Sydney, 7 August 1981. Flashguns strobed as Rupert Murdoch led his mother up the red and purple carpet for the black-tie premiere of his first feature film as producer: Gallipoli. The date had been chosen for the sharpest possible significance: Rupert’s Weekend Australian stressed in its front-page coverage of the premiere that it was “exactly 66 years after the bloody struggle”, the Battle of the Nek, recreated as the final scene of the movie. Although Rupert’s father did not feature in the film, the newspaper photograph showed Keith Murdoch staring out, serious but dashing in officer’s uniform as a war correspondent, above the beaming smiles of a young Mel Gibson and his co-star Mark Lee. The legend next to the photograph pointed to the “Gallipoli letter that stunned Australia”, reprinted in its 8000-word entirety in the magazine section. Following this lavishly illustrated spread came two glowing film reviews. This was the first, and — as it transpired — the only production from Associated R & R Films.

The film’s plot delivered a three-act tragedy. In outback Australia two young athletes answer the recruitment call drilled into them by the press and Kipling’s tales. Training in Egypt, they bond over larrikin anti-English japes and the sowing of their wild oats. Finally at the hellish warzone, they are sacrificed by incompetent colonial commanders in a diversionary action while the British are “just sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea”.

One otherwise glowing review from outside the Murdoch stable conceded that those “who resent emotional manipulation will be affronted by this film”. The charge of propaganda was not only levelled at the film; it has been levelled against Keith’s famous “Gallipoli letter” of a generation before. It is the letter that made his career, and has been woven into an untouchable myth. It’s a myth that Rupert has deployed to deflect criticism of the sharper edges of his own career — a myth that has overshadowed Keith’s darker legacy.

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In 1915 colonial lines of communication and control, centred in London, meant that even Australia’s prime minister and its minister for defence had been kept in the dark about the movements of the AIF; they were not informed of the plan to land at Gallipoli until after the event. However as the weeks went by they feared the worst. The blunt facts of high casualty rates for little or no apparent gain flew in the face of the upbeat official and heavily censored press reports. The PM and defence minister, George Foster Pearce, wanted an inside account of the campaign’s management and a realistic assessment of its prospects. Keith saw his chance and suggested that he could do so under the guise of investigating mail arrangements and provisions for the wounded in Egypt. Pearce agreed.

The letters of introduction Keith took with him were acknowledgments of his position and indicators of the possibilities their authors saw for his ability to act for them. Most crucially Pearce gave Keith a letter that introduced him to Sir Ian Hamilton, the British commander of the Dardanelles campaign. Fisher also wrote to David Lloyd George, the ambitious, recently appointed minister for munitions, stressing that Keith was now the representative of “a very influential cable service for several important newspapers in Australia”.

Arriving in Cairo in mid-August Keith investigated the mail arrangements and hospital conditions for the Australian wounded recuperating there. A copy of the Sunday Sun, which contained the launch publicity for A Hero of the Dardanelles, was put to good use as the centrepiece of an inspiring photograph of the men on their ward, sent back to Sydney on the next ship south. However Keith soon wrote to Hamilton, enclosing Pearce’s letter and requesting permission to visit the Anzac force on the Gallipoli peninsula. He stressed he would be going across “in only a semi-official capacity, so that [he] may record censored impressions in the London and Australian newspapers” he represented.

Keith also emphasised (in a line that would become infamous given his subsequent actions) that “any conditions you impose I should of course, faithfully observe”. To this he added a few more lines of praise and the passionate plea: “May I say that my anxiety as an Australian to visit the sacred shores of Gallipoli while our army is there is intense.”

Hamilton hesitated to let him go but was persuaded by his insistence that he would accept military censorship. In his diary a month after their meeting, when the first rumblings of Murdoch’s actions reached him, Hamilton wrote: “All I remember of his visit to me here is a sensible, well-spoken man with dark eyes, who said his mind was a blank about soldiers and soldiering”; he had entered into “an elaborate explanation of why his duty to Australia could be better done with a pen than a rifle”.

