Bernays was the third son and fourth and youngest child of Lillian Jane Bernays and Stewart Frederick Lewis Bernays, a Church of England clergyman who became Rector first of Stanmore, and later of Finchley, both in North London. He was the great-grandson of German Jewish Professor Adolphus Bernays. He was educated at Rossall School and Worcester College, Oxford where he was president of the Oxford Union in 1925. After university he became a journalist on the Daily News, and practised the profession until entering government, despite occasional clashes with his employers because of the independent line he took in the internal clashes among Liberal factions in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Finding himself dropped by the News Chronicle after it supplanted the Daily Newsin the summer of 1930, he travelled with the then leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords, William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, to Australia, and thence, alone, to India. The result was his book about Mahatma Gandhi, Naked Fakir.
Early political career
He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal at Rugby in the 1929 general election ; but, following the positive reception afforded Naked Fakir, he was adopted as Liberal candidate for Bristol North – a seat once held by the distinguished Liberal Cabinet Minister Augustine Birrell – at the 1931 general election. He was elected with a majority of 13,214 over the incumbent, Labour MP Walter Ayles, who had twice won the seat, in 1923 and 1929, when the non-Labour vote was split between two other candidates. That there was no Conservative candidate, in an election that saw the Conservatives win 55% of the national vote, does much to explain the size of Bernays's majority; and this fact, coupled with Ayles's record of winning when he had two opponents rather than one – he lost to a single Liberal rival in both 1922 and 1924, while beating a Liberal and a Conservative in 1923 and a Liberal and an independent in 1929 – likewise explains why, throughout the period 1931–1935, one of Bernays's chief preoccupations was to ensure that the Conservatives should hold him in sufficiently high esteem to refrain from opposing him at the next election. Bernays made a slow start in the House of Commons – his maiden speech was badly affected by the stammer which continued to plague him in debate, and he was hors de combat for some time in 1932 after having his appendix removed. That autumn, however, he visited Germany for the first time to observe political developments there; he subsequently developed an expert knowledge of the country and was a consistent and determined critic of the Nazis after their accession to power in early 1933. His account of his journalistic and political travels between 1930 and 1933, Special Correspondent, was published in 1934. When the official Liberal Party left the National Government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, over the tariffs-versus-Free Trade issue in November 1933, Bernays remained on the government benches, with the Liberal National Party MPs, although Bernays himself, unlike Leckie and McKeag, did not yet openly become a 'Simonite.' As early as July 1934, however, in a letter to Lucy Brereton, he was distinguishing himself from "he poor old Samuel Liberals" and their "frightful position"; yet in December of the same year, writing to Lucy once more, he referred to the official Liberals as "we" and called Samuel his "leader"; while in March 1935 he told his sister that he was "very seriously thinking" of "asking for the government whip". In short, he agonised about his party affiliation for some time. He was re-elected at the 1935 general election as a "Liberal independent of all groups in the party" – again without Conservative opposition, though with a drastically reduced majority of 4,828 – and finally joined the Liberal Nationals in September 1936. His decision to end his period of vacillation may have been motivated by a sense that he had burned his bridges with the official Liberals, and that it would be hard for him to advance in his political career as an independent Liberal; while as a Liberal National he would be eligible for office in the National Government without having to go the whole hog and become a Conservative. It may also have been connected with the tragic death of his mother Lillian, who, after a long period of depressive illness and voluntary residence in nursing homes, was found dead in the River Thames just before Christmas 1935. Bernays' sense that he needed to recover his psychological equilibrium and rebuild his career after his mother's death and the publicity it provoked is evident in his diary entries from early 1936. Bernays's father remarried in 1937; Bernays acted as his best man.
In government
When Neville Chamberlain replaced Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, Bernays was appointed as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health in the National Government, serving under Sir Kingsley Wood. Wood was succeeded, upon being appointed Secretary of State for Air in May 1938, by Bernays's old friend and occasional political patron Walter Elliot. Personal loyalty to Elliot may have helped to keep Bernays in his job after the Munich crisis that autumn, when Harold Nicolson and many of Bernays's other friends and associates thought he should have followed through on his earlier threats to resign because of the government's policy of appeasement of Hitler and the Nazis. He moved in July 1939 to become Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport, and held that post until he left government when Winston Churchill took over as Prime Minister in May 1940. He was also, especially after their ten-week trip to East Africa in early 1937 as members of a governmental commission on colonial education, a very close friend of the writer and National Labour MP Harold Nicolson, in whose celebrated diaries he is frequently mentioned. This, along with remarks in Bernays's own diaries and letters Whatever the truth of these rumours, Bernays eventually, in 1942, married Nancy Britton, the daughter of George Bryant Britton. He had met Nancy shortly before the collapse of his relationship with Leonora Corbett. They had two sons.
Second World War
Bernays joined the Army as a sapper in 1942 and was commissioned as a subaltern into the Movement Control Section of the Royal Engineers in January 1943; according to Who's Who he was promoted to Captain in 1944, although his casualty record with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, by whom he is commemorated on the Cassino Memorial in Italy, lists his rank as Lieutenant. After he died in a plane crash in the Adriatic Sea in January 1945, while flying from Italy to Greece as part of a parliamentary delegation to visit British troops, no by-election was called, and the Bristol North seat remained vacant until the 1945 general election, when it was won by the Labour candidate William Coldrick.
