Kitchener: Hero and Anti-Hero

319 Pages·2016·2.37 MB·English

by  C. Brad Faught

C. Brad Faught is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Tyndale
University College in Toronto. A fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a
senior fellow of Massey College at the University of Toronto, he is the author of
five previous books. In 2012, he was the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II
Diamond Jubilee Medal.
‘Written in a very clear and readable style and based upon thorough and
excellent research. The various and often dramatic phases of Kitchener's rapid
rise to national and international fame are chronicled with great skill, shrewdness
and sensitivity… one of the best biographies of Kitchener to be written so far.’
Denis Judd, author of Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to
the Present (I.B.Tauris, 2012)
KITCHENER
Hero and Anti-Hero
C. B F
RAD AUGHT
Published in 2016 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright © 2016 C. Brad Faught The right of C. Brad Faught to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this
book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.
ISBN: 978 1 78453 350 2
eISBN: 978 0 85772 960 6
ePDF: 978 0 85772 756 5
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP
record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog
Card Number: available
To the memory of my grandfather, Gunner John George Faught, a Canadian
soldier of World War I
Also by the Author
Clive: Founder of British India
Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham
The New A-Z of Empire: A Concise Handbook of British Imperial History
Gordon: Victorian Hero
The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
 1. An Irish and Continental Childhood and Youth, 1850–67
 2. The Making of a Surveyor-Soldier, 1868–82
 3. In Egypt and Sudan, 1882–92
 4. Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, 1892–8
 5. Omdurman, Fashoda, and Khartoum, 1898–9
 6. The South African War, 1900–2
 7. India and Afterwards, 1902–11
 8. Egypt Again, 1911–14
 9. Supreme British Warlord, 1914–161
10. A Watery Grave and a Contested Reputation: 1916 and Beyond
Chronology
Notes
Bibliography
Preface
W
riting 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