The Pursuit of Laughter Read online

  In the early 30s we dined with him sometimes at his pretty old house in North Street; we thought he was an Australian because he said so. He was very good company, held right-wing views, and was devoted to Winston Churchill. The Churchill children had a story that he was ‘papa’s’ son, and we were inclined to think that perhaps he was and that his name, which suited him so well, was probably a brilliant invention of Mr Churchill’s. Yet, like his fuzzy red hair, the name Brendan Bracken turns out to have been his very own.

  He was born in 1901 at Templemore in Co Tipperary; his father, who sculpted gravestones and was an active Fenian, died when he was three and his mother married again. There were several brothers and sisters. Brendan was sent to a Jesuit boarding school where he was so unhappy that he ran away. His relations arranged for him to go to Australia, where he worked at various jobs including teaching and journalism. He also read enormously, and came to admire England so much that he decided to become an Englishman. For this purpose he considered it essential that he should go to an English public school, so having saved a few hundred pounds he sailed for England. Here he made his way to Sedbergh and called upon Mr William Nassau Weech, the headmaster. He told him several lies. He said he was an Australian orphan whose parents had perished in a bush fire, and that he was 15 years of age. Whether or not he was believed, Brendan talked Mr Weech into accepting him into the school.

  Brendan, lapsed Catholic and lapsed Irishman, an enormous ‘boy’ aged 19, drew a cheque book out of his pocket and paid his fees there and then. He stayed at Sedbergh only one term, but the Weech family had grown so fond of him that they invited him to spend Christmas with them. When he left, he had an old school tie and a near-English accent; certainly it was neither Irish nor Australian, but what is now called mid-Atlantic. In his rather thick voice he talked incessantly, and if anyone else succeeded in saying a word or two Brendan kept up a sort of humming sound until he could break in and resume his monologue. Part of the reason why he and Randolph Churchill so often quarrelled was that they both wanted to talk and both became exasperated when neither would listen.

  In order to keep body and soul together after leaving Sedbergh Bracken taught at a preparatory school near London, where he seems to have taken pleasure in beating the unfortunate boys. His vile behaviour there—and some of his pupils are still alive to tell the tale of the cruel ‘red-haired master’—comes as a disagreeable surprise to those who only knew him as a kind friend, but it ties up with strange stories one had heard, and which Andrew Boyle mentions briefly, of Brendan many years later incongruously dressing up as a boy in shorts and wishing to be whacked himself. Except for one or two beautiful girls, who were miles beyond his reach but whom he pretended to court, one never heard Brendan’s name linked with man or woman. His passion was directed elsewhere, to money and to power.

  Andrew Boyle has mapped his rapid ascent in detail. When they first met, in J.L. Garvin’s house, Brendan’s hero Winston Churchill was not only out of office but out of Parliament. Bracken had no difficulty in attaching himself, but though the circumstances chanced to be rather favourable there is no doubt that he was exactly the sort of young man Churchill liked to have about him: brash, self-assured, amusing, talkative and efficient, with the news and gossip of the day bubbling out of him at top speed. Bracken’s profession was now journalism; his ambition, politics.

  In 1929 he was elected MP for North Paddington, and in Parliament he made Churchill’s causes his own, sharing in his unpopularity and meanwhile making a good deal of money in business and in newspapers. After ten years on the back benches the war came; Churchill’s star rose, and with it Bracken’s.

