Melbourne marked an interesting milestone last week when one of the city’s most eccentric entrepreneurs, Gary Morgan, along with his family business, Roy Morgan Research,  celebrated their 70th birthdays.

Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu briefly fronted a Collins Street lunch on Friday to celebrate the occasion, perhaps reflecting the fact that the Morgan and Baillieu families go back a long way in Melbourne through business and the media. And when you throw in the Murdoch family, the ties that bind are even deeper.

It all started in 1852 when William Williams, Gary Morgan’s great grandfather, joined The Herald as a printer. In 1902, one year before Sir Keith Murdoch got his start as Malvern reporter for The Age, another Morgan relative, Alfred Massina, joined with Theodore Fink and WL Baillieu to form The Herald & Weekly Times Ltd.

Massina was the initial chairman but it was directors and financiers Fink and Baillieu who were later responsible for the emergence of Sir Keith Murdoch as a towering HWT figure in the 1920s, a development that has had profound implications for many people the world over. Just ask Hugh Grant, the Dowler family or Julia Gillard.

The Age’s gossip columnist Suzanne Carbone produced an item about Gary and Roy Morgan Research’s milestones on Friday, which included the following:

“Roy Morgan conducted the first Australian Gallup poll in 1941 on ‘equal pay for men and women’ and then in the 1980s came the “Worm”, the audience measurement system that became famous in the 1993 election debate between Paul Keating and John Hewson.

“When Morgan stood for lord mayor in 2008, he found out what the public thought of him. In a poll, Robert Doyle had a popularity rating of 26.5 per cent and Morgan languished on 3.5 per cent. The pollster was labelled a loud-mouthed egomaniac but someone who could shake things up. When he stood against John So in 2004, Rupert Murdoch told him: ‘God help Melbourne if you’re elected.'”

“The city isn’t out of the woods yet because Morgan is ‘seriously considering’ standing next year. ‘Life begins at 70. I’ve only just started,’ he said. Look out!”

Despite the family histories that saw Roy Morgan occupying the office adjacent to Sir Keith Murdoch inside the HWT building for many years, the Roy Morgan newspaper readership survey has long caused a tempestuous relationship with Murdoch’s Australian arm. Indeed, under John Hartigan, News Ltd ultimately financed Newspaper Works to try and establish a competitor — so far without results. Understandably, advertisers insisted on the need for independent measurement.

While Newspoll and Roy Morgan are competitors in the research and polling space, historical and family milestones should still be recognised. As this paper by Gary Morgan demonstrates, Roy Morgan played an important role in building and developing HWT during the latter part of Sir Keith Murdoch’s 30-year reign at the top of the company, which ended with his death in October 1952.

Many former and current HWT and News Ltd employees, along with Murdoch family members, have acknowledged this history during the recent celebrations. Indeed, people such as Terry McCrann, Andrew McKay, Des Keegan, Bob Gordon and Dulcie Boling attended Friday’s lunch at Roy Morgan’s Collins Street conference centre.

When Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu also dropped by, it prompted Gary Morgan to reflect on all these old Morgan, Baillieu and Murdoch family connections.

I sat next to former Herald Sun editor Bruce Guthrie at the lunch and was amused when he commented that current HWT managing director Peter Blunden would bristle at the mere mention of Morgan’s name. Blunden felt Morgan’s readership figures always fell short of the mark during his stewardship of the Herald Sun. Interestingly, they went up under Guthrie.

Lo and behold, anyone who picked up Saturday’s Herald Sun and got to page 80 discovered a stinging editorial attack on Ted Baillieu, headlined “Victoria stalls as Ted fiddles”.

In a week when he’d unveiled some far-reached legislation to establish an independent anti-corruption watchdog, Ted Baillieu was being blasted for “stagnation” and “waffle” that could only be sorted by some “jobs summit”.

Surely this extraordinary attack couldn’t have been sparked by the crime of Ted Baillieu attending Roy Morgan’s 70th birthday? When asked about this theory, Herald Sun editor-in-chief Phil Gardner replied: “A daily newspaper’s job is to hold the government of the day to account, whatever the hue. And the claim by your unidentified source is laughable. And a fabrication.”

In Blunden’s defence, Herald Sun marketing columnist Ray Beattie did note some of the history when he observed the following on December 9:

“In 1940 Sir Keith Murdoch (father of Rupert) sent his bright young accountant, Roy Morgan, to the US to find out about opinion polls from Dr George Gallup, founding father of the industry.

“When he returned, Morgan was Australia’s leading — only — expert on the subject and immediately was put to work researching for this paper’s ancestors, the Melbourne Herald group.

“In the spring of 1941, three months before Pearl Harbour, Murdoch set Morgan the task of measuring a “reader interest survey” for the Sydney Sun. It was Australia’s first ‘Gallup’ opinion poll.

“Political polling was tricky in the middle of a fierce war, but after it ended Morgan applied the Gallup method to pick the winning party for the next five federal elections from 1946 to 1954, within a margin of 1%.

“The Roy Morgan Research Centre became independent in 1959, though it received housing, power and postage from The Herald until 1973.”

News Corp, of course, bought HWT 14 years later in 1987 as Rupert claimed his birthright, and the colourful Morgan and Murdoch families have been competing vigorously in the polling and research space ever since.