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