The Life and Death of Lord Kitchener

The Kitchener Enigma. The Life and Death of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, 1850-1916, Trevor Royle, The History Press, 2016, hardback, £25.00, pp. 416, ISBN 9780750967297

Trevor Royle’s bold, masterly, highly readable biography of one of the most recognisable faces or more specifically moustaches of the First World War, originally published to critical acclaim in 1985, has been extensively revised and updated to commemorate the centenary of Kitchener’s death in 1916. Piecing together the scant eye-witness accounts, and drawing upon film evidence of the sunken vessel in which he perished, Royle probably comes as close as we are now ever likely to get to explaining the circumstances of Kitchener’s death after he was last seen impassively and stoically upon the stricken cruiser Hampshire’s deck after it had struck a German mine.

Royle revises negative representations of the enigmatic Field Marshal Earl Kitchener and British Secretary of State for War, deriving principally from the embittered post war memoirs of Field Marshal Sir John French and Lloyd George, which portrayed Kitchener as ‘an archaic and taciturn monolith whose presence terrified his colleagues and disguised a multitude of short comings including incompetence and a refusal to delegate responsibility’. By contrast, Royle portrays him not so much as the stern taskmaster, but rather as a caring man capable of displaying great loyalty to those close to him, whilst remaining sceptical of speculative representations of his sexuality.

He also throws new light on his Irish childhood, his years in the Middle East as a biblical archaeologist, his attachment to the Arab cause and his struggle with Lord Curzon over control of the army in India. Above all, he reassesses Kitchener’s role in the Great War, presenting his ‘phenomenally successful recruitment campaign’ for which he remains best remembered through those ubiquitous posters, 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’.