicked, and there had been an exodus of the more amorously inclined to Whiteway’.23 This was probably a very personal interpretation; Tolstoy’s proscriptions on sexuality appeared to have caused White the greatest difficulty. Shaw herself maintained that in search of ‘something warmer, more vital, more appealing to the idealistic side of our natures than mere economics’, and feeling that Purleigh ‘was affected by class prejudice, and disagreeing with its anti-sex (and anti-woman) ideas’, she left with some others and formed Whiteway.24 Although White wrote in detail about Sedlak and his adventures, finding a common outlook with him in his perspective on authority and the army in particular, the colony itself seems to have been a genuine attempt to come to terms with the ideals of an anarchist society and must have left an impression on White. Sedlak wrote a book with the remarkably unsellable title, A Holiday with a Hegelian, ‘which no one on earth but himself could understand. I as little as any; but I could understand that Francis understood. He had entered a world of pure thought’, said White.25 More importantly, Sedlak had been to visit Tolstoy who had advised him to go to Purleigh, which is probably where he met Nellie Shaw for the first time. White was amused and felt that the impracticalities of the master’s diktats were illustrated when Sedlak was asked how he intended to return to England from Iasnia Poliana, Tolstoy’s estate. On replying that he would walk, Tolstoy asked him had he any money. Sedlak said, ‘“No, have you?” “No” said Tolstoy [and] eventually three roubles were borrowed from the master’s cook, and Francis set out to walk to Purley [sic]’.26

Living by the sweat of his brow had proved to be beyond White, and, in a phrase as elegant as it is eloquent, he said that as regards ‘free love’ anyone ‘not by birth an aristocrat or gypsy lack[ed] the right balance of confidence or nonchalance’.27 (It was not to be his only deliberation on free love; there is a report of a lady turning down his offer in the twenties to stay in a republican free love commune. Her response was that she had no objection to the latter, but felt that the former meant living in Ireland, something she could not accept.) He concluded:

I had tried out Tolstoy. Doing so had convinced me that if Tolstoy had tried himself out as a younger man, instead of breaking away to his tragic death at the last, he’d have seen the snag he left people like Sedlak and me to find out for him. He sent his mind out on adventures and left his body with his wife and that convenient cook.28

‘From this Tolstoyan anarchist colony of Whiteway’ White turned from a pursuit of inner peace for his turbulent mind to a searching outside for social justice, which, as he said, took him into the ‘thick of the fight in Ireland’.29

White emerges from this time as someone who is desperately seeking some personal form of fulfilment but also with an awareness of himself that insists he must have a role to play in the grand scheme of things. Although a quarter of a century would elapse before he openly acknowledged his beliefs to be that of an anarchist, his demeanour was already of a nature that resisted centralised authority and was robustly sceptical of all grand narratives. Despite being married to a Roman Catholic, White opposed that body vigorously and in particular because of its centrally authoritarian structure. On the other hand, he had little patience for social constructs or ideologies that boiled down to a lot of ‘–isms’, whether it was Catholicism, nationalism, or the sectarianism that polluted both sides of the political divide in Ireland.

Home

In the spring of 1912 Sir George White ‘caught a chill at a flower show in the [Royal Chelsea] Hospital grounds, and became seriously ill’. He died on 24 June of that year and it is a mark of his prestige that while he lay seriously ill he had a visit from the king and queen, ‘who had both come in person to express to his wife their sympathy in her trouble’.30

At the beginning of 1912 Jack White was still at the Whiteway Colony. A letter he wrote to some of the Irish papers in Belfast, dated 15 April 1912, gives his address as c/o Francis Sedlak, Whiteway, Nr Stroud, Gloucestershire.31 Probably since his return from Canada, but certainly during his time in Whiteway, Ireland had begun to play a part in his thinking. He did at that time express a hope ‘to return to Ireland shortly’.32 Having spent holidays in Whitehall when young, with all the attendant attractions and, as importantly, securities of childhood memories, it would have represented for him somewhere he could find his bearings or at least gain some peace. The fact that at this stage his father’s ‘health had failed, and in the general breakdown he had been attacked by some form of that mysterious malady, aphasia’ (a disorder of speech and writing), 33 would have indicated to White that the time was imminent when he would have to take over as head of family and the duties of care for the White estate at Correen, outside Ballymena. Although the Whites were not exactly well off by ascendancy standards – Sir George having taken the Chelsea Hospital governorship ‘because he was not a rich man, and he felt that a comfortable house and an extra £500 a year were not to be thrown away’ 34 – Whitehall and its revenues would still have represented alleviation from the penury he and Dollie were enduring.

