Some famous Murdochs

MURDOCH, JOHN, b. 1748?, Robert Burn's teacher. John was employed by five families of Alloway, Ayrshire to educate their children in the little school there. He lodged with each of the families in turn and received a modest salary. When Robert Burns was around seven years old his teacher was 18. John's strict methods of teaching resulted in much being added to Scottish Culture. In later life, after Burns fame had spread, John admitted that he had failed to see the full potential of the young Robert!

In his mid-20s, William walked all the way from Ayrshire to the Birmingham Soho works of the great James Watt and Matthew Boulton on spec of getting employment. Watt was abscent at the time of William's interview. Nervously, William dropped his top hat which appeared rather heavy. Boulton enquired and on hearing that it had been made on a lathe which William had built himself he was given a job there and then!

It was soon realised what a genius William was and he was sent off to Cornwall to tend to the company's steam engine business in the tin mines. In 1785 he built the first road going 'car' - a steam tricycle which terrorised the inhabitants of Redruth. William wanted to mount a steam 'car' on rails but his company told him moving engines couldn't possibly have any future - and it didn't, for another 30 years.

He continued to experiment with coal gas. Around 1795 he had managed to light his house in Redruth by gas. In 1802 the company factory in Birmingham had it's front lit for the treaty of Amiens. The first big order was for a 1000 burner system for a Manchester factory. By 1813 Westminster Bridge in London was lit up.

William is probably unique among Murdochs by being declared a Deity. Nassred-din, Shah of Persia believed he must have been the re-incarnation of Marduk god of light!

Decent urban light had a dramatic effect of society. For the first time it became relatively safe to go out after dark. The world was never the same again.

After performing with amateur groups in Philadelphia, Murdoch made his successful debut at the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, in Lovers' Vows by August von Kotzebue. Following an unsalaried season with the company, he traveled about North America, playing with various companies. In 1832, when he was emerging as an important actor, he mistakenly took arsenic for medicine and was a semi-invalid thereafter.

For the next 60 years Murdoch was on the stage irregularly, yet he managed to establish a reputation and was highly regarded during the 19th century as both a tragedian and a comedian. In 1833 he played again at the Chestnut Street Theatre, with Fanny Kemble, one of England's leading actresses, who was then on tour in the United States. Twenty years later he performed with Joseph Jefferson, one of the outstanding figures of the American stage, in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's masterpiece The School for Scandal; in such plays Murdoch was considered to be the finest light comedian of his day. His appearance at the new Metropolitan Theatre, San Francisco, about that same time helped the establishment of fine theatre on the West Coast. He appeared in England in 1856, and his successful performances at the Haymarket Theatre, London, were noted in the Autobiography of Jefferson, who paid him great tribute. His style was marked by superb elocution, finesse, and naturalness.

Murdoch came out of retirement in 1861 to entertain and perform benefits for the American Civil War wounded. His last appearance was at a dramatic festival in Cincinnati in 1883. Among his most popular roles were Mirabell (in William Congreve's Way of the World) and Mercutio and Orlando (in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It, respectively). His book The Stage; or, Recollections of Actors and Acting was published in 1880.

Britannica CD 98 ® Multimedia Edition © 1994-1998. Ency. Brit. Web Site

Each year at his old school students at Dalbeattie High proudly compete for the Murdoch Memorial Prize.

Now ... in a current block buster movie a different story is being portrayed. This is strongly challenged by relatives of William. The Internet site which tells the true story should be visited: William McMaster Murdoch - Hero of the Titanic .

After an early childhood spent in London, Murdoch went to Badminton School, Bristol, and from 1938 to 1942 studied at Somerville College, Oxford. Between 1942 and 1944 she worked in the British Treasury and then for two years as an administrative officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. In 1948 she was elected a fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford.

Murdoch's first published work was a critical study, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953). This was followed by two novels, Under the Net (1954) and The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), that were admired for their intelligence, wit, and high seriousness. These qualities, along with a rich comic sense and a gift for analyzing the tensions and complexities in sophisticated sexual relationships, continued to distinguish her work. With what is perhaps her finest book, The Bell (1958), Murdoch began to attain wide recognition as a novelist. She went on to a highly prolific career with such novels as A Severed Head (1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and the Good (1968), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976), The Sea, The Sea (1978), The Philosopher's Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and The Brotherhood (1987), and The Message to the Planet (1989).

