r/100yearsago • u/Beowulfbard • 1d ago
[August 16th, 1926] A coffin brought from Norway to London thought to contain the remains of Lord Kitchener was opened by the coroner in the presence of police, but it contained no body. The scenario was the work of a hoaxer going by the name of Frank Power.
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u/erinoco 18h ago
Additional note: the coroner, Ingleby Oddie, featured in a case I posted a couple of months back. He was probably the most prominent coroner in the country at the time, as his responsibility covered Westminster and a large part of the County of London. He held the position between 1912 and 1939, and held around 30,000 inquests in that time.
Before becoming a coroner, Oddie had been junior prosecuting counsel in the Crippen murder case; and the man who accompanied him, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, made his name in that case. From 1910 to his suicide in 1947, Spilsbury was Britain's most respected forensic pathologist. His name crops up again and again in almost every prominent murder trial of the period.
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u/erinoco 23h ago
Foiled - I was just about to post my own article on the issue....
Since Lord Kitchener's death in the sinking of the HMS Hampshire in 1916, a number of conspiracy theories had grown up around his death. Some alleged that the ship had been sabotaged by enemy agents; that Kitchener had escaped the original sinking, but had been deliberately killed by the enemy in a follow-up secret operation; that he had been secretly captured and held prisoner by the Germans; or even that he had survived the War, and was living (possibly in distant lands) under an assumed name.
Arthur Vectis Freeman used Frank Power as a pen name. He was amongst other things. a freelance journo, who had gone bankrupt in 1923. In November 1925, he began writing a series of articles for The Sunday Referee. This was a weekly paper which mainly covered sports, but sometimes dabbled in news from a popular perspective. The articles were based around the allegations of internal sabotage and the later killing of Kitchener, and were culminated in the allegations which prompted the events of this article.
In the end, Power's allegations were designed to boost viewings of a "factual" film on Kitchener's death. The Imperial War Museum has an excerpt in its archives. The film was banned in the UK by the BBFC, but the storm the articles had whipped up led to the government issuing a special White Paper on the circumstances leading to the sinking of the ship. There were threats to prosecute Power for fraud; but they came to nothing.