Brendan Bracken, 1st Viscount Bracken
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Brendan Bracken, 1st Viscount Bracken PC (15 February 1901 – 8 August 1958) was an Irish-born British Conservative cabinet minister.
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.
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 a member of the Anglo-Irish protestant ascendancy, which was also untrue. It seems most likely that this story was told to hide his Irish roots at a time of civil war in his home country and great hostility in Great Britain.
He was very pro-British despite the fact that he was born to Joseph Kevin Bracken, a founder of the Gaelic Athletic Association and Hannah Agnes Ryan, and raised as a Catholic in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland. His father (and later his stepfather) were both Irish Nationalists and separatists. He was educated by the Jesuits in Ireland before he was sent to Australia, and later attended the Sedbergh School in Cumbria. Emmett Dalton once confronted him about their childhood acquaintance 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.
After Sedbergh, Bracken had a successful career as a publisher and newspaper editor in London before being elected to the House of Commons in 1929.
A supporter of Sir Winston Churchill from 1923, Bracken served as Minister of Information from 1941 to 1945 after a short stint as Churchill's Parliamentary Private Secretary. 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 is said to be the model for the brash Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
His most famous business achievement was in merging the Financial News into the Financial Times in 1945. The latter was published from the rebuilt Bracken House just east of St. Paul's Cathedral.
He was elevated to the House of Lords by Churchill, as Viscount Bracken of Christchurch in the County of Southampton, in 1952.
He died of oesophagal cancer on 8 August 1958, aged only 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.
[edit] References
- Brendan Bracken by Charles Edward Lysaght (Allen Lane, London 1979) ISBN 0-7139-0969-2.
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Sir William Perring |
Member of Parliament for Paddington North 1929–1945 |
Succeeded by Sir Noel Mason-Macfarlane |
| Preceded by Sir Charles Lyle |
Member of Parliament for Bournemouth 1945–1950 |
Succeeded by Constituency abolished |
| Preceded by Constituency created |
Member of Parliament for Bournemouth East and Christchurch 1950–1951 |
Succeeded by Nigel Nicolson |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by Duff Cooper |
Minister of Information 1941–1945 |
Succeeded by Geoffrey Lloyd |
| Preceded by A. V. Alexander |
First Lord of the Admiralty 1945 |
Succeeded by A. V. Alexander |
| Peerage of the United Kingdom | ||
| Preceded by New Creation |
Viscount Bracken 1952–1958 |
Succeeded by Extinct |
Categories: 1901 births | 1958 deaths | Anglo-Irish people | Conservative MPs (UK) | Lords of the Admiralty | Members of the Privy Council of the United Kingdom | Members of the United Kingdom Parliament from English constituencies | Old Stortfordians | Old Sedberghians | People of Irish descent in Great Britain | Throat cancer deaths | Viscounts in the Peerage of the United Kingdom | UK MPs 1929-1931 | UK MPs 1931-1935 | UK MPs 1935-1945 | UK MPs 1945-1950 | UK MPs 1950-1951
