John Baker White

Early life and education

Baker White was born in 1902. in Malling, Kent the only son of John Wilfred Baker White and his wife Katherine Blythe. They had married in 1899, when Katherine was just 20, and White 22. White's father had died when he was sixteen, and he had inherited the family fortune, which meant he did not need to work, and he did not. Soon after John's birth, his father deserted his mother, and in 1905 ceased living with her completely, spending his time big game hunting in Rhodesia and Canada. In January 1907, Katherine sued for restoration of conjugal rights, ensuring the proceedings attracted substantial newspaper interest. But White refused to meet the 14–day deadline set by the judge. Katherine was consequently granted a divorce. This had been a way of engineering a legal separation at a time when divorce was hard to achieve. Within a couple of years, his father had returned to the UK and settled as a gentleman farmer near Canterbury. Young John Baker White saw and stayed with his father regularly, and his mother and father jointly made decisions about his future.

In 1909, Katherine remarried to Gerald Hartley Atkinson, whom John Baker White knew as "Uncle Tim" — a name he continued to use. Atkinson was forty-two and on the 1911 census describes himself as a Met Police Pensioner.

He grew up with his mother and step-father and a half sister on their nursery garden specialising in gladioli, "The Flagstaff", in Southampton. His own early ambition to join the navy led to his mother and father sending Baker White to a preparatory school, Stubbington House, with reputation for preparing pupils for a naval education. By the time he had finished his preparatory education, his hunger to join the Navy had cooled. In the Autumn 1916, rather pursuing a conventional naval education he went to Malvern College; leaving there in the summer of 1920. During his time in Malvern College in the final stages of the War, he had become accustomed to the idea of a military career but by the time he left in 1920 this was not a promising option. Discussing options with his father, he alighted on the idea of becoming a farmer. Rather than being an unpaid "farmers son" on his father's farm, he arranged a paid position as a boarder and "Farm Pupil" on a farm in Arlington near Eastbourne.

Farming was not a career he seriously followed after his pupillage. His future career would be shaped by the interests and activities and acquaintances of his mother and stepfather during his time as a farm pupil.

Career

Industrial Intelligence Bureau / Section D

The role of Sir George Makgill's private anti-socialist intelligence service in the 1920s first emerged in 1993 and 1994. Official confirmation only came fifteen years later with the Publication of Christopher Andrew's "Defence of the Realm" the authorised history of MI5. The only evidence for such a service was to be found in Baker White's 1970 autobiography "True Blue" and he was, by the time he died in 1988, a fairly peripheral figure in the radical right. The Economic League, which he had run and written about, was still in existence, and shocking revelations were emerging of a massive blacklisting operation run by it for over fifty years.

The story of the undercover espionage in which Baker White had engaged in the 1920s and 1930s, while according to his own accounts he been "running" the League, caught the attention of a few historical researchers. In "True Blue" he attributed the operation to a figure called George McGill he also referred to as "G". There was no record of anyone called George McGill being active in the radical right at the time he was writing about, or earlier when the League was formed. However, a Scottish historian researching employers organisations, Arthur McIvor, had published a paper in 1988 specifically examining the early history of the Economic League and identifying close links with another other organisations of the radical right during and immediately after the Great War. The most significant was the British Commonwealth Union, which had previously been called The British Empire Union, whose main wartime spokesman was Sir George Makgill whose profile matched that in Baker White's lightly disguised profile.

When MI5 confirmed through Andrew the broad outline of Hughes' and Hope's revelations, they also added a sort of definitive name for the organisation, and expanded on the rates of the British Fascists. But they left unanswered questions about the scope of the organisation, and its relationship to the British Fascists it remains ambiguous.

The two people who have written with personal knowledge of "G's" organisation are Baker White in his autobiographical works, and Maxwell Knight in a note afterwards and left in the MI5 archive. Neither source is entirely reliable. Baker White renames individuals, including Makgill himself.

