A prominent Conservative politician and close friend of Winston Churchill set up a bogus “summer school” in Scotland where he posed as a 16-year-old schoolboy and hired other teenagers to cane him, according to a new memoir.
Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s wartime minister of information and one of Britain’s most successful newspaper publishers, was 54 in the mid-1950s when he embarked on a secret double life as a schoolboy named “Mike” who was said to suffer from a premature ageing condition.
The man who founded the modern Financial Times — whose London headquarters is named Bracken House — hired tutors and classmates who were led to believe that “Mike” was a troubled teenager in shorts and long socks who needed to be punished regularly for smoking and drinking.
“The instrument of chastisement in our mini boarding school was ... the cane,” writes David Campbell, one of several teenagers hired as “prefects” to supervise “Mike”. Campbell, 85, writes in his memoir Minstrel Heart that although he found Mike “a bit odd”, Bracken’s fantasy world was so carefully constructed with forged letters from supposed guardians, lawyers and an imaginary uncle that he came to accept the premature ageing story.
Although “surprised” to be asked to administer the cane, he noted that Mike “never evinced any grudge” about being punished. It was not until several summers later that a new tutor arrived at the school, recognised Bracken, and the fantasy crumbled. “Part of me was stunned, part [had] already begun to unpeel the cataract of credulity that had let myself, tutors, companions, cooks and housemaids in successive Scottish grand house ‘schools’ become part of the masquerade,” Campbell writes.