The death of the British Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, in June 1916, as stunning and as tragic as it was, was still something remote to most New Zealanders, something that happened "over there'' and did not touch lives directly.
But only to most New Zealanders.
To many people in North Otago and a few in Dunedin, it was personally saddening, almost as if a family member - as commonplace as that had become - had died fighting.
Horatio Herbert Kitchener, or 3K of K4 as he was frequently known from his title of Kitchener of Khartoum, was to Britain and its empire almost the embodiment of the fight against Germany and its allies.
Tall and ramrod straight, he stared out with piercing blue eyes to millions, as he implored them to sign up.
The recruits and later the conscripts who joined to supplement the small professional British Army formed "Kitchener's army''.
When he died, one of 650 victims when the cruiser Hampshire hit a mine off the Orkneys, the news was received almost with disbelief.
It was as if such a man could surely not suffer the same fate as hundreds of thousands of others, to be cut down in war.
Kitchener should have been above such a fate.
There were those in New Zealand who knew him as a soldier because he had toured in 1910, inspecting troops and facilities and giving advice about what the country could do if war came.
And there were those in New Zealand who knew him as a relative or friend.
When Kitchener arrived by train in Dunedin in February 1910, he was met at the station by his sister Millie.
She was by his side for the rest of his time here.
Millie told writer Bessie Ross that her famous brother "was decidedly averse'' to interviews, which explained why there were inaccurate or exaggerated tales about him (including one that he did not like women).
Years later, between Kitchener's death in 1916 and Millie's in 1925, Millie did not believe he was dead.
Spiritualism was in fashion at the time and since Millie could not "talk'' to her brother after 1916, she fervently believed he was still alive, probably in a German prisoner of war camp.
The Kitchener connection began when his father, Henry, moved to New Zealand in the 1860s, with the intention of settling as a farmer.
The life didn't suit him and he went to France, but Millie, who had married a Scot, Harry Parker, decided to take over the land.
They worked in various locations in South Canterbury and North Otago.
One of their sons, James, was working at Hampden when he enlisted for the Boer War and went off to South Africa with the Second Contingent.
He later transferred to a British unit named for his famous uncle, Kitchener's Horse, and was killed on May 1, 1900.
A plaque remembering him was installed in St Stephen's Church in Hampden and when the church was secularised last year, the plaque was transferred to the town's Memorial Hall. Parker is also mentioned on the Boer War monument in Oamaru.
Another of Millie's sons, Alfred, served in India and Egypt and was for a time governor of Sinai when it was under threat of occupation by the Ottoman army.
Known as "Parker Pasha'', he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and retired as a lieutenant-colonel.
The Parkers moved to Britain before the war and Harry Parker died in 1912.
One of their daughters, Frances - usually known as Fanny - gained some notoriety in 1914 when she and another suffragist tried to blow up the cottage at Alloway in Ayrshire in which Robert Burns was born.
The women were apparently placing bombs when they were found by the watchman.
They ran, but he caught them and both were arrested. Fanny gave her name as Janet Arthur, but later had to concede she was really Frances Parker, a niece of Kitchener's.
(Suffragist medals given to Parker were recently bought at auction in London by Te Papa.)
The New Zealand Chief Justice, Sir Robert Stout, recalled at the time of Kitchener's death that he met his father, Henry Kitchener, while he was in New Zealand and also that he knew Millie Parker well.
"I remember being struck with her attitude during the South African war,'' he recalled.
"She seemed to me to have her father's courage and his high sense of duty and of service for the empire. Can there not be seen in his noble son, whose death we are now lamenting, some trace of his father - his courage, his devotion to duty and his anxiety to follow the truth wherever it may lead?''
A cousin of Lord Kitchener's, also Henry, died as the result of a house fire in Cumberland St, Dunedin, in 1882 that claimed four of his children.
Also a soldier, he had come to New Zealand to manage Waihemo station owned by his uncle, but moved to Dunedin when he realised the farming life was not for him.
Fire broke out in the two-storey wooden house, apparently as a result of clothes being left to dry in front of an open fire, early on July 1, 1882.
A police constable saw smoke and burst into the house, there to be confronted with Arabella Kitchener, a child in her arms, trying to descend the stairs.
He helped both out but flames prevented him from re-entering.
A boarder, William Ash, jumped from the veranda and the policeman cushioned his fall. Kitchener was not so fortunate.
He threw two of his boys from a window then jumped from the veranda, but was seriously injured.
Two girls, aged 11 and 6, and a boy aged 8 died in the fire, a 6-month-old baby boy died later and Henry Kitchener died nearly three weeks later.
Arabella took several months to recover from her burns and she and her two surviving sons eventually left Dunedin.
They settled in Tauranga for a time, where one of the sons, working as a bank teller, shot himself in the forehead.
He eventually recovered and they left New Zealand.
When Lord Kitchener died, it was reported the two sons had died and that Arabella was living in Jamaica, where her husband had once served.
- Ron Palenski
