Friendship between legends defied distance
FIRST, they were foes who fought a war against each other. Then they were allies in the two major wars of the 20th century, while both held high office. They were soldiers, statesmen, legends in their own time.
And, finally, when both were old men, voted out of office, Churchill described his friendship with Smuts as “one of two old love-birds moulting together on a perch, but still able to peck”.
Their backgrounds could hardly have been more different, nor geographically further apart, and yet their friendship would become legendary, and would help shape our modern world.
They were Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, grandson of the 7th Duke of Marlborough, born in 1874 in Blenheim Palace, the largest private home in Britain, and Jan Christian Smuts, born four years earlier and half a world away on an isolated farm near Riebeek West in the Cape. Both had fathers who were in politics: Lord Randolph Churchill was at one stage Chancellor of the Exchequer during Winston’s privileged but lonely childhood, while the father of Jan Smuts was a member of the colonial parliament. Winston was packed off to Harrow school which he disliked; Jan attended school for the first time at the age of 12, and then only after the death of his older brother, who had been the one destined for a professional life.
He came to regard the Boers exceptionally highly (describing them later as the finest enemies he had ever fought against), writing that a Boer soldier was worth four or five British soldiers in the field, a comment that won him few friends back home. He greatly admired General Louis Botha. To the end of his days, Churchill’s desk at his home, Chartwell, held only photographs of his family – and one of Jan Smuts. By then they had seen off the German enemy (twice) and forged a new dispensation for a modern world, the embryo UN for which Smuts had written the preamble.
Former editor of The Star, Richard Steyn, author also of Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, has focused on the closeness of the two unlikely friends, their correspondence and their roles against the backdrop of (mainly European) conflict during the first half of the 20th century.
It is an engaging book with an emphasis on historical events rather than on their personal lives, perhaps slightly to the book’s cost; though, to be fair, much has been written about that aspect over many decades. Nevertheless a “timeline” of both of their lives, including their personal family details, would have been helpful.
Both great men had that characteristic essential to political survival, that of determined persistence. The irrepressible Churchill ended his war memos with “KBO” – Keep Buggering On. Though the austere Smuts might not have entirely approved of the wording, it was a sentiment which he fully embraced.