The Viscount Bracken | |
|---|---|
 Bracken in 1947 | |
| First Lord of the Admiralty | |
| In office 25 May 1945 – 26 July 1945 | |
| Monarch | George VI |
| Prime Minister | Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | A. V. Alexander |
| Succeeded by | A. V. Alexander |
| Minister of Information | |
| In office 20 July 1941 – 25 May 1945 | |
| Prime Minister | Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | Duff Cooper |
| Succeeded by | Geoffrey Lloyd |
| Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister | |
| In office 1940–1941 | |
| Prime Minister | Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | Lord Dunglass |
| Succeeded by | George Harvie-Watt |
| Member of Parliament forBournemouth East and Christchurch Bournemouth (1945–1950) | |
| In office 15 November 1945 – 7 January 1952 | |
| Preceded by | Leonard Lyle |
| Succeeded by | Nigel Nicolson |
| Member of Parliament forPaddington North | |
| In office 30 May 1929 – 5 July 1945 | |
| Preceded by | William Perring |
| Succeeded by | Noel Mason-MacFarlane |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 15 February 1901 (1901-02-15) |
| Died | 8 August 1958(1958-08-08) (aged 57) London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | Conservative |
Brendan Rendall Bracken, 1st Viscount Bracken (15 February 1901 – 8 August 1958), was anIrish-born businessman, politician and a Minister of Information and First Lord of the Admiralty inWinston Churchill'sWar Cabinet.
He is best remembered for supporting Churchill during his whole political career.
A noted publisher and editor, he was also the founder of the modern version of theFinancial Times[1] and of the monthly business magazineThe Banker, as well as Managing Editor ofThe Economist.
He wasMinister of Information from 1941 to 1945, managing the United Kingdom's propaganda efforts againstNazi Germany during the War.
Brendan Rendall Bracken was born inTemplemore,County Tipperary,Ireland, the second son and third of the four children ofJoseph Kevin Bracken (1852–1904), builder and monumental mason, and his second wife, Hannah Agnes Ryan (1872–1928). His father had belonged to theIrish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
Widowed in 1904, Hannah Bracken had moved her family (including two stepdaughters) by 1908 toDublin, where Brendan attended St Patrick's National School,Drumcondra, until 1910, when he was transferred to theO'Connell School, run by theIrish Christian Brothers. Distressed by his misbehaviour, his mother sent him in 1915 toMungret College, aJesuit boarding school inCounty Limerick, but he quickly bolted and ran up hotel bills. She then sent him toAustralia to live with a cousin who was a priest inEchuca,Victoria. The young man led a nomadic existence in Australia, moving often but reading avidly, as an auto-didact.[2]
In 1919, Bracken returned briefly to Ireland, finding his mother settled inCounty Meath. He distanced himself from Ireland as well as his siblings, who were in revolt over their father's inheritance. He moved instead to settle inLiverpool.
In 1920, he appeared atSedbergh School, claiming to be a 15-year-old and an Australian, to have been orphaned in a bush fire and to have a family connection to Montagu Rendell, the headmaster ofWinchester College. Without fully believing the story, Sedbergh's headmaster, impressed by the young Bracken's depth of knowledge and eagerness to progress, accepted him. By the end of one term, hisIrish republican heritage and his five formative years in Australia had blended with the elements and trappings of aBritish public school man.
He might have had good reason to hide his Irish heritage, as theIrish War of Independence (1919–1921) had aroused hostility toward Irish people living inGreat Britain. For whatever reason, that denial became a regular feature of his life. Another example occurred in 1926, when he metMajor-GeneralEmmet Dalton, a former senior commander in the newIrish Army, in London.
