This is not just a psychological involvement with your family but an operatic involvement. It’s your destiny. You literally see yourself as part of a grand plot and extraordinary story.
Indeed, Keith Murdoch isn’t just the most prominent businessman and newspaper publisher in Australia: He’s the hero of Gallipoli.
The battle for the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey is the most fundamental story of Australian identity. It’s the Australian version of Dunkirk or Pearl Harbor or Bunker Hill. Or greater still. It is at the center of Australia’s place in the world—its relationship to the British, its ideas of mateship, egalitarianism, and anti-establishmentarianism. And, not insignificantly, it’s a story later retailed by Keith’s son, who helped finance the 1981 film Gallipoli, directed by the Australian Peter Weir and starring Mel Gibson (making Mel Gibson a star).
Gallipoli, where in 1915 the British ordered eight thousand Australian and New Zealand infantry and light horsemen to their death in a failed assault on the Turks, is not just the family’s first media event; it is media as a transformative force.
Keith Murdoch is, in 1915, a young man of a good background and fine connections, whose professional potential is already abundantly clear. He’s the product of two generations of Scottish-Protestant clergy, in an age when the clergy is a highest-attainment profession. The Murdochs are Free Churchers. Keith’s grandfather James Murdoch, born in 1817 on the Moray Firth, of Scotland, joins upward of 470 other Presbyterian clergymen in the Disruption of 1843 to break with the Church of Scotland. The issue here—a Murdoch theme to this day—is the relationship with England. The Church of Scotland is too tight with the English establishment (an anti-English catechism became central to the Free Churchers). The schism here, however, isn’t one of rebels turning their back on the establishment, but rather—and this remains another Murdoch family theme—the troublemakers arguing that they are the rightful establishment.
Keith’s father, Patrick, is born in Scotland in 1850. Patrick, raised in anti-English Scottish Protestantism, becomes an assistant to a big-name London clergyman and then in 1878 is ordained himself and given a church in Cruden, a fishing village in Aberdeenshire.
Patrick marries Rupert’s grandmother Annie Brown in 1882, and in 1884 takes a Free Church posting in Melbourne. Patrick, in relatively short order, finds himself not just a clergyman-pillar of the Melbourne community—and the immigrant waves have made Melbourne the largest city in Australia—but a leader of the Presbyterian Church of Australia.
Keith is born in 1885. He is meant to carry on the Calvinist line, but instead becomes a journalist. This is perhaps because of his terrible stutter—a grievous impediment to preaching. Still, at the turn of the century, 1885 journalism is nobody’s idea of a profession. Or it is only a good idea if you own the press itself. To be a journalist from an upper-class family is to see yourself as something of a cultured industrialist. You would own the factory; the actual people who gathered up the news would be the factory workers.
Keith’s father arranges a job for him on a prominent Melbourne paper.
Then, in 1908, he goes to study—unhappily, as it turns out—at the London School of Economics. He returns to Melbourne in 1910 and becomes a political writer—a parliamentary correspondent. He’s a supporter of his father’s friend Andrew Fisher, the Labor Party leader who is elected for three terms as Australia’s prime minister. The Murdochs, in other words, are cronies and confidants of the most powerful people in the land.
Keith Murdoch, beginning his management rise, becomes the London editor of the news agency United Cable Service (the journalism business at the time is also the telegraph business). His father’s chum Fisher, serving his third term as prime minister, asks the twenty-nine-year-old Keith to stop in Egypt on his way to London to look into some problems with the mail service to Australian soldiers (journalism is also closely related to mail).
Enterprisingly, Keith gets in touch with General Ian Hamilton, the commander of the Australian force in the Dardanelles, hoping to secure a firsthand look at the battlefield scene at Gallipoli.
Stringent censorship regulations are in place, not least of all because everything about the Dardanelles campaign has gone so terribly wrong. Keith agrees, in writing, “not to attempt to correspond by any other route or by any other means than that officially sanctioned.”
