The rumour that Kitchener survived

HMS Hampshire sank on 5 June 1916 with Lord Kitchener aboard. Rumours that he survived or had never sailed spread within weeks.

HMS Hampshire sailed from Scapa Flow for Archangel on 5 June 1916, carrying Lord Kitchener to talks in Russia. Bad weather turned the destroyer escort back, but the ship went on alone. She hit a mine from U-75, a German submarine, roughly 1.5 miles off the Orkney coast and went down in under twenty minutes. Kitchener was one of 737 dead.

The handling of the night fed speculation. People asked why the ship sailed in such weather, and why armed men were posted round the cliffs to keep locals away. Some theories held that Kitchener had been killed on purpose, or had never boarded and a double's body lay in the water instead.

The survival story took several forms. The commonest was that the Germans picked Kitchener out of the water and held him in secret in a German prison. Come summer 1916, Kitchener's sister, Mrs Parker, had been won over, and a report from July 1917 shows the tale was circulating more widely. The historian blogger Beachcombing, who records it, treats these as wartime rumours.