Born: 7 November 1909, United Kingdom
Died: 23 December 1999
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Eirene Jones
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Lawrence William White. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
White, Eirene Lloyd (1909–99), politician, was born 7 November 1909 at Anwylfan, St John’s Ave., Belfast, eldest child among one daughter and two sons of Thomas Jones (1870–1955), briefly professor of economics at QUB (1909–10), and his wife Eirene Theodora, daughter of Richard John Lloyd, reader in phonetics at the University of Liverpool. In her infancy her parents returned to their native Wales when her father, who earlier had been Barrington visiting lecturer in Ireland (1904–5), resigned his university post to become secretary of the Welsh national campaign against tuberculosis. A Fabian socialist and early member of the Independent Labour Party, Tom Jones went on to a distinguished career in Britain as a senior civil servant and administrator of and adviser to various philanthropies and academic institutions. A trusted confidant of David Lloyd George from the latter’s time as chancellor of the exchequer, Jones was deputy secretary of the cabinet under Lloyd George and three subsequent prime ministers (1916–30), and secretary of the economics advisory council. With Lionel Curtis he was one of the secretaries to the British delegation that negotiated the Anglo–Irish treaty of 1921. The third volume of his Whitehall diary, published in 1971 with the subtitle Ireland 1918–1925, is an important source for Anglo–Irish relations within those years.
Reared in a scholarly household, and acquainted from childhood with famous and powerful men, Eirene was educated at St Paul’s girls’ school and Somerville college, Oxford. After graduation she was a labour ministry officer (1933–7), and also travelled, worked, and studied in several European countries and the USA. During the second-world-war blitz she was active in Cardiff with the Women’s Voluntary Service, then worked as a welfare officer with the ministry of labour in south Wales (1941–5). Undaunted by pervasive prejudice against a woman candidate, she contested the 1945 general election for the Labour Party in the north Wales constituency of Flintshire; though defeated, she reduced the 10,000-vote majority of the sitting conservative MP to 1,039. As London correspondent of the Manchester Evening News, she covered political and industrial stories (1945–9). In 1948 she married John Cameron White, a fellow political journalist whom she had met at a No. 10 news conference, and who later worked with Oxford University Press; they had no children.
Seen as a coming figure in the Labour Party, and elected to the party’s policy-setting National Executive Committee (NEC) (1947–53, 1958–72), after reconstitution of her Deeside constituency she was comfortably elected MP for East Flint (1950–70), overcoming intensive campaigning by local steel interests against nationalisation of the industry; the same issue would nearly cost her the seat in the 1959 election. Under private members’ procedure she introduced a matrimonial causes bill allowing for divorce after seven years’ desertion, which she withdrew on receiving a government undertaking to establish a royal commission on marriage and divorce. Like her father ‘an instinctive moderate’ (Ellis, 519), she charted a middle-of-the-road course through the bitter ideological battles that dominated Labour in opposition after 1951; assuming the thankless role of conciliator between the party’s right and left wings, she was regarded as ‘unreliable’ by both. Her invitation to left-wing leader Aneurin Bevan to speak in Flint enraged the powerful trade-union bosses who controlled election to the NEC’s women’s section, leading to her resignation from the committee, protesting intolerance within the party (1953). As a supporter – though not an uncritical one – of the rightist Hugh Gaitskell as party leader after her return to the NEC in 1958, she was tipped for the education ministry in a future Labour government. After Gaitskell’s sudden death in January 1963 and the subsequent ascendancy to the party leadership of the former Bevanite Harold Wilson, White held non-cabinet offices in the Labour governments of the 1960s. As parliamentary secretary in the colonial office (1964–6), and minister of state for foreign affairs (1966–7), she made history as the first woman minister in both departments. Her foreign-office portfolio embracing both UN affairs and southern Africa, she helped implement government policy toward the white-supremacist government of Ian Smith in the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia (latterly Zimbabwe), which had unilaterally declared independence. To counter electoral gains by the nationalist party Plaid Cymru, she was moved to the Welsh office as minister of state (1967–70). A cool-headed and decisive minister, noted for her disciplined intellect and capacity to master a subject quickly, she was an effective parliamentary and public speaker, with a fine rich voice and a confident, efficient, almost donnish demeanour. As Labour Party chairman (1968–9), she devoted much of her opening address at the 1969 annual conference in Brighton to a vigorous attack on the anti-immigration position of Enoch Powell as recently articulated in his notorious ‘rivers of blood’ speech; she warned that one need ‘look no further than across the Irish Sea’ to observe the consequences of bigotry, intolerance, and hostility to diversity (Independent obit.).
Created a life peer as Baroness White of Rhymney (1970), she continued an active political career; a deputy speaker of the house of lords (1979–89), she was chair or deputy chair of several parliamentary committees, including the lords’ select committee on the European communities. Her abiding commitments to higher education, environmental protection, and such cultural interests as the Welsh national museum and library were reflected in her membership of numerous governing bodies, boards, commissions, councils, and institutes. After her husband’s death of lung cancer in 1968 she was a strenuous campaigner against the tobacco industry. She was a lifelong member of the Fabian Society, which she chaired in 1958–9. Her several honorary degrees and fellowships included an honorary LLD from QUB (1981). As literary executor for her father, she arranged for the editing and publication of his Whitehall diary, to the dismay of elements within the upper civil service distressed by the very existence of such a document. In her later years she resided in Abergavenny, Gwent, where she died on 23 December 1999.