The Kitchener Enigma

The Life and Death of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, 1850-1916

Trevor Royle

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780750967297
• eBook ISBN: 9780750968874
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

In this critically acclaimed biography, now fully updated, Royle revises Kitchener's latter-day image as a stern taskmaster, the ultimate war lord, to reveal a caring man capable of displaying great loyalty and love to those close to him. New light is thrown on his Irish childhood, his years in the Middle East as a biblical archaeologist, his attachment to the Arab cause and on the infamous struggle with Lord Curzon over control of the army in India. In particular, Royle reassesses Kitchener's role in the Great War, presenting his phenomenally successful recruitment campaign – 'Your Country Needs You' – as a major contribution to the Allied victory and rehabilitating him as a brilliant strategist who understood the importance of fighting the war on multiple fronts.

1

AN IRISH BOYHOOD

Horatio Herbert Kitchener was born on 24 June 1850 at Gunsborough Villa, an unpretentious shooting lodge standing some 3 miles from Listowel in County Kerry in south-west Ireland. Later in life he was noticeably reticent about some of his family background, but whenever it was hinted that he came from Irish stock Kitchener would demur and repeat the Duke of Wellington’s disclaimer of his own birth in Ireland that ‘A man can be born in a stable and not be a horse’.

Like many other English families who settled in Ireland, the Kitcheners were always anxious to emphasise the purity of their English origins. These can be traced back to the reign of King William III when they were churchwardens of the Church of Holy Cross in the parish of Binsted on the Hampshire downs. In 1666 a Thomas Kitchener left Binsted to become an agent to Sir Nicholas Stuart of Hartley Maudit, whose estate was at Lakenheath in Suffolk. His grandson, also called Thomas, had three sons, the eldest of whom, William, became a successful tea merchant in London: this was a period when London was emerging as one of the world’s great commercial centres and the city’s merchants prospered accordingly. William also extended the family’s fortunes by rising in society. He became a member of an ancient guild, the Clothmakers’ Company, and his sister Elizabeth married a brother of the foreign editor of The Times, Henry Crabb Robinson, whose diary and correspondence threw much interesting light on the lives of his friends and fellow writers Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt.

William Kitchener married twice, for the second time in 1797 to Emma Cripps, by whom he had three sons, the youngest being Henry Horatio Kitchener, the father of the future field marshal. He was born on 19 October 1805 at the family home at 8 Bunhill Row in Moorgate and he was named for Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, whose death at the battle of Trafalgar took place two days later. The young Henry Horatio Kitchener was also to follow the profession of arms but he foreswore the navy for the army, being commissioned in 1830 into the 13th Light Dragoons. In 1845, as a captain, he married Frances Ann, the daughter of the Reverend John Chevallier of Aspall Hall in Suffolk.

If the Kitchener family was solidly and unprepossessingly English, by comparison the Chevalliers were glamorous and romantic. Of Huguenot stock, they had owned the handsomely proportioned Aspall Hall, near Stockmarket, since 1702 and down the years they also owned the living of Aspall, a benefice that allowed the eldest sons of the family to continue living in landed ease. Frances’s grandfather, Temple Chevallier, was a scholar of Magdalene College, Cambridge; her uncle, Temple Fiske Chevallier, was a noted astronomer and a pioneer of science in education; and her own father, John, was a qualified physician who interested himself in agrarian improvement and the care of the mentally ill as part of his duties as the rector of Aspall. He married three times, his third wife, Elizabeth Cole of Bury (Lancashire), presenting him with five children, of whom Frances Ann, or Fanny, was the youngest. In their turn, five children were born to Henry Horatio and Fanny: Henry Elliott Chevallier (1846), Frances Emily (Millie) Jane (1848), Arthur (1852), Frederick Walter (1858). Horatio Herbert, being born in 1850, was therefore the third child and second son: from his father he borrowed Nelson’s Christian name but throughout his life the family knew him as Herbert. In his adult years Kitchener was to be much taken with his Chevallier connection and the family followed his career closely. Whenever he could, he visited Aspall while on leave and when he came to be raised to the peerage in 1898 he took as part of his title the name of his mother’s childhood home.

