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 a Roman Catholic in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland. His father (and later his stepfather) were both republicans or republican supporters. He was educated by the Jesuits in Ireland before he left for England, 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. Bracken had a career as a publisher and newspaper editor before being elected to the House of Commons in 1929.

A good friend of Sir Winston Churchill, 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'.

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 esophageal 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] Reference

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