Captain Jack the Governor’s Son Through history the offspring of Governors of Gibraltar have tended to lead lives of respectable nobility, Jack White would have none of that. Captain Jack White was the rebellious son of Field Marshal Sir George Stuart White, Governor of Gibraltar from 1900 to 1904. Sir George was a standup representative of the Anglo-Irish landowning class of the 19th century. He was a career soldier who won the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan and was hailed as the ‘Hero of Ladysmith’ for his role as head of the British Army that defended that city during a 118-day siege at the height of the Boer War. At first, James Robert ‘Jack’ White proved to be a chip off the old block. He was educated at Winchester Public School, attended Sandhurst Military Academy and at the age of 18 fought with the 1st Gordon Highlanders (his father’s regiment) in the Boer War. Captain Jack was a good soldier and earned the Distinguished ServiceOrder but events of the war ignited a change that would transform him from a member of the landed gentry to a socialist loving anarchist. It has been claimed that at the Battle of Doorknop, when an officer ordered a petrified 17-year-old shaking with fear to be shot, Captain Jack turned his own pistol on the officer and said, “Do so and I’ll shoot you.” Although the Boer War is when Captain Jack began losing his respect for the British ruling classes he managed to control his aversion long enough to stay in the army and serve as his father’s aide-de-camp at Gibraltar. It was while serving on the Rock that he met Mercedes ‘Dollie’ Mosley, the daughter of a Gibraltar businessman, and, despite objections from both families, they married. Captain Jack continued his military career in India and Scotland but in 1907 he resigned his commission citing disaffection with the army and its role in suppressing the workers. For the next decade he and Mollie lived the life of the ‘peaceniks and hippies’ that would appear on the anti-war scene half a century later. They traveled to Bohemia, lived in a ‘Tolstoyan’ commune in England and worked their way across Canada. Along the way Captain Jack’s socialist leanings hardened and he decided to return to his native Ireland — he was born a protestant in County Antrim — to rally protestants and workers against the Unionist Party and what he termed the ‘bigotry and stagnation’ of Northern Ireland protestants. He organised a meeting at Ballymoney and there he met Sir Roger Casement, a man of like mind and social background, and was in turn invited to Dublin where he met James Connolly and was converted to socialism. In 1913 when the transport workers were on strike in Ireland Captain Jack organised and trained an Irish Citizen’s Army which was intended as a worker’s militia to protect picket lines from assaults from the police and thugs hired by employers. He was quite proud of his soldiers and boasted that just the sight of them “Put manners on the police.” Initially Captain Jack and his militia had the support of much of the public but by the excessive use of violence, mainly by beating administered with hurley sticks, they alienated many of their followers. When World War I broke out Captain Jack went to work for the Red Cross and was not in Ireland in 1916 when the Republicans rose up against Britain in the Easter Rebellion. The Irish Citizen’s Army was under the command of Connolly and fought alongside the Irish Republican Brotherhood in the ‘Rising’ which lasted from Easter Monday 24th April to 30th April. Connolly was wounded in the fighting and arrested. As a leader of the rebels he was sentenced to death. Captain Jack rushed back to Britain and tried to organise a miners’ strike in Wales as a way of rallying support for his friend; instead he was arrested and sentenced to two three-month terms in prison. Connolly, despite being diagnosed by doctors as having only a few days to live, was tied to a chair and executed by firing squad on 12th May 1916 Connolly’s execution and that of the other leaders, 15 in all, were not well received, even throughout Britain, and drew unwanted attention from the United States, which the British Government was trying to draw into the war against Germany. There was uproar on both sides of the Atlantic when it became known that a dying man had been tied to a chair and killed. As a consequence the British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith ordered that no more executions were to take place and all other death sentences were to be commuted. After the rebellion Captain Jack joined the Communist Party but his credibility had waned and he was marginalised by the Irish Repubican Army. In the late 1930s he attempted to restore his revolutionary credentials by volunteering to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain he became attracted to the philosophy of the anarchists, one of several factions infighting on the Republican side. In May 1937 he took part in a street battle in Barcelona between the anarchists and the communists. On his return to London, Captain Jack met and married his second wife, Noreen Shanahan, the daughter of an Irish government official. His belief in socialism and anarchy did not prevent him from moving into the family manor, White Hall, at Broughshane in Country Antrim. He had inherited the estate on the death of his mother in 1935. He received a regular income from the rent and sale of the lands and supplemented his income with freelance writing for various journals. Captain Jack’s last venture into public life came in 1945 when he ran in the General Election for the Antrim constituency as a ‘republican socialist’. In his campaign he spoke out against the Orange Order and the Unionist Party and was soundly beaten by the Conservative candidate. Captain Jack died of cancer at Belfast in 1946 and was buried in the White family plot in the First Presbyterian Church in Broughshane. Sir George White had died in 1912 and so did not live to see his son turn against the country and beliefs he had defended all his life but the family demonstrated their shame at Captain Jack’s politics by having all his papers destroyed. by Reg Reynolds

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