Captain Jack White has a walk-on part in Irish folk memory as the son of a British Field Marshal who co-founded the Irish Citizen Army with James Connolly, drilled it for a few months during and after the 1913 lock-out, and then disappeared as mysteriously as he had emerged. That James Larkin and the locked workers attracted a range of unconventional sympathisers, and even the most colourful of them were overshadowed by Big Jim, made White’s cameo seem less remarkable. And though labour historians have noted his subsequent involvement in various left-wing escapades and White sought to explain himself in Misfit: My Autobiography (1930) and six pamphlets, he has remained, till now, a hugely under-researched and enigmatic figure. This biography is particularly timely as Leo Keohane was able to interview those who knew White personally, and ‘a vast haul of family papers’ (p. ix) provided by White’s grand-niece partly offset the curious loss of White’s personal archive.

Born into a unionist family in Broughshane in 1879, educated at Winchester and Sandhurst, White won a D.S.O. in the Boer War, served as an aide–de-camp to his father as governor of Gibraltar, and seemed well positioned for an easy life as a chocolate soldier. Instead, an innate anarchism took him off in search of ‘what he believed were Tolstoyan principles’ (p. 51), working in odd-jobs and joining the ‘freethinking’ Whiteway colony in the Cotswolds. Back in Antrim during the Ulster crisis, he sided with the home rulers, though whether he was rejecting the conservatism of unionists or embracing republicanism is a moot point. He retained a scepticism about nationalism and a suspicion of Catholic clericalism to his death. After his celebrated Irish Citizen Army days, on which Keohane offers valuable fresh detail, he worked for the Irish Volunteers in Derry, urged Welsh miners to strike in protest at the executions of the Easter week leaders, soldiered with divers far-left groups in the Ireland of the 1920s and 1930s, and went to the civil war in Spain in October 1936. He died of cancer in Belfast in 1946.

For the cognoscenti, White is most interesting as one of Ireland’s few published anarchists, and much of the little written on him has come from anarchists in search of a hero. Keohane’s Ph.D., on which this biography is based, made more of the anarchist trope and its diminution in the book is probably indicative of the difficulty of sustaining the argument. White was certainly an anarchist of some sort. In addition to the Whiteway colony, he was a sometime member of the (British) Anarcho-Syndicalist Union. He also remained a Christian, as did Ulster’s other famous anarchist, Bruce Wallace. But what are we to make of the want of consistency in his commitment to political causes and organisations? The closest anarchism came to the mainstream in Ireland was in its influence on the syndicalist ideas of Connolly and Larkin. Yet White walked away from Larkinism in 1914, with, admittedly, a push from the notoriously jealous Big Jim himself. Despite Keohane’s best efforts, White’s anarchism seems nebulous, quirky, and driven by what Connolly referred to as ‘an exaggerated form of that Individualism we are in revolt against’ (p. 115).

And, at the personal level, White could be exasperating. While courageous and imaginative, with impressive integrity and a love of the underdog, his absolute self-belief and clipped, military manner made him abrasive at times. Even in Misfit he does not come across as an altogether likeable man. And though Keohane is an admirer, his account is objective enough to acknowledge that White ‘came to blows, literally in some cases, with every single institution and organisation he was involved with, except the anarchists and some extremely radical movements’ (p. 1). So what was he: a self-indulgent hippie, a mystic anarchist, a socialist Don Quixote, or, as one local historian told Keohane, ‘a bit of an eejit’? This is a fair, comprehensive, and finely written study, so read it and decide.

Finally, the book is well-produced and features choice illustrations, but there are a few typos and one should be flagged. Distinguished Connollyologist Helga Woggon is cited as Woggan, a ubiquitous error which has caused her prodigious output to be underestimated in these digital days.