Jack's Page

Welcome to Jack's Web Page

Jack was born in early 1929 at the Royal Women’s Hospital Paddington to William White and Florence White (nee Pilkinton). The family were living at Hurstville Grove.

He went to school at Hurstville Primary where two of his kids later went.

In one of those life changing events which don’t quite seem so at the time, in February 1938 Will and Flo sailed on the Oronsay for England so Jack could meet his grandparents. This was before the Austrian Anschluss in March 1938 (which happened while they were still at sea) and the Munich Agreement over the Sudetenland in September 1938 – momentous events which later had a big though indirect effect on his life.

Will was from Bradford and Flo was from Rotherham. Jack went to school for a while in Bradford, but apparently the kids there couldn’t understand anything he said in his Aussie accent and he couldn’t understand their Yorkshire brogue.

The family moved to London in 1939; the war started and the bombing became too intense to stay there. The family moved to Totnes in Devon where Will became involved in the war effort. Since Will was a British subject, and in a protected trade as a toolmaker, they were refused an exit visa required for the family to be able to return to Australia, even if travel were possible. There is an infamous family incident involving Jack and Will, whose job it was to be fire spotters for the fire brigade during air raids. There is conjecture as to which one was at fault in letting the picture theatre, the social hub of the town, burn down at a time when there wasn’t an air raid on.

Jack went to Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes. He graduated with his HSC equivalent before the end of the war and was offered an “exhibition” to London University (like a scholarship). But with the war ending, the family took passage in July 1945 on one of the first ships leaving England for Australia - the SS Empire Paragon, an ammunition ship which could only carry 5 passengers. On return to Sydney, the family lived at first with Alf and Annie Palmer, friends from before the war, in the Promenade in Sans Souci. Ken Palmer, their son, was later best man at Mary and Jack’s wedding.

Will bought three blocks of land in Griffiths Street Sans Souci, then in 1949 built a house on number 13 and sold the other 2.

Jack got a job, at 17, with Imperial Chemical Industries in the NSW head office in George Street. He started studying accountancy at night at St George Technical College (best guess). At 21 Jack contracted bacterial meningitis – the bad version. Penicillin had just been released and he recovered. He was on a convalescing holiday in the Burragorang Valley (now underneath Warragamba Dam) in 1951 when he met his beautiful wife to be who was also on holiday there.

Jack and Mary were married in St Mary’s Church in Birrell Street Waverley on 6 December 1952.

They bought a block of land in Cawarra Road Caringbah, where Jack was going to build a house with Will’s help. But Will died in 1952. Mary and Jack sold the Caringbah block, and moved to the house in Griffiths Street. Some of the frames for the Caringbah house had been built, and these were used in the building of the flat at Griffiths Street where Flo then lived with them. Jack did all the building work.

Jack and Mary also bought 2 blocks of land in Tuggerawong on the Central Coast. This land was resumed by the Education Department before they were able to build a holiday house, and the proceeds of the resumption were just enough to meet the £500 cost of the block of land in Jacobs Drive in Sussex Inlet, in 1965, where the much loved “Sussex house” was built.

Jack was transferred to the ICI plant at Villawood in the early sixties. He needed a decent car to get there, and heard about a 1937 Dodge for sale, owned by two sisters who only ever drove it to church on Sundays and which only had 50,000 miles on the clock. He bought the Dodge, and took turns weekly with a work colleague to drive to Villawood.

Jack was transferred to a new ICI enterprise at the Botany plant called Catoleum, which made chemicals used in the catalytic cracking process for the refining of petroleum.

Jack’s last move with ICI was to the joint venture between ICI and Phillips Petroleum at Kurnell. The plant made carbon black, the stuff that made tyres black. ICI sold their interest to Phillips and Jack then worked for a wholly owned subsidiary of an American company based in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Having been one of the first employees, Jack turned out to be the last employee of Phillips in Australia when they shut the plant down in 1983. He managed to convince them that he had continuous service from 1946 when he started with ICI, which helped his redundancy payment considerably.

Jack didn’t settle into retirement very well at 54, so Mary sent him out to find a job and he worked at Multiplan at Kogarah, doing their books for quite a while. Always a service-minded man he gave his time as treasurer to the 1st Sans Souci Scout group, to the Bankstown City Band for many years, and was a warden at St Georges church, Hurstville from 1996 to 2001.

Jack and Mary and Flo moved from Griffiths Street to Hurstville in 1990. It was a sensible move but it meant the loss of Jack’s beloved sheds, which he couldn’t quite recreate in, or under, a 3 bedroom town house. His mother died in 2000, at 100, and he and Mary were then together, alone, for the first time in their married lives. They moved to Beauty Point Retirement Village in 2007. Jack was really struggling now with pain, loss of mobility, and a memory which wouldn’t quite work for him. His last move was to Southhaven in September/October 2010.

Around noon on Tuesday, the Ides of March, 2011, Jack White slipped away peacefully from us at Southhaven Nursing Home. Janice and Derek were with him.