He was educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Cambridge. He succeeded his grandfather in the earldom on 27 March 1937. In 1937, he was a Page of Honour to King George VI at his coronation. Like his great-uncle before him, he was an English Freemason. He was initiated on 24 November 1947 in the Royal Somerset House & Inverness Lodge No 4, and rose to senior rank, serving as Senior Grand Warden of the United Grand Lodge of England. Henry Kitchener was also a committed supporter of the organic movement and took up a role with the charity Garden Organic. Having joined the charity’s founder, Lawrence Hills’, band of enthusiasts in July 1958, as member number 171, Henry Kitchener became its president in 1973, a position he was to occupy for the next thirty-five years. In 2008, during Garden Organic’s 50th anniversary year, Earl Kitchener left the organisation as President and was replaced by Professor Tim Lang. However Earl Kitchener remained interested in the organic movement and regularly wrote and updated the organisation whenever a subject arose that he felt passionately about.
Lord Kitchener, who had been a member of the Council of the UK’s Electoral Reform Society, was a strong supporter of its advocacy of the electoral system that provided proportional representation using the Single Transferable Vote, known as PR-STV. As a hereditary peer, who had a right to sit and vote in the House of Lords - until that right was largely removed for such peers in 1999 - he had, with his friend and colleague, the late Earl Russell, in the House in support of open list PR-STV for UK elections of Members of the European Parliament, when that House amended, on four separate occasions, a 1998 Lower House Bill that provided for a closed list only. Within the Electoral Reform Society, the Earl Kitchener had also been a strong advocate for the use of the Meek system http://www.prsa.org.au/meek_stv.htm of PR-STV, which had been devised by his colleague, Brian Meek. Lord Kitchener had, in 1992 visited Australia http://www.prsa.org.au/qn/77.html#ers to assist in a successful campaign for the entrenchment, as the result of a successful 1995 referendum, of a PR-STV electoral system for the legislature of the Australian Capital Territory. He had earlier visited New Zealand, where he studied attitudes to the new MMP electoral system there, and what he regarded as a far superior approach to MMP, which was the Meek system of PR-STV that New Zealand has legislated for use as an option in municipal elections.
Scientific career
Lord Kitchener was a qualified physicist. He spent most of his working life with ICI at Winnington, Cheshire. Lord Kitchener's interest in the application of evidence-based research was demonstrated by his role of President and a Trustee of the Institute for Food, Brain and Behaviour a UK charity conducting scientific research into the effects of nutrition on brain function and behaviour. Kitchener was associated with the charity for over 20 years serving under two chairmen, the late Bishop Hugh Montefiore and the current chairman, Mrs Frances Jackson. He took a keen, detailed, interest in IFBB's scientific work, interrogating scientists robustly at Board Meetings on the progress of their research and was a keen and perceptive reader of academic journal articles and papers.
Succession question
His niece Emma Joy Kitchener, LVO , a Lady-in-Waiting to HRH Princess Michael of Kent, married Julian Fellowes on 28 April 1990. On 15 October 1998 the Fellowes family changed its surname from Fellowes to Kitchener-Fellowes. She is also a great-great-niece of Herbert, 1st Earl Kitchener. Lord Fellowes publicly expressed his dissatisfaction that the proposals to change the rules of royal succession were not extended to hereditary peerages, which had they been would have allowed his wife to succeed her uncle as The Countess Kitchener in her own right. Or as he put it "I find it ridiculous that, in 2011, a perfectly sentient adult woman has no rights of inheritance whatsoever when it comes to a hereditary title" Instead, the title became extinct on her uncle's death because there were no male heirs. On 9 May 2012, The Queen issued a Royal Warrant of Precedence granting Lady Emma Fellowes the same rank and style as the daughter of an Earl, as would have been due to her if her late father had survived his brother and therefore succeeded to the earldom. Specifically it declared that Lady Fellowes "shall henceforth have, hold and enjoy the same title, rank, place, pre-eminence and precedence as a daughter of an Earl" as she would have received if her father had survived her uncle and "succeeded to the title and dignity of Earl Kitchener of Khartoum and Broome."
