Arnold Henry White

Arnold Henry White, the third child and second son of Edward White (1819–1898), a Congregational minister and his wife, Rachael Aldersey, was born at Chapel House, Hereford, on 1st February 1848. After a period working for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company he became a coffee planter in Ceylon. This ended in failure and in the late 1870s he returned to London where he became a manager of the Edison Electric Light Company. When he lost his job he decided to become a journalist.

White's first book was The Problems of a Great City (1886). A member of the Liberal Party he was their unsuccessful candidate for Mile End constituency in the 1886 general election. His political views moved to the right and becoming disillusioned with William Gladstone, he joined the Conservative Party but was defeated in Tyneside in 1892 and 1895.

White now decided to concentrate on journalism and his articles began appearing in a variety of newspapers and journals. He was a strong opponent of immigration and especially concerned himself with the arrival of Jews from eastern Europe. He visited Russian several times in the 1890s and attempted to persuade Tsar Nicholas II to establish a colony in Argentina for Russian Jews.

White also held strong views on the state of the British Navy. He became close friends of Admiral John Fisher. According to his biographer, Geoffrey Russell Searle: "Both men were obsessed with the danger posed by the recently founded German high fleet. Indeed, White favoured the sudden and unheralded destruction of the German warships in harbour before they could seriously threaten Britain's naval hegemony." He published his most popular book, Efficiency and Empire, in 1901.

During this period he launched a campaign against Whitaker Wright, the founder of the London and Globe Company which floated a variety of stock and bond issues dealing with mining. He was also the main figure in the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway. When this company got into trouble he illegally transferred money from his other companies. Wright was arrested and while awaiting trail, White published an article in August, 1903, on the case while it was subjudice, resulted in his committal to Brixton Prison for contempt of court. On 26th January 1904, Wright was convicted of fraud and given a seven year prison sentence. He committed suicide by swallowing cyanide in a court anteroom immediately afterward.

White made his final attempt to get into the House of Commons when he unsuccessfully contested Londonderry North as an independent in the 1906 General Election. In 1907 he began writing a regular column for the weekly The Referee under the pseudonym Vanoc. A supporter of eugenics he was a strong critic of socialism and pacifism.

On the outbreak of the First World War White became a leading advocate of conscription. During this period he became a close associate of Noel Pemberton Billing, the independent MP for East Hertfordshire. White also wrote for Billing's journal called The Imperialist that was part-funded by Lord Beaverbrook.

The journal also claimed the existence of a secret society called the Unseen Hand. As Ernest Sackville Turner, the author of Dear Old Blighty (1980) has pointed out: "One of the great delusions of the war was that there existed an Unseen (or Hidden, or Invisible) Hand, a pro-German influence which perennially strove to paralyse the nation's will and to set its most heroic efforts at naught... As defeat seemed to loom, as French military morale broke and Russia made her separate peace, more and more were ready to believe that the Unseen Hand stood for a confederacy of evil men, taking their orders from Berlin, dedicated to the downfall of Britain by subversion of the military, the Cabinet, the Civil Service and the City; and working not only through spiritualists, whores and homosexuals."

Billing and White now joined forces with Lord Northcliffe (the owner of The Times and The Daily Mail), Leo Maxse (the editor of The National Review), the journalist, Ellis Powell (the editor of the Financial News), Horatio Bottomley (the editor of John Bull) and the former soldier, Harold S. Spencer, to claim that the Unseen Hand were working behind the scenes to obtain a peace agreement with Germany. In 1917 White published the book, The Hidden Hand, about this mythical group.

In December 1917, Billing published an article in The Imperialist by White that argued that Germany was under the control of homosexuals (White called them urnings): "Espionage is punished by death at the Tower of London, but there is a form of invasion which is as deadly as espionage: the systematic seduction of young British soldiers by the German urnings and their agents... Failure to intern all Germans is due to the invisible hand that protects urnings of enemy race... When the blond beast is an urning, he commands the urnings in other lands. They are moles. They burrow. They plot. They are hardest at work when they are most silent." It was true that there was a great increase in cases of sodomy coming before the British courts but the main reason for this was the large numbers of young men being herded together under wartime conditions.

According to James Hayward, the author of Myths and Legends of the First World War (2002): "While it is true to say that the years 1914-18 saw a significant increase in cases of male indecency brought before the courts, this had no more sinister cause than the simple fact that large numbers of young men were herded together under wartime conditions. White, however, discerned the presence of the Hidden Hand... his purple portrait of gay subversion was pure fantasy."

Relying on information supplied by Harold S. Spencer, Billing published an article in The Imperialist on 26th January, 1918, revealing the existence of a Black Book: "There exists in the Cabinet Noir of a certain German Prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past twenty years, agents so vile and spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute."

Billing claimed the book listed the names of 47,000 British sexual perverts, mostly in high places, being blackmailed by the German Secret Service. He added: "It is a most catholic miscellany. The names of Privy Councillors, youths of the chorus, wives of Cabinet Ministers, dancing girls, even Cabinet Ministers themselves, while diplomats, poets, bankers, editors, newspaper proprietors, members of His Majesty's Household follow each other with no order of precedence." Billing went onto argue that "the thought that 47,000 English men and women are held in enemy bondage through fear calls all clean spirits to mortal combat".

In February, 1918, Noel Pemberton Billing changed the name of The Imperialist to The Vigilante. Soon afterwards it published an article that argued that the Unseen Hand was involved in a plot to spread venereal disease: "The German, through his efficient and clever agent, the Ashkenazim, has complete control of the White Slave Traffic. Germany has found that diseased women cause more casualties than bullets. Controlled by their Jew-agents, Germany maintains in Britain a self-supporting - even profit-making - army of prostitutes which put more men out of action than does their army of soldiers."

During the First World War White was a strong opponent of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Sinn Féin movement in Ireland. As his biographer, Geoffrey Russell Searle, has pointed out: "Military victory, when it came, did not bring White peace of mind; he spent his final years raging impotently against Bolsheviks, Germans, Sinn Féiners, and international Jewry."

Arnold Henry White died at his home at Farnham Common, Buckinghamshire, on 5th February 1925.

Primary Sources

(1) Arnold Henry White, The Imperialist (December, 1917)

Espionage is punished by death at the Tower of London, but there is a form of invasion which is as deadly as espionage: the systematic seduction of young British soldiers by the German urnings and their agents... Failure to intern all Germans is due to the invisible hand that protects urnings of enemy race... When the blond beast is an urning, he commands the urnings in other lands. They are moles. They burrow. They plot. They are hardest at work when they are most silent.

(2) Ernest Sackville Turner, Dear Old Blighty (1980)

One of the great delusions of the war was that there existed an Unseen (or Hidden, or Invisible) Hand, a pro-German influence which perennially strove to paralyse the nation's will and to set its most heroic efforts at naught... As defeat seemed to loom, as French military morale broke and Russia made her separate peace, more and more were ready to believe that the Unseen Hand stood for a confederacy of evil men, taking their orders from Berlin, dedicated to the downfall of Britain by subversion of the military, the Cabinet, the Civil Service and the City; and working not only through spiritualists, whores and homosexuals.