Heathorn on Film and the Kitchener Conspiracy

To a stand­ing room only audi­ence, Dr. Stephen Heathorn kicked off the Fall Thursday Sem­inar series in the Depart­ment of His­tory with a talk entitled ‘Long Before Oliver Stone…Conspiracy The­ory and the ’Kit­chener Films’ 1921–26.’ Heathorn’s talk centred on the back­story to a half-decade struggle to bring the movie ‘How Kit­chener Was Betrayed’ to Brit­ish screens dur­ing the early 20s. He used this epis­ode to demon­strate how offi­cial policy per­petu­ated the Kit­chener myth and avoided ques­tions of pro­fes­sional com­pet­ence. This paper comes from a lar­ger explor­a­tion of how memory and repu­ta­tion of mar­tial lead­ers is manip­u­lated over the space of the 20thC.
In 1916, Kit­chener drowned on a mis­sion to Rus­sia when the ship he was aboard struck a mine off the Orkneys. Pub­lic grief was intense over the loss of the man who sym­bol­ized the fight­ing spirit of the nation and led many to ques­tion the culp­ab­il­ity of mil­it­ary and politi­cians in the tragedy. Although the mines that lay in the path of the Hamp­shire were known to some in the admir­alty, in the fog of the after­math of Jut­land, this intel­li­gence prob­ably failed to reach Scapa Flow in time to divert the mis­sion. The fail­ure of the gov­ern­ment to pub­licly reveal the res­ults of the invest­ig­a­tion into the sink­ing gave birth to sev­eral con­spir­acy the­or­ies. In 1921, this led to the film ‘How Kit­chener Was Betrayed,’ which spun a tale involving a trait­or­ous brit­ish officer, a beau­ti­ful ger­man spy and Rasputin. The film was imme­di­ately banned by offi­cial bod­ies seek­ing to main­tain Kitchener’s iconic status as sym­bolic of ulti­mate sac­ri­fice for the nation. When the film could not be shown, the ori­ginal own­ers sold it to Frank Powers, a journ­al­ist of some repute. He re-edited the film now call­ing it ‘the Tragedy of the Hamp­shire’ and once again attemp­ted to gain offi­cial accept­ance. Des­pite removal of the plot involving the Ger­man spy and the Brit­ish officer, a license for the film could not be obtained. In a last des­per­ate attempt to get some return on his invest­ment in the film, Powers claimed to have dis­covered the body of Kit­chener in Nor­way in 1926. Sta­ging an elab­or­ate tour of Nor­way with a cas­ket in tow, he returned via Scot­land to Lon­don. When patho­lo­gists pried open pol­ished cas­ket they dis­covered only a thick layer of tar inside.
Using papers declas­si­fied in 2001, Heathorn demon­strates that there was a con­cer­ted effort on the part of author­it­ies to pre­vent the show­ing of this film (con­sidered most per­suas­ive media of the time) in a man­ner which might raise ques­tions of pro­fes­sional com­pet­ence on the part of the gov­ern­ment and the mil­it­ary. He asserts that iron­ic­ally, it was this lack of trans­par­ency and unwill­ing­ness to pub­licly chal­lenge Powers that fed the sense of con­spir­acy. Offi­cials saw the dra­matic por­trayal of Kitchener’s demise as a clear chal­lenge to the legit­im­acy of the state. Des­pite a dif­fi­cult war­time rela­tion­ship, both the Home and War offices agreed that Kitchener’s repu­ta­tion could not be tar­nished. He was the sym­bol of all that made the fight­ing just and worth the cost.