William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme

The Right Honourable The Viscount Leverhulme
William Lever
Member of Parliament for Wirral
In office 1906–1909
Preceded by	Joseph Hoult
Succeeded by	Gershom Stewart
Personal details
Born	William Hesketh Lever (1851-09-19)19 September 1851 Bolton, Lancashire, England
Died	7 May 1925(1925-05-07) (aged 73)
Political party	Liberal Party
Spouse	Elizabeth Hulme
Relations	James Lever (brother)
Children	William Hulme Lever, 2nd Viscount Leverhulme
Education	Bolton Church Institute
Occupation	Industrialist, philanthropist and colonialist
Known for	Lever Brothers

William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (19 September 1851 – 7 May 1925) was an English Industrialist, philanthropist and colonialist. Lever personified the Northern, nonconformist conscience: he was Liberal in his politics, earnest in his philanthropic endeavours, and committed to social amelioration and moral improvement at home, as typified by Lever’s company town, Port Sunlight. Although attacked for his labour policies in palm oil plantations in the Congo, he was committed to Britain’s “civilising mission” overseas. Starting with a small grocery business begun by his father, he began making soap in the 1880s. Lever rode the cresting late-Victorian consumer revolution to build a vast industrial empire spread across the globe, with such famous brands as Lux and Lifebuoy. Four years after his death his enterprises were amalgamated as Unilever, which, by 1930, employed a quarter of a million people and, in terms of market value, was the largest company in Britain.

Family

William Lever was born on 19 September 1851 at 6 Wood Street, Bolton, Lancashire, England. He was the eldest son and the seventh child born to James Lever (1809–1897), a grocer, and Eliza Hesketh, daughter of a cotton mill manager. He was educated at Bolton Church Institute between 1864 and 1867 and worked in the family grocery business from 1867 until he was given junior partnership in 1872.

In 1874 he married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Ellen Hulme (d. 1913), daughter of a draper and neighbour from Wood Street. William, their only surviving child, was born in 1888. He was a member of the Congregationalist church and applied its ideals in his business life. Lever bought Thornton Manor in 1888 and lived there and in his other house at Hampstead which he bought in 1904, until 1919 when he moved to London and died there in 1925. He had given up Hill Side, Heaton by 1901.

He was created Baron Leverhulme on 21 June 1917, and Viscount Leverhulme on 27 November 1922 – the hulme section of the title being in honour of his wife. Leverhulme died of pneumonia, at his home at Hampstead, London 7 May 1925 after which the viscountcy passed to his son, William Hulme Lever.

Business

After working for his father's wholesale grocery business, in 1886 he established a soap manufacturing company called Lever Brothers (now part of Unilever) with his brother James. It was one of the first companies to manufacture soap from vegetable oils, and in conjunction with Lever's business acumen and marketing practices, produced a great fortune. James Lever never took a major part in running the business. A recent biography by Adam Macqueen suggests that James suffered from diabetes throughout his life, and that perhaps his symptoms (prior to the discovery of insulin and effective treatment of the condition) were mistaken for mental instability

From 1888, Lever put his philanthropic principles into practice through the construction of Port Sunlight, a model community designed to house and support the workers of Lever Brothers, who already enjoyed generous wages and innovative benefits. Lever's philanthropy had definite paternalistic overtones, and life in Port Sunlight included intrusive rules and implied mandatory participation in activities. With accommodation tied to employment, a worker losing his or her job could be almost simultaneously evicted. Nonetheless, conditions, pay, hours, and benefits far exceeded those prevailing in similar industries.

Cartoon from The Daily Mirror, 22nd. October 1906. A parody of William Lever, whose factory was named "Port Sunlight".

In 1906 Lever, together with Joseph Watson of Leeds and several other large soap manufacturers, established a monopoly soap trust, in imitation of similar combinations established in the USA following John D. Rockefeller's organisation of the Standard Oil Co. as a trust in 1882. Lever believed such an organisation would bring benefits to the consumer as well as the manufacturer, through economies of scale in purchasing and advertising. The scheme was launched at the moment, as President Roosevelt had just launched his trust-busting policy in America. The British press, in particular the Daily Mail, of which he had been one of the largest advertising customers, was virulently opposed to the scheme, and aroused popular hostility urging a boycott of trust brands and making what were later proved in court to be libellous assertions as to the constituent ingredients of the soaps concerned. All participants in the trust suffered severe losses to profits and reputations, Lever estimated his loss at "considerably over half a million" combined with a reduction by a third in the value of his shareholding, the scheme was abandoned before the year's end.

Africa

In the early 1900s, Lever used palm oil produced in the British West African colonies, the history of palm production there was featured in British Pathe News in 1950. When he found difficulties obtaining palm plantation concessions there, he looked elsewhere. In 1911, Lever visited the Belgian Congo to take advantage of cheap labour and palm oil concessions. The Congolese were subject to colonial exploitation by the Belgians through a system known as travail forcé, forced labour. A book "Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation In The Congo" states "Leverhulme set up a private kingdom reliant on the horrific Belgian system of forced labour, a program that reduced the population of Congo by half and accounted for more deaths than the Nazi holocaust", the book portrays him out of character and in stark contrast to the good he did in life and how Leverhulme is remembered in England. To quote A.N. Wilson from the Mail Online, January 2010, "The altruism of Leverhulme or the Cadbury family are in sad contrast to the antisocial attitude of modern business magnates, who think only of profit and the shareholder."Archives record Belgian administrators, missionaries and doctors protesting against their governments system. Formal parliamentary investigations were called for by members of the Belgian Socialist Party, but the practise of forced labour continued until independence in 1960.