Murdoch's novels typically have convoluted plots in which innumerable characters representing different philosophical positions undergo kaleidoscopic changes in their relations with each other. Realistic observations of 20th-century life among middle-class professionals are interwoven with extraordinary incidents that partake of the macabre, the grotesque, and the wildly comic. The novels illustrate Murdoch's conviction that although human beings think they are free to exercise rational control over their lives and behaviour, they are actually at the mercy of the unconscious mind, the determining effects of society at large, and other, more inhuman, forces. In addition to producing novels, Murdoch wrote plays, verse, and works of philosophy and literary criticism.

Britannica CD 98 ® Multimedia Edition © 1994-1998. Ency. Brit. Web Site

The son of Sir Keith Murdoch (1886-1952), a famous Australian war correspondent and publisher, Murdoch studied at Worcester College, Oxford (M.A., 1953), and briefly worked as an editor on Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express, where he first gained practical experience in the sensationalist journalism that would be a major influence early in his career as a publisher. His father having died, he returned to Australia in 1954 to take over his inheritance, the Sunday Mail and The News, both of Adelaide; he quickly converted the latter into a paper dominated by news of sex and scandal, often writing its banner headlines himself. The News's circulation soared, and he then went about instituting similar changes in papers that he bought in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

By the time that Murdoch acquired his first British newspaper in 1969--the News of the World of London--he had put together a proven formula for boosting circulation, which entailed an emphasis on crime, sex, scandal, and human-interest stories with boldface headlines, prolific sports reporting, and outspokenly conservative editorializing. This formula was successful with both the News of the World and The Sun, a London daily that he acquired the following year.

In 1973 Murdoch entered the American newspaper business by purchasing two San Antonio, Texas, dailies, one of which--the San Antonio News (later the Express-News)--he transformed into a sex-and-scandal sheet that soon dominated the city's afternoon market. In 1974 he introduced a national weekly sensationalist tabloid, the Star, and in 1976 he purchased the afternoon tabloid New York Post, but in the late 1980s he sold both, profitably; he repurchased the Post in 1993. He also purchased the Boston Herald American from the Hearst Corporation in 1982 and changed the name to the Boston Herald (sold 1994). He bought TV Guide in 1988. Overall in the 1980s and '90s he bought and later sold a number of American publications--such as the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York City Village Voice, and New York magazine. Among Murdoch's diverse publications were a number of more conventional and respected newspapers, such as The Times of London and the Sunday Times (both acquired in 1981) and the Australian (a national daily that he established in 1964). Murdoch took residence in the United States in 1974 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985, based in New York City.

In the 1980s and '90s Murdoch amassed major holdings in other communications ventures, including radio and television stations and video, film, and record companies, as well as book publishing. In 1985 he acquired Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation and bought several independent American television stations from Metromedia, Inc., consolidating both these ventures into a new company, Fox, Inc. He bought the Australian news group The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. in 1987. He thereafter purchased a number of book-publishing companies--including, in the United States, the prestigious Harper & Row Publishers (1987), the religious publisher Zondervan (1988), and the giant textbook and trade publisher Scott, Foresman & Company (1989), and, in the United Kingdom, the venerable William Collins PLC (1989); these companies and some operations in Australia and New Zealand were merged in 1990 as HarperCollins Publishers. In Britain in 1989 Murdoch inaugurated Sky Television, a four-channel satellite service, which merged with the rival British Satellite Broadcasting in 1990 to become British Sky Broadcasting.

This heady expansion burdened Murdoch's international media conglomerate with a heavy debt, which he reduced by selling off New York, Seventeen, the Daily Racing Form, and several other American magazines. In 1993 he purchased Star TV, a pan-Asian television service based in Hong Kong, as part of his plan to build a global television network. In 1995 the News Corporation entered into a partnership with MCI Communications Corporation, a major provider of long-distance telecommunications services in the United States.

Britannica CD 98 ® Multimedia Edition © 1994-1998. Ency. Brit. Web Site

Originally Wullie was the creation of Dudley D. Watkins (1907-1969), an absolute genius in the field of cartoon art. These days the strips are drawn by Ken Harrison.

Aye, an' lang may yer lum reek!