Brendan Bracken, 1st Viscount Bracken

Brendan Bracken, 1st Viscount Bracken [ [http://www.thepeerage.com/e405.htm thePeerage.com - Exhibit] ] ["Brendan Bracken" by Charles Edward Lysaght (Allen Lane, London 1979) ISBN 0-7139-0969-2] PC (15 February 1901 – 8 August 1958) was an Irish-born businessman and a British Conservative cabinet minister.

Early life

Bracken's early life was subject to great confusion, much of which was contributed by himself. On his orders his private papers were burnt just a day after his death. Several potential biographers gave up in despair at the limited material available though there have been some works, based as much on interviews with those who knew him as on his papers.

He became a British conservative despite being born to Joseph Kevin Bracken, a Fenian, a builder and a founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association and Hannah Agnes Ryan, and was raised as a Catholic in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland. His father (and later his stepfather) were both Irish republicans. The most likely reason was that he was clever and ambitious, and the Irish economy remained weak in 1920-25 because of the war of independence and the civil war. His father had been a successful builder but after his death in 1904 his family moved to Dublin and lived in middle-class genteel poverty. The fatherless Bracken turned into a clever but unruly teenager.

A common rumour was that he was Winston Churchill's illegitimate son, a rumour that neither actively sought to deny, although it was untrue. When Bracken arrived in Britain in 1920 he claimed alternately to be either Australian who had lost his parents in a bush fire, or was a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, which was also untrue. It seems most likely that this story was a convenient way to hide his Irish roots, as the Anglo-Irish war (1919-1921) aroused great hostility towards many Irish people living in Great Britain. During the Second World war Bracken told many people that his brother had been killed in action at Narvik, which was completely untrue.

He was educated by the Jesuits at Mungret College, County Limerick in Ireland, but ran away in 1915, and his widowed mother sent him in early 1916 to work for cousins at Echuca in Victoria, Australia. On his return, using an Australian accent and claiming that he had been orphaned in a bush fire, he was admitted to Sedbergh School in Cumbria in 1920. He claimed that he was fifteen but he was in fact eighteen, and left after one term [ Irish Times 9 August 2008] . Emmett Dalton met him in London in 1926 and recalled their acquaintance at primary school in Dublin, which Bracken denied, but Dalton (a British soldier turned IRA confidant and one of Michael Collins' right-hand men) insisted that he remembered the smell of Bracken's corduroy trousers.

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. 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. (Lysaght pp.172-173, quoting 4 sources).

upport from USA 1940-41

Bracken also had met Harry Hopkins, a close friend of the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the late 1930s and welcomed him after his flight to Britain on 9 January 1941. The USA had already decided to help Britain, and Hopkins got on well with Churchill, but Bracken's personal tie helped speed the decision to assist Britain nearly a year before the USA actually entered the war. (Lysaght, pp.183-184).

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 Atlee'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. [Irish Times, 9 August 2008]

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 lapsed 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.

ee also

* [http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=128 Online review of Bracken's life 2002]

References