The former Grand Lodge closed down altogether for twenty years, which dramatically confirmed the devolution of power. In its place provincial lodges became the dynamic parts of the order, and one of the most successful was the Albion, based at Oxford. It secured as its patron a prominent aristocrat, the Duke of Marlborough. This gave it an especially notable publicity coup on 10 August 1908, when it held a ceremony under a group of oaks in the park of the Duke's seat at Blenheim, in which it initiated his relative, the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had already made his mark as a
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