ABSTRACT
At the time of their deaths, Kitchener and Haig had acquired fame, high state honours, and popular esteem. By Cubitt's definition, discussed in the introduction, both had developed heroic reputations. Kitchener's celebrity was obtained in the late Victorian empire and thus in some ways resembled other imperial military heroes like Henry Havelock and Charles Gordon, and indeed, later in the twentieth century it would be his imperial career that would be more remembered. As Britain became a more multicultural society, the treatment accorded Kitchener in the Reputations programme applying contemporary standards and divorced of full context though it did reflected the more critical post-colonial circumstances, at least in the media. So British martial figures with heroic reputations in the twentieth century have indeed been profoundly shaped by the peculiar legacy of the First World War.