Shortly after their marriage Fanny accompanied her husband to India, where he reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel. However, shortly after the birth of Chevallier, their first child, her health wilted and Colonel Kitchener decided to bring his family back to Britain where he transferred on half-pay to the 9th Regiment of Foot (later The Norfolk Regiment). Being put on half-pay was not an unusual experience for the Victorian army officer but it was a setback as it did not count towards an officer’s career; also, if he remained on the half-pay list for more than two years compulsory retirement followed. After chasing appointments in Whitehall during the course of 1848, Colonel Kitchener finally decided to leave the army. He sold his commission early in the following year and determined to seek a more modest living elsewhere, in Ireland.

At the time, in 1849, Ireland was just coming to the end of the Great Famine, a disastrous four-year period that saw the failure of the potato crop, the staple foodstuff, bring huge distress to the rural population. To combat the effects of the subsequent evacuation of the rural areas and to infuse new capital into Ireland the government passed the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849 by which bankrupt estates could be sold to land speculators. On completion of a sale through the Encumbered Estates Court in Dublin the purchase money would be distributed amongst various claimants and the residue paid to the seller. Of the 7,200 petitions heard by the Encumbered Estates Court that year some 300 came from Britain: one of those successful was Colonel Kitchener.

Early in 1850 Colonel Kitchener bought the estate of Ballygoghlan, on the Kerry-Limerick border between Moyvane and Tarbert at the mouth of the River Shannon. The once thriving estate had been ruined by the famine, its village of the same name was deserted and the house itself was in such a condition of disrepair that the family could not immediately move in. While Colonel Kitchener busied himself with supervising the necessary alterations his wife stayed with a family friend at Gunsborough Villa, near Lisselton on the road from Listowel to Ballybunion, and it was while she was there that her third child, Horatio Herbert, was born during the early part of the summer of 1850. Three months later, on 22 September, he was baptised at the Protestant church of Aghavallen at Ballylongford. His godmother, Miss Mary Elliott, was the daughter of another English landowner at Tanavalla near Listowel. By the year’s end the Kitcheners had moved into their new home and appointed a nurse for the children, Mrs Sharpe. Her memories paint a vivid picture of family life at Ballygoghlan.1

As was the case with the majority of the British speculators who bought land under the terms of the Encumbered Estates Act, Colonel Kitchener’s presence caused a good deal of local resentment. Many bankrupt estates had been sold at the insistence of creditors and the new landlords were often only intent on getting a quick return on their capital outlay. They might have improved their properties and introduced new methods of agriculture but they were not always respecters of tenants’ rights. As there was no law to protect the Irish peasant from rack-renting and eviction, the landlords used that freedom to coerce tenants into becoming little more than poorly-paid labourers and considered themselves free to evict those who failed to keep up with the increased rents.

It was not long before Colonel Kitchener exercised his rights in an attempt to make his estate quickly profitable. When one of his tenants who could not meet the new rents was evicted from his property the colonel ordered his bailiffs to set their dogs on any who disobeyed his orders. According to local tradition the tenant’s family was also horse-whipped before the roof was burned off their cottage, thus making it no longer fit for human habitation. The incident may have been typical of many others perpetrated during those years but it created a good deal of outrage in the vicinity. Colonel Kitchener, like most of his class, underestimated the determination of the Irish peasants not to abandon land they took to be theirs by right of inheritance and his actions made him a hated figure.

Not long after that incident Colonel Kitchener evicted one Sean MacEniry, an articulate farmer who gained some measure of revenge by composing folk verses that lampooned his landlord.2 The main thrust of his insults was MacEniry’s claim that Colonel Kitchener suffered from bromhidrosis, an unfortunate malady characterised by a fetid stench from the body’s sweat. Known in Irish as boladh an tsionnaigh (stench of the fox) or as boladh an diabhail (stench of the devil), the complaint is considered in the local folk traditions of Kerry and Limerick to be ‘the mark of utter depravity’.3 Yet in carrying out evictions from his property and by behaving harshly towards his tenants, Colonel Kitchener was merely behaving like many other English landlords of the time. In their eyes, peasant-Ireland, tied to superstition and the Catholic Church, Gaelic-speaking and largely hostile to its landlords, represented a people who had to be brought within the ‘civilising’ influences of Victorian expansion and profit-making. Recent outbreaks of terrorism by various nationalist groups had only confirmed British distrust of the Irish and it was hard for the parliamentarians in London to grasp that the situation could only be retrieved by putting right fundamental grievances, especially those concerned with land tenure. The gulf between tenant and landlord was wide and Colonel Kitchener never made any attempt to bridge it: his children were brought up to look upon themselves as belonging to a superior race and from an early age his sons, noticeably Herbert, behaved in an imperious and arrogant way towards the Irish.4

