Appeal over Irish man who drowned with Kitchener in 1916 Appeal over Irish man who drowned with Kitchener in 1916 Metropolitan Police attempt to locate relatives of top official’s personal bodyguard Fri, Jun 3, 2016, 18:59 Updated: Fri, Jun 3, 2016, 19:02 Det Sgt Matthew McLoughlin from Ballycommin, Co Tipperary, was Kitchener’s personal protection officer when the HMS Hampshire hit a mine and sank on June 5th, 1916 The Metropolitan Police in London has issued an appeal to find relatives of an Irish man who drowned with Lord Kitchener 100 years ago. Det Sgt Matthew McLoughlin from Ballycommin , Co Tipperary , was Kitchener’s personal protection officer when the HMS Hampshire hit a mine and sank on June 5th, 1916. McLoughlin was the only one of the Metropolitan Police’s royalty and specialist protection unit to die on duty during the first World War.

He was born in Kilcommon , Co Tipperary, on February 6th, 1879, the son of a RIC man. He joined the Met Police in 1900 and the special branch in 1909. McLoughlin’s stock within Scotland Yard soared after he warned his superiors of a possible assassination plot against the Secretary of State for India Sir Curzon Wylie . His warning went unheeded and Wylie was assassinated in 1909. The Century Project Prior to becoming the personal protection officer for Kitchener, he had provided security for King Edward VII and King George V. Kitchener was appointed secretary of state for war in 1914, a cabinet position, and was Britain’s most senior soldier responsible for the recruitment of millions of volunteers to what became Kitchener’s army. French speaker McLoughlin accompanied Kitchener everywhere and was fluent in French. Kitchener was on his way to Russia to meet Czar Nicholas II to discuss tactics for the coming summer Allied offensive. He had an entourage of 11 with him including Leitrim-born diplomat Hugh James O’Beirne.

The ship left Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands on the afternoon of June 5th. It hit a German mine in heavy seas and all but 12 of the 662 men on board drowned including Kitchener. McLoughlin was well known in police circles. An obituary published after his death stated that he was “an exceptionally capable officer, possessed a good acquaintance with the French language and was noted for his discretion”. ADVERTISEMENT The Metropolitan Police still retain responsibility for the protection of the British royal family and senior members of the British government. The royalty and specialist protection command intends to name a room in its new headquarters in London after McLoughlin and are trying to track down his relatives. McLoughlin had one son Michael who appears to have emigrated to Venezuela in the 1920s and disappeared. Attempts by Scotland Yard to find surviving relatives have proved to be unsuccessful to date.

If you believe you are a relative of any of the above, or have any information that might assist the Met in tracing a living relative, please email scott.hamer@met.police.uk and richard.roe@met.police.uk The strange death of Lord Kitchener Add to myFT The strange death of Lord Kitchener The British war secretary’s demise at sea in June 1916 has spawned endless conspiracy theories. A century on, can the speculation be laid to rest? Read next by: Jeremy Paxman Kitchener c 1890 On a sunny day, Marwick Head is a glorious place to be. Sandstone cliffs tumble sheer into peacock and petrol-blue water. Fulmars, kittiwakes, guillemots and puffins swirl over the sea below, and the rock faces are a cacophony of screams and whoops from the nesting gulls. The clifftop air is rank with the fishy stink of uncountable quantities of guano. At the top of the headland stands a squat, crenellated tower.

Almost 50ft high and visible for miles, it has no obvious function – too fat to be a lighthouse, too small to be a castle. A stone panel on the landward side explains: “This tower was raised by the people of Orkney in memory of Field Marshall Earl Kitchener of Khartoum on that corner of his country which he had served so faithfully nearest to the place where he died on duty. He and his staff perished along with the officers and nearly all the men of HMS Hampshire on 5th June, 1916.” Though it is hardly remembered at all today, the wreck of the Hampshire was seen at the time as little short of a national disaster. Hundreds of men perished that night, among them the best-known soldier in the English-speaking world, who, in June 1916, became the most senior officer from either side in the first world war to die on active service. Horatio Herbert Kitchener embodied the British war effort, and his now-forgotten death is a salutary tale about the fate of heroes. When news of the loss of HMS Hampshire reached London, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reached for his purple inkpot.

Lord Kitchener, he said, had left behind “the memory of something vast and elemental, coming suddenly and going strangely, a mighty spirit leaving great traces of its earthly passage.” How to register the loss of this powerful force? Prime Minister Herbert Asquith asked parliament to petition the king for the construction of a national memorial to commemorate Lord Kitchener. Though a bronze statue was erected on Horse Guards Parade, no great national monument was ever built. The worthies responsible settled instead on dedicating one of the chapels in St Paul’s to his memory – “K” shares the place with everyone else who died in the war – and a grant to the medical school at the University of Khartoum, the city he had subjugated for the empire. With the coming of peace, “Kitchener scholarships” became available to surviving soldiers who had had their education disrupted by war service. Hearing of his death, half-a-dozen local communities inscribed K’s name on to the memorials they were already building to their own dead, alongside the names of ordinary soldiers and sailors who had answered his 1914 appeal for volunteers and would never return.

The tower built in the 1920s in Orkney to commemorate Lord Kitchener’s death But the people of Twatt wanted something grander. No records of their discussions survive, so quite why the inhabitants of this tiny Orkney village were overcome by the urge to raise a great tower to commemorate Lord Kitchener in that summer of 1916 is a matter of conjecture. As far as we know, he only visited the Orkneys in order to change ship, which means he can hardly have known the place at all. Maybe it was an understandable sense that since he had drowned a mile or so off their coast, he was theirs. The feeling was strongly held enough for the islanders to raise over £700 (perhaps £28,000 at today’s values) to build a memorial in local stone. The drowning had hit them hard. “It is a national calamity. There was only one Kitchener and no one can take his place,” lamented a 70-year-old woman in a letter from the village of Skaill, sharing in a feeling which swept the whole country.