In those days, White, if his perspective of twenty years later is to be accepted, believed that he was inspired in some way. He wrote, ‘I had been dowered with liqueur sensation which freed me from the necessity to stop my processes in order to examine them.’ 35 He felt that this inspiration manifested itself in a power that assisted him in carrying out whatever his ‘sensation’ indicated to him. Convinced by his success in persuading Dollie from afar to marry him, he believed that ‘such a power’ at his disposal ‘could not stop at these long distance amorous assignations’.36 Identifying it with sexuality of a sort, he wondered that his

deepening and widening amorousness might hit on the exact time and place, say, to cut a country out from under the batons of twenty thousand policemen, or a church out from under a Pope, or a class out from under a carefully-nourished lie. I would be led to meet the men who would co-operate with me as surely as I had been led to meet Dollie.37

He postulates that ‘if action was no good without intelligence, intelligence was even less good without action’,38 and recollects his feeling of being ‘very much alive, and [I] suspected that my life impulse was derived from a highly intelligent Person, who was also alive’. Unnervingly he then states that ‘I decided more and more to trust my half formed wishes.’ 39

It is at this time that he addresses the Irish problem for the first time and in typical idiosyncratic fashion identifies it as ‘the sex problem writ large’. He sees the two ‘warring creeds and races’ as partners in an unstable marriage where ‘Ascendancy, male dominance, must disappear and with it the submissive, irresponsible, or the nagging, hysterical woman. Comradeship must take the place of male dominance or female emotional hysteria’.40 Reminiscent of Arnold’s gendering of the Celt and Anglo-Saxon, White’s analysis was not original, but it demonstrated both an objectivity and a precocity for its time: ‘Obviously they [the warring creeds] could not meet, while one partner was attached to a foreign king and the other to a foreign pope.’ 41

Political Debut

As both an outsider born and educated in England and someone whose roots were in Antrim, White was positioned to contribute substantially to resolving the ‘Irish Question’. As in the case of James Larkin and James Connolly, White represented the return of the diaspora but from a different tradition. The only evidence of his first foray into the Irish political scene comes from his own report of his speech delivered at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, London, a well-known venue for political debate. The Times reported the meeting on 6 December 1912 but despite the lengthy list of speakers on the platform there is no mention of White. The Manchester Guardian, 3 December 1912, gave advance notice of the meeting, mentions White’s name and, interestingly, Yeats’s, but there was no follow-up report. Certainly, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen Gwynn were present, and Shaw’s speech is reported in brief. It was an addition to the initial resolution of the meeting of the Irish Protestant Home Rule Committee which

expressed its abhorrence of the methods employed by Ulster Unionists, and wishes to assure the British electorate that the grant of self government so far from endangering Protestantism in Ireland, will further the spread of mutual toleration and trust among all creeds in the country.

Shaw, in typical fashion, reworked the old saw that England was nominally supposed to govern Ireland, but ‘that was a fiction’. He went on to say that

the fact he was an Irishman filled him with a wild and inextinguishable pride. He was assured that as a Protestant he would be protected by Englishmen. He would sooner be burnt at the stake (Cheers). He did not want religion banished from politics, particularly from Irish politics; but he wanted to banish much that was called ‘religion’.42

Conan Doyle, by then Sir Arthur, (whose origins were Irish), said that the Catholic Church in Ireland had never been a persecuting one, conveniently ignoring its singular lack of opportunity.43 White’s own speech, which was not reported, was a fine one but displayed some of the kind of independent thinking that earned him a reputation for unreliability among his fellow platform speakers. Connolly, for example, on at least one occasion refused to speak until after White had finished, because he felt he might be required to undo some damage White might cause.44 There is no doubt that White was a very accomplished public orator, from his days at Winchester on the school debating team to the late thirties when as a member of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union, Albert Meltzer described him as one of the ‘excellent speakers’ the movement had.45 Like any good speaker, he was sensitive to his audience, but there is no evidence of him ever conforming for the sake of diplomacy, or even co-operating with whatever group he was involved with, for that matter. On this particular occasion, he takes what is a convoluted point – for a speech, that is – and elaborates it for what he described as a mainly Catholic audience. Whether they grasped the point he made or not, he believed that he was received with great enthusiasm. This is almost certainly true because his closing lines demonstrate all the gifts of a demagogue: ‘I hear the spirit of Catholic Ireland crying to the spirit of Liberalism: Give us some of the freedom you have won, and we will give you some of the reverence and beauty you have lost.’ 46

This address at the Memorial Hall address was his maiden public political speech and is of some interest because it demonstrates how his analysis of the political system was to change over the next five years. It was an ecumenical speech with a tolerance and understanding of Catholicism that probably was dictated by the composition of the audience. White said he saw Protestantism and Catholicism as ‘complementary and, if they but knew it, mutually necessary parties’.47 He maintained that all religions were not equal ‘in the sense that it is a matter of indifference to which one, one belongs’, but rather that different religions cater for ‘the needs of the universal human spirit at different stages of that gradual evolution of the spirit’.48 The difference to him was that Protestantism had

arrived at a recognition of having within itself its own supreme law, had glimpsed within itself, however dimly, the Logos or higher creative reason, whereas [Catholicism] had not, and consequently objectified its supreme law in a Church and priesthood external to, and having authority over itself.49

