Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/599

 the enemy at bay; for only once, in the rough and tumble fights of Waggon Hill and Caesar's Camp (6 January), did they make any attempt to close, while his indomitable courage inspired a defence which more than once had cause for despair. After a siege of 118 days, Ladysmith was relieved (28 February) by the advance of the Natal field force, Lord Roberts's invasion of the Free State having drawn away a number of besiegers. It is with the defence of Ladysmith that White's name will always be associated, and he deserves to be honourably remembered for his reply to the suggestion of Sir Redvers Buller [q.v.], after the latter's defeat at Colenso (15 December), that he should make terms: ‘The loss of 10,000 men would be a heavy blow to England; we must not think of it.’ Broken in health as a result of the siege, he came home to be appointed governor of Gibraltar, where on the occasion of a visit by King Edward he received the baton of field-marshal. In 1905 he was awarded the order of merit, and was made governor of Chelsea Hospital, where he died 24 June 1912.

White married in 1874 Amy, the only daughter of the Venerable Joseph Baly, archdeacon of Calcutta, and had one son and four daughters.

 WHITE, WILLIAM HALE (1831–1913), novelist (under the pseudonym of ), philosophical writer, literary critic, and civil servant, was born in High Street, Bedford, 22 December 1831. He was the eldest son of William White, bookseller and printer, of Bedford, by his wife, Mary Anne Chignell, of Colchester. His father, a strong dissenter and whig politician, was a man of some note in the public life of Bedford, and later became a famous doorkeeper of the House of Commons; he was the author of a series of lively parliamentary sketches for the Illustrated Times, a collection of which edited by Justin McCarthy [q.v.], appeared under the title The Inner Life of the House of Commons (1897). Hale White was educated at Bedford Modern School, and after a rather mechanical process of ‘conversion’, entered, at seventeen, the Countess of Huntingdon's college at Cheshunt, with a view to becoming an independent minister. He passed thence to New College, St. John's Wood, from which he was expelled, with two other students, for unorthodox views concerning the Biblical canon. Later he occasionally preached in Unitarian chapels, at Ditchling and elsewhere, and also in the London chapel of the famous Welsh preacher, Caleb Morris, for years Hale White's friend and spiritual guide. But his most definite early connexion with London was his engagement in the early 'fifties with John Chapman [q.v.], the publisher and editor of the Westminster Review, in whose office he met George Eliot and enjoyed her friendship. There are traces of this association in the sketch of ‘Theresa’ in the Autobiography, while Chapman is obviously ‘Wollaston’. In 1854 he passed into the civil service as a clerk in the office of the registrar-general, Somerset House; but was transferred in 1858 to the Admiralty, where he rose (1879) to be assistant director of contracts, frequently acting as director. He retired on a pension at the age of sixty. For a short time he was registrar of births, marriages, and deaths for Marylebone. He died 14 March 1913 at Groombridge, Kent, and was buried in the churchyard there. He was twice married: first, in 1856 to Harriet (died 1891), daughter of Samuel Arthur, a dress-trimmings maker, and a pupil of Sir Charles Hallé; by her he had five sons, the eldest of whom was Sir William Hale White, the physician, and one daughter; secondly, in 1911 to Dorothy Vernon, daughter of Horace Smith, metropolitan police magistrate for Westminster.

Hale White's work in literature virtually began with the appearance in 1881 of The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, followed in 1885 by its sequel, Mark Rutherford's Deliverance. For the two books he invented a posthumous editor, ‘Reuben Shapcott’. He maintained the pseudonyms of ‘Mark Rutherford’ and ‘Reuben Shapcott’ through the series of novels which followed these works of spiritual biography, never formally acknowledging his authorship even when his place in contemporary literature had become assured. The novels closed in 1896 with Clara Hopgood. The intervening volumes, The Revolution in Tanner's Lane (1887), Miriam's Schooling, and other Papers (1890), and Catharine Furze (1893), yield, with the autobiographical books, the flower of his thought on life and religion, while his later imaginative work appears in Pages from a Journal, with other Papers (1900), More Pages from a Journal (1910), and the posthumous Last Pages from a Journal (1915), consisting of 573