But Orkney was especially affected, she thought: “Dead bodies are being washed up on the shore. There were 4 or 5 found last Wednesday evening [and] another one was found off the Hole of Rowe. All this is most distressing to us.” When the shots rang out in Sarajevo in 1914, Britain had been without a war secretary, the previous occupant having been forced to resign earlier that year. The 64-year-old imperial paladin, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, was a soldier rather than a politician, yet the obvious choice for the job. He was immediately summoned to Downing Street to receive his appointment. At 6ft 2in, with piercing blue eyes set in a face weathered by years of overseas soldiering, he was an imposing presence. “If not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster,” the prime minister’s wife, Margot Asquith, was supposed to have sneered, referring to the famous recruiting advertisement. But the man brought the same ruthless drive to running the war effort as had characterised his imperial war-making and without his appeal for volunteers, Britain could not have survived the early stages of the fighting.

He soon became to the first world war what Winston Churchill would later be to the second world war. Although a soldier not a politician, Kitchener was the obvious choice for war secretary. At 6ft 2in, with piercing blue eyes, he was an imposing presence This vain, imposing, arrogant man arrived at the War Office in 1914 garlanded with medals, stars and satin sashes awarded for raising the Union Jack over numerous corners of foreign fields. Having survived a brutal and eccentric upbringing in Ireland (his father disdained blankets, preferring to sleep under sheets of newspaper sewn together, and once punished his son by staking him out on the lawn, wrists and ankles tied to croquet hoops), he had risen to become not merely a general but the greatest public expression of ramrod uprightness. He had subjugated not just his fear but his physical comfort to the Manifest Destiny of the greatest power on earth. He had never married. By the time of his appointment as war secretary, Kitchener had already served as consul-general in Egypt and commanded the army in India.

Most famously, he was “the Sudan machine”, the man who had crushed the massive force of Islamists which had risen in the desert against the British empire and beheaded another imperial hero, the romantic, half-mad General Charles Gordon of Khartoum. After a retaliatory campaign in 1898 (more slaughter than combat), Kitchener had led his punitive expedition into Omdurman riding on a white charger surrounded by kilted Highlanders. There he set up his machine guns on the plain and mowed down 11,000 spear-carrying “dervishes” in their long, patched smocks, for the loss of a mere 48 officers and men. Soon, his moustache was the personification of empire, emblazoned on biscuit tins, buttons and postcards. The famous Kitchener recruiting poster: his efforts garnered enough volunteers to see Britain through the early stages of the war So, even though he had several times said that he would rather sweep the streets than have a job in the War Office, when war broke out in 1914, K was immediately appointed war secretary.

The Times reflected the popular mood, writing: “We need hardly say with what profound satisfaction and relief we hear of Lord Kitchener’s appointment.” The new war secretary was no bonehead and quickly delivered himself of the hugely significant judgment that, far from being over by Christmas, the fighting would last for years. He recognised at once that Britain’s small professional army – vastly outnumbered by the conscript forces of continental Europe – would need to be multiplied in size many times. The war would be won, he said, by “the last million men”. The Cabinet table was an odd place for a man who despised politicians. And by 1916, many of them were coming to despise him, too. Thousands of lives had been lost in the doomed Gallipoli adventure, and Kitchener carried the can, too, for a calamitous cock-up in the supply of artillery shells in the spring of 1915.

In a true pots-and-kettles observation, the new minister of munitions, David Lloyd George, castigated his managerial style by likening Kitchener to “one of those revolving lighthouses which radiates momentary gleams of revealing light far out into the surrounding gloom and then suddenly relapses into complete darkness”. Two years into the war, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith felt able to reduce Kitchener’s responsibilities but dared not cast him completely aside. A motion in the House of Commons in May 1916 sought to reduce his salary by £100, a signal of loss of confidence which the war secretary undermined two days later by appearing before a committee of MPs in his field-marshal’s dark-blue undress uniform: his apparent frankness and his colossal reputation won them round. The electorate loved him and the politicians knew it. But then came an opportunity to get the man out of the way, for a little while at least. HMS Hampshire at sea in 1903 Say what you like about the Kaiser, he was good for Orkney, the windswept, sparsely populated islands north of the Scottish mainland.

When the German navy threatened Britain, the Orkneys’ huge, protected bay at Scapa Flow provided a vast natural refuge for much of the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet. This was Kitchener’s destination when, on June 4 1916, he boarded a night train at King’s Cross station in London for the 700-mile journey north to the most northerly town on the British mainland, Thurso. The following morning he crossed to the Scapa anchorage. Here he boarded the armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire to embark upon a secret voyage to Archangel, for talks with Britain’s Russian allies. The tsar was begging for fresh supplies of guns and explosives and Britain was worried whether Russia, which had taken enormous casualties, would have the will to stay the course of the war. Kitchener jumped at the idea of leading a mission of reassurance. As the commander of the Grand Fleet, Admiral John Jellicoe, recalled later, the war secretary “expressed delight at getting away for a time from the responsibilities and cares attaching to his Office”: he seemed almost to think of his mission as something of a holiday. Within hours of embarking on his sea voyage, Kitchener had vanished.

The captain of the ship carrying the war secretary and his dozen-strong staff – translator, policeman and staff officers – was ordered not to follow the obvious route to northern Russia. Instead of steaming directly out into the North Sea, following the sea lanes regularly patrolled by mine-sweeping vessels, the Hampshire was to sail into the Pentland Firth, then to turn north, hugging the western coast of the Orkneys and only to head for Russia once it had passed to the north of the islands. There was certainly a reasonable argument for the unusual course, for by early afternoon a fierce storm was blowing from the northeast and the lee of the islands offered some shelter. Even though the sea was far too rough to launch a torpedo, the Hampshire was instructed to maintain a speed of 18 knots to outrun any U-boats which might be lurking in the area. That afternoon the storm changed direction, anyway, and was soon blowing into the face of the warships.