Keith landed at Gallipoli on 3 September 1915. Morale was desperately low following the disastrous August offensive. Keith spent the next three and a half days walking “many miles through the trenches”, speaking with soldiers and whatever officers he could find. Hamilton would later snipe that Keith had spent one week at the press correspondents’ camp on the Island of Imbros and only a few days at Anzac Cove and Suvla.

Whatever were the actual days or hours spent with the soldiers, it was Keith’s meeting with Ashmead-Bartlett at the press camp on Imbros that most informed the terms of his subsequent actions. The British correspondent was a flamboyant and volatile personality. He had initially supported the British strategy but had recently been hauled over the coals by the War Office for spreading disillusion and boasting of his machinations to remove Hamilton from command. In the version of events agreed by the pair, Ashmead-Bartlett said that Keith, feeling his own word would not “carry sufficient weight with the authorities”, had begged him to write a letter “telling the plain truth” about the campaign. Keith would then carry the letter secretly back to London, so evading the censorship restrictions. Ashmead-Bartlett went straight to the top, addressing his letter to the British prime minister Herbert Asquith. It detailed the “true state of affairs out here”, the incompetence of the command, the collapse in the morale of the troops and the dire prospect of the winter conditions to come.

Hamilton, having got wind of the plot, managed to cable ahead so that at Marseilles the sealed envelope was seized from Keith by military police. But Keith had absorbed the pessimistic outlook and bitter criticisms of this “most ghastly and costly fiasco”: of the appalling waste of life, of “muddles and mismanagement”, “the absolute lack of confidence in all ranks in the Headquarters staff”, and how the “splendid Colonial Corps” had been “almost wiped out”. Combining Ashmead-Bartlett’s views with his own brief observations, Keith decided to compose his own letter, to his own prime minister.

Having arrived in London from Gallipoli with information about what was happening there, Keith was in demand. With barely a chance to settle in at the United Cable Service office housed in the Times building, he was whisked off for lunch with the newspaper’s powerful editor, Geoffrey Dawson. It was later claimed that Northcliffe, hearing that an Australian journalist was on his way to London from the Dardanelles, said, “He may prove to be the lever we want.” In line with the anti-second-front strategy views of its proprietor, the Times sought to expose the true course of the campaign and refocus energies on fighting the Western Front. Dawson was “moved by the sincerity and vividness” of the “word pictures” Keith painted of organisational debacles and dire conditions. In a flurry of letters and meetings, the cogs started to bite. Keith retold his story to Sir Edward Carson, chairman of the British Cabinet’s Dardanelles committee.

Keith was embarking on a fine balancing act. He wanted to account for a complete military failure while upholding the reputation of the Australian troops in their first engagement as a force, apportioning the blame solely to the British commanders. By extolling the virtues of the Australian soldiers in a letter that, though nominally to the Australian PM, would be read by the most influential and powerful figures in the British government, he sought to promote the standing of his countrymen (and by association, his own standing).

He began his letter with the words: “I shall talk as if you were by my side” and over the 25 typed pages that followed, his language became increasingly emotional. Complicated issues were dramatically over-simplified. “Australians now loathe and detest any Englishman wearing red”, he wrote; the “countless high officers and conceited young cubs” were “plainly only playing at War”; and sedition was “talked round every tin of bully beef on the peninsula”. Although Keith disclaimed any military knowledge, General Hamilton was described as having completely failed as a strategist. The prescription was straightforward: undoubtedly the essential and first step to restore the morale of the shaken forces was to recall the general and his chief of staff.

However, Keith did not suggest abandoning the campaign and evacuating the peninsula. Since the Australian divisions would “strongly resent” the confession of failure that a withdrawal would entail, he hoped the cabinet would hang on through the winter for another offensive, or for peace. “The new offensive must be made with a huge army of new troops. Can we get them?”

