Brendan Bracken, 1st Viscount Bracken

PC (15 February 1901 – 8 August 1958) was an Irish-born businessman and a British Conservative cabinet minister. He is remembered primarily as an ardent opponent of the appeasement of Adolf Hitler and a supporter of Winston Churchill, first in Churchill's opposition to appeasement, and then in his prosecution of the Second World War. Bracken was also the founder of the modern version of the Financial Times. .

Early life

Bracken was born in 1901 in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland. He was the son of Joseph Kevin Bracken and Hannah Agnes Ryan. J.K. Bracken was a successful builder, who was a member of the Fenian brotherhood that was committed to winning the independence of Ireland from Britain by force. He was also a founder member of the Gaelic Athletic Association established in 1884. His father died when Brendan was three. His mother then married Patrick Laffan, who was also sympathetic to armed Irish rebellion, and moved with Brendan, his three full siblings and his two step sisters, to Dublin. He was educated by the Jesuits at Mungret College, a boarding school in County Limerick, but ran away in 1915. In Dublin, Brendan became all but uncontrollable, engaging in vandalism and altercations. In desperation his mother sent him to Australia to live with one of her cousins who was a Catholic priest in Echuca in Victoria State. Brendan led a hardly more settled existence in Australia, moving often but reading avidly and acquiring a self education.

In 1919 Bracken returned to Ireland but finding the Irish Rebellion raging he settled instead in Liverpool. In 1920 he appeared at Sedbergh School in Cumbria, claiming to be 15 years old, an Australian, to have been orphaned in a bush fire, and to have a family connection to Montagu Rendell, then the headmaster of Winchester College. On the basis of this story he was accepted at Sedbergh. At the end of one term he emerged having succeeded in trading his Irish republican lower middle class background, for that of a British public school man.

He might have had good reason for hiding his Irish heritage as the Anglo-Irish war (1919-1921) aroused great hostility towards Irish living in Great Britain. For whatever reason this denial became a regular feature of his character. A second example occurred in 1926 when he met Emmett Dalton in London. This British soldier turned IRA confidant, who was one of Michael Collins's right-hand men, recalled meeting Bracken at primary school in Dublin. Bracken denied this, but Dalton insisted that he remembered the smell of Bracken's corduroy trousers. A third example occurred during the Second World War when Bracken told people that his brother had been killed in action at Narvik, when in fact his brother was alive, well, and asking Brendan for money, from Ireland.

In the 1981 ITV Drama series Winston Churchill: The wilderness years it was suggested that he encouraged a rumour that he was Churchill's illegitimate son and that as a result Clementine Churchill actively sought to turn her husband against him.

Business and political career

After Sedbergh, whose "old boy" tie he used to good effect, Bracken was briefly a schoolmaster at Bishop's Stortford College. He then made a successful career from 1922 as a magazine publisher and newspaper editor in London. His initial success was based on selling advertising space to at least cover the cost of each number. In the 1923 election he assisted Winston Churchill's unsuccessful attempt to be elected MP for Leicester, which started their political affiliation. Bracken stood for parliament several times before being elected to the House of Commons in 1929 for the London constituency of North Paddington. Many of his early magazine stories included a political flavour and he commissioned articles from a wide range of politicians such as Churchill and Mussolini. Business and politics permanently overlapped in his life, in a similar way to the career of his occasional friend Max Beaverbrook. He needed politicians for stories and they needed the publicity given by his publications.

Bracken's physique was memorable. Very tall and fit, immaculately dressed, with a shock of long unruly red hair and very bad teeth, he was also very short-sighted and wore thick lenses. He tended to converse in lengthy monologues. To many this was a repellent combination, but he could also memorize an impressive array of gossip, facts and anecdotes, and his publishing career was always successful.

A supporter of Winston Churchill from 1923, when Churchill was out of parliament and in the political wilderness, in the 1930s he was invited to join Churchill's "Other Club". Their lives changed from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. When Churchill became prime minister in May 1940 Bracken helped in moving him in to Downing Street. Bracken was sworn of the Privy Council in 1940, despite his lack of ministerial experience. He served as Minister of Information from 1941 to 1945 after a short stint as Churchill's Parliamentary Private Secretary. He was unpopular with his civil servants, who cheered when news of his defeat in the 1945 General Election came through.

At this point Churchill's son Randolph considered that Bracken was "the fantasist whose fantasies had come true".

Assists in selection of Churchill

In two matters relating to Churchill Bracken can be said to have played a key part behind the scenes. When Neville Chamberlain prepared to resign in May 1940, his successor would be Churchill or Lord Halifax. Bracken advised Churchill tactically to say nothing when the three met, indicating that he would not support Halifax, and as a result Churchill's name went forward for approval by parliament.

Support from USA 1940-41

An interesting insight into the nature of the relationship between Churchill and Bracken is found in Churchill's history of World War II. Churchill writes that he had received telegrams from Washington about Harry Hopkins, "stating that he was the closest confidant and personal agent of the President. I therefore arranged that he should be met by Mr. Brendan Bracken on his arrival." The strong suggestion, of course, is that Churchill arranged, as is diplomatic custom, for Hopkins to be met by the person who was his closest counterpart in British government, and that Bracken often played the role of confidant and personal agent to Churchill. After Bracken met Hopkins' flight on 9 January 1941, Churchill and Hopkins forged a close association. According to Lysaght, Bracken and Hopkins did as well and this personal tie helped speed the decision to assist Britain nearly a year before the USA actually entered the war.

Post War Years

In 1945 Bracken was briefly made First Lord of the Admiralty but lost the post in the fall of the Churchill government to Clement Attlee's Labour Party. He himself lost his North Paddington seat but returned as MP for Bournemouth in a November 1945 by-election. He was a relentless critic of the Labour Government's policy of nationalisation and the retreat from Empire.

He is said to be the model for the brash Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Though he dated several glamorous ladies in the 1930s, including the well-connected starlet and model Penelope Dudley Ward, he never married.

His most famous business achievement was in merging the Financial News into the Financial Times in 1945. The latter was published from Bracken House, clad in pink stone to match the colour of the paper, just east of St. Paul's Cathedral, which was remodelled in 1989. At this stage he was also publishing The Economist.

Retirement and death

He was elevated to the House of Lords by Churchill, as Viscount Bracken of Christchurch in the County of Southampton, in 1952, but never used the title nor sat in the House. He retired from publishing in 1956.

He died of oesophagal cancer on 8 August 1958, aged 57, six years after his elevation to the House of Lords. A former Catholic, he refused the last rites of the Church despite efforts by his nephew Fr. Kevin Bracken, a Trappist monk in Bethlehem Abbey, Portglenone, to persuade him to return to the Catholic faith.

External links

• The Churchill Centre's review of Bracken's life, 2002

References

1. thePeerage.com - Exhibit
2. Brendan Bracken by Charles Edward Lysaght (Allen Lane, London 1979) ISBN 0-7139-0969-2
3. Lysaght, 2002
4. Lysaght pp.172-173, quoting 4 sources.
5. Churchill, The Second World War, v.3, chap.2, pp.22-3
6. Lysaght, pp.183-184.
7. Irish Times, 9 August 2008

External links