Bracken, Brendan, Sir
1901 - Born on the 15th of February in Ireland. He was an Irish-born British Conservative cabinet minister.
1920 - When Bracken arrived in Britain in 1920 he claimed alternately to be either Australian who had lost his parents in a bush fire, or a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, which was also untrue.
1923 - A supporter of Sir Winston Churchill.
1929 - After Sedbergh, Bracken had a successful career as a publisher and newspaper editor in London before being elected to the House of Commons.
1941-1945 - Bracken served as Minister of Information after a short stint as Churchill's Parliamentary Private Secretary.
1945 - Bracken was briefly made First Lord of the Admiralty but lost the post in the fall of the Churchill government to Clement Atlee's Labour Party.
- He himself lost his North Paddington seat but returned as MP for Bournemouth in a November by-election.
- He is said to be the model for the brash Rex Mottram in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
- His most famous business achievement was in merging the Financial News into the Financial Times.
1952 - He was elevated to the House of Lords by Churchill, as Viscount Bracken of Christchurch in the County of Southampton.
1958 - He died of oesophagal cancer on the 8th of August, aged only 57, six years after his elevation to the House of Lords.
Page last updated: 12:52pm, 31st Aug '07