Debate On Kitchener's Sexuality
Some biographers have concluded that Kitchener was a latent or active homosexual. Writers who make the case for his homosexuality include Montgomery Hyde, Ronald Hyam, Dennis Judd and Richardson. Biographers who make the case against include Cassar, Pollock, and Warner. Pakenham, Magnus and Royle hint at homosexuality, though Lady Winifred Renshaw said that Magnus later recanted.
The proponents of the case point to Kitchener's friend Captain Oswald Fitzgerald, his "constant and inseparable companion," whom he appointed his aide-de-camp. They remained close until they met a common death on their voyage to Russia. From his time in Egypt in 1892, he gathered around him a cadre of eager young and unmarried officers nicknamed "Kitchener's band of boys". He also avoided interviews with women, took a great deal of interest in the Boy Scout movement, and decorated his rose garden with four pairs of sculptured bronze boys. According to Hyam, "there is no evidence that he ever loved a woman". However, he was apparently in love with, and may have been engaged to, Hermione Baker, the beautiful young daughter of Valentine Baker, commander of the Egyptian gendarmerie, but she died from typhoid in January 1885, aged eighteen. In 1902 he unsuccessfully courted Lord Londonderry's daughter, Helen Mary Theresa; she married Lord Stavordale instead. He was friendly, in her old age, with the courtesan Catherine Walters.
Patrick Barkham, a contemporary journalist, remarked that Kitchener "has the failing acquired by most of the Egyptian officers, a taste for buggery".
According to A.N. Wilson, his interests were not exclusively homosexual. "When the great field marshal stayed in aristocratic houses, the well informed young would ask servants to sleep across their bedroom threshold to impede his entrance". His compulsive objective was sodomy, regardless of their gender.
J. B. Priestley noted in his book on The Edwardians that one of Lord Kitchener's personal interests in life included planning and decorating his residences. He was also known to collect delicate china with a passion. (Such allusions to an 'artistic temperament' were a common code for implying homosexuality at that time).
Read more about this topic: Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener
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