Preface

Writing a full-scale biography of the British military officer and statesman Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Earl Kitchener of Khartoum (1850–1916), in what is a thoroughly post-colonial and post-British imperial age, begs the question, it seems to me, of why? A century after his death and well-beyond the time in which he was considered to be both heroic and important, what is there about him that might repay close re-examination? The ongoing centenary of World War I, as well as the marking of the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Kitchener himself this year, might provide reason enough for a new biography, and in part I am motivated by these two reasons. But beyond mere chronological convenience, lie the compelling and resonant questions of his contestable historical reputation in Britain, as well as in the colonies and territories of the former British Empire, especially where he was active. It is part of the normal undulations of history that the reputations of great men and women rise and fall in public estimation, and Kitchener's is clearly one of these. From the moment of his shocking death by drowning in June of 1916, Kitchener's life story fell into the hands of biographers and publicists of various kinds, and if nothing else an examination of a hundred years of how he has been assessed and re-assessed makes for a highly revealing exercise in epochal historical reading.

In 1920, four years after Kitchener's death and two years removed from the end of the cataclysmic World War I, Sir George Arthur, who had been his personal private secretary during the first two years of the conflict, published a three-volume official biography, Life of Lord Kitchener.¹ Arthur's biography is long (approximately a thousand pages), apologetic, and traditionally heroic; in other words, it is emblematic of its time and would go on to hold the field as the last word on Kitchener for a generation. That is not to say, however, that in the years between Arthur's work and the publishing of the next full-length biography of him – Kitchener: Portrait of an Imperialist, by Philip Magnus in 1958 – other, contrary, words were not spoken. Indeed they were, and principally such words came from Winston Churchill, as well as from the wartime Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. The mutual disaffection of Lloyd George and Kitchener, in particular, was a clear feature of their relationship as fellow Cabinet ministers from 1914 to 1916, and in his War Memoirs, published beginning in 1933, Lloyd George gave full vent to his negative feelings about his erstwhile colleague.² To him, Kitchener had been a martinet and a bungler and therefore had mismanaged the first two years of the British war effort, prior to his own succeeding in office of the deceased War Secretary, and then later of the Prime Minister himself, H.H. Asquith, in December 1916. Arthur may have still held the field in the 1930s, but Lloyd George's dyspeptic memoirs did much to damage Kitchener's posthumous standing in Britain and elsewhere. Not until Magnus's biography was published 25 years later did a fuller-orbed picture of a highly complex man whose record and reputation had been forged largely through 40 years' service as a pro-consular figure of empire, and not by a brief, though highly pivotal, ministerial career, take hold in the mind of the contemporary public.³ Magnus was much closer to Lloyd George's critical stance towards Kitchener than he was to Arthur's relative hagiography, but altogether the subject still remained in wait of superior work.

Since Magnus's in 1958 a number of other major biographies of Kitchener have been published: George Cassar's in 1977; Trevor Royle's in 1985; and, most recently, John Pollock's two-volume work in 1998 and 2001, respectively, of which Cassar's is the most perceptive and did much to re-set the balance in how Kitchener was viewed both by scholars and, to a lesser extent, by the wider public.⁴ In addition, Kitchener's life and work has been the subject of many shorter biographies and essays. As well, he has been portrayed in the well-known feature films Khartoum (1966) and Breaker Morant (1980), and his life examined in a television documentary, Reputations: Kitchener: The Empire's Flawed Hero, broadcast by the BBC in 1998.

Our own age, while much less interested in and accepting of the traditionally heroic status accorded Kitchener by his contemporaries, reveals its own preoccupations by focusing on, for example, his allegedly ambiguous sexual identity; or more pointedly, his ‘minorism’, as the term of the time denoted homosexuality. ‘Was “K” Gay?’, asked a writer in 1999.⁵ The field of Kitchener scholarship today, therefore, is contested in ways that have changed but remain linked nonetheless to the foundational ‘hero/anti-hero’ cleavage that has long defined studies of him and continues – as this book will seek to demonstrate – to repay investigation in light of much recent scholarship concerning the idea of the ‘heroic’. Indeed, one recent study has argued persuasively that perhaps it is time to amend the viewing of Kitchener through such a dichotomous lens altogether by suggesting a new category entirely: Kitchener as ‘anachronistic’ hero.⁶

At any rate, in writing this up-to-date biography my main aspiration has been to comprehend Kitchener as fully as possible within the context of his own time and thereby avoid either overt approbation of him on one hand, or censure by a twenty-first-century readership on the other. Of course all good biography attempts to achieve this kind of balanced end, but the reputations of outsized historical figures such as Kitchener make the task more difficult than it is with lesser or little known subjects. Accordingly, and with the benefit of much antecedent scholarship and full access to the rich Kitchener archive, it is hoped that his life as portrayed here may be as complete as the form allows. Biography, like any other historico-literary pursuit is partial; indeed, its very nature makes it to be such. But to the degree that exhaustiveness can be achieved within the arc of some 120,000 words this book attempts to capture Kitchener the man in all stages and places of his life, ranging as it did from his childhood in Ireland through a number of significant military, governmental, and pro-consular appointments in Sudan, Egypt, South Africa, India, and, of course, finally, in England itself. In the end, it will be suggested that the original impulse of biographers to designate him as heroic was correct, although requiring of significant caveats.