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Title: Jack White Author: Alan MacSimoin Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: Jack White, biography Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20120312172132/http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/ws/ws50_jack.html
Captain Jack White is known as the man who drilled the Irish Citizen
Army during the 1913 lock-out. His later anarchism has been hidden from
history by the writers of history books.
White belonged to the Anglo-Irish landowning class. James Robert -
always known as Jack, was born in Co Antrim, at Whitehall, Broughshane,
just outside Ballymena. As a young man he followed his father into the
British army, where he saw action against the Boers in South Africa.
It is said that at the battle of Doorknop he was one of the first to go
over the top. Looking back he saw one 17 year old youth shivering with
fright in the trench. An officer cried "shoot him". White is said to
have covered the officer with his pistol and replied "Do so and I'll
shoot you". Not exactly the attitude wanted among the officer classes of
the army!
Soon after this he dropped out of the army. Arriving back in Ireland he
found Sir Edward Carson's bigoted crusade against Home Rule was in full
swing. This was the time when the original UVF was created to threaten
war against the British government if Ireland was granted any measure of
self-rule.
Jack organised one of the first Protestant meetings, in Ballymoney, to
rally Protestant opinion against the Unionist Party and against what he
described as its "bigotry and stagnation", that associated Northern
Protestants with conservatism. Another speaker at that meeting, and
coming from the same sort of social background, was Sir Roger Casement.
As a result of the Ballymoney meeting Jack was invited to Dublin. Here
he met James Connolly and was converted to socialism. Very impressed by
the great struggle to win union recognition and resist the attacks of
William Martin Murphy and his confederates, he offered his services to
the ITGWU at Liberty Hall. He spoke on union platforms with such famous
names as Francis Sheehy Skeffington, Big Bill Haywood of the Industrial
Workers of the World, and James Connolly.
He put forward the idea of a workers militia to protect picket lines
from assaults by both scabs and the blackguards of the Dublin
Metropolitan Police. This proposal to create a Citizen Army, drilled by
him, was enthusiastically accepted. Its very appearance, as White
recollected, "put manners on the police".
He later put his services at the disposal of the Volunteers, believing
that a stand had to be taken against British rule by a large body of
armed people. He went to Derry where there was a brigade of Volunteers
who were largely ex-British Army like himself. But he was shaken by the
sectarian attitudes he found. When he tried to reason with them and make
the case for workers' unity they dismissed his case as merely sticking
up for his own, i.e. Protestants.
When Connolly was sentenced to death after the 1916 rising White rushed
to South Wales and tried to bring the miners out on strike to save his
life. For his attempts he was given three months imprisonment.
He came home to find himself in a political wilderness. The unionists
regarded him as a Shinner. The nationalists regarded him as an
Orangeman! He moved towards the newly founded Communist Party which,
with the first reports from Russia, seemed offer hope to humanity. But
he had his doubts about them and never joined. Indeed for a time in
London he worked with Sylvia Pankhurst's anti-parliamentary communist
group, the Workers Socialist Federation.
In 1934 a special convention was held in Athlone which was attended by
200 former IRA volunteers together with a number of prominent
socialists, Communists and trade unionists. It resolved that a
Republican Congress be formed. This was a movement, based on workers and
small farmers, that was well to the left of the IRA. White joined
immediately and organised a Dublin branch composed solely of ex-British
servicemen. One notable result of this was a contingent of British
ex-servicemen marching behind the Congress banner through cheering
crowds of Dubliners on a demonstration against war and poverty.
The Congress is best known for bringing 200 Belfast Protestant workers
to the republican Wolfe Tone Commemoration that year and for the
scandalous attack on them by Sean McBride's IRA men who were determined
that no 'red' banners would be seen at their Catholic day out in
Bodenstown.
One of the men carrying the second banner - on which was embroidered
James Connolly Club, Belfast - The United Irishmen of 1934 - was John
Straney, a milk roundsman from loyalist Ballymacarret who was later
killed while fighting Franco's army at the Battle of the Ebro in 1939.
Congress later split between those who stood for class independence,
those who fought only for the Workers Republic, and those - led by the
Communists - who firstly wanted an alliance with Fianna Fail to reunite
the country. After the bulk of the first group walked out (many of them
demoralised and ending up in the Labour Party) White remained in the
depleted organisation. But their reduced size did not reduce the hatred
the rich had for them. In April 1936 the Congress contingent taking part
in the annual Easter Commemoration was subjected to attack by blueshirt
gangs all along the route.
The main target of the mob was White. Patrick Byrne, the joint secretary
with Frank Ryan of the Congress, describes him as a "tall, well built
man with a clipped army moustache" who "used his blackthorn stick to
advantage in close encounters with his attackers". Inside the cemetery
he was badly injured by a blow of an iron cross ripped from a grave.
Byrne and a young poet, Tom O'Brien, who also fought in Spain managed to
get White away.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War saw General O'Duffy's blueshirts
sending a contingent to help Franco. The Communist Party and leading
republicans organised the Connolly Column to fight the Spanish fascists.
Incidentaly the Irish International Brigade was yet one more example of
how Catholics and Protestants fought together in a common class cause.
White was thrilled with the collectivisation in Spain, and also with the
volunteer militias. He learned with amazement that this was the work of
the anarchists.
In addition to his work with the Connolly Column at the front, he
trained militia members in the use of firearms. He also trained women in
the villages on the way to Saragossa in the use of pistol for defence.
What he could not stomach was that the Irish, like all the International
Brigadeers, were being increasingly manipulated by the Communist Party.
He had never accepted the CP, he had just not seen an alternative. Now
he saw that alternative and it was anarchism.
There was a clash between White and Frank Ryan, who accused White of
being a 'Trotskyite' and a traitor. White relinquished his International
Brigade command and offered his services to the anarchist CNT union.
White was asked to work, with the legendary Emma Goldman, for the CNT in
London. In the course of a few months in Spain he had become a convinced
anarchist.
It was at this time that he wrote the pamphlet 'The Meaning of
Anarchism'. He joined the group producing Freedom (the anarchist paper -
still published in London - whose founders included Peter Kropotkin),
and was one of the organisers of the regular meetings at the National
Trade Union Club against Italian fascism and in support of the Spanish
anarchists.
At this time White worked with a Liverpool-Irish anarchist, Matt
Kavanagh, on a survey of Irish labour history in relation to anarchism.
In 1940 White died. His body was hardly cold when the family, ashamed of
Jack's revolutionary politics, destroyed all his papers, including a
study of the Cork Harbour 'soviet' of 1921.
His importance lies not in what he wrote, for all that survives is one
short pamphlet, nor in any particular position he took. His importance
lies in the link he provides between Irish working class history of the
past and our anarchist vision today. All through his life he tried to
organise ordinary people to defend their own interests and to realise
the power they had if only they would use it. That is the job we have to
continue and complete.