Distressed by his misbehaviour, his mother sent him in 1915 to Mungret College, a Jesuit boarding school in County Limerick, but he quickly bolted and ran up hotel bills.

In 1920, he appeared at Sedbergh School, claiming to be a 15-year-old and an Australian, to have been orphaned in a bush fire and to have a family connection to Montagu Rendell, the headmaster of Winchester College.

Without fully believing the story, Sedbergh's headmaster, impressed by the young Bracken's depth of knowledge and eagerness to progress, accepted him.

By the end of one term, his Irish republican heritage and his five formative years in Australia had blended with the elements and trappings of a British public school man.

The former British Army officer, turned IRA confidant, who was one of General Michael Collins's right-hand men, recalled meeting Bracken at national school in Dublin.

He obtained a job at the Empire Review, where he got acquainted with J. L. Garvin, former editor of The Observer, who would introduce him to Winston Churchill in the summer of 1923.

[6] The Banker features a regular column called "Bracken",[7] focusing on providing views and perspectives on how to improve the global financial system.

Many of his early magazine stories included a political flavour, and he commissioned articles from a wide range of politicians such as Churchill and Benito Mussolini.

Later, when King George VI personally expressed his concern that an Irishman, son of an IRB man, should be appointed a Government Minister and member of the Privy Council.

Churchill stood up for his protégé and wrote to the King: “He has sometimes been almost my sole supporter in the years when I have been striving to get this country properly defended”.

Churchill wrote that he had received telegrams from Washington about Harry Hopkins "stating that he was the closest confidant and personal agent of the President.

According to Charles Lysaght's biography, Bracken and Hopkins had met in America in the late 1930s, and that personal tie helped speed the decision to assist Britain nearly a year before the US actually entered the war.

In 1945, after the end of the wartime coalition, Bracken was briefly First Lord of the Admiralty in the Churchill caretaker ministry, but lost the post in the general election won by Clement Attlee's Labour Party.

[15] In early 1952 he was elevated to the peerage as Viscount Bracken, of Christchurch in the County of Southampton,[16][17] but never used the title or sat in the House of Lords, which he called "the Morgue".

He organised and financed the restoration of the eighteenth-century school building as a library, with a commemoratory inscription, "Remember Winston Churchill", which still stands today.

[12] A heavy smoker, Bracken died of oesophageal cancer on 8 August 1958, aged 57, at the flat of his friend Sir Patrick Hennessy in Park Lane, in London.

[19][12] Although raised a Catholic, he refused the last rites of the Church despite efforts by his nephew, Rev Kevin Bracken, a Cistercian monk at Bethlehem Abbey, Portglenone, County Antrim, to persuade him.

[20] By his own wishes, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered behind the Cinque Ports[21] by his chauffeur, Alex Aley, at Romney Marshes of which "his master, Winston Churchill was the then Lord Warden".

[27] Bracken is featured in the 1981 TV mini series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years, portrayed by Tim Pigott-Smith.

[32] On 21 December 2010, RTÉ One broadcast an hour-long TV documentary about his life entitled Brendan Bracken – Churchill's Irishman.

The programme was made by Spanish production company, Marbella Productions, in association with RTÉ, and examined Bracken's life through photographs, interviews, rare archive footage and dramatic reconstructions, and told of his importance in the areas of British political and journalistic life, despite his attempt to hide from history by having all his papers burned after his death.