  There followed six glorious years when he was where he had always longed to be—at the very centre of things. As Minister of Information, ‘God’s greatest liar’, as Randolph called him, came into his own. He got on splendidly with journalists and was the most loyal of colleagues, and loyal as well to his subordinates, some of whose clever propaganda ideas misfired. For example, having heard from ‘intelligence’ that German officers guarding the Franco-Spanish frontier were homosexuals, ‘a plan was devised for dropping suitable pornographic leaflets, beautifully illustrated and captioned, on these idle enemy units in the hope of undermining their morale.’ The leaflets were to fly over in balloons, but unluckily a freak storm blew up and they landed on a golf-course in Surrey. A golfer who picked one of them up complained to J.B. Hynd, a new MP who ‘held rigid views on the counter-productive nature of our sordid business’. Bracken, determined to shield his bright ideas man, received Mr Hynd and told him: ‘You shouldn’t be surprised at the lengths to which Goebbels will go.’ He succeeded in convincing Mr Hynd that it was the Germans who had sent the beautifully illustrated pornographic leaflets. Since, presumably, they were ‘captioned’ in German this cannot have been too easy; but Brendan’s deviousness amounted to genius and he was believed. In such care-free style did the Minister of Information run his ‘lie-machine’. It cost a fortune, but it was only the tax-payers’ money and it ran on oiled wheels.

  It was Brendan’s finest hour. When the war was over, all this fun came to an end. There was a Labour landslide, and Churchill and Bracken were plunged into the depths of gloom. Bracken lost his seat, and although he won a by-election soon afterwards the savour had gone out of politics for him. He accepted a peerage but never took his seat.

  Bracken’s letters to his great crony Lord Beaverbrook during the last years of his life are among the best things in this entertaining book. They are full of political gossip, some of it damaging. All he wished was for Churchill to become Prime Minister once more; that Churchill was unfit owing to repeated strokes did not weigh with the faithful Brendan. By the time the Tories got back he himself no longer wanted office, for Brendan was far from well. An injudicious doctor who treated a bruise with penicillin caused him untold misery and covered him with boils and blains. He died aged 58 of cancer of the throat. Sir Patrick Hennessy was with him at the end. ‘“Tell me one thing only, Pat,” said Churchill, “How did he die?”, “Very bravely,” said Hennessy. “Poor, dear Brendan” said Churchill. And big tears welled up in his old eyes.’

  Brendan Bracken made the best daily and the best weekly in English journalism—the Financial Times and the Economist. They are his memorial. He gave his ‘old school’ of a single term a magnificent library. His friends—a diminishing company—miss him still. We were completely divided from him by politics, yet I can never forget his kindness to us when our fortunes were at a low ebb.

  Probably the present is the last moment in time when a biographer could have uncovered Brendan’s carefully concealed origins. By his orders, all his papers were burnt at his death. Mr Boyle has written an enthralling book. I hope it is not curmudgeonly to say that there are too many misprints. Also, why cannot publishers employ, in addition to their inefficient proof-readers, some pedant to see that names are correct? There was no such person as Lady Sybil Colefax; Lord Stonehaven was not the father of Theodora Benson; and so forth. All quite trivial, but why not get it right?

  Poor, Dear Brendan: The Quest for Brendan Bracken, Boyle, A. Books and Bookmen (1974)

  On Love and Sex

  The Montagu Case

  The facts about what is called the Montagu case are well known. In the autumn of 1953 Lord Montagu of Beaulieu was charged with two offences, the jury acquitted him of the more serious one but disagreed about the other, and a re-trial was ordered. ‘On December 16th,’ writes Mr Wildeblood, ‘the day, significantly enough, of the ending of Edward Montagu’s first trial, McNally had been interviewed by a member of the RAF Special Investigation Branch about letters which had been found in his kit. These had been written by a number of men, including myself. He was again “grilled” on December 23rd, and on the following day was arrested and charged by the RAF with indecency with male persons, no names being mentioned. He spent Christmas under close arrest, and was brought up before his C.O. on December 27th.

  ‘In spi
te of his plea of guilty, no evidence was offered and he was released “without prejudice”. The Crown was after bigger fish than McNally. By this time he had confessed to offences with numerous men, but the police were interested in only one name—mine. This was because, in one of my letters, I had mentioned the magic word “Beaulieu”… None of the other men accused by McNally and Reynolds—of whom there were twenty four—was ever prosecuted.’ On December 28th the police took over. Altogether McNally was interrogated for eighteen hours, and ‘finally he was told that he would never be prosecuted for any of the offences which he had revealed, provided that he turned Queen’s Evidence against Edward Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers, and myself’. McNally and another airman, Reynolds, were browbeaten into such a state of terror that they were prepared to say yes to any question that was put to them. The evidence of these airmen was accepted, and Montagu, Pitt-Rivers and Wildeblood were sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment. The airmen went free.

