Arnold White

Arnold Henry White (1 February 1848 – 5 February 1925) was an English journalist and antisemitic campaigner against immigration.

Early life In 1879, he married Helen Constance (1849 – 1918), only daughter of Lowell Price of Farnham Royal, Buckinghamshire. She predeceased him and they had one son who was called Murray. He stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal for Mile End in 1886. However White broke away from the Liberals when Gladstone refused to condemn the Irish Plan of Campaign and stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal Unionist for Tyneside in 1892 and 1895.

Geoffrey Alderman has argued that after visiting Russia in 1890, White transitioned towards a stance of virulent racial antisemitism, arguing that the problem of Jews in the UK was ‘not…of numbers, nor of habits, nor of occupations…but the fact that, good, or bad or indifferent the orthodox immigrants belong to a race and cling to a community that prefers to remain aloof from the mainstream of our national life, by shunning intermarriage with Anglo-Saxons’.

In 1899 he published the book The Modern Jew (London, W. Heinemann).

In 1900 White visited the Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy as the guest of Admiral Lord Charles Beresford and in June 1901 he sent the Daily Mail a private letter from Beresford's which complained about naval deficiencies. White was also friends with Admiral Sir John Fisher, who shared an antagonism towards the new German High Fleet. White wrote an article which favoured a preventative attack on this fleet in its harbours which angered the Kaiser and Arthur Balfour. When some English journalists visited Germany in a goodwill mission in April 1907 the Kaiser insisted on White's exclusion. which claimed to have uncovered a plot to Germanize Britain. He died in 1925 and requested in his will that on his grave there would be a plain wooden cross inscribed with his name, date of death and the words ‘for England’.