Protestant individualism proved a natural habitat for the liberal approach, and it was astonishing then that when the normally ‘authority’-embracing Catholics demonstrated a desire for autonomy, the opposition came from ‘some Protestants who exclaim the forces of hell are being let loose’.50 Maybe White was a little disingenuous in conflating political and religious mindsets, and it is difficult to imagine any audience grasping the sophisticated tenets of such an argument at a political gathering, but it indicates an original mind. White, even twenty years later, was still pleased with his speech: ‘The predominantly Catholic audience cheered it to the echo. At that time I was so fresh and ingenuous I would have got a blessing from the Pope for a eulogy on Luther.’51

White’s earliest comment on Irish affairs was in the letter he wrote from the Whiteway colony in April 1912. This made no such attempt at appeasement when denouncing a Protestant refusal to allow Winston Churchill to speak in the Ulster Hall, Belfast, earlier in the year as ‘the naked spirit of Popery’.52 White saw this as his entry into Irish politics, indeed all politics, because he almost never adopted any kind of nationalist perspective, seeing all struggles more or less, as he asserted in the Memorial Hall speech, as essentially against authoritarianism of one kind or another. The letter, although in one sense a crowd-pleasing exercise, is consistent with later utterances, lauding the ethos of Protestantism, but condemning bigotry and damning the perpetrators as doing Ulster ‘incalculable damage in the eyes of all to whom the true spirit and mission of Protestantism is most dear’.53

Preparation for Ballymoney

At this point White’s antagonism was directed almost entirely against unionism and in particular Carson and all the sectarianism that he seemed to foment. Although he held no brief for Catholicism, White’s entire efforts in finding a resolution to the impending strife seemed to lie in Home Rule. This support, it has to be reiterated, was not that of conventional nationalism; at that stage White would have had little, if any, sympathy for an independent thirty-two county Ireland. His socialism was at an embryonic stage; his notion of equality would have been freedom from religious discrimination for all the people in Ireland. The later influence of Connolly, coupled with his natural sympathy for the underdog – which would develop into an extremely radical political position – was never allied with an enthusiasm for Sinn Féin or any of the earlier Irish nationalist positions. He later indicated his lack of sympathy with nationalism, not just in the afore-mentioned letter in 1940 where he declared that he ‘was Red, I never was Green’, but there were occasions when he openly stated that under certain conditions he would take up arms, either for Carson (in his first speech in Dublin), or against the Free State (again in the 1940 letter).54 For all that, it would have been difficult to distinguish his actions, or at least the motives for his actions, from those of some of the nationalist activists he was involved with. On the other hand, and typical of the man, he writes about an enthralment to the country that would rival the emotions of someone like James Clarence Mangan:

With my Bible and shillelagh I went to the Route [the environs of Ballymoney] to chase […] the spirit of ’98. This spirit, though a potent intoxicant, is not the product of the local distilleries at Bushmills and Coleraine. To define it fully would take a history of Ireland and more than that. It would take one of those flashes of Kathleen Ni Houlihan’s eyes, which have been known to bind even full-blooded Englishmen under a spell for life. To some, these flashes come by way of the mind. To some they come lying out on a Donegal or Connemara mountain by way of – what? the aesthetic sense, a sexual susceptibility to something powerfully female in the Irish earth? Why bother to define it? Especially if, in these disillusioned days, one is almost tempted to suspect that Homer with his tales of Circe and the sirens knew at least as much about it as Yeats with his bean rows and his beehives. Enough to say that to the genuinely spell-struck, it disturbs the knowledge of how many beans make five. It disturbs the balance.55

White’s willingness to court the irrational, the transcendent, is always lurking under the most pragmatic positions he might take. It probably is this that fuels his ready embracing of anarchism, ‘a vital unreason’, in the phrase that George Dangerfield, the English historian, used to describe a related radical strategy, syndicalism.56