In fact, Keith spends almost no time at all at the front. Instead, he settles into the press camp, on the island of Imbros away from the front, and falls under the spell of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett of the Daily Telegraph, the dean—a drunken one—of the Dardanelles correspondents. Because of the censorship rules, most of Ashmead-Bartlett’s dispatches never see print. The rules, according to Phillip Knightley (who will work for both Keith Murdoch at the Herald and for Rupert at the Times of London) in his book The First Casualty, about journalists in wars, allow “no criticism of the conduct of the operation, no indication of set-backs or delays, and no mention of casualty figures.” Very few people in Britain or Australia, in other words, understand the enormousness of the debacle.
Ashmead-Bartlett convinces Murdoch that the deterioration of the Dardanelles campaign will only get worse. “Murdoch,” according to Knightley, “must have realised that almost by accident he was in possession of information that would certainly rank as one of the great stories of the war.”
Keith decides to break the censorship rules and smuggle out the British correspondent’s dispatch. Their plot is discovered and the dispatch confiscated.
Acting not so much as a journalist but as a confidant of the powerful, Keith writes Fisher, the Australian prime minister, recounting everything he can remember from the Ashmead-Bartlett dispatch. It’s a paean to the virtues and heroism of the Australians and an indictment of the duplicity and cowardice of the British. It is, in Knightley’s description, “an amazing document, a mixture of error, fact, exaggeration, prejudice, and the most sentimental patriotism, which made highly damaging charges against the British general staff and Hamilton, many of them untrue.”
Arriving in London, Keith Murdoch brags about the letter to Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times. The Times—which Keith’s son Rupert will own in a few generations—is then owned by Lord Northcliffe (aka Alfred Harmsworth). In the history of powerful press barons who’ve meddled in politics, Northcliffe ranks only behind William Randolph Hearst and Rupert himself. Northcliffe has fiercely opposed the Dardanelles campaign and, with the encouragement of future prime minister David Lloyd George—this is all at a very high level of intrigue—who also opposes the campaign, has Keith’s letter sent to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, who promptly has it printed and distributed to the cabinet.
As a nearly direct consequence of Murdoch’s letter, whatever its inaccuracies, Hamilton, the British general, is removed, and the evacuation of Gallipoli begins.
Or…maybe it doesn’t happen like that at all.
This event, so central to Australian mythology and to the rise of the Murdoch family, will be subject to natural and baroque revisionist accounts. Keith is not only not heroic but mendacious—a sneak, a thief, a plagiarist, and, of course, a self-promoter. Or he is the dupe of powerful men, a bit player in a larger conspiracy. Or a kind of Zelig—in the frame of history, but without real consequence.
No matter: It is a personal and media coup—Keith Murdoch becomes part of Australia’s World War I mythology. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of Gallipoli, the Times, at that point owned by his son, will run an account of his legend under the headline “The Journalist Who Stopped a War.”
The coup, in addition to making Keith famous at home, also cements his relationship with Lord Northcliffe, who becomes his mentor—his media rabbi.
Northcliffe is one of the great figures of the tale. His is the first great populist media empire. He has the touch (he helps Joseph Pulitzer create the famous one-time tabloid issue of the World, which appears on January 1, 1901, and a few years later begins the tabloid London Daily Mirror) a
nd he has the business model: mass.
“A newspaper is to be made to pay. Let it deal with what interests the mass of people. Let it give the public what it wants,” pronounces Northcliffe to the great condemnation of intellectuals far and wide.
Northcliffe’s company—which will continue into the twenty-first century as Associated Newspapers, publishing the Daily Mail, “the voice of middle England,” and arguably the most influential paper in Britain—also includes the Daily Mirror, the Evening News, and the Observer. (The Mirror and Observer eventually change hands; the Evening News, which will continue to be owned by Associated, will change its name to the Evening Standard.) His takeover of the money-losing Times in 1908 is an occasion for pretty much the same kind of censure by the upper crust and journalists that will occur when Rupert takes it over more than eighty years later.
Keith Murdoch, after Gallipoli, runs his news service out of the Times’ office until in 1920 he is offered the editorship of the Melbourne Herald—the most upmarket and establishment paper in the country—which, with Northcliffe’s assent, Keith accepts.
