People Australia

James White, enlistment photo, 1942

National Archives of Australia, A9301, 80574

James Gale (Jim) White (1901-1977) painter and trade union official

Birth: 31 July 1901 at Tottenham, London, England, son of Scottish parents Robert White, glazier, and Maggie, née Gale. Marriage: 3 May 1920 at Glasgow, Scotland, to Mary Gatheral (May) Livingstone (1902-1978), born at Glasgow, Scotland. They had one daughter and one son. Death: 9 August 1977 in Mount Henry hospital at Como, Western Australia. Religion: Presbyterian [on RAAF service record]; buried with Uniting Church forms. 

• Educated at public schools in Scotland, he left school aged 15 and was an apprenticed painter to his father Robert White, Glasgow, for five years.
• Served in the Royal Navy (Merchant Service) from 1916 to 1918. He and his wife arrived in Western Australia in 1923.
• Gale was secretary in 1938 of the Western Australian branch of the Painters’ Union (later Operative Painters and Decorators’ Union of Australia — OPDUA).
• Was a member or the Australian Labor Party in the late 1930s at least and supported the affiliation of the WA branch of the union both politically and industrially to the ALP. Contested election to Subiaco Municipal Council in January 1942.
• Enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force (Citizens Air Force) on 15 May 1942. Worked as barracks painter. Discharged on 10 July 1945.
• Was elected federal president of the OPDUA in September 1949 and held the post for twenty years. Supported amalgamation of Painters’ Union in late 1960s.
• Kept federal structure afloat with a group of leaders including Gordon Lewins (Victoria) and Joe Anderson (NSW) in the 1950s and 1960s. Viewed by OPDUA members in 1948 and 1949 as being a radical and stirrer and a ‘fellow traveller’ with the Communist Party of Australia.
• In ALP preselection contested Federal seat of Fremantle challenging Kim Beasley senior in 1949, a moderate. Supported known Communists such as E. J. Hanson and Lewins within the union.
• Successfully organised regular margins campaigns together with other Communist and left-wing officials such as Lewins and Hanson.
• Worked zealously to form a group of female members in WA who were ticketwriters so as to expand union coverage and membership. These were the only substantial group of female members of OPDUA in Australia during the 1950s and early 1960s.
• Travelled to China in a Building Workers’ Unions delegation as guests of the National Building Workers’ Union of China in August and September 1957, a visit which he described as “an education and revelation of the possibilities of the universal brotherhood of workers and mankind”.
• Cause of death: cerebral accident (2 days) and hypertension (years). 

Sources
John Spierings, A brush with history: history of the Operative Painters' and Decorators' Union (Melbourne, 1993), pp.44-45, 118-19, 154-55 and 161.