Nonetheless, Herbert Savill, the captain of the Hampshire, attempted to keep to the ordered speed and had soon outpaced the two destroyers assigned as escort vessels: looking back through his binoculars the captain could catch only occasional glimpses of them in the mountainous seas and by 7pm he had sent them back to base. Flashing a final “good luck” message, the escorts returned to Scapa. Less than an hour later there was a tremendous explosion. The Hampshire shuddered and took on water. “It was as though an express train crashed into us,” recalled a stoker who survived. The lights on the cruiser failed as the electrical system short-circuited, though the propellers continued to turn. Within minutes, the vessel was sinking by the bows, with most of the lifeboats unlaunchable in the storm. It was still daylight, and onshore in the Orkneys observers from the Royal Garrison Artillery had seen the Hampshire explode. The postmistress in the remote settlement of Birsay sent an immediate SOS by telegraph to Kirkwall to alert the naval authorities.

But the Hampshire went down in 15 minutes – time only to launch three small life rafts, which were soon hopelessly overcrowded with desperate sailors. Interviews in the local archives hold the recollections of some of the Orcadians who braved the howling winds and torrential rain to try to rescue those sailors who might make it to the few inlets between the cliffs. They found the life rafts dashed on the rocks, one thrust by the enormous waves into a crevice in the cliffs high above the sea. The official report lists 643 dead, though local historian Brian Budge believes the true figure to be 725. It is certain that there were a mere 12 survivors. Of Lord Kitchener there was no sign at all. Though corpses continued to wash up the shores of the Orkneys for weeks afterwards, K’s body was never found.

Kitchener was last seen standing in his uniform on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, calmly talking to two staff officers as the ship went down Two of the survivors later testified to an Admiralty inquiry that as the ship sank, the war secretary emerged from the gun room, when there was a call of “Make Way for Lord Kitchener!” to allow him passage through the frightened men pouring up to reach the lifeboat stations. The British war secretary was last seen standing in his field marshal’s uniform on the starboard side of the quarterdeck, calmly talking to two staff officers as the ship went down. Only two days before Kitchener’s departure from London, the British Grand Fleet had scurried back to Scapa Flow after the battle of Jutland, to discharge casualties, refuel and repair. The biggest naval engagement of the whole war had certainly not been the victory which the world’s greatest fleet – and the British public – had been encouraged to expect. On a straight actuarial assessment, the Royal Navy had lost more ships (14 vessels and more than 6,000 lives) than the Germans (11 ships and more than 2,500 casualties).

The Germans swiftly proclaimed they had won a great triumph. As the commander of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Reinhard Scheer drank champagne, a celebratory public holiday was declared and the Kaiser boasted to his sailors that, “The spell of Trafalgar has been broken. You have started a new chapter in world history.” On this occasion, triumph lay with he who proclaimed it first and most noisily. The British government stumbled about, issuing contradictory assessments, always too late and none of them proclaiming victory. Watching one British battlecruiser after another explode, Admiral David Beatty had declared, “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today.” There was much blaming of the unhelpful weather. Kitchener leaving the War Office, June 1 1916 Then, within days of one disaster came another.

Dark-suited men clustered around the noticeboards of the gentlemen’s clubs of St James’s, where the terse communiqué from the commander-in-chief of the Grand Fleet had been cut from the newspapers and pinned, those at the back of the huddle asking in hushed voices, “Is it true?” The king noted his personal distress at the news of Kitchener’s death in his diary: “It is indeed a heavy blow to me & a great loss to the Nation & the Allies.” He ordered army officers to wear black armbands for a week. Across the nation, hands trembled as people read of the calamity in the early editions of the newspapers. The Daily Mirror distributed 1.5 million copies that day. The conspiracy theories began almost at once. How could such an important figure, in the full protection of the greatest navy in the world, be dead? On June 7, the Evening News reported that all over London people believed the sinking had been the work of German secret agents. On hearing the shocking news of K’s death, members of the stock market cried out, “This is the work of spies!

Shall we any longer tolerate German-born members in our midst?” Establishment figures like Admiral Jellicoe and First Lord of the Admiralty Arthur Balfour – to say nothing of absurd bigots like the founder of the nationalist rag John Bull, Horatio Bottomley – were inundated with letters alleging the disaster had been the work of German fifth columnists, Bolshevik infiltrators or Irish nationalist saboteurs. Sometimes – as when an officer was said to have been spotted going into K’s cabin and proffering him a service revolver, to enable him to do the decent thing – it was claimed that the disaster had been perpetrated by the British government. Then there were the theories that Kitchener wasn’t dead at all. Why, since his sister had been unable to make contact with him through a medium, he must be alive! He was in Russia, commanding the tsar’s army. He had been spotted living in a cave in Orkney. Like King Arthur or Barbarossa, ‘K’ would return when his country most needed him.

Kitchener’s death was seen as a national calamity: the Daily Mirror distributed 1.5 million copies of this memorial issue The Admiralty conducted two separate investigations, the first in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the second a full 10 years later. Each of them concluded that the ship must have hit a German mine. On June 22 1916, Sir Richard Cooper MP demanded to know “on what evidence the Lords of the Admiralty formed the conclusion that the Hampshire struck a mine”. Six months later he was still, unsuccessfully, demanding answers: British officialdom’s traditional instinct for secrecy in a crisis asserted itself at once and held sway for decades. Even in 1959, Donald McCormick, a cheap journalist who had once worked alongside Ian Fleming, published The Mystery of Lord Kitchener’s Death, a self-proclaimed definitive look at various possible causes of death, rehashing selected conspiracy theories about secret agents, bombs and the rest. Refused access to Admiralty records beyond the official White Paper, he offered little that might be called evidence. The Conservative MP Irene Ward then plaintively asked in parliament whether the Admiralty might now make available the documents referring to the loss of HMS Hampshire.

