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Grand Alliance

How Winston and the Welsh Wizard made history.

Nov 17, 2008, Vol. 14, No. 09 • By DAVID AIKMAN
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David and Winston

How the Friendship Between Lloyd George and Winston Churchill Changed the Course of History

by Robert Lloyd George

Overlook Press, 303 pp., $29.95

For all of the big and small studies of various stages of Churchill's career--the early adventures in Cuba, the Northwest Frontier, and in Sudan, the heroics of the Boer prison camp escape--little has been written about the epic friendship of his political life, the one with the Liberal party giant David Lloyd George. The account of that friendship by Robert Lloyd George, great-grandson of the great man, goes far to fill the lacuna. The subtitle may overreach a little--a friendship that "changed the course of history"--but not by much.

For an unbroken period of 44 years, the two were close friends, sometimes rivals for power and sometimes, together, decisive partners in events of global significance: The 1914 declaration of war against Germany, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Norway debate in the House of Commons that brought Neville Chamberlain down and Churchill to power. When Lloyd George died in March 1945, Churchill, still prime minister, worked through the night preparing the eulogy he would deliver at the Welshman's funeral the next morning.

An unlikelier pairing for a half-century of political friendship would be hard to envisage. Lloyd George, 11 years older than Churchill, was born into humble farming circles in Wales and left school at 15. A lay preacher in his teen years in nonconformist chapels, he began his law career by defending poachers out of an office in a back room of his house. He entered parliament at 27 as a Liberal member determined to fight for the rights of the poor and disadvantaged.

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