Whiteboys

Rob Gandy’s article on the Aintree Spectres [FT399:3842] includes speculation that a mysterious group called the ‘Lily White boys’ might be involved, although his further investigations into the nature of this group came up short. The name reminded me of an entry in John Michael Greer’s reference book The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies (Harper Element, 2006), entitled ‘Whiteboys’ (pp533-534).

To quote the opening paragraph in full: “The first known Irish political secret society, the Whiteboys, first appeared in Tipperary in the autumn of 1761. Enclosure Acts passed by the Irish Parliament permitted local landlords to seize village common pasture for their own use. In response, bands

of local farmers gathered at night to destroy the ditches and fences erected by the landlords. Members of the bands took to wearing white shirts as a uniform, making recognition easy at night, and this gave them their name: Buachailli Bana in Irish, Whiteboys in English”.

The entry states that the Whiteboys were active in bursts from the 1760s to the 1780s, undertaking acts of civil disobedience that provided an outlet for rural Irish Catholics to vent their spleen against a variety of injustices and oppressions. These included excessive tithes and dues paid to both the Catholic and Protestant churches of Ireland, along with “abusive landlords and extortionate rents for farmland”. Naturally persecuted by the authorities of the time, the Whiteboys operated as a looseknit secret society. Organised in local groups led by a ‘captain’, members pledged an initiation oath to uphold the societies’ nocturnal activities, and would suffer serious retributions if they transgressed their membership.

The Whiteboys achieved some political victories in 1785, when their protests against tithes and dues “won the support of large sections of the middle and upper classes”, leading to reforms that arguably prevented landlords from engaging in evictions

similar to the notorious Highland clearances during the same period. Greer states that the Whiteboys were superseded by more radical, nationalistic Irish protest groups that sprang up in the late 18th century. Apart from this, he notes that their most lasting legacy is a distinctly sinister one: “The Whiteboy custom of assembling by night in white garments, however, spread to the American South by way of Irish immigrants, and was adopted after the Civil War by the Ku Klux Klan.”

Idle speculation in relation to Mr Gandy’s article: could the ‘Lily White Boys’ be some kind of local group derived from these Irish Whiteboys? As the Liverpool area was a major immigration point for Irish fleeing the Great Famine of the 1840s, perhaps the Spectres are some kind of secret society amongst Merseysiders of Irish descent, dedicated to preserving or honouring aspects of their Hibernian heritage

(or with motivations linked to the vagaries of modern Irish politics)? Admittedly the descriptions of the Spectres’ activities sound more cultic than radical, but perhaps the post-war Whiteboys had metamorphosed into a Gaelic neo-Pagan group casting spells against Unionists and the Reverend Ian Paisley… Dean Ballinger

Hamilton, New Zealand