Paging into the past
BOOKS: Winston Churchill and Jan Smuts: The Friendship
The friendship lasted for 50 years, including through two world wars, and overcoming a rocky start, when the two men found themselves on opposite sides of the Anglo-Boer War
Richard Steyn’s first book, a slim volume titled Jan Smuts: Unafraid of Greatness, was a highly regarded and sorely needed rehabilitation of SA’s most neglected of great men. However, his second book is in a class of its own. In a world with more than 1,500 biographies of Winston Spencer Churchill, and more being published all the time, former newspaper editor Steyn has written what is likely to be the go-to reference work for decades on one of the most interesting and longest-running political friendships of all time. The friendship between Smuts and Churchill lasted for 50 years, including through two world wars, and overcoming a rocky start, when the two men found themselves on opposite sides of the Anglo-Boer War. The young Winston had come to SA as a war correspondent to cover a conflict in which he thought the mighty British Empire would quickly curb the "insolent Boers". He was captured in an ambush of an armoured train in Natal and held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria,...
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