James White (financier)

James White (17 May 1877 – 29 June 1927) was an English financier, property developer and speculator. From a working-class family in Lancashire, he worked at a number of jobs before becoming well known in the years before the First World War as a boxing promoter. From that, he moved into property and other transactions, making large sums of money in major deals. He became a racehorse owner and theatre proprietor.

White finally overreached himself financially, and being unable to meet his huge liabilities, committed suicide at the age of 50.

White was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, the son of Thomas White, a bricklayer, and his wife, Catherine, née Mullroy. He was educated at St John's Roman Catholic School, Rochdale. Little is known of his early career; it is on record that he worked in a cotton mill, and White said in 1925 that when he was 19, he and three others bought a circus in Rochdale, and that he later leased a theatre in Matlock in the adjoining county of Derbyshire.

In 1899, when he was 21, White married Annie Fetton, a worker in the wool industry. In 1900 he went to South Africa to work as a labourer on the railways, returning less than a year later. He became a builder and later bought and sold property and arranged finance for purchasers. In 1908 he suffered a financial failure and was declared bankrupt, although he ultimately paid all his debts in full. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography records that Annie White died at an unknown date and White married a second time, having a son and three daughters with his second wife, Doris.

White moved to London and turned his hand to promoting boxing matches. In 1911 he attracted public notice when a much-publicised match under his management was banned because one of the boxers was black. White threatened to stage the match in Paris to escape the ban. The enormous public interest in the controversy propelled White to the attention of businessmen, politicians and press barons; his influence as a broker of deals grew steadily. In the words of the ODNB, "White possessed the kind of charisma that disarmed critics. With deep-blue eyes, an engaging smile, and a Lancastrian breeziness, he impressed those willing to fall under his spell." The conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, whose financial fortunes became entangled with those of White, described him as "one of that group of financial wizards who appeared and vanished like comets in the sky of the business world during the period 1910–1930".

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