THE MURDOCH METHOD

How a family business remade the news.

- ANDREW O'HAGAN

St. Bride's, situated in an alley just off Fleet Street, is known as the journalists' church. Having weathered not a few disasters the Great Fire of London, in 1666, the Luftwaffe in 1940-it now advertises itself as "A Space for Silence," offering an hour of contemplation each weekday afternoon, yards from the world's most famous newspaper street.

On a recent rain-soaked day, I arrived to find only one umbrella in the porch bucket and a church filled with lit candles and the chill of old sermons. In the left aisle was a book of remembrance honoring media workers who died in the line of duty, titled "Truth at All Costs." Just behind it, wooden pews displayed commemorative plaques.

"Sir Keith "Murdoch," one read. "A great journalist.' Murdoch, the son of a Scottish clergyman, was, for a while, a managing editor of the United Cable Service, an Australian overseas news agency. Based in London in 1915, he was posted to Turkey to cover that front of the World War. On September 23rd, he wrote to the Australian Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, fearfully anticipating a winter offensive and the imminent slaughter of thousands of young men. Murdoch's detailed report later known as the Gallipoli Letter exposed the way incompetent British officers were herding Australasian soldiers to their deaths. "I shall talk as if you were by my side," he typed on the first page, marked "Personal." He described visiting positions in Suvla Bay, wandering for miles through trenches, interviewing whatever leaders and officers he could. Many young men, he reported, were sent to the front lines without water, and were dying of thirst.

Others were treated just as cavalierly.

"To fling them, without even the element of surprise, against such trenches as the Turks make, was murder," he wrote.