Four decades after the event, they said they could not. But, in 1926, Kitchener did return. A journalist, Frank Power (real name Arthur Vectis Freeman) produced a coffin containing the body of a field marshal which, he said, had washed up on the coast of Norway. Power, (a “most unscrupulous blackguard” in the view of the then first sea lord) acknowledged that the Hampshire might have struck a mine but in public speeches, newspaper articles and two books, made a cottage industry out of dastardly plots. He claimed there had been two further explosions from inside the ship: clear evidence of sabotage, orchestrated by all manner of vile people, including the inevitable German spies as well as Boer victims of Kitchener’s concentration camp policy in the South African war at the turn of the century. According to Power, the war secretary had escaped in a tiny wooden boat, and “after a terrific struggle with the waves, Kitchener was tossed ashore on to a low rock, utterly exhausted, unable to make any further effort to help himself – but alive!” At some point, Power alleged, K had then been shot by a secret agent working for the British government.

He was now lying in a grave in Norway, and would shortly be brought back (by Power) for the ceremonial funeral he deserved. Power duly arrived with a coffin at Waterloo Station. The casket passed the night in a chapel, draped in a Union flag, with candles burning at each corner. He intended, he said, to see that the great hero had a proper burial. The only problem with this stunt was the Westminster coroner’s entirely predictable insistence that all unusual deaths must be subject to an inquest. Power was unable to prevent him opening the coffin and discovering that K’s “body” was really an uneven layer of tar. The journalist claimed that someone must somehow have stolen the great man’s corpse. An Admiralty directive ordered that if Kitchener’s corpse was to be found ashore, it should be retrieved in secret and put inside a special ‘metal-lined shell’. Why? Yet there had been some odd aspects to Kitchener’s disappearance. In July 1916 Sir George Arthur, Kitchener’s secretary, wrote to tell Admiral Jellicoe that K’s supposedly secret visit to Russia had been common knowledge there long before the war secretary had even arrived in Scapa Flow.

Had German intelligence intercepted British signals, thereby leading to the mining of the waters off Marwick Head? Should Admiral Jellicoe have insisted that the Hampshire take the unusual course to the west of the Orkneys, instead waiting for the storm to blow itself out? Why had his staff ignored not one but three intelligence reports of German U-boat activity in the area through which the Hampshire was to travel? An Admiralty directive after the disaster referred to reports that bodies from the Hampshire were being washed ashore and ordered that if Lord Kitchener’s corpse was to be found among them, it should be retrieved in secret and put inside a special “metal-lined shell” carried on board HMS Cyclops. Why? The conspiracy theories refused to die. Another concerned MP, the socialist and prohibitionist Edwin Scrymgeour, knew that a secret police report was being kept hidden, proving that the Admiralty had botched the rescue operation during the crucial few hours following the sinking. Internal notes from the Admiralty insist that no such report existed.

Oscar Wilde’s former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, claimed a conspiracy which took in Winston Churchill, the battle of Jutland and a worldwide network of Jews (Churchill successfully sued Douglas for criminal libel and the latter spent six months in prison). The biography of an alleged German spy published in 1932 – larded with lines about “man-made barracudas lurking just below the surface of the sea” – claimed that the key figure in Kitchener’s death had been a Boer agent masquerading as Russian nobleman. Sir George Arthur published a posthumous biography of the war secretary blaming the Royal Navy for inadequate precautions. It was also said that the Hampshire had been carrying vast quantities of gold to be given to the Russians, and later an expedition jointly sponsored by the fabulously wealthy arms dealer Sir Basil Zaharov and the German industrialist Gustav Krupp in the 1930s was said to have recovered good quantities of it. It was only in the late 1960s that the secret records of Admiralty investigations into the sinking of the Hampshire – coming to the pedestrian yet plausible conclusion that the ship had almost certainly struck a mine – were declassified.

Reports from captured German archives note that the log of submarine U75 recorded her scattering mines in the area around Scapa Flow just before the disaster – the U75 claimed the Hampshire as one of her victims. Yet when the Kitchener files in the National Archives were reviewed in 1973 and 1981, two were still judged unsuitable for publication and sealed until the end of 2015 and the end of 2025. If there was a conspiracy, it was remarkably long-lived. Lord Kitchener boarding HMS Hampshire on June 5 Had there really been a cover-up? Or is there something in the death of a hero which makes a conspiracy seem more believable? There are plenty of reasons to believe that there is a less dramatic explanation to Lord Kitchener’s death. At the time of the disaster, the Royal Navy high command must already have been overwhelmed trying to make sense of what had happened at Jutland. One can easily imagine the “just what we need!” mood likely to have come upon senior officers at the news that another warship had gone down just off the coast. To be told The Boss was on board must have seemed the last straw.

The war had already continued for far longer than most people had ever anticipated. The Royal Navy’s pummelling at the Battle of Jutland had done nothing for public morale. The catastrophe of the battle of the Somme was merely weeks away. Now this. For years afterwards people could remember where they had been when they heard the news that the man who seemed to embody the war effort had vanished. Stunned crowds stood on the streets, occasionally muttering in low voices. “Now we’ve lost the war. Now we’ve lost the war,” a platoon sergeant was heard wailing as he rocked back and forth in his trench on the western front. A coroner, summing up an inquest in Yorkshire, wrote that “the deceased seems to have become very depressed after learning of the death of Lord Kitchener, and subsequently to have taken his life”. But it seems to have been something more complicated that stirred Orcadians to raise their memorial. Island folk memory seems to hold it as fact that local people desperate to rescue sailors washed up on their shores had been blocked from doing so, sometimes at the point of a soldier’s bayonet.

