“I shall die young and be forgotten.” – The Little Museum of Dublin, July 2016.
This weekend a new exhibition opens at the Little Museum of Dublin, Churchill & The Irishman. It shines a light on a man who managed to live both on the main stage and in the shadows during his lifetime, being both a public figure and a deeply mysterious one.
Brendan Bracken (1901-1958) was a British Conservative Government Minister, an influential journalist and the man responsible for giving us The Financial Times newspaper among many other things. Denying and suppressing all evidence of his Irish roots, he burst onto the British public stage, but quickly became one of Winston Churchill’s most trusted allies. Randolph Churchill, son of the Prime Minister, would joke of Bracken as “the fantasist whose fantasies had come true.”
Brendan Bracken was born in Tipperary in 1901, the son of Joseph Kevin Bracken, who was a founding member of the Gaelic Athletic Association and a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood to boot.An article on the excellent Hogan Stand notes that J.K Bracken wasn’t merely a spectator to the early endeavors of the GAA, but a very active participant He was one of five persons proposed by GAA founder Michael Cusack “to fill the vice-presidential positions at the third meeting of the GAA”, and personally seconded the nomination of the Fenian radical John O’Leary to patron of the new body. Brendan’s father was closely aligned with these two important nationalist organisations, though the passing of his father in 1904 removed any such influence from his youth.
J.K Bracken’s GAA team in Tipperary carry the name of Brendan Bracken’s father today. (Source)
His mother, widowed in 1904, took the young family to Dublin, and Brendan attended the O’Connell School on North Richmond Street. Named in honour of Daniel O’Connell, the school would later become synonymous with the 1916 Rising, with over 130 students and graduates in the ranks of the rebel forces. Among others Seán Heuston, Seán T. O’Kelly and the great republican adventurer Ernie O’Malley were educated there. If the Christian Brothers teachers made a profound nationalist impression on their students, there was no risk of such with Bracken. Charles Lysaght, author of a masterful biography of Bracken, notes that:
He mitched from school and organised a gang that vandalised neighbours’ gardens. He once threw another boy into the Royal Canal. When packed off to Mungret, a Jesuit boarding school in Limerick, he absconded.
Departing Ireland in 1916, he had nothing beyond the £14 his mother provided him with to try and settle in Australia. Lysaght writes that”for three years the adolescent Brendan led a peripatetic existence there, moving between Catholic religious communities, doing some teaching and reading incessantly to educate himself.”
The O’Connell School on Dublin’s North Richmond Street. Graduates include the executed 1916 leaders Seán Heuston and Eamonn Ceannt. Though he didn’t graduate,Bracken was educated here for a period (Image Credit: O’Connell’s)
He briefly talked his way into one of Sydney’s most exclusive Catholic schools, claiming that he had been educated in Clongowes in Ireland. Unfortunately for him, a priest who had just come out from Clongowes exposed him as a liar, and the traveling circus of his life continued. Having led a rather nomadic existence in Australia, working in odd jobs for brief periods, he would arrive on the doorstep of Sedbergh School in Cumbria, England, claiming to be a 15 year old in 1920, and that his parents had been orphaned in an Australian bushfire.
Acceptance into a high profile, private English school however was the foot on the ladder, a ladder he was, for once at least, content to stay on. The reputation of his school allowed him to advance in the upper-echelons of British society, becoming a magazine and newspaper editor in London, and retaining his Australian backstory.
The secret Tipp man was editing the Illustrated Review in London, and also commissioning articles from people like Winston Churchill, with whom he would form an incredible friendship and bond. His magazine was politically conservative in outlook, and became adored by Tories, never suspecting that the new found face at their dinner tables was the son of an IRB man, an organisation that had been bombing the very city he had made home a few decades earlier. Politicians and journalists moved in the same circles of course, one needs the other to survive. The Conservatives really took to Bracken, to such an extent that he was asked to stand for Parliament in 1929, for North Paddington.
They stood him for a marginal enough seat, which he won by over 500 votes, but on the campaign trail his political opponents began to publicly ask just who this man was, and how he had landed into British politics. The idea that he was a Polish Jew was spread by opponents to undermine him. He never really had a consistent story for his own background, but in every made up version of the past there was only one consistency – no reference to little old Ireland. In Parliament, he became fiercely right-wing, resisting any move towards granting Indian self-government for example. He remained a figure in Westminster for many years, but really shone in the World War Two years, when Churchill’s deep faith in him saw him take the role of Minister of Information.
Bracken and Churchill. (Image: the Little Museum of Dublin)
From 1941 to 45, Bracken served in that role. While he played the media well, having been an editor and journalist himself, he wasn’t always popular with the Ministry’s employees, including one named Eric Blair, better known to us today as George Orwell, the man who would write Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia and, most famously of all, the wonderful 1984. It’s been stated that Bracken’s ministry, and initials, were central inspiration for Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth in 1984, which was published in 1949.
The post war period brought about the total collapse of the Tories in Britain, and a leftward drift brought the Labour Party to power. Labour won a formidable victory, winning just under 50% of the vote with a majority of 159 seats, and Clement Attlee’s government went to work on a process of major nationalisation, taking control of major industries and utilities including the Bank of England, coal mining, the steel industry, electricity, gas, and inland transport. Bracken was totally opposed to all of this, condemning it as socialism, and becoming a vocal opponent of what he saw as the ‘Retreat From Empire’ of the government.
He resigned his seat in the commons in 1952 and became Viscount Bracken of Christchurch in Hampshire, but never took his seat in the House of Lords, regarding it as a political graveyard. As a voice in the media he remained important, giving us The Financial Times as we know it after merging two publications, and becoming chairman of the Union Corporation mining house, with interests in South Africa, which he frequently visited. He also became a trustee to the British National Gallery, resisting any attempt to return to Hugh Lane paintings to Ireland. Hugh Lane, the art collector after whom the gallery in Dublin is named, died on board the Lusitania in 1915, and the question of whether his works would be displayed in London or Dublin was a never-ending row, in fact it wasn’t until 1993 that it was decided 31 of the 39 paintings would stay in Ireland.
When Bracken died of cancer in 1958, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Kent. On his instructions his papers were burnt by his chauffeur, which is one of the reasons we know so very little about the man, he may well have taken many mysteries with him.
There was just too much around Bracken that didn’t make sense, and which would later captivate the public, not least his relationship with Churchill and influence on Orwell. This new exhibition is a fine introduction to this man of mystery, and includes letters from Bracken himself along with other interesting source material. As ever, the exhibition is beautifully designed and will capture the imagination of visitors. It runs until 25 September.