While maintaining the Herald’s establishment appeal, he begins to apply the basic Northcliffe formulae: contests, serials, shorter stories, beauty pageants, crime stories. More significantly, Murdoch launches a sister paper, the Sun News Pictorial, a morning tabloid—the first in Australia—which becomes the biggest-selling paper in the country.
In 1928, it’s Northcliffe who helps convince the board of the Herald and Weekly Times company to make Keith Murdoch the managing director of the firm. Expansion is substantial and immediate. Keith adds radio stations to the group, installs up-to-date presses, and begins, through a program of acquisitions, to build the first newspaper chain in the country.
Continuing to imitate Northcliffe, Keith becomes an art collector too.
Rich, powerful, a workaholic—and not, apparently, the most likable guy in Australia—the forty-three-year old bachelor marries Rupert’s mother, nineteen-year-old Elisabeth, in 1928.
Two more family themes are set in stone: Elisabeth, through her father, Rupert Greene, is the source of their son’s charm and gambler’s bravado; Keith, by way of two generations of clergy, is the source of Rupert’s coldness, toughness, and puritanism.
Keith Rupert Murdoch is born in 1931—the boy among what will be three sisters, the heir among the girls.
Later it will be hard to get a clear picture of Murdoch’s upbringing because it will come prepackaged in lots of upper-class language. That in itself will be a distinguishing fact: The Murdochs, within the context of egalitarian Australia, are living at the uppermost extreme.
His childhood alternates between idyllic and lonely, with lots of Australian country life (when Rupert is seven, his father also buys a many-thousand-acre sheep farm). It’s about not being overindulged in the midst of substantial wealth—in fact, being treated with calculated cruelty to build character. Still, the mythology holds that while there is great harshness, there is great love and affection too.
And then it’s off to boarding school—at age ten. Geelong Grammar on Corio Bay, fifty miles from Melbourne, is among the world’s most elite boarding schools; twenty years after Murdoch’s time, Prince Charles will be sent to Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop program, which involves a year of living in the Australian mountains. Geelong, which into the 1990s will still be using corporal punishment, features all manner of privations. It even has a novelistic headmaster, Sir James Darling, a man whose Christian determination is to break the pride of rich kids, not least of all through the theoretically leveling virtues of sport.
Rupert, who will one day control a significant part of the world’s sports programming and own stakes in a handful of professional teams, hates sports. And he hates authority. These two attributes are the classic mark of a prep school troublemaker. Nor is he popular. He is the disliked son of the disliked father—the domineering, politically meddling newspaper publisher often at odds with the other fathers of the establishment.
Rupert, it turns out, is rather unbreakable. The lesson he seems to take from Geelong Grammar is the obvious one: Fuck them all. (At his mother’s eightieth-birthday party, in 1989, attended by the entire upper crust, including Sir James Darling, Rupert will even force something like an apology out of the former headmaster.)
And then in 1950 it’s off to Oxford, in England, that hell/heaven for Australians.
His mother and his father take him to school—and along the way give him a bit of a world tour, including an audience for the Presbyterian Murdochs with the Pope in Rome.
The reason Keith has the time to accompany his son is that at sixty-five and in failing health (several heart attacks and prostate cancer), Keith is slowly being forced out of his job at the Herald and Weekly Times. Keith Murdoch may be among the most powerful men in Australia, but he’s run up against the limitation that generations of corporate men of the future will regularly encounter: at the end of the day, even CEOs are just employees. Their power is rented—they don’t own it.
Oxford is, all in all, a good time for Rupert. He cuts a figure. He’s arch, he’s aggressive, he’s charming, he’s funny, he’s rich, he’s rebellious (though not too rebellious), he gambles. His father is naturally worried about his left-wing airs—he sports a bust of Lenin on the mantel in his rooms—as well as his grades; he’s a terrible student. But he’s a focused one, too—focused on his own unique interests. William Rees-Mogg, the editor of the Times of London when Murdoch acquired it and who would go on to be a Times columnist, was an undergraduate with Murdoch and remembers Murdoch’s enthusiastic interest in buying the undergraduate magazine, Cherwell. (“I told him,” Rees-Mogg will recall almost sixty years later, “I thought Cherwell would never get enough advertising from the sort of ordinary university advertisers to make it profitable.”)