There are still Orcadians who believe British military headquarters ordered the local lifeboat not to put to sea to attempt a rescue. Much of this is nonsense. The soldiers with bayonets were probably just trying to secure the shoreline. And what would have been the fate of a wooden lifeboat powered by men at the oars, in seas too heavy for armoured destroyers? Yet the bad smell lingers, even after so many years. Though several notables attended the unveiling of Kitchener’s statue on Horse Guards Parade, not a single senior member of the government came to the dedication of the Orkney memorial. The Hampshire lies in about 65 metres of water, a protected war grave. According to two men who dived the wreck before the current ban was introduced, she lies upside down on the seabed and you can swim straight into the cavernous engine rooms (“like Westminster Hall”, says one of them.) The ship’s coal-fired boilers hang from the roof above. The bow is severed from the rest of the ship – “It’s a huge hole, almost a third of the length of the ship,” says John Thornton, a Scapa Flow diver.

Veterans of shipwreck investigations say the first thing that sailors do when abandoning ship is to kick off their sea boots: the seabed at the scene of a disaster is generally littered with shoes or relics of shoes. There were none at the site of the Hampshire – evidence, says Thornton, that “the ship went down very fast indeed”. Admiralty investigations into the sinking concluded there was no conspiracy. They would, wouldn’t they? And what could be so sensitive that two files in the National Archives remained closed to the public until the end of 2015 and 2025? Kitchener the imperial hero, as depicted in Hubert von Herkomer and Frederick Goodall’s ‘Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum’ (1890) Was it something about his private life? Kitchener was long ago conscripted into the ranks of homosexual history, a gay hero in a less tolerant age. He was, for example, accompanied on his final journey by his aide-de-camp, “Fitz” – Captain Oswald Fitzgerald, of the 18th Bengal Lancers – the latest in a series of handsome younger men on his staff.

Fitzgerald had saved his boss from a would-be assassin in Cairo railway station and Kitchener had planned to bequeath his 5,000-acre African estate to him. As it was, “they died in each other’s arms when the HMS Hampshire struck a mine off Orkney in 1916”, the gay activist Peter Tatchell informed Guardian readers 10 years ago. There is not a shred of evidence to support this claim. It is true that K never married. It is certain that Oswald Fitzgerald also died when the Hampshire went down, and that he had been with Kitchener for nine years, though that hardly adds up to conclusive evidence of anything much. At the time of K’s eminence (and indeed until 1994) homosexual activity in the army was a court martial offence. But – as the part-time prostitution of ordinary soldiers in public parks and the scandals attaching to a few officers periodically demonstrated – homosexuals were, and are, almost certainly as well represented in the army as in any other walk of life. The occasional remark from enemies that Kitchener’s time in Egypt had enhanced his “taste for buggery” proves nothing.

Nor does his near-kleptomaniac enthusiasm for fine porcelain, or his passion for orchids, textiles, flower arranging and his pet poodle. Perhaps his insistence that the handsome young men he chose as staff officers move on to other jobs as soon as they married points to what were then known as Uranian tastes, but who knows? Whatever his aesthetic enthusiasms, there is not a jot of proof that Kitchener was what we would understand to be an active homosexual. A man who could endure the privations of imperial campaigning need not necessarily have found abstinence impossible. There are so many outstanding questions about the great British hero. What could possibly be sufficiently sensitive that one government after another – though more likely some bored functionary low down the food chain – deemed they should stay secret so long after the event? I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to have them declassified, and discovered that, alas, our heroes succumb to the same plodding fate as the rest of us. The files are as dull as ditch water. The Inland Revenue wants to get its hands on the proceeds of a sale of a few bits of pottery from the Kitchener estate.

There is an undignified wrangle over whether Captain Fitzgerald might have lived a little longer than Kitchener, and therefore could be liable for taxation on the African estates he inherited as he struggled for life in the icy waters off Orkney. There are pages and pages of turgid legalese. But there are no revelations about Kitchener’s private life, no mutters of official anxiety, nothing to suggest a conspiracy of any kind. When Lord Kitchener’s effects were returned to England, much of his treasured porcelain arrived from his prewar official residence in Cairo packed in newspaper. The family kept one particular sheet of newsprint which had wrapped part of his dinner service. You can clearly see the circular impression of a plate beneath the headline “HMS Hampshire sinks with all on board”. Was it pure chance that had led an Egyptian servant to choose the front page of the Egyptian Morning News of June 8 1916 to pack away one of the Sirdar’s baubles in the recording of his impermanence? We shall never know, but even at the distance of one hundred years these coincidences can be striking. The banal is always more likely than the bizarre.

With all its strange public displays of grief and crackpot conspiracy theories, public reaction to Kitchener’s disappearance had about it some of the characteristics of the death of Princess Diana. Kitchener – tall, tough, ruthless – was a hero for a different age: who can even name a single serving general today? But once someone has found a place in the popular imagination we do not let them go easily. Jeremy Paxman is an FT contributing editor. © Jeremy Paxman 2014. The author’s latest book, ‘Great Britain’s Great War’ (Viking, £25) is available now Photographs: Getty; Alamy BBC - History - Lord Horatio Kitchener z Lord Kitchener, depicted in the famous recruitment poster © Kitchener was a British military leader and statesman who, as secretary of state for war in the first years of World War One, organised armies on an unprecedented scale. He was also depicted on the most famous British army recruitment poster ever produced. Horatio Kitchener was born on 24 June 1850 in County Kerry, Ireland. He was educated in Switzerland and at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.