The formerBritish Army officer, turned IRA confidant, who was one of GeneralMichael Collins's right-hand men, recalled meeting Bracken atnational school in Dublin. Bracken denied that, but Dalton insisted that he remembered the smell of Bracken's corduroy trousers. A third example occurred during theSecond World War, when Bracken told people that his brother had been killed in action atNarvik, but his brother was alive and well in Ireland and was importuning Brendan for money.[citation needed]
After Sedbergh, whose"old boy" tie he used to good effect,[citation needed] Bracken was briefly a schoolmaster atBishop's Stortford College. He moved to London, where he joined the League of Nations Union and made pro-imperialist speeches. He obtained a job at theEmpire Review, where he got acquainted with J. L. Garvin, former editor ofThe Observer, who would introduce him to Winston Churchill in the summer of 1923.[3]
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 the1923 election, he assistedWinston Churchill's unsuccessful attempt to be elected asMember of Parliament (MP) forLeicester West, which began their political association. He also assisted in Churchill's1924 Westminster Abbey by-election campaign. In the fighting that occurred on the streets, Bracken was stabbed.[4]
He joined the publishing company Eyre & Spottiswoode and, in 1925, became a director of the company.[5]
In 1926, he was the founding editor ofThe Banker, and magazine and bankers still name their respected annual Bank of the Year awards "Brackens" in his honour.[6]The Banker features a regular column called "Bracken",[7] focusing on providing views and perspectives on how to improve theglobal financial system. He edited theFinancial News, andThe Practitioner before being promoted to managing director ofThe Economist in 1928.
Many of his early magazine stories included a political flavour, and he commissioned articles from a wide range of politicians such as Churchill andBenito Mussolini. Business and politics permanently overlapped in his life, like that of the career of his occasional friendLord Beaverbrook. He needed politicians for stories and they needed the publicity his publications gave. A supporter of Churchill from 1923, who was out of Parliament and in his political wilderness, Bracken was invited to join Churchill's "Other Club". Their lives changed from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
Bracken himself was elected to theHouse of Commons in 1929 as aUnionist for the London constituency ofNorth Paddington, which he won with just 528 votes.Stanley Baldwin described Bracken as Churchill's "faithful chela",chela being theHindi word for disciple.[8]
During Churchill's "Wilderness Years", Bracken would become his main support. From 1934 Brendan also supported Churchill's calls for rearmament in Parliament. Later, whenKing George VI personally expressed his concern that an Irishman, son of an IRB man, should be appointed a Government Minister and member of thePrivy Council. Churchill stood up for his protégé and wrote to the King: “He has sometimes been almost my sole supporter in the years when I have been striving to get this country properly defended”.[9]
In two matters relating to Churchill, Bracken can be said to have played a key part behind the scenes. WhenNeville Chamberlain prepared to resign in May 1940, the candidates to succeed him were Churchill orLord Halifax. The political issue at stake at the time was which potential successor theLabour Party would accept in the formation of a National Government. Churchill's view was that the Labour Party would not support him and so agreed with Chamberlain to nominate Halifax.
When Bracken became aware of Churchill's agreement to nominate Halifax, he convinced Churchill that the Labour Party would indeed support him as Chamberlain's successor and Lord Halifax's appointment would hand certain victory to Hitler.
Bracken advised Churchill tactically to say nothing when the three met to arrange the succession. After a silence when Churchill was expected to nominate Halifax, the latter obligingly ruled himself out, and Churchill was put forward as Britain's wartime Prime Minister, having avoided any appearance of disloyalty to Chamberlain.[1]
When Churchill becamePrime Minister in May 1940, Bracken helped in moving him into10 Downing Street. Bracken was sworn into thePrivy Council in 1940, despite his lack of ministerial experience, and became Churchill'sparliamentary private secretary.
An insight into the nature of the relationship between Churchill and Bracken is found in Churchill's history of the Second World War. Churchill wrote that he had received telegrams from Washington aboutHarry 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 suggestion was that Churchill had 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's flight on 9 January 1941, Churchill and Hopkins forged a close association. According toCharles Lysaght's biography, Bracken and Hopkins had met in America in the late 1930s, and that personal tie helped speed the decision to assist Britain nearly a year before the US actually entered the war.[10]
In 1941, Bracken was persuaded by Lord Beaverbrook and Churchill himself to become Britain's wartime Minister for Information.[11][12] At the same time, he was one of the heads of thePolitical Warfare Executive.[13] He won over most of the proprietors by giving them more news, often on a confidential basis, and censorship was kept to a minimum. TheBBC was also allowed a lot of freedom as long as it behaved according to the UK's war interests.
In 1945, after the end of the wartime coalition, Bracken was brieflyFirst Lord of the Admiralty in theChurchill caretaker ministry, but lost the post in thegeneral election won byClement Attlee's Labour Party. Bracken lost his North Paddington seat but soon returned to the Commons, as Member of Parliament forBournemouth in a November 1945 by-election. He was a relentless critic of the Labour government's policy ofnationalisation and the retreat from empire.[14]
At the1950 general election, he was returned forBournemouth East and Christchurch, a seat he held until thegeneral election the following year. His last speech in the House of Commons would take place on 5 July 1951 on the Hants and Dorset Bus Company Dispute.[15]
In early 1952 he was elevated to the peerage asViscount Bracken, ofChristchurch in theCounty of Southampton,[16][17] but never used the title or sat in theHouse of Lords, which he called "the Morgue".