There’s a summer road trip—in a car purchased by his father—through Eastern Europe and Greece. The car is totaled in Turkey.
Then, in October 1952, Rupert’s father suddenly dies.
While Keith was the chairman of the Herald and Weekly Times, in a bit of corporate shuffling that would be dubious now—and raised eyebrows then—he personally came to own both the Adelaide News and a significant stake in Queensland Newspapers Ltd., which owned the Brisbane Courier-Mail. Together with his reputation in Australia and a modest fortune, these papers are the legacy he leaves his family.
The co-executor of Keith’s estate with Dame Elisabeth is Harry Giddy, Sir Keith’s successor as the Herald and Weekly Times chairman, who promptly convinces her, over Rupert’s protests, to sell the family’s controlling interest in Queensland Newspapers to the Herald and Weekly Times. Rupert blames the owners of his father’s company not just for failing to accord his father a bigger stake in the company he built for them, but also for acting in their own interests in convincing his mother to sell a key part of the Murdoch family patrimony. It’s an elemental moment for him of understanding what the rich are up against: other people who are rich.
And it will remain a family sore spot. His mother, in my interview, will take careful issue with her son’s resentment: “It was very hard to know what to do, because he wanted to keep certain properties and we knew that it was not possible. And that was hard, as I said, it was a very hard time because I insisted that we were not going into enormous debt and I’m sure that was the right thing. But I think he will always regret it very much that I didn’t allow him to hang on to [the] Queensland interest because, you know, we just couldn’t go owing a lot of money at that stage. Rupert was too young.”
Meanwhile, Rupert has another year of Oxford left in which to think about the Adelaide News.
It’s a familiar scenario: the (slightly) ne’er-do-well son who is left the father’s odd media holdings at a callow age. There’s Hearst, of course, who turns a failing newspaper into an empire; there’s Bill Paley, whose father leaves him, in addition to a cigar company, a radio station, which eventually becomes CBS and the most pow
erful media company of its time; there’s Bill Ziff (parts of whose business Rupert will one day buy), who inherits a few small magazines and turns them into one of the largest private media fortunes in the United States. There’s Ted Turner (whose rivalry with Murdoch will be an eighties subtheme), whose father leaves him a billboard company which he turns into his billion-dollar media enterprise.
The key here is young men inheriting not just family businesses but specifically media enterprises, which by their nature seem to invite young men to think they can do it as well as anybody else. If the family business were, say, coal mining, or banking, or manufacturing, they likely would not be so confident.
So…a young man of particular self-confidence, entitlement, aggressiveness, with a dilettantish what-the-heckness and a deep competitive streak, prepares to take up his legacy.
But before Rupert goes home to assume his position at the Adelaide News he goes to work for the newspaper proprietor who, next to Northcliffe, most defines the Fleet Street style and “the black art of journalism”: Beaverbrook.
William Maxwell Aitken, who will become Lord Beaverbrook, had arrived on Fleet Street by way of Canada and a profitable stake in the Rolls-Royce company, which he sold to fund his one true passion—a London newspaper company.
It’s 1953. Rupert is twenty-two. Beaverbrook’s Daily Express is at the epicenter of Fleet Street, the world’s most competitive newspaper market. There are low papers (the vivid and “popular”) and high papers (the stuffy and “unpopular”). Fleet Street’s measures are as harsh and binary as the Nielsen ratings will be in American television a generation later.
Fleet Street is to journalism—journalism as an act of civic responsibility, that is—as military music is to music. Its essence is selling single copies: making the sale in the blink of an eye as you go past the newsdealer. Fleet Street is in the audience business rather than the news business, or it is an open rivalry between both impulses. It is also the class business. Every Fleet Streeter knows which is his class.
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