Lever Bros. Soap Co.
Right into the 19th century each soap manufacturer in the UK operated a kind of regional monopoly, which meant there was little competition between the manufacturers, and therefore no incentive to improve.
The manufacturers themselves didn’t see much between their product and the company down the road. One manufacturer was quotes as saying “there is little or no difference between different makes – There is a Thomas’s Primrose, a Knight’s Primrose, a Cook’s Primrose – all the same soap”
This changed very rapidly when William Hesketh Lever, son of a Bolton grocer, rolled up his sleeves. He’d been working with local chemist William Hough Watson on ways to create soap bars using glycerin and vegetable oils, rather than the tallow fats normally used in laundry products. The family business was overwhelmingly dependent on working class custom, and William had noted that soap was a product on which working households were spending more and more money.
It wasn’t just a desire for cleanliness that was driving this. Some responsibility for this could be laid at the feet of Florence Nightingale, whose work in the battlefields during the Crimean War had made her a national heroine. Back in England in 1956 she turned her attention to improving the standards of nursing. Her influence went far beyond hospitals, and her instructions to nurses on cleanliness extended to household manuals, creating the basis for an entirely new standard of judgement. A new word was on people’s lips. Hygiene.
In 1884 Lever introduced the name ‘Sunlight’ for all the bar soaps he sold. He and his chemist had found that using palm oil instead of tallow is lathered well, so he began to publicize it as “the soap that lathers itself” or the “self-washer” soap.
To make it stand out from other bars, and to draw attention to the brand he sold it in one pound tablets ready-wrapped in paper with his name and “sunlight” printed on. Although there were precedents in America, forming household soap into tablets was a novelty. Lever’s products were easily distinguished by both appearance and name from all the other soaps around.
Lever quickly found the old ‘washer’ soap manufacturers up in arms against him, so he leased a works in Warrington and began making it in serious quantities.
Lever and his brother never looked back. Production went from 3,000 tons in 1886 to 18,000 by the end of the decade. A year later he moved to a brand new facility at Port Sunlight where he delivered around 52,000 tons in its first year.
His success came from the care he took with his advertising, using clever slogans, displaying ads at railway stations and roadside billboards. He took ads out in local newspapers and aimed straight for working class customers – the same audience his old rivals said would never change from traditional ‘washer’ soaps.
His aggressive advertising techniques succedded. Unlike, say, printed cottons, where the design determined who would buy the fabric, there was nothing about the actual appearance of the tablets of Sunlight soap that identified it as a working-class product....
William Lever built Britain’s largest company and in so doing, made the first modern multinational. And unlike the US Robber Barons, for Lord Leverhulme his workers' welfare was as important as his wealth. But this didn't extend to his African workers, with fatal consequences.
William Hesketh Lever is born on 19 September 1851. After six daughters, his father’s happy he finally has someone to inherit his successful Bolton based grocery business. William’s brother, James Darcy Lever, joins the family three years later. Unlike the robust William, James will suffer from ill health throughout his short life.
Aged 16, William leaves school and joins the family business. In 1874, he marries. His wife, Elizabeth Hulme, not only lived on the same street as him, but attended the same church. The Congregationalist Church infuses him with many of the ideals he will make real with his business empire. The couple will have a number of children, but only one, also called William, will survive.
In 1885, the brothers enter the soap business by buying a small soap and cleaning product works in Warrington. Lever Brothers is born.
HONEY SOAP
They partner up with William Hough Watson, a chemist from their home town. His newly invented soap uses a colonial raw product, palm oil, and glycerine rather than tallow. It’s a free-lathering soap first named ‘Honey’ and then ‘Sunlight Soap’. Thanks to William’s marketing acumen, within a decade of its launch it is on sale in 134 countries. By 1888, they’re producing 450 tonnes. Business is good. Five years after moving into the village of Thornton Hough, William buys the manor there. Next, he’ll buy the village.
PORT SUNLIGHT
Needing larger business premises, William purchases 56 acres of land in Cheshire. He builds on marshes and creates Port Sunlight. The model village is developed between 1888 and 1914.
“Some 30 architects were commissioned to create a complete ‘garden’ village in what was unapologetically called the ‘old English’ style”
Simon Schama, A History of Britain
Two cottages are built as exact reproductions of the farmhouse of William Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway. At a time when urban poverty and overcrowded slums are endemic, William has Jacobean-Flemish gables, exposed timbering and leaded windows in country cottages for his workers. As with the model village of Cadbury’s, Bourneville, the cottages have their own running water and unlike some at Bourneville, all have indoor bathrooms.