Politics and philanthropy

William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, portraited by William Strang, 1918

Lever was a lifelong supporter of William Ewart Gladstone and the Liberal cause, and was called upon to contest elections for the Liberal Party. He served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the Wirral constituency between 1906 and 1909 and used his maiden speech to the House of Commons to urge Henry Campbell-Bannerman's government to introduce a national old age pension, such as the one he provided for his workers. He was High Sheriff of Lancashire in 1917 and Mayor of Bolton in 1918.

Lord Leverhulme is remembered as a philanthropist. He created the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight; he endowed a school of tropical medicine at Liverpool University; he gifted Lancaster House in London to the British nation; and endowed the Leverhulme Trust. The garden of his former London residence 'The Hill' in Hampstead, designed by Thomas Mawson is open to the public.

After his death the Leverhulme Trust was set up and provides funding for education and research.

Bolton

Lever was a major benefactor to his native town, Bolton where he was made a Freeman of the County Borough in 1902. He bought Hall i' th' Wood, one time home of Samuel Crompton and restored it as a museum for the town. He bought the 2100 acre Rivington estate in the neighbouring township in 1901. Most of the estate was compulsorily purchased by Liverpool Corporation in 1902 but Lever was allowed to construct and landscape Lever Park on the north side of the Lower Rivington Reservoir which he gifted to the inhabitants of Bolton. Lever was responsible for the formation of Bolton School after re-endowing Bolton Grammar School and Bolton High School for Girls in 1913. He bought the land for bolton's largest park, Leverhulme Park in 1914.In November 1918 Lord Leverhulme was invited to become Mayor of Bolton even though he was not a councillor because the council wanted to honour a "Notable son of the Town" as a mark of the high regard the citizens of Bolton had for him.

Isle of Lewis & Harris

Abandoned house and croft in SW Lewis, with exposed gneiss visible.

In 1917 in semi-retirement, Lever bought the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, with the intention of reviving the fishing industry, by making Stornoway an industrial town with a fish cannery. The product would have been distributed and sold by the 400+ retail shops belonging to Mac Fisheries, the fish mongers he had bought from 1918 onwards. His plans were initially popular, but he was opposed to land re-settlement, and this led to land raids (described under Coll, their main setting). The government had promised land to returning demobilised First World War veterans, and they sided against Lever who abandoned his plans for Lewis. After offering to give Lewis to its people in 1923, he was turned down and sold it to absentee landlords. He concentrated his efforts on Harris, where the town Leverburgh took his name. Lever bought an estate in Harris in 1919 for £56,000; this plan floundered after his death, and his executors sold an estimated £500,000 investment for £5,300.

Quotes

William Lever is often named in marketing circles in respect of the famous quotation concerning advertising, namely: "I know half my advertising isn't working, I just don't know which half."

Titles, styles and honours

Honours

• Baronet of Thornton Manor 1911, in the parish of Thornton Hough, in the county of Chester
• Baron Leverhulme, of Bolton-le-Moors, in the County Palatine of Lancaster 1917
• Viscount Leverhulme, of The Western Isles, in the Counties of Inverness and Ross and Cromarty 1922
• High Sheriff of Lancashire, 1917

Titles and styles

• Mr William Lever 1851 – 1911
• Sir William Lever, Bt 1911 – 1917
• The Rt. Hon. The Lord Leverhulme 1917 – 1922
• The Rt. Hon. The Viscount Leverhulme 1922 – 1925

References

• Lever, William Hulme. 'Viscount Leverhulme by his Son' George Allen & Unwin Ltd. London 1927
• Macqueen, Adam. The King of Sunlight : How William Lever Cleaned Up the World, Bantam Press, 2004. ISBN 0-593-05185-8
• Marechal, Jules. Travail forcé pour l’huile de palme de Lord Leverhulme L’Histoire du Congo 1910–1945, Part III. Editions Paula Bellings. 396 pages.

Further reading

• Jolly, W. P., Lord Leverhulme, Constable, London, ISBN 0-09-461070-3
• Lewis, Brian. So Clean: Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilization (2008)
• Smith, Malcolm David, Leverhulme's Rivington, Wyre Publishing, Lancashire, ISBN 0-9526187-3-7, The Story of the Rivington 'Bungalow'.
• Mawson, Thomas H,, Bolton A Study In Town Planning & Art
• Hutchinson, Roger, "The Soapman"
• Nicolson, Nigel, "Lord of the Isles"

Bergin, John Philip, "Nature and the Victorian Entrpreneur: Soap, Sunlight and Subjectivity". Unpublished PhD, University of Hull, 1999.

• Hochschild Adam and Marchal Jules, "Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation In The Congo" ISBN 978-1-84467-239-4 in

External links

Lever's Hampstead house and its garden (Hill Garden) are described in

• London remembers
• Ronald Fisher (whose family lived in the house before Lever)
• Lord Leverhulme's vision of Leverburgh
• The Commercial Travellers' Benevolent Institution - a charity that Lord Leverhulme named in his will.