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 irascible media mogul. 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 John Murdoch, who was born in Pitsligo Free Church Manse in 1850 to the Reverend James and Helen Murdoch, née Garden. Patrick served as the Presbyterian church minister of Cruden Bay, in Aberdeenshire from 1878. He emigrated to Victoria, Australia, in 1884 along with his parents, brother Walter, and newly acquired wife Annie. Apart from spending a night in jail for contempt of court after refusing to hand over a document in a libel case in 1909, he enjoyed great success as a career Presbyterian, eventually becoming moderator-general of the Presbyterian Church of Australia.

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 Robert 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, playing host to the locals in the Cruden Bay hotel in his role of Laird of Pitsligo Castle.

But back to the Reverend Murdoch, the black-robed incumbent of the local kirk, who was often to be seen walking deep in contemplation around the windswept landscape overlooking the North Sea. There, by these same storm-lashed cliffs, your scrivener would like to fancifully imagine he came across another sinister character immersed in his own thoughts. This was his equally contemplative contemporary, the Irish writer and theatre manager, Bram Stoker, creator of Dracula, who visited Cruden Bay on numerous occasions in search of literary inspiration, and was so absorbed in his inner creative process that, according to his wife, Florence, he “seemed to get obsessed by the spirit of the thing, (and) would sit for hours, like a great bat, perched on the rocks of the shore, or wander alone up and down the sand hills thinking it all out”.

Bram Stoker

Stoker, a close friend of the actor Henry Irving, shared with that giant of the stage a belief in “passing a character through one’s own mind” by adopting that same character’s personality traits, which in the case of Count Dracula were not very nice ones. Bram spent a great deal of time engaged in this early version of method acting, scaring the locals in his eagerness to hone up on the old vampire’s more nasty crepuscular habits, though it seems unlikely he ever slept in a coffin of earth in the local Kilmarnock Arms Hotel, which still exists (reasonable rates; dog friendly). Your scrivener isn’t sure whether it still serves up a recipe created by Mrs Stoker – a dish of interleaved plum and tomatoes awash in their own juice popularly known as Dracula’s salad.

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 – the ultimate kenspeckle loon, with fangs to die for! If so, what does that tell us about the Murdoch empire and News International, or indeed Logan Roy?

The answer to that question is, most infuriatingly, probably not very much, for it seems the Reverend Murdoch and his family flock had quit the neighbourhood (a dead ringer for Transylvania, in Stoker’s mind) shortly before the sinister actor manager commenced his many visits there, though we can’t be absolutely sure. It’s possible, off course, that the Reverend Patrick or members of his family may have made return visits to the childhood scene during Stoker’s time there, much as Logan Roy made a visit to his old childhood haunt of Dundee, a sort of Transylvania sur mer, you might say. Or that locals who remembered the Murdochs may have regaled Bram with fire and brimstone tales of the preacher and his flapping back cape taking the air on his favourite cliffside walk.

Tragically, none of this could be made to stand up in a court of law, so we’ll just have to treat it as informed speculation, or at the very least a damned good story which must on no account be spoilt.