Frank H. Murdoch was born on March 11, 1843, at Chelsea, Massachusetts, the eldest of the six children of George Frank Hitchcock and Mary Murdoch, and the eighth in descent from Luke Hitchcock, a shoemaker, who took the freeman's oath at New Haven in 1644 and died in Wethersfield, field, Connecticut, in 1659.
In 1861, through the interest of his uncle, James Edward Murdoch, whose name he adopted, he secured employment at the Arch Street Theatre, Philadelphia, of which Louisa Lane Drew had just become manager. He remained with her company, playing juvenile and light comedy parts, until his death.
Four plays are ascribed to him. Of The Keepers of Lighthouse Cliff the time and place of production are unknown; David Belasco, however, told William Winter that James A. Herne had acted in it and had lifted from it the climax of Shore Acres. Only a Jew was produced by John T. Raymond, February 24, 1873, at the Globe Theatre, Boston, three months after Murdoch's death. A flimsy, impossible little comedy of parted lovers and a stolen will, it was rendered entertaining and even charming by the novel scenes in a pawnshop and by the sweet amiableness of Nathan Rosenthal, the deus ex machina of the piece.
As Murdoch was acting in Philadelphia at the time, he did not see the production of his Davy Crockett, which he wrote for Frank Mayo, at the Opera House, Rochester, New York, September 23, 1872. It was received somewhat tepidly, but Mayo believed in the piece, wrote encouragingly to its author, continued to tinker the script, and from time to time tried it out on audiences. After a few years it gained favor and for two decades it was immensely popular. To the actual Davy Crockett the play owed only its name, but to Scott's ballad of young Lochinvar and to the youthful Natty Bumpo of the Deerslayer it owed almost everything. An idyl of the backwoods, its famous scenes showed Davy barring the door with his arm while wolves gnawed their way almost through the floor and wall of the log-cabin, and later confessing bashfully to his cultured sweetheart that he could not read or write. Hamlin Garland has testified to the relief felt by the spectators when the girl offered to teach Davy his letters. Critics pining for an autochthonous drama beheld great virtues in what was essentially a piece of claptrap.
Murdoch himself took the part of Bob Tangent, a "sensation writer, " in his fourth play, Bohemia, or The Lottery of Art, which was put on for the usual week's run at the Arch Street Theatre October 28, 1872, and which was ascribed on the program to a "young gentleman of Philadelphia. " Intended for a satire on the venality and unscrupulousness of dramatic critics, and motivated perhaps by newspaper treatment of his wife, a member of the Arch Street company, Murdoch mixed too much indignation with his humor, and the result was a flat failure. The critics, impenitent and unabashed, made the most of the situation.
Although they attributed the play to Barton Hill, Mrs. Drew's leading man, and praised Murdoch's own acting warmly, the young author was deeply grieved. He was still brooding over his fiasco when he was stricken twelve days later with meningitis and died on November 13, 1872, after a brief illness.
Frank H. Murdoch was a modest, agreeable young man with a good sense of his vocation and ambition for honors as a dramatist.
Frank H. Murdoch was marreid to Jennie Workman.