Making no mention of his father’s death, White recalls that when he returned to Ireland that he ‘knew little of the history of Ireland, nothing of her current parties and personalities’.57 He must have been reading up on the country around that time, however, because in his first speech on home soil he demonstrated not just a sense of history, in particular about 1798 and the subsequent Act of Union, quoting Lecky among others, but, more significantly, also mentioned Connolly’s writing. This direct reference in the speech appeared to be more for effect rather than of any particular relevance; he quoted Connolly: ‘The English were not yet eight years in Ireland [...] [and] already the Irish were excommunicated for refusing to become slaves.’ 58 White’s speech was given at a meeting in Ballymoney in County Antrim on 24 October 1913. Apart from marking Roger Casement’s Irish political debut and maiden speech, the meeting was an event of some significance because it was an attempt, initiated by White, to demonstrate that there was a substantial opposition to Carson among the Protestants of the north of the country. It is an event forgotten now but of interest and of some pertinence because of the alternative voices it recollects – voices, that is, that acknowledged the very different history of the smaller of the two main islands off the European continent but simultaneously embraced some of the traditions of the larger. A less important note is that White’s recollections confuse parts of his speech with that given by Alice Stopford Green. The pamphlet A Protestant Protest is accepted as the definitive account of the speeches delivered at the meeting.

In attempting to set up this meeting, White met a number of influential people including, in early October 1913, the Liberal Home Ruler, the Reverend J.B. Armour, who, despite his position, appeared to be far more concerned than White with the Lockout in Dublin. White was probably unaware of the crisis at that time. Armour, in a letter to his son, gives his analysis of the strike as a ‘kind of foreword of the future [when] the question before an Irish Parliament will not be Catholicism versus Protestantism –— but labour against capital with a by-play, clericalism versus anti-clericalism’. He follows this with a description of a meeting with White who was mainly concerned about Carson’s sectarianism. This must have seemed to Armour almost the antithesis of the socialist analysis of his letter, yet it was also of some concern to him:

Captain White, son of the late Field-Marshal Sir George White, was here on Monday evening to see if a meeting could be got up against the Carson policy. I have not heard what was done as Dr Taggart [the North Antrim Liberal electoral organiser] did not seem anxious for me to be present, though on what grounds I cannot say, as the captain is anxious to enlist a number of Protestants who may not be ardent home rulers but who are opposed to Carson’s histrionics. I saw Captain White. He is strong for Home Rule and has been in communication with Lord Dunraven, though whether he is a Dunravenite pure and simple or not, I could not say. There was talk of holding the meeting immediately after Carson had discharged the last of his wooden guns in Ulster. His concluding play is to terminate during this month.59

While not exactly the wholehearted support that White maintained it was, it could be said that the subsequent meeting held at Ballymoney was White’s brain-child, and it is a mark of the feeling of dismay among liberal Protestants opposed to Carson that such a meeting could be held so readily. White was joined by Sir Roger Casement on the platform, and from the very beginning White’s talent to exacerbate and disconcert was evident. He maintains that his original idea was to protest against the creed of ‘lovelessness’ that Carson promulgated but that on the insistence of Casement it was changed to an anti-Carson lawlessness.60 White’s appeal, he said, was to God, Casement’s to Caesar.61 His latent millenarianism, which becomes evident in his later letters, comes to the fore here in an esoteric flight of fancy about ‘Ireland as the pivot of a great world change’:

Her little parochial rebellions achieve nothing but a morbid intensification of the martyr-mania of her people. Her real upheavals come in unison with world wide movements and connect her effort towards internal unity with the unity of mankind.62

‘We’ll get on alright if you’re honest’, he told Casement whose response was that this was ‘most insulting’; nevertheless, White, surprisingly, believed it cleared the air for ‘affection and humorous tolerance’ to develop.63

White wrote that he was in Pentonville Prison serving three months for sedition and in an adjoining cell to Casement the night before he was hanged, and a note of criticism still lingered about the planning for the Ballymoney meeting, even after all the years. Casement, he said, was a man of ‘kingly presence’ marred by his training as a diplomat. ‘Do all diplomats think they can wrangle anything?’ 64 he asks when pointing out that Casement’s objection to the lawlessness of Carson was inconsistent with an incident in Cork when he called for three cheers for the same gentleman. White believed that Casement was mistaken, not just about the nationalist cause, which White never embraced; he also believed that Casement, when failed by the British Empire, turned to the Kaiser. Then, in his own idiosyncratic way White stated, ‘I knew by intuition, before I knew by reason, that the destiny of Ireland had nothing to do with Caesars or empires except to outlast the lot and rise on their ruins.’65

A clue to White’s more ready antipathy lies in his frank remark that there was a ‘rival messiahship’ between them.66 Armour, who was more than aware of friction between them, wrote in a letter to his son that it was he who had invited Casement down after receiving a letter from him about a similar meeting to that which White was planning. After various discussions about the constitution of the panel of speakers and in particular the ‘lawlessness’ clause, Casement later told Armour that White had (some time earlier in Belfast):

opened on Sir Roger, accused him of every kind of crime, winding up with the charge that he was not an honest man. […] Sir Roger told me that and bound me over to secrecy, [Casement’s] explanation of the matter is that there is a slate off. Certainly White is peculiar.67