On a recent visit to London, I visited the Cabinet War Rooms from which Churchill directed British operations in the second World War.
The Cabinet Room, the famous Map Room and a myriad of offices have been restored to show how they looked between 1940 and 1945. These rooms were home to politicians, civil servants, and military personnel. The room closest to Churchill's, which doubled as an office and a bedroom, has "Mr Bracken" written on the door. For a Fenian's son who was not yet 40, it was the culmination of a remarkable journey.
Brendan Bracken, my uncle and namesake, was born into a strongly nationalist family in Templemore in 1901. His father, JK Bracken, was a builder. One of the seven founders of the GAA in 1884, he is reputed to be responsible for instigating the ban on foreign games.
JK Bracken died when Brendan was three years old and his mother subsequently moved to Dublin. He was a wild youngster and his mother couldn't control him. After spending periods in O'Connell Schools, where he was a contemporary of Sean Lemass, and Mungret College, he was shipped off to a relative in Australia at the age of 15.
After three years of a nomadic existence, staying in religious houses and reading up on British imperial history, he returned to Ireland to discover that his mother had remarried. He moved to England, where he found work as a teacher He said he was 23 years of age when he was really 19 and that he was a graduate of the University of Sydney. He taught there for two terms and next turned up at Sedbergh, a public school near the Lake District. Here he announced that he was 15 and told the headmaster that his parents had died in a bush fire in Australia and had left him money to complete his education. Again his stay was brief, but it enabled him to claim to be a public school man as he sallied forth to take on all comers and become part of the British establishment.
After a short spell of schoolmastering he established himself in journalism and his remarkable abilities came to light. Within a few years he had engineered the amalgamation of a series of quality newspapers including the Financial Times, the Economist, the Banker and the Investors' Chronicle. Through J.L.Garvin, editor of the Observer, he met Winston Churchill. They became so friendly that it was rumoured that they were father and son, a rumour that he did not deny. He took over Churchill's election campaigns and became his closest friend.
At the age of 28 he was elected MP for North Paddington. His election literature at the time said he was a one of the fine old British Bulldog Breed, that he was a native of Bedfordshire and a graduate of Oxford University. His opponents, sensing something odd, put it about that he was, in fact, a Polish Jew. He had to wire Ireland to get his birth certificate and put out a statement that "Mr Bracken is British and descended from long generations of people with no mixture of foreign blood". He established himself in a fashionable house in Lord North Street in Westminster, became part of society and built up his newspaper empire. On the political front, he was Churchill's sole supporter in the House of Commons. He also helped put Churchill finances on a sound footing and had the ability to lift him out of the depression that assailed him.
When, at the outbreak of war, Churchill joined the government, Bracken remained his right-hand man. He became his parliamentary secretary and played a crucial role in the manoeuvring that led to Churchill becoming prime minister in May 1940. As Churchill's confidant, he exercised immense power. As Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's adviser, said: "The men who saw Churchill after midnight were the men who ran England". A lapsed Catholic, one of his great hobbies was appointing Anglican bishops.
In 1941 he was appointed minister for information. He was the fourth occupant of the office since the start of the war and it was regarded as a graveyard for political reputations. However, Bracken was a marvellous success. Nobody knew better how to cultivate the press and how to lace fact with fiction.
He was popular with his civil servants as he stood up to Churchill and defended the freedom of the press to criticise Government activities. He also established the independence of the BBC. At the end of the war he was briefly first lord of the Admiralty and, as the youngest member of the Cabinet, he was spoken of as a future prime minister.
In opposition after Churchill's defeat, he was a strong critic of nationalisation and a precursor of Mrs Thatcher in his views on the economy and market liberalisation. However, he lost interest in politics, perhaps because he was conscious of Churchill's waning powers and had little real political ambition. Also his health was poor and he declined the post of colonial secretary when Churchill was returned to power. He became a peer, Viscount Bracken of Christchurch, though he never took his seat in the House of Lords.
He returned to his business career and oversaw the expansion of the Financial Times into a great national newspaper, but the zest seems to have gone out of his life and he became old before his time.
He died, aged only 57, of cancer. He left instructions that no funeral or memorial service were to be held and that all his papers were to be destroyed.