Schools are built to educate 500 children. For women and girls, special classes are offered in cooking, dressmaking and shorthand. By 1909, there are 700 cottages, a concert hall and theatre, a library, a gymnasium and an open air swimming pool. Rents are one fifth of the weekly wage.
However, this largesse comes with conditions. William demands observance of strict ethical codes. Breaking them can mean losing your job. And as the cottages are tied to employment, losing your job means losing the roof over your head. William makes many social activities compulsory in his village.
During this remarkable development James is felled by a bout of illness and resigns his directorship. Massively successful products such as ‘Lifebuoy’, ‘Lux’ and ‘Vim’ are launched and subsidiaries are set up in the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Australia and Germany. The Port Sunlight plant alone produces 5,000 tonnes of soap a week.
xxx
Lever, William Hesketh, first Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925), soap manufacturer and philanthropist, was born on 19 September 1851, at 16 Wood Street, Bolton, seventh child and elder son of James Lever (1809–1897), wholesale and retail grocer, and his wife, Eliza, daughter of William Hesketh, cotton mill manager, of Manchester. He had eight sisters and a brother. He was educated privately in Bolton, and at Bolton Church Institute (1864–7). On his sixteenth birthday he was given a copy of Samuel Smiles's Self-Help, which provided his secular credo. He was a lifelong Congregationalist, who applied many of that sect's ideals in his business life, though he developed an interest in Christian Science. He was put to work in the family grocery in 1867, and admitted to a junior partnership worth £800 a year in 1872.
In 1874 Lever married Elizabeth Ellen (d. 1913), daughter of Crompton Hulme, linen draper, a neighbour in Wood Street. They had been friends since childhood; she was a kindly, resilient woman, to whom he remained devoted. Their only surviving child, William, was born fourteen years after their marriage, in 1888; he inherited his father's titles, and published a biography of him in 1927.
The soap business
Sunlight
In the 1880s, William Lever leased a chemical works in Warrington, where he experimented with different ingredients to manufacture soap. He settled on a formula of palm kernel oil, cottonseed oil, resin and tallow, and named it Sunlight soap.
It was an immediate success, forcing the company to move to a new and much larger factory by the river Mersey in Cheshire. People were now buying a particular make of soap rather than a type.
Like some other Victorian industrialists, Lever was a philanthropist. He built a model town to house his workers, calling it Port Sunlight after the soap it produced. Port Sunlight went on to develop other products like Lifebuoy carbolic soap, Sunlight soap flakes and Vim, each of which became a household name.
Although Lever was a grocer by trade,his instincts were those of a marketing man. He studied not only the habits of his father's customers, who were chiefly poor Lancashire housewives, but also American techniques of brand naming, advertising, and sales promotion, for he admired the successful provision of household necessities and minor luxuries at a moderate price to a new mass of American consumers.An additional grocery branch was opened at Wigan, organizational reforms were made, large premises were built, and new commitments were undertaken, including a line of soap tablets marketed from 1874 as Lever's Pure Honey Soap. The elder Lever, with the conservatism of age, was anxious at these measures, but their success disarmed opposition.
In 1884 Lever decided to trade on his own account in a soap made largely from vegetable oils rather than the customary tallow. His brother, James Darcy Lever (1854–1910), agreed to join him in the firm of Lever Brothers. Their father hesitated to support the scheme, though he eventually provided some capital. William Lever had no technical knowledge, and did not invent the soap, but recognized its potential popularity with housewives. His great strokes were to give his soap the registered brand name of Sunlight, and to provide packaging that made it easily recognizable and served as a guarantee of quality. Other great brand names associated with him were Lux soap powder and Vim household cleaner, which he registered in 1894. His vigorous advertising and promotion created a demand which no retailer dared ignore.Competitors resented but emulated his methods. Initially Sunlight soap was supplied by other manufacturers for sale by Lever Brothers, but in 1885 the firm bought a soapworks at Warrington and thereafter made its own soap.
The need for a large factory soon became pressing, and in 1887 Lever bought 52 acres, later extended to 500 acres, conveniently situated on the Mersey, near Bebington in Cheshire. He conceived the idea of a colony of industry to be called Port Sunlight, where his workpeople should live near his works. There were picturesque houses and gardens, together with many social and sporting amenities. Manufacture began there in January 1889. Though ruling his model community as a benevolent despot, he introduced a co-partnership scheme in 1909.