However, Colonel Kitchener was determined to make his estate prosper and by 1857 he felt confident enough to extend his holdings by taking on Crotta House in Kerry, a seventeenth-century pile with an imposing front porch near Kilflynn, halfway between Listowel and Tralee. It had belonged to the Ponsonby family, which was part of the great house of Bessborough, and its acquisition was an outward sign of the colonel’s continuing success. As a result, Herbert’s childhood days were divided between the two houses but, although Crotta was the grander of the two with its large garden and views of the Slieve Mish mountains to the south-west, it was always regarded by the children as less homely than Ballygoghlan.

Family life was run on military lines and Mrs Sharpe, the governess, recounts how breakfast was served punctually each morning at eight o’clock and that even the maid serving breakfast to Mrs Kitchener in her bedroom had to wait outside the door until the clock in the hall struck the hour.5 Punishment, too, was meted out on martial lines and the boys were encouraged to develop a sense of discipline based on a code of mutual honour. Tale-telling was frowned upon and stoicism of body and mind encouraged: when, for instance, at the age of ten Herbert damaged his hand with a large stone he retired to his bedroom and would not allow his mother to be told of the injury. Before saying goodnight to her he hid his hand in his jacket sleeve behind his back so that she would not be alarmed. On another occasion he suffered without complaint the punishment of being pegged out for a minor offence – this involved him being spread-eagled beneath the summer sun on the front lawn with his hands and feet tied to croquet hoops.6 And when he fell from his horse and injured his arm while hunting, his father ordered him to remount and continue the chase. This, too, he suffered without complaint.

Colonel Kitchener also employed his boys as additional hands to help in the improvement of his estates. According to Stephens, the colonel’s steward, young Herbert was the equal of any man on the estate when it came to the cutting of turf and his father trusted him with the herding of cattle to market in Listowel although, in strict accordance with his instructions, the manager of the Listowel Arms Hotel was forbidden to serve the boy with breakfast until all the cattle had been sold.7 As their father had a dislike of formal schooling, the boys’ education did not pass beyond elementary instruction at the village school in Ballylongford: yet, on receiving a teacher’s report that Herbert was a dullard the colonel flew into a rage and threatened to apprentice his son to a hatmaker. Consequently, private tutors were employed but this proved an unsatisfactory solution. Some years later, in 1867, when Herbert’s learning was tested by his cousin Francis Elliot Kitchener, then a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he was found to have only a rudimentary grasp of English and arithmetic and an almost complete absence of general knowledge.

Nevertheless, in his father’s eyes, those drawbacks were not of any immediate concern as he believed that his boys should be practical first and academic second. So it was against a background of hard physical work and equally strict discipline that Herbert’s childhood was spent. As a small boy he was pretty, fair and curly-haired, noticeable for his winning smile and arresting, sky-blue eyes.8 Later, his hair turned dark and he quickly outgrew his brothers, to become a handsome, lanky boy who seemed in his teenage years to be too tall for his strength. Nonetheless, he sat a horse well, and local tradition has it that, whenever he took cattle to market, he would delight in trying to chivvy them into a semblance of order. Certainly his erect military bearing was long remembered in the district.

