What secret about Lord Kitchener’s death was so explosive it had to be covered up for 110 years?
A great British hero, rumours that he was gay — and conspiracy theories galore. JEREMY PAXMAN investigates . . .
judged unsuitable for publication and sealed until the end of 2015 and the end of 2025. If there was a conspiracy, it was being hidden from sight for a remarkably long time.
Was there really a cover-up? Or is there something in the death of a hero that makes a conspiracy seem more believable?
Orkney’s folk-memory seems to hold it as fact that local people desperate to rescue sailors had been blocked from doing so, sometimes at the point of a bayonet. There are still Orcadians who believe British military headquarters ordered the local lifeboat not to attempt a rescue.
Much of this is nonsense. Yet the bad smell lingers.
Though several notables attended the unveiling of Kitchener’s statue on Horse Guards Parade, not a single senior member of the government came to the dedication of the Orkney memorial.
Admiralty investigations into the sinking concluded there was no con- spiracy. They would, wouldn’t they? And what could be so sensitive that two files in the National Archives remained closed to the public until the end of 2015 and 2025? Was it something about his private life? Kitchener was long ago conscripted into the ranks of homosexual history.
He was accompanied on his final journey by his aide-de-camp, ‘Fitz’ — Captain Oswald Fitzgerald, of the 18th Bengal Lancers — the latest in a series of handsome younger men on his staff. Fitzgerald had saved his boss from a would-be assassin in Cairo and Kitchener had planned to bequeath his 5,000-acre African estate to him.
As it was, ‘they died in each other’s arms when the HMS Hampshire struck a mine off Orkney in 1916’, the gay activist Peter Tatchell informed Guardian readers ten years ago. There is not a shred of evidence to support this claim.
It is true that Kitchener never married. It is certain that Fitzgerald also died when the Hampshire went down, and that he had been with Kitchener for nine years, though that hardly adds up to conclusive evidence.
At the time of Kitchener’s eminence (and, indeed, until 1994), homosexual activity in the Army was a court martial offence. But homosexuals were, and are, almost certainly as well represented in the Army as in any other walk of life.
The occasional remark from enemies that Kitchener’s time in Egypt had enhanced his ‘taste for buggery’ proves nothing. Nor does his near-kleptomaniac enthusiasm for fine porcelain or his passion for orchids, textiles, flower arranging and his pet poodle.
Whatever his aesthetic enthusiasms, there is not a jot of proof that Kitchener was what we would understand t o be an acti v e homosexual.
So what could be sufficiently sensitive about this great British hero, and his death, that one government after another deemed the files about him should stay secret so long?
I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to have the Kitchener files declassified, and discovered that, alas, our heroes succumb to the same plodding fate as the rest of us.
The papers are as dull as ditchwater. The Inland Revenue wants to get its hands on the proceeds of a sale of a few bits of pottery from the estate. There are pages and pages of turgid legalese. But there are no revelations about Kitchener’s private life, no mutters of official anxiety, nothing to suggest a conspiracy of any kind.
The banal is always more likely than the bizarre. With all i ts strange public displays of grief and crackpot conspiracy theories, t he r eaction t o Kitchener’s disappearance had about it some of the characteristics of the death of Princess Diana.
Kitchener was a hero for a different age: who can even name a single serving general today? But once someone has found a place in the popular imagination, we do not let them go easily.