Lever travelled extensively, spreading his business overseas, opening branches or agencies in the colonies, United States, and European countries. In addition he undertook five world tours between 1892 and 1923–4, always travelling with a large and pompous retinue. His early travel articles were published in a book entitled Following the Flag (1893).
Some of Lever's foreign ventures made slow progress, but generally the profitable development of his affairs was continuous. In 1890 Lever Brothers was made a limited company, and in 1894 it was floated to the public with a capital of £1.5 million, divided equally into preference and ordinary shares. No ordinary shares were offered publicly, and Lever, who became chairman, gradually acquired all of these. He initiated a policy of amalgamation with other soap makers, either by purchase or interchange of shares, which resulted in a wide control over the soap-making trade. In 1906 he proposed a new and greater amalgamation of soap companies, which was denounced by the Daily Mail and other newspapers controlled by Lord Northcliffe, who anticipated a loss of advertising revenue. During the autumn of 1906 they directed at Lever many startling accusations, including fraudulent trading and sweated labour. The Sunlight business was damaged by these attacks, and other soap firms were alarmed into abandoning the proposed amalgamation. Lever was the first witness in a libel action brought by his company in 1907, and testified so forcefully that the defendants immediately offered a settlement. Lever Brothers received a total of £141,000 from Northcliffe's newspapers—at that date the highest libel payment ever made—and Lever used these sums to endow Liverpool University with a school of tropical medicine (of which he was chairman in 1910–13) and a school of town planning and civic design.
Politics and honours
Paradoxically for a plutocrat who created one of the world's largest combines, Lever all his life believed in self-help and free trade: W. E. Gladstone, who visited Port Sunlight on 28 November 1891, was his political hero. Lever contested Birkenhead as a Liberal without success in 1892, 1894, and 1895. In 1900 he failed again in the Wirral division of Cheshire, but in 1906 he was returned for that constituency, though he found parliamentary responsibilities too heavy and retired in December 1909. He unsuccessfully contested the Ormskirk division of Lancashire in January 1910. Although unsuited by temperament for party politics, he enjoyed electioneering and became a competent platform speaker. According to A. C. Menzies: 'Leverhulme speaks well, with a flow of language of a homely order, no great rhetoric, rather fatherly expoundings, mixed with endless anecdotes and not a few cryptic utterances' (Menzies, 147). One example of his speaking style was the observation: 'Every time a cloud appears in the sky it is not always going to rain cats and dogs. Our imagination is the architect of our fright.' Such sentiments led the Liberal journalist A. G. Gardiner to compare Lever to Benjamin Franklin: 'I can see him putting himself through the same hard moral discipline, taking himself in hand with a certain grim joy, and subduing himself to his own maxims with relentless firmness. He is a moral athlete who has trained himself down to the last ounce, and wins the race by first winning the victory over himself' (Gardiner, 195). On Liberal Party recommendation Lever was created a baronet in 1911 and was raised to the peerage in 1917 as Baron Leverhulme, his title combining his own and his wife's surnames. He was advanced to a viscountcy in 1922.
New business ventures
Lever was always fearful of being held to ransom by monopolist suppliers of raw materials. He therefore became interested in bringing palm oil and palm-kernel oil from west Africa under his own control. In 1910 he established crushing mills in Nigeria, and to ensure continuity of supplies he obtained in the following year a concession of land and works in the Belgian Congo. There he planted forests of palm trees, erected a new town called Leverville, opened Lever hospitals, and put Lever steamers on the Congo River and Congolese children in Lever schools. His first mill opened at Leverville in 1911. He visited the Congo twice in great state, in 1912–13 and in 1924–5. His wife, who had accompanied him, died on her return from the first visit, and the second was swiftly followed by his own death. His aggrandizing African interests reached a disastrous climax in 1920 when Leverhulme committed his company to buying control of the Niger Company for over £8 million. This transaction was followed by a plummeting in values, and for a time his rashness threatened to ruin his life's achievement.
Leverhulme bought the Isle of Lewis in 1917, and the isles of North and South Harris in 1919. He set up a company called MacFisheries, and acquired several food companies, notably T. Wall & Sons, sausage makers, intending to develop the fishing industry and improve the conditions of the crofter population of these Scottish western isles. In 1923 he abandoned his plans for Lewis after encountering opposition, but his intentions were not repulsed on Harris, where the town of Obbe changed its name to Leverburgh. Leverhulme's great projects—Port Sunlight, the Congo plantations, the Hebridean venture, and the Niger fiasco—provided a necessary challenge for his creative, combative, and restless imagination. He had a passion for organizing, building, and regulating other people's lives.
