November 5, 2009

The Irish Times (5 November 2009) – LONDON LETTER: Brendan Bracken left republican roots behind to become Churchill’s key ally, a rich financial publisher and a viscount, writes MARK HENNESSY

THE EARLY morning mist rose from the grounds of Winston Churchill’s home in Chartwell on the Weald of Kent, leaving wisps lingering on branch and hedge, exposing the black swans grooming by the side of the lake.

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So much of Chartwell is Churchill’s creation: the house was practically rebuilt in the 1920s; the lake and swimming pool were made to his orders, while many of the redbrick walls around the estate were put up by his own hand.

After his time in office ended in the late 1920s, Churchill faced the lean years of the 1930s, when his warnings about Nazi aggression went unheeded, and friends were notable by their rarity.

Brendan Bracken was one of them. Today, he features in just one photograph in the house, standing, appropriately, in the background as Churchill left Downing Street on the day after France fell in June 1940.

Bracken was always in the background.

Now, a documentary is being made by Aidan Bracken of Marbella Productions on the life of a man who was Churchill’s minister of information during the war years, and the inspiration for George Orwell’s “Big Brother” in his book 1984 .

Born in Templemore, Co Tipperary, the son of JK, one of the founders of the Gaelic Athletic Association, Bracken’s life journey would have been more believable had he become a country TD.

He and his mother left Kilmallock, Co Limerick, where the family were by then living, for Dublin, when she remarried after the death of his father, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

His stepfather, Patrick Laffan, too, was a believer in armed rebellion.

Bracken was sent to Mungret College in Limerick, but became uncontrollable and ran away.

In desperation, and fearing that he would follow his father’s political path, his mother sent him to Australia to a priest cousin.

Having absorbed Fenianism to the full, Bracken here, in a monastery library, fell in love with 18th-century England.

Having travelled to England by 1919, Bracken told lies – a habit of his life – to persuade Sedbergh College in Cumbria to take him in, pretending to be 15 when he was, in fact, 19, and to be an Australian.

Sedbergh gave him “the old school tie” that he, by then, craved.

By 22, he had met Churchill – the defining figure of his life, according to Adrian Bracken: “Churchill, for him, was the personification of 18th-century England – the descendant of John Churchill, born in Blenheim Palace.”

In 1928, he returned to Tipperary for the funeral of his mother in Borrisoleigh where “he cried his eyes out at the back of the church” and left without meeting his siblings, though he supported them financially afterwards.

During Churchill’s “wilderness years”, Bracken was his hero’s right-hand man, implying to some that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son and forming with him “the party of two”, as it was called, in the House of Commons after he was elected as an MP in 1929.

Wealthy from publishing and share-dealings, Bracken never married, though he had a few liaisons, but he was a “networker par excellence”, travelling from one country home to another, passing around the political gossip of the day.

He was intensely disliked by many. His bad breath, interminable monologues peppered with interesting nuggets infuriated, though his generosity was notable.

He was, in the words of Churchill’s son, Randolph, “a fantasist”.

But he was a brilliant communicator, as he showed at the Financial News , the Economist and the Financial Times , though he was not the man who made that newspaper pink – which he is sometimes credited with – since that had happened even before he was born.

During the war years, he played a key role in winning the premiership for Churchill over Lord Halifax; ran much of Britain’s propaganda abroad; and, yet, prevented his hero from destroying the BBC’s independence at home.

Orwell was not the only writer to use Bracken as inspiration. Evelyn Waugh based his colonial cad, Rex Mottram, in Brideshead Revisited – which traced the downfall of the great houses – on him.

Following the war, he was given a place in the House of Lords, the pinnacle of the British establishment; but he never took his place, and, increasingly, withdrew into himself, telling friends, “I will die young, and forgotten”.

His prediction came true when a lifetime of chain-smoking led to oesophageal cancer and a painful death in 1958.

He helped to ensure his own removal from the pages of history by ordering his servant to destroy his papers.

They burned for eight days in the grate of his Lord North Street house.

“It was an extraordinary life. He recreated his past, for reasons that were not entirely clear. It is a fascinating journey from being an Irish republican to an English nobleman,” said Adrian Bracken.

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©The Irish Times