The purpose of Knight's written account was to explain how he came to be playing a leading role in the British fascisti while serving as a MI5 officer: In 1924 at the request of the late Sir George Makgill Bt who was then running agents on behalf of Sir Vernon Kell I joined the first of the Fascist Movements in this country – The British Fascisti.

British Fascists

Fourteen months after his address to the Canterbury NCU, the British Fascisti were created on May 6, 1924. The British Fascisti described itself as not politically affiliated, but it only operated inside the Conservative Party and it did not oppose it. It soon attracted the support of Conservative nobles and big names, but the members of its executive committee were reticent about publicity.

In Portsmouth, this caused problems for Capt. A. G. Wright R.N. who was trying to establish a branch in Farlington, but had found some reluctance because the names of the executive were not public. At the next meeting, he was able to confirm the names of the executive, which include John Baker White as Director of Departments and his mother as Director of Social Propaganda. They were not however the only parent-and-offspring members. Mrs and Miss Lintorn-Arman (sic) are also listed as Founders. Rotha Linton-Orman was only seven years Baker White's senior, and she would remain his close associate until her death in 1935 when she was just forty.

This was Baker White's first recorded public role in the radical right, but there is no explanation of his executive responsibilities, if any, as "Director of Departments". It is also unclear how long he remained on the executive of the BFs, which was later in 1924 renamed its Grand Council. But by 1925, he was working in the public relations department of the Mine Owners Association of Great Britain, from where he was recruited to work in the Economic League in 1926. In neither role would he have as much time to devote to executive functions as he had with the BFs.

Those moves coincided with the appointment of Maxwell Knight, a future MI5 officer, as the British Fascisti's Chief of Staff and Director of Intelligence. The association between Rotha Lintorn Orman, Maxwell Knight and John Baker White had predated the formation of the British Fascisti in 1924.

Mining Association of Great Britain

To date, most of the pursuit of his anti-communist vocation had been unpaid, although he later recalled he was earning around two guineas a week for his freelance journalism. He heard from a friend that the Mining Association was looking for a writer to join the public relations department. The Mining Association of Great Britain was the mine owners and employers association. Phillip Gee was the head of its Public Relations Department, and its chief Executive was Maj Hugh Gillespie. Its President was Sir Evan Williams, a south Wales mine owner and a founder member in 1919 of the Economic League. Baker White was initially interviewed by Gee, who told him that the final position would be conditional on him working in a pit for six months. He was then taken to meet the Chief Exec who confirmed that following his six month probationary period as a mine worker he would be given the post as Gee's assistant. In his autobiography, he writes about this experience living in digs with a conservative underground miner at Newstead Pit in Nottinghamshire. He writes sympathetically about the lives and work of the miners, though not about their union or ambition for nationalisation. After six months in Nottingham he returns to work in the headquarters of the Association in King Street in Covent Garden.

He did not spend long in the Mining Association, although he was to spend the next decade and a half alongside Evan Williams and Phillip Gee. As the time approached for the General Strike he was being interviewed successfully in April for a role in the Economic League. The strike started in the first week of May and was over in eight days. Baker White says little about his role during the strike, though it was over so quickly there may never have been a role to report.

Economic League

Baker White had been married to Irene Graham in October 1925, and he was anxious to increase his income to support his new married life. His own account of how he came to work for the Economic League is mysteriously misleading. He tells us "Irene brought me luck because I applied for, and much to my surprise got, the job of Director of the Economic League. I was appointed in April 1926."

He did go to work for the League after the General Strike, but not as its Director, that was not a role he would take up on a permanent basis until 1933. In 1932, he signs himself in letters to newspapers as "acting director". In 1929, he describes himself as "assistant director" and before that, in August 1928, The Roscommon Herald describes him as "Secretary of the Economic League". The League's Director throughout this period was King's Counsel, Archibald E. Crawford, and after he relinquished the role he joined the League's Central Council.

