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Life
| b. Templemore, Co. Tipperary, son of Joseph Bracken, a co-fndr of the GAA; ed. by CBS Dublin, and Jesuits in the Limerick prep. school to Clongowes Wood; sent to Australia in 1916 by his mother to avoid Republican connections; enrols self at Sedbergh public school in Cumbria as ‘orphan’, and leaves after one term; later appointed to board of Govs. (1950); joins Empire Review, 1922; meets and forms an association with Churchill, 1923; presumed to be his son; |
| associated with Sir Oswald Mosley in anti-Labour caucus; buys Financial News and The Economist for Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1928; Conservative MP for Paddington, 1929; become Churchill’s Parl. private sec., 1935; Privy council, 1940; Minister of Information, 1941; loses seat to Labour, 1945; declines Col. Sec., 1951; Viscount Bracken of Christchurch, 1952; dies of throat cancer, Aug. 1958. DIB FDA DIW |
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Criticism
Charles Edward Lysaght, Brendan Bracken (London: Allen Lane 1979), 372pp., ill. [16pp. pls.]; Mary Trotter, ‘“Double Crossing” Irish Borders: The Field Day Production of Tom Kilroy’s Double Cross’, in New Hibernia Review, 1, 1 (Spring 1997), p.31-43, esp. 40ff. [Note, this commentator holds Bracken to have been born in Brooklyn.]
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Notes
Adrian Bracken: The film-maker Adrian Bracken spoke on his relative Brendan Bracken, Conservative MP and minister in Churchill’s wartime coalition government, at the Hammersmith Irish Cultural Centre, London, Spring 2010.
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