The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  In 2011 it seemed important to make space for more recent developments. However, attempts have been made, including by Rupert Murdoch himself, to suggest Keith’s wartime career laid down the editorial traditions which the family have since striven to maintain. The real evidence shows that Keith Murdoch was in fact a ruthless political operative using his journalistic role largely as cover.

  His politico-military interventions were seriously misconceived, ending in a wild anti-Semitic plot intended to remove General John Monash ‘Australia’s greatest soldier’ from command at the vital moment in 1918 when Monash’s troops were making the great breakthrough which led to the Battle of Amiens and defeat of the German army. The plot failed (Monash privately complained that it was bitter to confront ‘a pogrom’ at the climax of the war). But in the euphoria of victory Keith Murdoch’s scheming was forgotten: the facts did not emerge until long after his death in 1952. The story is so bizarre that it has sometimes been doubted. A full version in PDF (with notes) will be supplied without charge on application to bruce®pages2.ads124.co.uk

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  THE SOUTHCLIFFE INHERITANCE, 1919–1953 No word hostile to you has ever been uttered in Cabinet. On the contrary, all ministers realise only too well what the Government and the Party owe to the papers of your group.

  J. A. LYONS, Prime Minister of Australia, to Sir Keith Murdoch, 1935 The citizens of a free country have to depend on a free press … That is why the Constitution gives newspapers express protection from Government interference … It is also possible for the public interest to be defeated by the way a newspaper is conducted since the principal restraint on a newspaper owner is his self-restraint.

  EUGENE MEYER, publisher of the Washington Post, 1948 The year 1931 was prosperous for Keith Murdoch, chief officer of the Herald and Weekly Times. His son Rupert was born, and Joe Lyons – who might be called the family’s first prime minister – took office. Rupert certainly grew up aware of his father as a ‘towering figure in Australian life’ – the words of the British historian John Grigg – and since the Great War Keith and the Herald had travelled far. But the dynastic account in which he injected a comatose outfit with Northcliffe’s expertise is untrue.

  In 1918 Theodore Fink and his manager Arthur Wise were running a prosperous business, and planning post-war investment to exploit the national addiction to printed matter. Political and personal stresses were the problem. Fink admitted the skill of James Davidson, editor since 1911, but he did so only grudgingly, as he grew more conservative and Davidson did not. Davidson, the ‘noble’ pioneer of pre-war reforms, tried to develop a non-partisan policy, but abolishing the paper’s editorial column only incurred the chairman’s disgust. To any practised newspaper eye, Murdoch’s letter sympathising with ‘my dear Mr Fink’ looks like a job application:

  I know you will be interested rather than indignant in my views – The Herald has always been curiously characterless as a journal. I know you have wished it otherwise … a newspaper should have some sort of a fighting platform, not necessarily political … The Herald has suffered from a lack of fighting and push …

  Ejected in 1918, Davidson went to Adelaide, South Australia’s capital, and did something Keith Murdoch never did. He created a paper, the News, which lasted many years – becoming the foundation-stone of Newscorp, in fact. His replacement, Guy Innes, didn’t enthuse Fink. But Murdoch’s presence in Europe was doubtless indispensable at the climax of the world drama.

  The 1920 company accounts told of rising sales and work on new premises and plant. The site was in Flinders Street, classic newspaper territory, on the fancier fringe of downtown: a five-floor building was to provide ample editorial spaces, mahogany directorial quarters, advanced graphics-processing, and five rows of the latest Goss machinery. (Fink and Wise, canvassing examples, drew considerably on the Chicago Tribune.)

  Melbourne’s market offered most potential: Hugh Denison of the Sydney Sun meant to invade, and Fink meant to repulse him. Both saw Murdoch as a desirable acquisition: the Anzacs’ saviour, admired by Northcliffe. (The Chief was by now eccentric enough to make his doorman head of advertising, but few comprehended his decline.) Keith adroitly kept his potential employers in the dark about each other. ‘My mind is clear,’ he wrote to Fink in September 1920, ‘that I would like to do the work … if I come as Editor of the Herald I am to have complete and absolute sole control over the [editorial] staff …’ While Fink was pressed for concessions, Denison was told he had the lead – being disabused (and enraged) in January 1921 when the Herald negotiations were complete.