When he first joined the League in the aftermath of the General Strike the coal strike continued until the Autumn. In the Nottinghamshire coalfield, where Baker White had been recently working, a breakaway union had been formed by a miner called George Spencer. Baker White explains how the League responded:"....the efforts of the Economic League were directed towards getting the miners back to work. A special flying squad, called the Constitutional Workers and equipped with vans and leaflets, was set up. Some members of it were fully trained League speakers, others were recruited, somewhat hurriedly, and mainly from unemployed ex-officers including two ex-Black and Tans who were habitués of Rayners Bar in the Haymarket.

After the collapse of the coal strike, Baker White tells us "I settled down to the daily routine of running the Economic League. Irene and I also settled down to living up to our income". But contrary to this suggestion, his role at the would be anything but routine. Makgill would shortly be dead, and the section that he was going to continue to run would need to be secured within the work of the Economic League. The MI5 and Kell would need to continue to have access to Knight's BF infiltrators. Amidst the chaos of the General Strike and its aftermath, the League had been approached by a Swiss lawyer, hoping to persuade them to become the British chapter of a newly forming international collaboration against the Comintern. The Central Council agreed, and the newly appointed John Baker White had been put forward as its representative to the organisation.

Transnational Anti-communism

There is a growing interest among historians in The Transnational Radical Right Anti-communist radical right, between the Russian Revolution and the start of World War Two. The movement did not disappear as a result of the defeat of fascism in Germany and Italy, but the fervently anti-Soviet cross-border organisations and alliances that emerged during the Cold War were very different to those between the Wars.

The transnational anti-communist radical right did not emerge until the end of the Russian Civil War in 1923. The civil war was decisively won by the Soviet Army, and was lost by the Russian White Movement despite the support of France. Britain, Japan, the US. Within Russia, the Bolsheviks had also faced the opposition from groups isolated from the White Movement, which included more libertarian socialist opponents, peasant up-risings and nationalist independence movements. These were all crushed, although Finland secured its independence.

The death of the White Movement led to the displacement of 1.5m White Russian supporters by 1923 westward into the Balkans and Western Europe. The White Movement was profoundly conservative, suspicious of democracy, and anti-socialist as well as anti-communist. Most were also inclined to activism and determined to prevent any European rapprochement with the Soviet state.

The first and possibly best-funded attempt to create a platform for trans-national anti-communist was a scheme devised by right wing political active Geneva lawyer Théodore Aubert and White Russian émigré Dr Georges Lodygensky, formerly a military surgeon then working for the Russian Red Cross.

The two men's paths had crossed when Aubert had recently successfully defended a White Russian who had assassinated a soviet diplomat in Switzerland. Their idea was to create an anti-communist international, mobilising ultra-conservatives, newly forming fascist movements, and the anti-Soviet White Russian emigrees.

The idea was that anti-communist international would work like the Comintern. There would be an international committee with representatives from each of the states involved, this would meet together at least once a year in a general assembly. This international organisation would be administered by a Permanent Bureau headed up by Lodygensky. The first meeting to establish it happened in Paris on June 23, 1924, and this consisted of 20 key activists for from each of the target countries. This core group agreed to a constitution and a name – in English. The international Entente against the Third International, in French the Entente internationale anticommuniste.

The Road To War

Despite being ultra-conservative economically, politically and socially, the League had maintained the conceit that it was politically neutral. Not coincidentally, the BFs and IEIA would also male this same argument for themselves in 1924.

After he became Director in 1932, Baker White. while continuer to propagate the conceit. Yet under his directorship, he and the Economic League had increasingly associated itself with, and promoted, a particular position in respect of appeasement. That position started with the appeasement notion of understanding why Nazi Germany was doing what it was doing during the 1930s. What that was, was re-arming. That was a problem because, the argument went, the answer to a former enemy state re-arming was not pacifism. Nor was it a solution to aggressively enforce demilitarisation two decades after the end of the conflict. The solution was to re-arm yourselves.