In 1871, he joined in the Royal Engineers. He took part in the unsuccessful operation to relieve General Charles Gordon at Khartoum in 1884-1885, and in 1886 was appointed governor general of eastern Sudan. Six years later served he became commander in chief of the Egyptian army. In 1896, he began the reconquest of Sudan from the forces of al-Mahdi, culminating in the Battle of Omdurman and the reoccupation of Khartoum in 1898. Kitchener was then made governor of Sudan, having become a national hero. In 1900, Kitchener was appointed chief of staff to Lord Roberts, British commander in the Boer War. When Roberts returned to England, Kitchener was left to deal with continuing Boer resistance. His ruthless measures - including the use of camps to imprison civilians (the origin of the term 'concentration camp') - were much criticised. On returning to England in 1902, he was created Viscount Kitchener (he was made an earl in 1914) and was appointed commander in chief in India.

In 1911, he became the proconsul of Egypt, serving there and in the Sudan until 1914. When war broke out, Kitchener reluctantly accepted the appointment of secretary of state for war. Unlike many in government and the military, he foresaw a war lasting for years, and planned accordingly. He rapidly enlisted and trained huge numbers of volunteers for a succession of entirely new 'Kitchener armies'. But his cabinet colleagues did not share the public worship of Kitchener and he was gradually relieved of his responsibilities. His support for the disastrous Dardanelles operation, combined with the 'shell crisis' of 1915, eroded his reputation further. Sent on a mission to Russia in June 1916, he drowned on 5 June when his ship, HMS Hampshire was sunk by a German mine off the Orkneys. Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850 - 1916) - Genealogy Horatio Herbert Kitchener in Off the Orkney Islands. Cause of death: Drowned when his ship HMS Hampshire hit a German mine.

Immediate Family: View Complete Profile Historical records matching Field Marshal The 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, KG NewspaperARCHIVE.com Text: ... circumstances un- der which the Hampshire was sunk. Sketch of Kitchener. Horatio Herbert Kitchener was Eng- land's foremost soldier, tak... Date: Text: "...Indicate circumstances" under which Hampshire was sunk. Horatio Herbert Kitchener was jEnglands foremost soldier, taking that distinc... Publication: Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, USA Date: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, 1836-1922 Text: "...Kitchener was England's foremost soldier, taking that distinction when Lord Roberts. Tattle Bolts, died. He was born at Crotter House... Publication: June 24 1850 - Ballylongford, County Kerry, Ireland Death: Australian Newspapers Text: ... profesion, and won distinction In ;i. lieutenant-Colonel Henry Horatio Kitchener died in 1894, in Ils 1SSth year. On hiis ... 250 Senega...

Publication: June 8 1916 - Launceston, Tasmania, Australia Page: Australian Newspapers Text: "...Kitchener of Khartoum. HIS LIFE AND WORK. Vicount Horatio Herbert Kitchener, British Feld-Marshal, whose death the nation now mourns,... Publication: June 10 1916 - Camperdown, Victoria, Australia Page: Australian Newspapers Text: "...as if' General Joffre had been killed. EARL KITCHENER OF KHARTOUM/ ,. Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 'born at Crotter House, Ballylóngfor... Publication: June 7 1916 - Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia Page: June 5 1916 - HMS Hampshire Residence: June 24 1850 - Ballylongford, Co. Kerry, Ireland Death: June 5 1916 - Onboard HMS Hampshire off the Orkney Islands.

Parents: Henry Horatio Kitchener, Ann Frances Kitchener Siblings: ...ces Emily Jane Parker (born Kitchener), Arthur Buck Kitchener, Frederick Walter Kitchener, Letitia Henrietta Emma Kawara Kitchener, <P... brother About Field Marshal The 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, KG Why is Kitchener an Ambassador of Darkness ? He killed 27000 woman and children in his concentration camps during the Anglo Boer war.Read Emily Hobhouse's account of these atrocities below. Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener KG, KP, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCMG, GCIE, ADC, PC (24 June 1850 – 5 June 1916), was an Irish-born British Field Marshal and proconsul who won fame for his imperial campaigns and later played a central role in the early part of the First World War, although he died halfway through it.

Kitchener won fame in 1898 for winning the Battle of Omdurman and securing control of the Sudan, after which he was given the title "Lord Kitchener of Khartoum"; as Chief of Staff (1900–02) in the Second Boer War he played a key role in Lord Roberts' conquest of the Boer Republics, then succeeded Roberts as commander-in-chief – by which time Boer forces had taken to guerrilla fighting and British forces imprisoned Boer civilians in concentration camps. His term as Commander-in-Chief (1902–09) of the Army in India saw him quarrel with another eminent proconsul, the Viceroy Lord Curzon, who eventually resigned. Kitchener then returned to Egypt as British Agent and Consul-General (de facto administrator). In 1914, at the start of the First World War, Lord Kitchener became Secretary of State for War, a Cabinet Minister.

One of the few men to foresee a long war, one in which Britain's victory was far from secure, he organised the largest volunteer army that Britain, and indeed the Empire, had seen and a significant expansion of materials production to fight Germany on the Western Front. His commanding image, appearing on recruiting posters demanding "Your country needs you!", remains recognised and parodied in popular culture to this day. He was blamed for the shortage of shells in the spring of 1915 – one of the events leading to the formation of a coalition government – and stripped of his control over munitions and strategy. He died in 1916 near the Orkney Islands when the warship taking him to negotiations in Russia was sunk by a German mine. After his death Kitchener was often dismissed as a great poster but not a great administrator. He was criticised by Lloyd George – who may have taken credit for some of Kitchener's achievements in the field of munitions – in his War Memoirs and by others. After many years' experience of commanding relatively small forces in imperial campaigns, Kitchener had made his reputation worse by his habit of secrecy, unwillingness to explain his actions to his colleagues, and reluctance to organise and delegate.

