Murdoch remained in London to learn what he could about popular journalism from Lord Northcliffe, “the greatest figure who ever strode down Fleet Street,” in the words of his great rival Lord Beaverbrook. Northcliffe owned the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail and, by 1915, was the chief proprietor of the Times of London. “God made people read,” he famously said, “so that I can fill their brains with facts, facts, facts—and later tell them whom to love, whom to hate, and what to think.” He believed in profit rather than in public service, and the mixture he sold was both heady and popular: crime, sex, money, health tips. An enthusiastic humiliator of underlings, Northcliffe expected office boys to stand when he entered the room. Signing his correspondence “Lord Vigour and Venom,” he spied on senior staff and had their telephones tapped. “He used his newspapers as instruments of political power and political blackmail,” Hugh Cudlipp, a Welsh newspaperman of a later generation, wrote. Murdoch valued the monomaniacal Northcliffe as a friend, but worried, he said, about his habit of making employees feel like “the puppets of his will.” Yet, when Murdoch returned to Australia to revamp the Melbourne Herald, he promptly earned the sobriquet Lord Southcliffe.