Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener (24 June 1850 – 5 June 1916) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. He rose to fame through his imperial campaigns, his role in the Second Boer War, and his central part in the early First World War.

Kitchener was given credit for winning the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 and taking control of Sudan, for which he was made Baron Kitchener of Khartoum. During the Second Boer War, as Chief of Staff from 1900 to 1902, he was instrumental in Lord Roberts’ conquest of the Boer Republics. He then took over as commander-in-chief after Roberts, at a time when Boer forces had shifted to guerrilla warfare and British forces were imprisoning Boer and African civilians in concentration camps. As commander-in-chief of the Army in India from 1902 to 1909, he clashed with the viceroy, Lord Curzon, who eventually resigned. Kitchener then went back to Egypt as British agent and consul-general, effectively running the country.

At the start of the First World War in 1914, Kitchener became secretary of state for war, a cabinet minister. He was one of the few who predicted a long war of at least three years, and with the authority to act on that insight, he built the largest volunteer army Britain had ever seen and greatly expanded material production for the Western Front. Though he had warned about the difficulty of supplying a long war, he was blamed for the shell shortage in spring 1915—an issue that helped form a coalition government—and was stripped of control over munitions and strategy.

On 5 June 1916, Kitchener was traveling to Russia on HMS Hampshire to negotiate with Tsar Nicholas II. In bad weather, the ship struck a German mine 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west of Orkney, Scotland, and sank. Kitchener was among the 737 who died.

**Early life**

Kitchener was born at Gunsborough Villa, north of Listowel, County Kerry, Ireland, to army officer Henry Horatio Kitchener (1805–1894) and Frances Anne Chevallier (1826–1864), daughter of clergyman John Chevallier of Aspall Hall and his third wife, Elizabeth (née Cole). Both sides of his family came from Suffolk and could trace their lineage back to the reign of William III; his mother’s family was of French Huguenot descent. His father had recently sold his commission and bought land in Ireland under the Incumbered Estates (Ireland) Act 1849, which was meant to encourage investment after the Irish Famine. Later in life, Kitchener revisited his childhood home only once, in summer 1910, at the invitation of Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne, and surprised the estate’s owners by recalling the Irish names of many fields. Though military historians sometimes label him Irish or Anglo-Irish—a group that supplied many senior British officers—Kitchener did not see himself that way and was known to quote the saying misattributed to the Duke of Wellington: “a man may be born in a stable, but that does not make him a horse.”

In 1864, his family moved to Switzerland, where the young Kitchener was educated at Montreux, then at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Pro-French and eager for action, he joined a French field ambulance unit during the Franco-Prussian War. His father brought him back to Britain after he caught pneumonia while ascending in a balloon to see the French Army of the Loire in action. Commissioned into the Royal Engineers on 4 January 1871, he was reprimanded by the Duke of Cambridge, the commander-in-chief, because his service in France had violated British neutrality. He worked as a surveyor in Palestine, Egypt, and Cyprus, learned Arabic, and made detailed topographical maps. His brother, Lt. Gen. Sir Walter Kitchener, also joined the army and served as Governor of Bermuda from 1908 to 1912.

**Survey of western Palestine**

In 1874, at age 24, Kitchener was assigned by the Palestine Exploration Fund to a mapping survey of the Holy Land, replacing Charles Tyrwhitt-Drake, who had died of malaria. As a Royal Engineers officer, he joined fellow officer Claude R. Conder. Between 1874 and 1877, they surveyed Palestine, returning to England only briefly in 1875 after an attack by locals at Safed in Galilee. Their expedition was called the Survey of Western Palestine because it was mostly west of the Jordan River. It collected data on topography, place names, and local plants and animals. The results were published in an eight-volume series, with Kitchener contributing to the first three volumes (Conder and Kitchener 1881–1885). This survey had a lasting impact on the Middle East: it forms the basis for the grid system used in modern maps of Israel and Palestine; its data are still used by archaeologists and geographers working in the southern Levant; and it effectively defined the political borders of the region—for example, the modern border between Israel and Lebanon is set at the point in upper Galilee where Conder and Kitchener’s survey stopped.

In 1878, after finishing the survey of western Palestine, Kitchener was sent to Cyprus to survey that newly acquired British protectorate. He became vice-consul in Anatolia in 1879.

**Egypt**

On 4 January 1883, Kitchener was promoted to captain, given the Turkish rank binbasi (major), and sent to Egypt, where he helped rebuild the Egyptian Army. Egypt had recently become a British puppet state, its army led by British officers, though still nominally under the Khedive (Egyptian viceroy) and his nominal overlord.