  The offences were alleged to have been committed during a summer weekend almost two years before. The moral of Mr Wildeblood’s book is simple; if he and his friends had not invited the airmen to their weekend party nothing would ever have been heard of it; they would have been left in peace; detectives would not have forced their way into their houses, read all their private letters, asked impertinent questions. The police would not have had an opportunity of altering a date on Lord Montagu’s passport.

  Now, less than two years since these disgraceful doings, one of the three victims of England’s archaic sex laws has written an account of the case, against the background of his childhood and upbringing, and described his year in prison. To someone like myself, who knows prison from the inside, this part of Mr Wildeblood’s book seems the truth, rather generously told. Those who have not been in prison can scarcely imagine how revolting are the lavatories, how uneatably disgusting the food, how freezing the cells in winter, what complete nonsense the idea that the prisoners are being trained for a trade, or fitted for life outside, or that anything at all is being done except to degrade their bodies and unutterably to bore and depress their minds. If people believe the comfortable tales that prison governors, prison doctors, prison visitors and prison commissioners tell them about prison, they will believe anything.

  Has Mr Wildeblood performed a service in calling attention to the horror of our gaols? There is a theory that when educated people are imprisoned, and write about it afterwards, things are changed. In women’s prisons sanitary towels are given to the prisoners supposedly as a result of agitation by the suffragettes who spent much time in and out of Holloway, and in such relatively small ways, no doubt, reforms are permitted to creep in. But to make (for example) the heating arrangements or the lavatories work in all the old prisons in the British Isles would cost millions of pounds, and many people might prefer to see the taxpayers’ money spent on schools, or housing.

  If the Home Office were honest enough to say: prison is dirty, smelly and insanitary, the food is filthy, the warders are rude, the beds are hard, the bedding inadequate, the work a heart-breaking muddle, but it is a punishment for breaking the law (except in wartime, when the Home Secretary can lock up anyone he dislikes) and therefore, if you wish to avoid its rigours, keep the law, that would be a point of view with a certain amount of commonsense in it. But spokesmen for the Home Office sing a very different tune; soon after his release Mr Wildeblood heard Lord Mancroft, speaking in the House of Lords, say: ‘I want to draw attention to food, because, whenever food is bad, or someone complains, it becomes headlines in the newspapers at once. Food is now served in cafeteria trays, and is of a standard which might surprise noble Lords.’ Mr Wildeblood comments: ‘Yes, it probably might, particularly if they knew that the cafeteria trays had been washed in soapless water by prisoners who had not had an opportunity of cleaning their hands after going to the lavatory’. At least one of his fellow-prisoners, he says, was having treatment for syphilis. Lord Mancroft’s fantasy was typical of Home Office pronouncements; the ponderous machinery of English hypocrisy is always set in motion when anything ‘unpleasant’ is under discussion, whether it be sex, or crime, or capital punishment, or just the diet of some poor wretch condemned to sit for a stretch in one of HM Prisons.

  As to the ‘psychological treatment’ from which Mr Wildeblood was supposed to be going to benefit in Wormwood Scrubs, he says: ‘the facilities for such treatment were not so much inadequate, as virtually absent’ and ‘once I was in prison… I was not only not encouraged to take psychological treatment but actively discouraged. Men in prison… do not merely remain as bad as they were when they came in; by a visible process of moral erosion… they become worse. This is particularly true of sex offenders.’

  Although Against the Law is a history of spite and hypocrisy, Mr Wildeblood admits, as every prisoner must, that even in the misery of gaol the kindness of one’s fellow prisoners, and of some of the warders, is a compensation; also he formed a sentimental attachment there, which no doubt helped to lighten the gloom.