Two anecdotes from his boyhood give a clue to the future man. One day his mother found him weeping inconsolably after coming across four dead fledglings in a felled tree: each bird had to be buried with great solemnity before he regained his composure. His mother worried about that side of his nature, fearing that he might repress his emotional instincts and so damage himself by his own self-discipline. Indeed, as he matured, Herbert tended to hide his sensitive side and adopt instead many of his father’s mannerisms. Once, while watching estate workers felling trees, he struck a boy called Jamesy Sullivan across the knuckles with his riding crop. Stung by the assault, Sullivan turned on Kitchener and struck him from his horse, knocking him unconscious. Such an attack would have spelled immediate dismissal and ruin for the workers but, on coming round, Herbert refused to tell his father or to have the men punished. That degree of sensitivity, aggression and aloofness, when mixed with a sense of high moral purpose, was a powerful combination, and it turned Kitchener into a reserved and complicated young man. He preferred keeping himself to himself, and his family and friends noticed that, apart from the love he lavished on his frail, pretty mother, he disliked baring even the slightest emotion in public.

Although Colonel Kitchener was a stern father with an unpredictable temper, he lavished much care and attention on his wife and encouraged his children to adore her, too. The poor health that had attended her in India had followed her to Ireland and she became a prisoner to incipient tuberculosis. The south-west of their adopted country, with its temperate but damp climate, was not an ideal one for her condition, nor was it helped by the eccentricities of her husband’s domestic arrangements. He hated to sleep beneath blankets, believing them to be unhygienic: instead, he preferred to cover their double bed with sheets of newspaper, specially sewn together, which could be varied in quantity according to the season of the year.9 In that way, he argued, cleanliness could be allied to economy. While such a bizarre regime may have been suitable for a robust man such as the colonel, it was bound to have a deleterious effect on his wife.

On the whole, their time in Ireland had been unhappy for Fanny Kitchener. Her childhood and early years had been spent in comfort and ease at Aspall and she was used to a close and tightly-knit society that revolved around visits, musical evenings and gossip. Ballygoghlan was a gaunt and uncomfortable house, difficult to heat, and the winter evenings were long and cold. The houses of the surrounding English families lay far apart and it often took a whole day to make a visit. If she wanted to go further afield, it meant writing letters and staying the night. It was no place for a woman unless she shared with her husband the pleasures of the field, but Fanny had never been the outdoor type and gradually the circle of her existence narrowed to the two houses, her husband and the well-being of her children. As the years progressed she became increasingly unwell, and by 1863 she was virtually confined to her room.

The only remedy for tuberculosis known to the Victorians was treatment in the mountain air of Swiss health resorts. To have stayed on in Ireland would have spelled Fanny Kitchener’s doom and so during the course of that winter of 1863 her husband put in hand the sale of his Irish estates. It was a good time to put them on the market. The population decline and the increase in the size and prosperity of agricultural holdings, together with his own improvement of his estates, made Ballygoghlan and Crotta attractive propositions that brought Colonel Kitchener a ‘decent’ return on his original investment of £3,000 when he came to sell them in the early part of 1864 (roughly £256,000 today). The family moved to Switzerland, first to Bex, then to Montreux.

Little now remains to remind the visitor of the Kitcheners’ stay in the district. Ballygoghlan has long since disappeared but part of Crotta and Herbert’s birthplace at Gunsborough still stand, the latter for many years in the possession of the O’Dowd family. In the tiny Church of Ireland chapel at Kilflynn, where the Kitcheners used to worship, a commemorative tablet was erected after the field marshal’s death by a Mrs Tugham Hanbury, the wife of a naval surgeon. It gives his date of birth, wrongly, as 15 June 1850. Only once did Kitchener return to the south-west of Ireland, in the summer of 1910, when he made a motoring tour of Cork, K...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 An Irish Boyhood
• 2 A Sapper in the Levant
• 3 Egypt: Riding the Desert Sands
• 4 Sudan: Planning for Victory
• 5 Omdurman: The Making of the Legend
• 6 Symbol of Empire
• 7 The Great Boer War
• 8 India: Commander-in-Chief
• 9 Egypt Again: Proconsul
• 10 War Lord: Raising the New Armies
• 11 The Need for Shells
• 12 Strategy on Three Fronts
• 13 Erosion of Power
• 14 An Unpitied Sacrifice
• 15 The Kitchener Legacy
• Bibliography
• Plates
• Copyright