Baker White had been visiting Germany for the Economic League and Section D since the days of the Weimar Republic. He had very senior contacts at Krupps, the largest German Arms manufacturer. Although he does not tell us how often he visited, it must have been at least annually. In 1937, he also attended the Nuremberg rally with his wife as honoured guests of the Nazi Party. There were two immediate outcomes of this. The first was a book, "Dover-Nürnberg, Return". The second was the creation of the Economic Youth Movement.

In his book, Baker White was lavish in his praise of Hitler calling him "a great man" with "very great ability, courage and perseverance". He emphasised Hitler's achievement arguing that he had brought Germany back from "...the depths and given it back its soul. He has done more, he has given it that precious thing, self-confidence, and hope in the future."

Baker White says his objective in writing the book was "to remove causes of misunderstanding" and goes on to say:

"... false statement, especially when accompanied by malicious cartoons, only serves to prevent two great nations understanding one another a little better. Be this said for the German People. They are making greater efforts to understand us than we are to understand them."

World War 2

Other than a few years in the Officer Training Corps at Malvern College, Baker White had no military experience. In 1935 he enlisted in a territorial unit, the London Rile Brigade which recruited mainly from the City of London. When his commission as a 2nd Lieutenant came through was made a platoon leader in the Lloyds Company. He had a bit more than three very part time to learn some soldiering skills at annual camp and evening or weekend sessions. By his own account it was some time before they would have real weapons in their hands.

When War seemed inevitable he arranged for one of his older El workers, Maj Tom Gribble to take over his responsibilities as Director and the day after the declaration he was on duty guarding the German Embassy.

In December 1939 a new military intelligence unit was set up – MI9 - to deal with weapons intelligence and counter sabotage. It would later have other responsibilities, but it was in these first months in 1940 that Baker White's experience with Krupps was most valuable to MI9.

This was a particularly early transfer into an intelligence unit and it would ensure that he would never be far from London during the whole of the War.

Towards the end of 1941 after MI9 had extracted maximum value from him he was transferred to work in propaganda (white, black and grey) in Ministry of Information section based in the Senate House of London University,

When the Political Warfare Executive (PWE) was established in August 1941 to lead Black Propaganda operations from a base in Woburn Abbey which is where he ended his war; being demobilised immediately after he won the Canterbury seat in the 1945 general election.

There is no doubt that his political career was cleaved in two by the Second World War or that the evidence from the first half of that career is a more authentic representation of what John Baker White stood for and believed. The war was an opportunity for redemption, and in vigorously deploying against the Nazis the tricks of political deception and manipulation that he had learnt before it he seized hat opportunity with both hands.

House of Commons

He was elected Member of Parliament for Canterbury in the 1945 general election and served until 1953, when he left Parliament through the method of becoming Steward of the Manor of Northstead. The subsequent by-election was won by Leslie Thomas

Back on the land

In 1966, he finally managed to put his farm pupilage to use to establish a 6,000 acre family farm in Kent.

He maintained his connection to the Economic League and in the 1960s was described as a publicity consultant. He was also chair of The Freedom Association in Kent.

Publications

Polemical works

"Red Russia Arms", Burrup Mathieson, 1932

"The Innocents' Clubs" (pamphlet), John Baker White, 1935

"The Red Network", International Anti-Communist Entente, 1939

"Nationalisation: Chaos or Cure?", Forum Books, 1946

"The Soviet Spy System", Falcon Press, 1948

"Pattern for Conquest [On Russian intrigue and espionage in Europe since 1945]", Robert Hale, 1956

Autobiographical Works

"Dover-Nürnberg, Return", Burrup Mathieson, 1937

"Its gone for Good", Vacher & Sons, 1941

"A Soldier Dares to Think", Vacher, 1942

"The Big Lie", Evans Bros, 1955

"Sabotage is Suspected", Evans Bros, 1957

"True Blue", Frederick Muller, 1970