At that stage, he was also publishingThe Economist. In 1951, with his love of history, he helped foundHistory Today magazine.[18]
From 1950 he was chairman of the board of governors of his former school, Sedbergh School, where he went frequently. He organised and financed the restoration of the eighteenth-century school building as a library, with a commemoratory inscription, "Remember Winston Churchill", which still stands today.[12]
From 1955 he was a trustee of the National Gallery.[12]
A heavy smoker, Bracken died ofoesophageal cancer on 8 August 1958, aged 57, at the flat of his friend Sir Patrick Hennessy in Park Lane, in London.[19][12] Although raised aCatholic, he refused thelast rites of the Church despite efforts by his nephew, Rev Kevin Bracken, a Cistercian monk atBethlehem Abbey,Portglenone,County Antrim, to persuade him. As he was unmarried, the viscountcy died with him.[2]
Upon learning of his demise, Churchill reacted to the news of his death by saying "Poor, dear Brendan."[1]
By his own wishes, he wascremated without ceremony atGolders Green Crematorium in north London.[20] His ashes were scattered behind the Cinque Ports[21] by his chauffeur, Alex Aley, atRomney Marshes of which "his master, Winston Churchill was the then Lord Warden".[22][23]
At the time of his death Bracken's estate came to £145,032.[12] On his instructions his papers were burnt by his chauffeur. Some of his documents are kept at theChurchill College Archive Centre of theUniversity of Cambridge.
Bracken was a consequential figure in British politics during his lifetime. His biographer,Charles Lysaght, wrote about him: “Without him Churchill might not have survived politically, let alone become Prime Minister. He was also a spin doctor par excellence half a century before the term was invented. And he was the effective founding father of the modernFinancial Times, Britain’s highest quality daily newspaper.”[24]
Randolph Churchill, Winston Churchill's son, once described Bracken as “the fantasist whose dreams came true".[25]
Bracken and his relationship with Churchill were the focus of an exhibit atThe Little Museum of Dublin in 2016 calledChurchill & the Irishman. The exhibit featured a collection of Bracken's letters to his mother. This was the first time that Bracken had been the subject of an exhibition. The exhibition was formally opened by John Ridding, at the time the Chief Executive of theFinancial Times.[26]
InEvelyn Waugh's 1945 novelBrideshead Revisited, Bracken served as a model for the character of Rex Mottram.[27] Bracken is featured in the 1981 TV miniseriesWinston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, portrayed byTim Pigott-Smith.[28] InThe Gathering Storm (2002), he is played byAnthony Brophy.[29]
It has been theorized that Bracken may have been the inspiration forBig Brother and/orO'Brien of the novelNineteen Eighty-Four, asGeorge Orwell worked at the Ministry of Information under Bracken's term as Minister of Information.[30][31]
Bracken appears as a major character inThomas Kilroy's 1986 playDouble Cross.Stephen Rea originated the role.[32]
On 21 December 2010,RTÉ One broadcast an hour-long TV documentary about his life entitledBrendan Bracken – Churchill's Irishman. The programme was made bySpanish production company, Marbella Productions, in association withRTÉ, and examined Bracken's life through photographs, interviews, rare archive footage and dramatic reconstructions, and told of his importance in the areas of British political and journalistic life, despite his attempt to hide from history by having all his papers burned after his death.[31]
The 2015 television documentaryChurchill's Secret Son is the 90-minute version of the previous documentaryChurchill's Irishman, updated by the producers including additional images, stories about Bracken's life and additional footage. The programme was transmitted onDiscovery UK'sHistory Channel on 24 January 2015 at 10pm, as part of the British History week, and coincided with the 50th anniversary of Churchill's death in 1965.
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forPaddington North 1929–1945 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forBournemouth 1945–1950 | Constituency abolished |
| New constituency | Member of Parliament forBournemouth East & Christchurch 1950–1952 | Succeeded by |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by | Minister of Information 1941–1945 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | First Lord of the Admiralty 1945 | Succeeded by |
| Peerage of the United Kingdom | ||
| New creation | Viscount Bracken 1952–1958 | Extinct |