Keith’s overriding priority was the protection of the Australian forces both in strength and reputation. He assured the prime minister that although they were “dispirited”, having “been through such warfare as no army has seen in any part of the world”, they were “game to the end”. Keith was placing the Australians on the highest of pedestals. Historian Charles Bean would later observe that during the war: “Murdoch’s admiration of the Australian soldiery rose almost to worship.” By contrast, the lowly Tommies were “toy soldiers” showing “an atrophy of mind and body that is appalling … childlike youths without strength to endure or brains to improve their conditions”. Their cowardice, anathema to the Australian troops it would seem, had led to an order “to shoot without mercy any soldiers who lagged behind or loitered in advance”. (This was a claim that Keith would regret the following year when pressed to substantiate it before the Commission held to probe the Dardanelles campaign.)

The Australian stock was eulogised as “all of good parentage”:

“But I could pour into your ears so much truth about the grandeur of our Australian army, and the wonderful affection of these fine young soldiers for each other and their homeland, that your Australianism would become a more powerful sentiment than before. It is stirring to see them, magnificent manhood, swinging their fine limbs as they walk about Anzac. They have the noble faces of men who have endured. Oh, if you could picture Anzac as I have seen it, you would find that to be an Australian is the greatest privilege the world has to offer.”

To protect reputations and morale Keith advised Fisher to take up the case of Sir John Maxwell, the English commander overseeing Australian recruits in Egypt. Keith had been incensed at Maxwell’s reaction to the Australians who had been rioting in the Whasa brothel district of Cairo: Maxwell had described their actions as “wilful murder”. Keith insisted that “only a very few of our men” had “burnt some houses in which they had been drugged and diseased”, and he accused Maxwell of attacking the good name of our “clean and vigorous army”. The men’s reputation was “too sacred to leave in the hands of” those who would undermine it with unpalatable truths. It was naive — he had been shocked by his first experience of the reality of warfare — but also cynical. It was a tool of persuasion.

To convey immediacy and paint the scene for his readers back home Keith dwelt on the men’s bodies in evocative articles, experimenting with writing in the first person present tense. Praise was wrapped in self-deprecatory rhetoric. Though he did not “wish to idealise the Australian soldier”, the contrast “between him and other fighters” was so great “that the tendency everywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean” was “to worship him as a super-type”. For those enlisting, “tales of hardship from Anzac act more as a magnet than as a repeller”.

Two days after sending his letter to Fisher Keith sent a copy to British prime minister Herbert Asquith. Asquith could see the close relationship between the newly arrived cable manager and the Australian prime minister. Keith clearly had a position of trust at the heart of the Australian government, and he could be candid in discussing issues about which others might have been more reticent.  As the former war correspondent and military historian Sir Max Hastings says: “Boy, Keith Murdoch understood how to promote Keith Murdoch.”

Asquith circulated copies of the letter to the War Cabinet. Keith’s letter was being read by those at the highest level in the world of the press as well as politics.

Within a week the British prime minister was backing away from a letter that he described as being “largely composed of gossip and second-hand statements”. Winston Churchill believed that Hamilton should not be troubled with “defending himself from the malicious charges of an irresponsible newspaper man”. Churchill had forwarded Asquith a note from the editor of the Daily Chronicle who had met with Keith and “was not much impressed”:

“When I questioned him on details of his report he gave me rather evasive replies. It is quite obvious that he had not seen the things which he described, nor has any personal knowledge of the men he condemned. His information was largely secondhand.”

Writing a few days later to Lord Murray with a copy of his report to Fisher, Keith was almost apologetic — not for dissembling but for putting his case with “perhaps excessive frankness”. However, he had “lived long enough in the world to know that reforms are secured only after heavy jottings”.

* This is an extract from Before Rupert: Keith Murdoch and the birth of a dynasty by Tom D. C. Roberts