David J Black: Origin story

David J Black

Fans of the brilliant, yet chilling, HBO series Succession seem to assume that the part of merciless Logan Roy, played to terrifying perfection by Brian Cox, is a thinly disguised portrayal of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch. If so, they really don’t know the half of it.

Rupert, raised at Cruden Farm, in Australia’s South Yarra Valley, was much influenced in his early years by his long-lived Scottish grandfather, the Reverend Patrick Murdoch, one-time Presbyterian church minister of Cruden Bay, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.

Curiously, that remote area of the ancient county of Buchan had another noted media link. From time to time the minister and his wife Annie would visit the store run by Rab Forbes, whose son, Bertie ended up in New York, where he founded Forbes Magazine in 1907. Bertie’s more famous son, Malcolm, would go on to become a wealthy playboy publisher and motorcycle enthusiast who dated, among others, Elizabeth Taylor. Like his father, he would return to the ancestral home often, where he would play host to the locals in the Cruden Bay hotel and act out his role as the Laird of Pitsligo Castle.

The Revered Murdoch, the black-robed incumbent of the local kirk, was often to be seen walking deep in contemplation around the windswept landscape overlooking the North Sea. There he would inevitably come across another bat-like character immersed in his own thoughts, by these same storm-lashed cliffs. This was his equally contemplative contemporary, the Irish writer and theatre manager, Bram Stoker, who had arrived in Cruden Bay in search of literary inspiration.

Could it be that the sight of that lone black-clad clergyman stalking around Buchan’s blasted landscape planted the germ of an idea in Stoker’s mind which later became his most famous creation – Count Dracula! If so, what does that tell us about the Murdoch empire and News International, or indeed Logan Roy?

Maybe it’s best not to think about it.