His last public appearance was in 1945, at an Orange Hall in his home town of Broughshane, County Antrim, where he proposed himself as a "republican socialist" candidate in the upcoming United Kingdom general election.

From May 1900 in the Transvaal, he took part in the engagement at Doornkop (where he threatened an officer who ordered him to shoot a shell-shocked prisoner),[4] the occupation of Johannesburg and Pretoria and, in August 1900, in the last set-piece battle of the war at Belfast-Bergendal.

[2] In 1907, responding to the tedium of Territorial duties in Aberdeen; the brutality of his wartime experience; and the belief that in the wake of Russo-Japanese War that the days of the empire he had served were numbered (he describes receiving news of Japanese victories with "something like ecstacy"),[10] White resigned his commission.

With the sanction of Archbishop William Joseph Walsh,[30][31] Hibernian crowds prevented the poorly-nourished children of the locked-out and striking workers leaving the city to be taken into the care of sympathetic, but not necessarily Catholic, families in Liverpool and Belfast.

[37] But by the spring, having failed to persuade the British Trades Union Congress to vote action in support of the Dublin workers, Larkin was urging a return to work,[38] and the ranks were thinning.

[12] Better, he suggested, to have "stuck with the Citizen Army", where he had "the clear guidance of international revolutionary principle undercutting and outlasting the conflict of national interests that caused the Great War.

[46] Following the declaration of war upon Germany in August 1914, White wrote a memorandum to Lord Kitchener and Sir Ian Hamilton proposing that the Volunteers serve as an Irish home guard.

With the apparent approval of his old Boer War commander, Field Marshall Earl Roberts, White drove the vehicle to the front in Belgium and joined an Australian Ambulance unit.

[35][53] After the Easter Rising, which found him in England, he hatched a plan to bring out the Welsh miners (cutting, he imagined, the coal supply to the British fleet)[54] on behalf of Connolly and his condemned comrades.

[39] Because of its anti-parliamentary and councilist position, it was one of the groups pilloried by Lenin in his work Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920),[59] and until its dissolution in 1924 was to remain at odds with the Moscow-approved Communist Party of Great Britain.

Defending what he understood as the syndicalist ideals of James Connolly, he argued that while Sinn Féin may have harnessed the powerful emotive appeal of nationhood (of "race"), without the consciousness of class it would never achieve its republic.

Contending not just with Britain and its "80,000 troops in Ireland", but also with the "capitalistic" international order intent on maintaining the status quo, the Democratic Programme of Dáil Éireann (which Thomas Johnson had helped draft) would not be realised without drawing together republicanism and socialism.

But in the Derry Journal, he was also to declare that, as a "Christian communist", he was "not prepared to go forward as the representative of any class or party, but only of a principle…the voluntary change to communal ownership of the land" and the "gradual withering of the poisoned branches of standing armies, prisons and the workhouse system".

[63][61] While this appeared to be a decided anti-Bolshevik position, later that same year White joined James Larkin's the Irish Worker League (IWL), Ireland's Communist International affiliate.

[73] While they urged units to have "harmonious" relations with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), their ranks did not accommodate members of the new Communist Party of Ireland (CPI), a reformulation of RWG under Seán Murray.

An initiative of Price and those within the IRA who had joined him in calling for a Workers' Republic, the Republican Congress was formed in April 1934 at a convention in Athlone supported and attended by delegation of northern (and Protestant) trade unionists.

[76] In June 1934, White turned up at the annual Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown with a contingent of 200 from the Protestant Shankill Road in Belfast, organised by members of the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland, among them 1916 veteran Winifred Carney and her ex-Ulster Volunteer husband, George McBride.

At the end of 1933, White joined the trade-unionist John Swift, the novelist Mary Manning, the (northern) playwright Denis Johnston, and the humanist Owen Sheehy-Skeffington in forming the Secular Society of Ireland.

[84] Its mission, as noted in the hostile Irish Press, was to establish "complete freedom of thought, speech and publication, liberty for mind, in the widest toleration compatible with orderly progress and rational conduct".

It sought an end to, among other things, "the clerically-dictated ban" on divorce and on birth control, the Censorship of Publications Act and “the system of clerical management, and consequent sectarian teaching, in schools."

It was also reported as supporting "full sex-education for all classes.”[85] These demands were a challenge not only to the devotionalism of the de Valera regime[86] (which placed the Secular Society under Special Branch surveillance)[84] but also to the priorities of almost every faction of Irish republicanism.

According to this account, while White had never accepted the Communist party, in Spain he became thoroughly disillusioned with its leadership and embraced what he now saw as "the alternative": the anarchism of the CNT-FAI and the "irresponsibles" who refused the compromises the libertarian movement had made in support of the Popular Front government.

Witness months earlier than George Orwell to the social revolution that broke out in north-east Spain after the attempted military coup of July 1936, White came to same conclusion the British POUMist reached in his Homage to Catalonia (1938).

In ruthlessness to heretics, in glorification of hide bound scholasticism supplying ready-made arguments whose repetition is the only safeguard from Inquisition, in docile obedience to higher priests and slavish support of their changes of policy however unprincipled, Communism is [by comparison] a mature and sophisticated philosophy.

[...] This voluntarism, scorning to calculate consequences and creative of new mass conditions, is the essence of Anarchism with its distrust of majorities and "l'illusion majoritaire" and its respect of spiritual quality rather than numerical quantity.White was also to argue that the Spanish anarchists represented a working class more alert than in Ireland—where the central role in the Easter Rising of the "international socialist" James Connolly is "conveniently forgotten"—to the "clerico-fascist menace".

[98] Just returned from Spain, in January 1937 White took the stage with the famous Russian-American anarchist Emma Goldman[99] at a meeting chaired by the novelist, Ethel Mannin to establish the CNT-FAI London Bureau.

A witness records White directing "a rich vocabulary of language" at, among other targets, Adolf Hitler, Pope Pius XII, Lord Brookborough and Éamon de Valera.

[105] Melzer believed that, embarrassed by his radical politics, White heirs "disposed of his papers" and that much was lost, including drafts of a survey of Irish labour history on which he had collaborated with the Liverpool-Irish anarchist, Matt Kavanagh, and a study of the little known Cork harbour "Soviet" of 1921.

[92] The writer Kevin Doyle, who a has authored a play on the subject ("The Burning"), concludes that, either alone or in conjunction with other members of the family, White's second wife, Noreen Shanahan did destroy her husband's papers, and that these may have included a continuation of his biography[111]—White's narrative in Misfit: A Revolutionary Life, published in 1930, ends in 1916.

In her thinly disguised roman à clef Bid Me to Live (written in 1927, published in 1960), White appears as Captain Ned Trent,[115] an Irish drifter adopted by leading wartime members of London's Bloomsbury Group, among them characters readily identified as Lawrence and his wife, Ezra Pound, Richard Adlington and, in the heroine Julia Ashton, H. D.