Eirene White, Baroness White

Who was Eirene White, Baroness White?

Eirene Lloyd White, Baroness White, née Jones was a British Labour politician and journalist.

Eirene was born in Belfast, the daughter of Dr Thomas Jones, commonly known as "TJ", a noted civil servant, educationalist and friend of the establishment. She was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. She spent a year in Heidelberg before working for the New York Public Library. Back in England, she studied housing policies and the problems of the homeless.

During World War II, White joined the Women's Voluntary Service and became Welsh Regional Secretary. She was recruited by the Ministry of Labour to help with the training of workers in Wales, particularly women, for the war effort. She also worked as a civil servant at the Board of Education until 1945 and after the War as a political correspondent for both the Manchester Evening News and the BBC. In 1948, she married fellow House of Commons lobby correspondent John Cameron White.

White stood in the 1945 general election in Flintshire without success. She was elected a member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee in the women's section in 1947. She was elected Labour MP for East Flint in 1950, one of the first female MPs in Wales. An early private member's bill encouraged the government to relax divorce laws. Annoyed by fights between left and right, she stepped down from the NEC in 1953 but returned in 1959 until 1972.