Eirene White, Baroness White
Eirene Lloyd White, Baroness White (née Jones) was a British Labour Party politician and journalist. She was born in Belfast on 7 November 1909 and grew up in the United Kingdom. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Somerville College, Oxford, spent a year in Heidelberg, and worked for the New York Public Library. Back in Britain, she studied housing policies and homelessness.
During World War II she joined the Women’s Voluntary Service and became Welsh Regional Secretary. She was recruited by the Ministry of Labour to help train Welsh workers for the war effort and later worked at the Board of Education. After the war she was a political correspondent for the Manchester Evening News and the BBC, becoming one of the first provincial journalists allowed into the parliamentary lobby.
White first stood for Parliament in 1945 in Flintshire. She was elected Labour MP for East Flintshire in 1950, one of the first female MPs in Wales. She supported a private member’s bill to relax divorce laws. She left the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in 1953, returning in 1959 and serving until 1972.
When Labour won the 1964 election, White held several government posts: parliamentary under-secretary at the Colonial Office (1964–65), Minister of State at the Foreign Office (1966), and Minister of State at the Welsh Office (1967–70). She kept her seat, even though it was a marginal one (majority of 75 in 1959).
White also chaired the Fabian Society (1958–59) and the Labour Party NEC (1968–69). She served as a governor of the British Film Institute and on the Trade Films Council. She retired from the House of Commons in 1970 and was made a life peer as Baroness White, of Rhymney in the County of Monmouth.
Her later roles included president of Coleg Harlech, governor of the National Library of Wales, chairman of the Land Authority for Wales (1976–80), deputy chairman of the Metrication Board (1972–76), and member of the Royal Commission on Environment Pollution (1974–81). She was Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords from 1979 to 1989 and received an honorary Doctor of Laws from the University of Bath in 1983.
In 1948 she married John Cameron White; they had no children. She died on 23 December 1999 in Abergavenny, aged 90. A purple plaque was unveiled in Flint in 2022 to honor her, noting that she was one of the first three women to represent Wales in the UK Parliament and Wales’s only female MP for about ten years.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:19 (CET).