Brendan Rendall Bracken was born in Templemore, County Tipperary, Ireland, the second son and third of the four children of Joseph Kevin Bracken (1852–1904), builder and monumental mason, and his second wife, Hannah Agnes Ryan (1872–1928). His father had belonged to the IRB and was one of the seven founders of the GAA.
Frustrated, his widowed mother, who had moved to Dublin, shipped him to Australia in 1916 after he ran away from the Jesuit College, Mungret, near Limerick. (DNB.) Bracken spent a short time on a sheep station but was fired for having more interest in books than the animals he was supposed to tend. Finally going to Sydney, he sought out the Christian Brothers, with whom he had long been associated.
Young Bracken worked for the diocesan newspaper’s advertising department before returning to Dublin in 1919 and finding that his mother had remarried and did not want him at home. With a small legacy Bracken went to England where, to conceal his politically incorrect background it was the time of the Black and Tans he pretended to be an orphan from Australia. The tall, fiery, red-haired Irishman soon made important connections that included Winston Churchill, who was making a bid to re-enter politics. Bracken and Churchill immediately hit it off as kindred spirits. After working in Churchill’s unsuccessful election campaigns in 1923 and 1924, Bracken met Maj Crosthwaite Eyre of the Eyre & Spottiswoode publishing firm. The major was looking for new talent and Bracken was hired to help establish a periodical edited by Hilaire Belloc. By 1925 Bracken was a director of Eyre & Spottiswoode. From this fortuitous beginning Bracken became highly regarded as editor and publisher of Financial News, The Banker, and The Economist. He went on to control a highly regarded medical journal, The Practitioner, and a firm that primed Bibles. With the influence gained from these activities and the backing of Churchill, Bracken became a conservative MP from North Paddington in 1929.
Bracken supported his mentor faithfully in Parliament during the 1930s when Churchill was in political eclipse. When Churchill returned to the Admiralty on 3 Sep 1939, Bracken went along as parliamentary private secretary. The Irishman retained the post when Churchill formed his wartime coalition government in May 40. A month later. Bracken was sworn to the Privy Council. (Douglas Woodruff in DNB, principal source of this sketch.)
Like HOPKINS with Roosevelt, Bracken was at his chief’s elbow around the clock. Hopkins, whose second wife died in 1937, lived at the White House, Bracken, who never married, lived at No. 10 Downing Street or its annex. Bracken soon moved from being a “horse holder” into the assignment for which he is best remembered, minister of information, on 21 July 1941. Succeeding Alfred DUFF COOPER as the fourth to hold the post since the war started, and conspicuously successful, he retained the portfolio until the war's end. In Churchill’s caretaker government, which lasted only a month in 1945, the faithful paladin was the first Lord of the Admiralty.
After the war Bracken resumed and expanded his highly successful business career. In 1952 he was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Bracken but never took his seal in the House of Lords. He refused to write or authorize a biography, and burned all his papers. Bracken died 8 Aug 1958 of throat cancer in London.
When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, Bracken helped in moving him into Downing Street. Bracken was sworn into the Privy Council in 1940, despite his lack of ministerial experience, and became Churchill's parliamentary private secretary.
An insight into the nature of the relationship between Churchill and Bracken is found in Churchill's history of World War II. Churchill writes that he had received telegrams from Washington about Harry Hopkins, "stating that he was the closest confidant and personal agent of the President. I therefore arranged that he should be met by Mr. Brendan Bracken on his arrival." The suggestion was that Churchill had arranged, as is diplomatic custom, for Hopkins to be met by the person who was his closest counterpart in British government, and that Bracken often played the role of confidant and personal agent to Churchill. After Bracken met Hopkins' flight on 9 January 1941, Churchill and Hopkins forged a close association. According to Lysaght's biography, Bracken and Hopkins had met in America in the late 1930s, and this personal tie helped speed the decision to assist Britain nearly a year before the USA actually entered the war.