However, since 1970, new records have opened and historians have to some extent rehabilitated Kitchener's reputation, one historian writing that he consistently rose in ability as he was promoted.[1] Some historians now praise his strategic vision in World War I, especially his laying the groundwork for the expansion of munitions production and his central role in the raising of the British army in 1914 and 1915, which provided an army capable of meeting Britain's continental commitment. The city of Kitchener, Ontario is named after the 1st Earl of Kitchener. ______________ Birth: June 24 1850 Ballylongford, Co Kerry, Ireland Title: 1st Earl Kitchener Military Service: In South Africa (Boer War) and India Occupation: Military commander and statesman Military Promotion: 1914 - On outbreak of WW1, recalled from India to England as Secretary of State for War. 1915 - Stripped of control over WW1 strategy Between 1914 and 1915 Death: Drowned when his ship HMS Hampshire hit a German mine. June 5 1916 Off the Orkney Islands.

--- Emily Hobhouse, the daughter of the Reginald Hobhouse and Caroline Trelawny, was born in Liskeard, Cornwall on 9th April, 1860. Educated at home, Emily lived with her parents until she was thirty-five. After the death of her father in 1895, Emily became more involved in social work and political reform. With her brother, Leonard Hobhouse, she was active member of the Adult Suffrage Society. Emily, like many members of the radical wing of the Liberal Party, was opposed to the Boer War. Over the first few weeks of the war Emily spoke at several public meetings where she denounced the activities of the British government. In late 1900 Emily was sent details of how women and children were being treated by the British Army. She later wrote: "poor women who were being driven from pillar to post, needed protection and organized assistance. And from that moment I was determined to go to South Africa in order to render assistance to them". In October 1900, Emily formed the Relief Fund for South African Women and Children.

An organisation set up: "To feed, clothe, harbour and save women and children - Boer, English and other - who were left destitute and ragged as a result of the destruction of property, the eviction of families or other incidents resulting from the military operations". Except for members of the Society of Friends, very few people were willing to contribute to this fund. Hobhouse arrived in South Africa on 27th December, 1900. After meeting Alfred Milner, she gained permission to visit the concentration camps that had been established by the British Army. However,Lord Kitchener objected to this decision and she was now told she could only go to Bloemfontein. She left Cape Town on 22nd January, 1901, and arrived at Bloemfontein two days later. There were at the time eighteen hundred people in the camp. Emily discovered "that there was a scarcity of essential provision and that the accommodation was wholly inadequate." When she complained about the lack of soap she was told, "soap is an article of luxury". She nevertheless succeeded ultimately to have it listed as a necessity, together with straw and kettles in which to boil the drinking water.

Over the next few weeks Emily visited several camps to the south of Bloemfontein, including Norvalspont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley and Orange River. She was also allowed to visit Mafeking. Everywhere she directed the attention of the authorities to the inadequate sanitary accommodation and inadequate rations. By the time that Emily returned to Bloemfontein in March 1901, the population had grown considerably. She later wrote: " The population had redoubled and had swallowed up the results of improvements that had been effected. Disease was on the increase and the sight of the people made the impression of utter misery. Illness and death had left their marks on the faces of the inhabitants.

Many that I had left hale and hearty, of good appearance and physically fit, had undergone such a change that I could hardly recognize them." Lizzie van Zyl, visited by Emily Hobhouse in the Bloemfontein concentration camp Hobhouse argued that Kitchener’s "Scorched Earth" policy included the systematic destruction of crops and slaughtering of livestock, the burning down of homesteads and farms, and the poisoning of wells and salting of fields - to prevent the Boers from resupplying from a home base. Civilians were then forcibly moved into the concentration camps. Although this tactic had been used by Spain (Ten Years' War) and the United States (Philippine-American War), it was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted. Emily decided that she had to return to England in an effort to persuade the Marquess of Salisbury and his government to bring an end to the British Army's scorched earth and concentration camp policy.David Lloyd George and Charles Trevelyan took up the case in the House of Commons and accused the government of "a policy of extermination" directed against the Boer population.

William St John Fremantle Brodrick, the Secretary of State for War argued that the interned Boers were "contented and comfortable" and stated that everything possible was being done to ensure satisfactory conditions in the camps. The vast majority of MPs showed little sympathy to the plight of the Boers. Hobhouse later wrote: "The picture of apathy and impatience displayed here, which refused to lend an ear to undeserved misery, contrasted sadly with the scenes of misery in South Africa, still fresh in my mind. No barbarity in South Africa was as severe as the bleak cruelty of an apathetic parliament." In August, 1901, the British government established a commission headed by Millicent Fawcett to visit South Africa. While the Fawcett Commission was carrying out the investigation, the government published its own report. According to the New York Times: “The War Office has issued a four-hundred-page Blue Book of the official reports from medical and other officers on the conditions in the concentration camps in South Africa.

The general drift of the report attributes the high mortality in these camps to the dirty habits of the Boers, their ignorance and prejudices, their recourse to quackery, and their suspicious avoidance of the British hospitals and doctors.” The Fawcett Commission confirmed almost everything that Emily Hobhouse had reported. After the war a report concluded that 27,927 Boers had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. In all, about one in four of the Boer inmates, mostly children, died. However, the South African historian, Stephen Burridge Spies argues in Methods of Barbarism: Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics (1977) that this is an under-estimate of those who died in the camps. Hobhouse decided to return to South Africa but was warned by the authorities they would refuse permission for her to visit the camps. When Hobhouse arrived in Cape Town on Sunday 27th October, 1901, she was not allowed to leave her ship. In poor health, she decided to recuperate in the mountains of Savoy.

It was while she was there that Hobhouse heard that the Boer leaders had signed the Peace Treaty of Vereeniging. Hobhouse was also an opponent of British involvement in the First World War. On 3rd September, 1916, she wrote to a friend: "Think of our beloved fatherland, think of beautiful Italy, of France and of Germany, all of them working at full capacity to produce weapons of war and destruction. It seems as if we have reached the end of our civilization. It is all too hideous for words". In 1921 the people of South Africa raised £2,300 and sent it to Hobhouse in recognition for the work she had done on their behalf during the Boer War. The money was sent to her with the explicit mandate that she had to buy a small house for herself somewhere along the coast of Cornwall. On 18th May, 1921, she replied: "I find it impossible to give expression to the feelings that overpowered me when I heard of the surprise you had prepared for me. My first impulse was not to accept any gift, or otherwise to devote it to some or other public end.