  Northcliffe gave a farewell party, and in September the new editor disembarked at Melbourne. Smith’s Weekly, an astringent Sydney journal, reported Wise greeting him with a ‘ready-to-wear expression of cordiality’, and speculated about the general manager’s prospects. Soon after, the Chief arrived on a world tour, and congratulated the Herald directors on Murdoch: their remaining duty was simply to support him. Next spring, when Murdoch demanded sole executive power, the board took this prescription, and Wise disappeared. Murdoch sent Northcliffe thanks (saying ‘director after director’ had been lobbied). But the Chief’s mind collapsed before the letter arrived, and he died in August 1922, aged fifty-seven.

  In command Murdoch cultivated something of Northcliffe’s weighty manner – he liked to be called ‘Chief’ – but avoided the original’s captious arrogance. He dressed carefully to make the best of his regular features, firm handshake and level hazel eyes. His manners were excellent, and he knowledgeably collected paintings, wine, furniture and books. The stammering youth was gone, and Melbourne knew little of his London conspiracies. He was a war hero, and the rising star of a substantial, cultivated family.

  Naturally Monash and White were absent on 6 June 1928 when the Reverend Patrick Murdoch married his forty-two-year-old son to nineteen-year-old Elisabeth Greene, but General Harry Chauvel, dashing leader of the Light Horse, represented the Anzac connection, and the diva Nellie Melba shed glamour on an extensive congregation.

  Keith and Elisabeth settled at Frankston, south-east of Melbourne, on a spacious farm named after Cruden in Aberdeenshire, location of Patrick’s first ministry. Rupert Greene passed on grace and charm to his daughter. But he had a taste for gambling, which she hoped to eliminate in her offspring: they were to see her husband as their model. The children were principally her care, for Keith’s workload was heavy, and extended well beyond Melbourne.

  Grigg correctly identified Murdoch as a huge national presence. But it was less exact to call him the greatest ‘editor and newspaper entrepreneur’ in Australia’s history. The Herald continued efficiently, but he was not an editorial innovator – pioneers like the political analyst A. N. Smith and the financial investigator ‘Monty’ Grover operated elsewhere. Nor was he an ‘entrepreneur’, if that means a creator of businesses. Takeovers were his métier, in an industry undergoing drastic rationalisation after luxuriant growth. Between 1923 and 1933 the number of metropolitan newspaper operators fell from twenty-one to six. Murdoch was the Herald group’s tactician during this time; Fink the strategist, creator of a formidable financial and technical base. Their personal affection did not survive Wise’s fall. But they collaborated over twelve years and three principal campaigns.

  The first opponent was Denison, attacking with the Sun News-Pictorial – a bright morning alternative to Age and Argus grey – and then with an evening competitor for the Herald. The Sun found a profitable new readership; the evening, though it reached a creditable sale of 100,000, made no money in Herald territory. It closed in 1925, and Denison found his overheads crippling when borne by a single paper. Murdoch was authorised to buy the Sun, which slotted economically into the powerful Flinders Street plant. With Melbourne secured, Fink led a raid on Perth in Western Australia by a party of Herald directors. They bought, and sold profitably, an option over the West Australian. Murdoch managed the deal in return for an interest, which Fink thought provided his first substantial capit
al.

  Though personally rewarding, Perth was not a purposeful corporate scheme. But the 1928 attack on Adelaide and the Bonython family’s entrenched morning Advertiser certainly was. A tiny moribund competitor, the Register, was bought and put under Syd Deamer’s editorial control. The ex-pilot, an intemperate, selfmade intellectual – close to Fink, but sceptical of Murdoch’s wartime role – was a tough newsman. The Bonythons, lacking competitive stamina, sold the Advertiser for a million pounds in 1929. The Register died, and Deamer returned to Melbourne as Herald editor, Murdoch becoming editor-in-chief and managing director. James Davidson agreed simultaneously a share-swap option over his evening News. It was activated on his death in 1930.

