Within hours of embarking on his voyage, Kitchener had vanished. 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’. Kitchener jumped at the idea of leading a mission of reassurance. 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. Here he boarded the armoured cruiser HMS Hampshire to embark upon a secret voyage to Archangel in northern Russia, for talks with Britain’s Russian allies. The following morning he crossed to the Scapa anchorage. This was Kitchener’s destination when, on June 4, 1916, he boarded a night train at King’s Cross station for the 700-mile journey north. 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. Say what you like about the Kaiser, he was good for Orkney, the windswept, sparsely populated islands north of the Scottish mainland. Two years into the war, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith felt able to reduce Kitchener’s responsibilities but dared not cast him completely aside.īut then came an opportunity to get the man out of the way, for a little while at least. Thousands of British lives had been lost in the doomed Gallipoli adventure, and Kitchener carried the can for a calamitous cock-up in the supply of artillery shells in the spring of 1915. And, by 1916, many of them were coming to despise him, too. The Cabinet table was an odd place for a man who despised politicians.
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.Įven though he had said several times that he would rather sweep the streets than have a job in the War Office, when conflict broke out, Kitchener was immediately appointed war secretary. Kitchener had already served as consul-general in Egypt and commanded the army in India. Kitchener walking along the gangplank towards the HMS Hampshire in June 1916, shortly before his death ‘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. At 6ft 2in, with piercing blue eyes set in a weathered face, he was an imposing presence. Kitchener, 64, was a soldier rather than a politician, yet the obvious choice for the job. When those shots rang out in Sarajevo in 1914, Britain had been without a war secretary. 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’. When news of the loss of HMS Hampshire reached London, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle reached for his ink pot. Horatio Herbert Kitchener embodied the British war effort, and his now-forgotten death is a salutary tale about the fate of heroes. Hundreds of men perished, among them the best-known soldier in the English-speaking world, who became the most senior officer from either side in the First World War to die in active service. Though hardly remembered today, the wreck of the Hampshire was seen at the time as little short of a national disaster. He and his staff perished along with the officers and nearly all the men of HMS Hampshire on June 5, 1916.’ A stone panel 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. Visible for miles, it has no obvious function - too fat to be a lighthouse, too small to be a castle. And at the top of the headland stands a squat, crenellated tower. Sandstone cliffs tumble sheer into peacock and petrol-blue water. On a sunny day, Marwick Head is a glorious place to be. Lord Kitchener died onboard the HMS Hampshire after it sank off the coast of Orkney in 1916