But after having read and reread your letter, I have decided to accept your gift in the same simple and loving spirit in which it was sent to me." Hobhouse purchased a house at St. Ives. On Christmas Day, 1921, she wrote to the organisers of the fund: "To you I owe everything that surrounds me now and that gives me a feeling of comfort and rest and security - the warmth of my little room - and the feeling of being at home. When I look back upon the year that has passed, I marvel more and more at everything that you and your people have done to ensure my happiness and my welfare". Emily Hobhouse died in London on 8th June, 1926. By John Simkin (john@spartacus-educational.com) © September 1997 (updated August 2014). ▲ Main Article ▲ Primary Sources (1) Emily Hobhouse wrote about how she decided to visit South Africa during the Boer War. It was late in the summer of 1900 that I first learnt of the hundreds of Boer women that became impoverished and were left ragged by our military operations.

That the poor women who were being driven from pillar to post, needed protection and organized assistance. And from that moment I was determined to go to South Africa in order to render assistance to them (2) Emily Hobhouse, letter to the people of South Africa (1913) I had never seen your country nor did I know anyone of you. It was therefore no personal link of friendship that brought me here. Nor was it a political motive of any description. I came quite naturally - in obedience to the feeling of unity or oneness of womanhood and of those noble traditions, characteristic of the life of the English people, in which I was nurtured and which I inherited from times immemorial. It is when the community is shaken to its foundations, that abysmal depths of privation call to each other and that a deeper unity of humanity evinces itself. (3) Emily Hobhouse wrote in October 1900 to Stephen Gladstone about the objectives of the Relief Fund for South African Women and Children.

To feed, clothe, harbour and save women and children - Boer, English and other - who were left destitute and ragged as a result of the destruction of property, the eviction of families or other incidents resulting from the military operations. (4) Emily Hobhouse, report on Bloemfontein Concentration Camp (January, 1901) When the eight, ten or twelve people who lived in the bell tent were squeezed into it to find shelter against the heat of the sun, the dust or the rain, there was no room to stir and the air in the tent was beyond description, even though the flaps were rolled up properly and fastened. Soap was an article that was not dispensed. The water supply was inadequate. No bedstead or mattress was procurable. Fuel was scarce and had to be collected from the green bushes on the slopes of the kopjes by the people themselves. The rations were extremely meagre and when, as I frequently experienced, the actual quantity dispensed fell short of the amount prescribed, it simply meant famine.

(5) Emily Hobhouse tells the story of the young Lizzie van Zyl who died in the Bloemfontein concentration camp She was a frail, weak little child in desperate need of good care. Yet, because her mother was one of the 'undesirables' due to the fact that her father neither surrendered nor betrayed his people, Lizzie was placed on the lowest rations and so perished with hunger that, after a month in the camp, she was transferred to the new small hospital. Here she was treated harshly. The English disposed doctor and his nurses did not understand her language and, as she could not speak English, labelled her an idiot although she was mentally fit and normal. (6) Emily Hobhouse, report on concentration camps in South Africa (March, 1901) The new scorched-earth policy of the military authorities during March and April, brought a large number of extra families into the camps which resulted in a considerable increase in their population. In many instances I was an eyewitness of what took place.

I saw families huddled up close to the railway line near Warrenton and Fourteen Streams; I saw an overcrowded train crawling along to Kimberley throughout a whole long night; I saw people, old and young, bundled in open trucks under a scorching sun near a station building without anything to eat. At midnight they were transported to empty tents where they groped about in the dark, looking for their little bundles. They went to sleep without any provision having been made for them and without anything to eat or to drink. I saw crowds of them along railway lines in bitterly cold weather, in pouring rain - hungry, sick, dying and dead. I never had any doubt that every female countryman of mine would feel just as I did at the sight of all this - with a profound feeling of compassion, burning with the desire to alleviate the suffering. (7) The New York Times (16th November, 1901) The War Office has issued a four-hundred-page Blue Book of the official reports from medical and other officers on the conditions in the concentration camps in South Africa.

The general drift of the report attributes the high mortality in these camps to the dirty habits of the Boers, their ignorance and prejudices, their recourse to quackery, and their suspicious avoidance of the British hospitals and doctors. (8) Emily Hobhouse, letter to Mrs. M. T. Steyn (22nd August, 1902) When the first report of the surrender reached me, I sat alone on the shore of a lake in the mountains of the Savoy. A newspaper brought me the news which was written in big capital letters. I was so deeply moved that I sat sobbing like a child for a considerable time, for it appeared to me that all that we also fought for, had been lost. I had no knowledge of any details and could only hope that the men who, throughout the whole struggle, showed such clear insight into all matters bearing upon the war, would have retained that ability up to the end. And that is what happened. Now that I know the facts, I feel consoled. By surrendering everything, they will gain everything. Their protest is supported by solid facts.

Their strength and bravery have been proved and even although they have laid down their arms, they will nevertheless complete the task for which they took up arms. I fully believe "all things will come to those who will but wait". Taken from by John Simkin Field Marshal The 1st Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, KG's Timeline 1850 The Great War | Postcards | Lord Kitchener View larger image Lord Kitchener Herbert Lord Kitchener was a hero of the Great War; he was drowned when the ship HMS Hampshire carrying him on a mission to Russia hit a German mine and sank. His body was never recovered. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote the tribute to him that is printed on this card. His face is of course familiar to us from the famous recruiting poster "Your Country Needs You." Categories:

Question: Lord Kitchener drowned when which ship hit a mine in 1916?
Answer: HMS Hampshire