  Connection to Queensland – Australia’s Deep North – began through an association with the extraordinary John Wren, who built his illegal gaming empire from a desperate punt on Carbine for the 1890 Melbourne Cup. Monty Grover’s riskiest target, Wren’s ill-fame survives in Power without Glory, Frank Hardy’s semi-fictional novel of Melbourne corruption. Diversifying to Queensland, Wren had acquired the Brisbane Daily Mail to run sporting promotions. Murdoch in the late 1920s bought its one rival, the Courier, and some of Wren’s Mail shares. It took four years to produce the desired outcome: a merged Courier-Mail, run by the Herald group, though Murdoch and the shareholders he brought in (Fink included) were a minority. Wren’s tacit and possibly unique admission was that he lacked the moral stature to function as a newspaper proprietor.

  Ten acquisitive years thus made the Herald group the chief force in Australian metropolitan journalism. Melbourne produced a challenge in 1933, when the Argus launched the Evening Star against the Herald – at a bad time for Murdoch, who was immobilised by heart trouble. Deamer, however, was as vigorous in defence as attack. Keeping a taut news cover, he moved the paper successfully upmarket, and in George Munster’s words it was sometimes ‘more reminiscent of the Manchester Guardian than the Daily Mail’. The Star died in 1936 without making any serious impression on the Herald.

  But when Murdoch returned from convalescence the tension between editor and editor-in-chief intensified sharply. The terminal incident profoundly impressed twelve-year-old Adrian Deamer: Syd burst into the house swearing he would never speak to Murdoch again. The phone rang, and Adrian’s mother announced that Sir Keith was calling. Syd hurled the phone through a window, and shortly after embarked the family for London, where other employment was found. Nobody knew just what had triggered the explosion, in which respect it resembled most rows involving Syd Deamer. But for once it had lasting consequences, because it occurred between men whose professional temperaments were profoundly opposed. To Murdoch, stories were a currency, and were most valuable when unpublished; by the 1930s he was an experienced practitioner of intrigue. Deamer’s professional interest lay entirely in the day’s disclosure, and whatever was on his mind reached his lips (or his newspaper) with virtually no delay.

  The Australian Labor Party (ALP)* appeared as the country’s natural rulers in Murdoch’s youth (when he considered editing a party newspaper). But conscription split the party, and Murdoch had discovered conservatism before repair-work enabled James Scullin to take power in 1929 – exactly as Wall Street crashed. Scullin had no experience of office, and just two colleagues with a little: E. G. (‘Red Ted’) Theodore, ex-Premier of Queensland, and J. A. (‘Honest Joe’) Lyons, ex-Premier of Tasmania. Red Ted was a brilliant self-taught preKeynesian, not unlike Huey Long. Honest Joe was a schoolteacher and financial ascetic. Distrust was mutual.

  On appointment as federal Treasurer Red Ted was accused of corruption – of having connections with John Wren. When he resigned to defend himself, Scullin made Lyons Acting Treasurer, and sailed for London to appease Australia’s creditors. Thirty years later Enid Lyons recalled the Melbourne lunch-party where Murdoch moved smoothly to divide the government:

  ‘Well, Mr Lyons, you will not be Acting Treasurer much longer. You will be Treasurer.’ Joe said he doubted it; he doubted even if he could wish to be. ‘Oh, but you will be. Scullin couldn’t do anything else after what you’ve done in his absence, and after the way he supported you from London. Don’t you think so, Mrs Lyons?’ he asked, turning to me …

  When Scullin found Red Ted freshened up sufficiently for reappointment, Lyons was upset – and aware of his potential outside the Australian Labor Party. Murdoch now helped the conservative Opposition’s leader reach the conclusion that his day was done – at which Honest Joe crossed over into the job. Scullin’s restored Treasurer treated the Depression with mild reflationary potions, and the Herald chain damned them as products of a shady financial background. Red Ted and Honest Joe were sternly contrasted throughout the 1931 election, with the result that Lyons’ victory over Labor was widely (furiously, by the unions) attributed to the Herald group.

  In 1934 Murdoch became Sir Keith, and Lyons ruled in public amity with the Herald till his death in 1939. But a private altercation over federal plans for broadcasting diversity foreshadows Rupert’s era of triple interplay between newspapers, government and electronic media. A limit of five radio licences for one company was proposed in 1935. Murdoch’s group had seven: the scheme, he wrote to Lyons, demonstrated personal hostility to him. Not so, Lyons replied over five handwritten pages (briefly extracted at the head of this chapter). The Cabinet had only gratitude for him and his papers. For many years, gratitude had been all a politician could give a newspaper. But Murdoch’s complaint and Lyons’ fawning reply suggest a relationship with exchange-value on both sides. The Herald kept its licences. But what happens to such assets when gratitude decays?

