Brendan Rendall Bracken,1st Viscount Bracken (15 February 1901 –8 August 1958),was an Irish-born businessman,politician and a Minister of Information and First Lord of the Admiralty in Winston Churchill's War 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 the Financial Times[1] and of the monthly business magazine The Banker, as well as Managing Editor of The Economist.
Widowed in 1904,Hannah Bracken had moved her family (including two stepdaughters) by 1908 to Dublin,where Brendan attended St Patrick's National School,Drumcondra,until 1910,when he was transferred to the O'Connell School,run by the Irish Christian Brothers. Distressed by his misbehaviour,his mother sent him in 1915 to Mungret College,a Jesuit boarding school in County Limerick,but he quickly bolted and ran up hotel bills. She then sent him to Australia to live with a cousin who was a priest in Echuca,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 in County 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 in Liverpool.
In 1920,he appeared at Sedbergh 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 of Winchester 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,his Irish republican heritage and his five formative years in Australia had blended with the elements and trappings of a British public school man.
He might have had good reason to hide his Irish heritage,as the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) had aroused hostility toward Irish people living in Great Britain. For whatever reason,that denial became a regular feature of his life. Another example occurred in 1926,when he met Major-GeneralEmmet Dalton,a former senior commander in the new Irish Army,in London.
The former British Army officer,turned IRA confidant,who was one of General Michael Collins's right-hand men,recalled meeting Bracken at national school in Dublin. Bracken denied that,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,but his brother was alive and well in Ireland and was importuning Brendan for money.[citation needed]
Business and political career
After Sedbergh,whose "old boy" tie he used to good effect,[citation needed] Bracken was briefly a schoolmaster at Bishop'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 the Empire Review,where he got acquainted with J. L. Garvin,former editor of The 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 the 1923 election,he assisted Winston Churchill's unsuccessful attempt to be elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Leicester West,which began their political association. He also assisted in Churchill's 1924 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 of The 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 the global financial system. He edited the Financial News, and The Practitioner before being promoted to managing director of The 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 and Benito Mussolini. Business and politics permanently overlapped in his life,like that of the career of his occasional friend Lord 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.
During Churchill's "Wilderness Years",Bracken would become his main support. From 1934 Brendan also supported Churchill's calls for rearmament in Parliament. Later,when King George VI personally expressed his concern that an Irishman,son of an IRB man,should be appointed a Government Minister and member of the Privy Council. Churchill stood up for his protégéand 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]
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,the candidates to succeed him were Churchill or Lord Halifax. The political issue at stake at the time was which potential successor the Labour 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]
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 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 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 to Charles 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]
Minister of Information
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 the Political 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. The BBC was also allowed a lot of freedom as long as it behaved according to the UK's war interests.
At that stage,he was also publishing The Economist. In 1951,with his love of history,he helped found History 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]
Upon learning of his demise,Churchill reacted to the news of his death by saying "Poor,dear Brendan."
By his own wishes,he was cremated without ceremony at Golders Green Crematorium in north London.[20] His ashes were scattered behind the Cinque Ports[21] by his chauffeur,Alex Aley,at Romney 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 the Churchill Archives Centre of the University of Cambridge.
Legacy
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 modern Financial 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 at The Little Museum of Dublin in 2016 called Churchill &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 the Financial Times.[26]
It has been theorized that Bracken may have been the inspiration for Big Brother and/or O'Brien of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four,as George Orwell worked at the Ministry of Information under Bracken's term as Minister of Information.[30][31]
Bracken appears as a major character in Thomas Kilroy's 1986 play Double Cross. Stephen Rea originated the role.[32]
2010 and 2015 television documentaries
On 21 December 2010,RTÉOne broadcast an hour-long TV documentary about his life entitled Brendan Bracken –Churchill's Irishman. The programme was made by Spanish production company,Marbella Productions,in association with RTÉ,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 documentary Churchill's Secret Son is the 90-minute version of the previous documentary Churchill's Irishman,updated by the producers including additional images,stories about Bracken's life and additional footage. The programme was transmitted on Discovery UK's History 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.
↑His article in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Volume 7, page 147) simply states his death cause as "throat cancer".
↑Note cremation was formally banned by the Catholic Church until 1963, and until 1966 Catholic priests were forbidden to officiate at cremation services.
↑"Cinque Ports". History of Romney Marsh. Archived from the original on 16 June 2022. Retrieved 30 October 2022.
Charles Lysaght & Trevor White. Churchill and the Irishman: The Unbelievable Life of Brendan Bracken; The Little Museum of Dublin 2016. ISBN978-0-9570286-3-0
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