  Against the Law, Wildeblood, P. (1955)

  The Failures of Glandular Therapy

  There was a notorious case a few years ago when three men were sent to prison for having, long before, had homosexual relations with other men—who were not only consenting partners but actually male prostitutes with pocketfuls of addresses of people to whom they had sold their favours but who, persuaded by the police to turn king’s evidence, themselves went free. There was a good deal of criticism of police methods in this case, and, partly as a result, the Government appointed a Departmental Committee under the chairmanship of Sir John Wolfenden to enquire into the laws concerning homosexuality and prostitution.

  In August, 1957, after sitting for three years, the Committee’s report was published. With regard to homosexuality, while advocating very heavy penalties for offences against juveniles, it included the following statement:

  We strongly recommend that homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence.

  One of the medical men who gave evidence before the Wolfenden Committee was a psychiatrist who has made the study of sexual abnormality his life work: Dr Clifford Allen. He has now published a book on homosexuality, its nature, causation and treatment. Briefly, he considers that it is a psychological disorder, often curable in the early stages by psychoanalytic treatment.

  … The basic cause for homosexuality is a psychological deviation. There is the possibility of subsidiary and ancillary factors such as endocrine dysphasias accentuating the psychological deviation, but these do not appear ever to be the prime cause. The psychological basis is confirmed clinic ally by the response to psychotherapy, and the failure to respond to other measures such as glandular therapy.

  He adds that psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, and in fact ‘most of the psychoses which, with or without drugs, release abnormal behaviour are basic ally homosexual.’

  He even cites the case of a homosexual mass murderer who, some forty years ago, killed a large number of boys, as though to demonstrate the lengths to which homosexuals may go—as if there were not plenty of heterosexual murderers such as Jack the Ripper.

  The trouble with psychiatrists is that they spend so much time with their neurotic patients that they gradually come to imagine that most people are similarly ill-adjusted to life. Dr Allen, with complete intellectual honesty, admits that experiments show that male rats become homosexual if segregated from female rats, and that apes at a certain stage in their development are often homosexual. We do not need Dr Allen to tell us that dogs have homosexual urges, for a walk in Hyde Park will prove to us that they do. Leaving the lower animals and coming to mankind, he relates that many primitive tribes practice homosexuality as a matter of course (though some, like the ancient Hebrews, fiercely repress it), while Greek civilisation was to a large extent based upon it. Yet in spite of so much evidence of ‘naturalness’ he persists in his theory of psychological disorder
. Nobody can deny, of course, that it is an abnormality, since only a fraction of men and women incline towards it.

  Dr Allen’s admirable reason for wishing to cure homosexuals (i.e., to direct their desires towards the opposite sex) is that he finds they are unhappy people. In England, where blackmail, prison and ruin threaten, they doubtless suffer from anxiety. Not everyone cares for ‘living dangerously.’ Most civilised countries have laws based on the Code Napoleon, which are infinitely less savage in this respect than our own which descend through the old ecclesiastical law, instead of from Greek and Roman law. In these countries, where, provided they are grown up, men and women can do as they please in private, homosexuals appear to be just as happy as anyone else. Of course they may suffer from jealousy, remorse, unrequited love and so forth, but no more, probably, than do heterosexuals. They are harmless members of the community, and the notion that they might suddenly change their habits and try to seduce young boys (a practice which the Code Napoleon punishes with severity) is almost as unlikely as that a normal heterosexual man should do so.

  The neurotic anxieties and unhappiness of his homosexual patients disturb Dr Allen, who devotes his life to attempting to cure them of their homosexuality, sometimes with success. He might possibly find them less nervous, and thus less prone to alcoholism, ‘violent psychotic fear-state,’ suicide, and the rest of the tragic disorders from which he says they suffer, if the law were changed in the way the Wolfenden Committee recommends. He is concerned with their cure, and in his opinion prison is the very last place where such a cure can be effected. The threat of prison and the fear of blackmail, while seemingly not capable of deterring the compulsive urge to assault juveniles which a certain type of homosexual appears to be unable to control, and which is undoubtedly a dangerously anti-social form of mania, can render miserable the life of the harmless ‘consenting adult’ and make him, at the very least, drown his wretchedness in drink.