  Neither Fink nor Murdoch assembled a major block of the Herald’s dispersed equity, using their resources instead to take various personal positions when expeditions were mounted under the group banner, acting usually in concert, but with assorted outcomes. Brisbane, though Fink shared in it, was essentially a Murdoch personal operation. The negotiations in Adelaide were Murdoch’s, on behalf of the group. But Fink’s private papers (which he left to Melbourne University) suggest much of the planning was his – plausibly, given Deamer’s role.

  The ‘Murdoch press’, subject of Lyons’ affection and the unions’ distaste, was something of an illusion. The Courier-Mail, the Sun News-Pictorial, the Herald, the Advertiser, the News (and many appendages) operated as a group, helpfully to editorial costs and overheads. But Murdoch’s proprietorial control was limited to Brisbane. Within the Herald company, the relative influence of managing director and chairman depended on boardroom sentiment. During the mid-1930s Murdoch’s stock rose and Fink’s fell, as Theodore moved into his eighties without his editorial ally Syd Deamer. War then shattered a declining relationship.

  That the Second AIF volunteered with fewer martial illusions was not the only difference between 1939 and 1914. Rather than denouncing ‘England’s war’, the non-communist left worried about Robert Menzies, Lyons’ successor, sympathising with London’s appeasers. But Keith Murdoch’s enthusiasm for Prime Ministerial propaganda remained undimmed. In June 1940, undertaking to relinquish all his editorial powers meanwhile, he became Menzies’ DirectorGeneral of Information. He then asked Menzies for the means to correct media ‘mis-statements’, and received sweeping authority over the content of newspapers, magazines, radio and theatre. Outrage was universal – except among the Herald papers, allegedly now disconnected from Murdoch. They remained silent. Theodore Fink, eighty-five and unwell, called on the Herald directors to protest. Principles of editorial independence would be eroded, they said, were they to do so.

  Dissociating himself from his own company’s behaviour, Fink called the Murdoch regulations ‘an infringement of the rights and liberties of the public’. His words were published everywhere – except in the ‘Murdoch press’. Public opinion fiercely supported Fink, and Menzies jettisoned the Director-General’s astonishing programme. Murdoch resigned in November and rejoined the board – perhaps a bittersweet victory for Fink, as its swiftness minimis
ed the damage to Murdoch’s reputation. On Anzac Day 1942 Theodore died, and Sir Keith succeeded.

  The regular portrait of Sir Keith as author of Australia’s first great media enterprise is over-coloured. Clearly he had a leading role, but even leaving Theodore Fink aside people like Davidson and Deamer were also significant and often more creative. Between Menzies’ fall in 1942 and his restoration in 1949 Murdoch had little leverage in federal politics, for Curtin and Chifley, the intervening Labor men, despised him. But within the Herald group his personality expanded throughout the 1940s. His dress and manner were imposing – rather imperial, by local standards and he usually had a promising young reporter assigned as his aide, to dispatch cases of wine to contacts, run confidential errands and tote his evening dress.

  He apparently personified the company, so that people often took him for its owner, and nicknamed him ‘Lord Southcliffe’. But his eminence owed much to the exclusion of the Fink era from corporate memory. Long-lived newspapers usually celebrate their history – but after the Second World War a distinguished career could be spent in the Herald building without discovering the men who had planned it. John Fitzgerald, one of Sir Keith’s aides in 1950, rose by 1972 to the editor’s office; there, he found an anonymous photograph of an elderly man. Eventually he identified Theodore Fink.

  In 1995 – by then under Newscorp control – the papers left Flinders Street for a new tower block, and corporate publicity celebrated the bold physical investment on which seventy years of profitable publishing had been based. It was credited wholly to Keith, who had not even been in Melbourne when the work was set in train. In 1998 Professor Don Garden published a life of Theodore, using his private papers. People who had worked years for the business were intrigued – even moved – by its contents. But they found it reviewed only in non-Murdoch newspapers, of which few by then remained. People are often ‘painted out of history’ figuratively. But here there is a literal echo. In 1928 the portraitist Sir John Longstaff executed a painting of Theodore Fink for the Flinders Street boardroom. After Theodore’s death it vanished, and has not since been seen.