Memories: Top aide to Winston Churchill posed as 16-year-old schoolboy to satisfy caning desires
Brendan Bracken, a friend of Winston Churchill and a former wartime minister, posed as a 16-year-old schoolboy and set up a bogus school before hiring three teenagers to be prefects and cane him.
They genuinely believed that Bracken, who was aged 54
at the time, was a 16-year-old called ‘Mike’ who suffered from a premature
ageing condition. The story was revealed by one of the boys, David Campbell,
now aged 85, in
a memoir published in June 2021.
The desire of adults to dress up as
schoolboys to enact corporal punishment scenes continues in the present day.
(Picture credit: Two Cups Productions)
Brendan Bracken and David Campbell at the
summer school (Picture credit: Sunday Times)
The revelation would probably have gone largely
unnoticed except the Sunday Times wrote
a story about it. It was followed up by the website, Irish
Central.
It happened in the mid-1950s. Bracken’s fantasy world
was so carefully constructed with forged letters from supposed guardians,
lawyers and an imaginary uncle that Campbell came to accept the premature
ageing story.
Campbell writes in his memoir, Minstrel Heart (2021, published
by Luath Press) that one day the careers master at his
school, George Heriot’s in Edinburgh, offered him and a friend (a fellow
prefect), an unusual summer holiday job.
‘The job description was that we were to act as
prefect companions to a 16-year-old boy whose health had been damaged by
excessive smoking and drinking, which had caused a premature ageing process.’
A large house, ‘Barscobe’, on the banks of Loch Lomond,
had been acquired for six weeks to function as a mini boarding school with
tutoring and domestic staff, and three ‘prefects’.
When he arrived at the school he was met by ‘a tall
red-headed man who looked about 40, wearing long red stockings, grey shorts and
a grey long-sleeved woollen windcheater.’
He was taken to his room where he found on the bed was
a pair of grey shorts, a pair of white flannel shorts, red stockings and grey
jersey.
The man turned out to be ‘Mike’, the boy he was employed
to companion.
Campbell recalls, ‘From primary school in Fraserburgh
through to my secondary education, the use of the tawse (a leather strap) on
the hands for punishment was accepted as a custom and hazard of school life.
The instrument of chastisement in our mini boarding school, however, was
foreign to us: the cane.
‘As part of our role as prefects, Mr Stewart [a
tutor], exhorted by Mike’s guardian, instructed us that, for the good of his
damaged health and as a deterrent to further impairment, if we caught Mike
smoking or drinking or in possession of cigarettes or alcohol, he should be
caned: six strokes.
‘The unpalatable reality is that following these
instructions, this is exactly what we did and after the initial grue of
distaste, continued to do.
‘My own acquiescence left me uneasy. Someone bending
over a chair to receive these strokes of the cane seemed worse than holding out
one’s hand to receive “the belt”. That Mike never evinced any grudge about
receiving these punishments surprised me at the time.’
In a later summer a new school was set up on the
island of Scalpay, adjacent to Skye, and Campbell once again was employed as
companion.
During this time a new tutor, Mr Green was employed.
Campbell writes, ‘Shortly after his arrival ... Mr Green, had sought a private
conversation with Mike. Outside, the rain was falling and I felt the isolation
of the island. The house was intensely silent. I was sitting nervously smoking
in my study when Mr Green knocked on the door. He came in, lips tight. We both
sat down. There were no preliminaries. “This has to stop,” he said. “Do you
know who Mike actually is? He is Lord Brendan Bracken, who was Churchill’s
wartime Minister of Information. You can imagine the feast the press would make
of the set-up here, the nature of the implications they would draw. I’ve spoken
to Lord Bracken and he has, of course, agreed. The matter is at an end.”’
After talking with Bracken, the next morning Campbell
packed and left.
Campbell told the Sunday Times that that the
man he knew as Mike never evinced a hint of sexual interest in the ‘prefects’
at his school. ‘He never, ever touched any of us in a sexual way, although
there was clearly an element of masochism,’ he said. ‘It just seemed to be this
strange fantasy we were all sucked into. I was 16 or 17 at the time, and yes,
you think that’s really odd, but he made a friendship with me and my family and
after a while you came to accept it.’
Bracken paid Campbell handsomely for his prefectorial
role. He covered school and university fees for Campbell and his brother, and
bought a house in Edinburgh for their mother. Campbell says Bracken never asked
him to keep quiet about his experience. A year after his ‘school’ was
disbanded, Bracken died of throat cancer, aged 57.
The Sunday Times reported, ‘Today Campbell
believes that whatever Bracken’s sexual proclivities and taste for being
beaten, what the viscount enjoyed most was “the manufacture of drama”. Campbell
has 34 letters, all apparently written by Bracken under different identities in
support of the fiction that he was an ailing schoolboy with special needs. “The
elaboration of his fantasy was a work of genius,” he said.’
Campbell later became a teacher, then a BBC radio
producer and latterly a traditional storyteller.
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