Property
Leverhulme relished architectural planning and was acquisitive of every sort of property: 'Sir William Lever of soap fame seems to have a passion for purchase and evidently thinks more of the buying than the thing bought,' Sir George Arthur commented in 1912 (284). He made a distinctive contribution to ecclesiastical architecture by building four Congregationalist churches and was an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects from 1920. He rebuilt the house and village on his estate at Thornton Hough in Cheshire (bought in 1891), opening out an ambitious road system which, when the local authority would not take it over, he closed. He extended the outer ramparts of his great house at Hampstead (bought in 1904) until they dominated the most sylvan corner of the heath. In 1899 he bought the Rivington estate near Bolton, and after his home there was destroyed by a suffragette arsonist in 1913, he built a new bungalow. Lord Crawford noted after a visit: 'Leverhulme bought it years ago, kept extending it—only a year before his death he added a large ballroom—and now this preposterous accumulation of rooms and verandahs is perched in the middle of Rivington Moor … Here he was uncontrolled and one sees the odd potpourri of rubbish and good things he collected—a few really nice bits of tapestry hung between monstrous forgeries and a number of wretched canvases by RAs of the eighties' (Vincent, 527). He also lived at Lews Castle, Stornoway (1918–23), and Borve Lodge, Harris (1923–5). In his grounds he built belvederes, dug lakes, and employed hundreds of gardeners. After his death there was a sale lasting fifteen days of the purchases with which he had filled his houses.
In 1912 Lever bought Stafford House in St James's from the duke of Sutherland. His gift in 1914 of this ducal palace under its new name of Lancaster House to serve as the London Museum was interpreted sordidly as an attempt to ingratiate himself with the government. In 1919 Leverhulme bought Moor Park with 3000 acres in Hertfordshire from Lord Ebury and transformed it into a country club with three golf courses. From Ebury's cousin the duke of Westminster he bought Grosvenor House on Park Lane for £500,000 in 1924, with the intention of developing it as a national arts centre. Among other benefactions he donated an art gallery at Port Sunlight in memory of his wife.
Death and character
Leverhulme was high sheriff of Lancashire in 1917, and mayor of Bolton and junior warden of the grand lodge of freemasons in 1918. Overwork, rather than his habit of sleeping outdoors in all weathers in a simple iron bed, caused his death from pneumonia on 7 May 1925, at The Hill, Hampstead. He was buried on 11 May 1925 at Port Sunlight.
Leverhulme's will, dated 11 September 1924, was brief but complex. It established a trust with four trustees. Though it mentioned 'research and education' as one of its objectives, it was the trustees rather than the benefactor who established the Leverhulme Trust which became the chief non-governmental funder of individual research in the second half of the twentieth century.
'Thickset in stature, with a sturdy body set on short legs and a massive head covered with thick, upstanding hair, he radiated force and energy', according to Sir Angus Watson. 'He had piercing, blue-grey eyes which, however, flashed with challenge when he was angry', and 'the short neck and closely-set ears of a prize-fighter' (Watson, 140–4). Leverhulme was often intensely troubled by his own fears, which he mastered courageously. He was both a tyrant and a sentimentalist, caring less for money than for the power it gave him. He never swerved from his sense that commercial efficiency was a service to humanity.
Sources
·
Viscount Leverhulme, by his son (1927)
·
W. P. Jolly, Lord Leverhulme (1976)
·
C. Wilson, The history of Unilever: a study in economic growth and social change, 1 (1954)
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A. G. Gardiner, Pillars of society (1913)
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A. C. B. Menzies, Modern men of mark (1921)
·
A. Watson, My life: an autobiography (1937), 140–41
·
The Crawford papers: the journals of David Lindsay, twenty-seventh earl of Crawford … 1892–1940, ed. J. Vincent (1984)
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[G. Arthur], Some letters from a man of no importance, 1895–1914 (1928)
·
The Times (8 May 1925)
·
C. Binfield, ‘Business paternalism and the Congregational ideal: a preliminary reconnoitre’, Business and religion in Britain, ed. D. J. Jeremy (1988), 118–41
·
A. Briggs, The story of the Leverhulme Trust (1991)
·
W. H. Lever, Following the flag (1893)
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W. H. Lever, The buildings erected at Port Sunlight and Thornton Hough (1905)
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W. H. Lever, Art and beauty in the city (1915)
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GEC, Peerage
Lever Brothers was a British manufacturing company founded in 1885 by two brothers: The 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925), and James Darcy Lever (1854–1916). They invested in and successfully promoted a new soap-making process invented by chemist William Hough Watson. Lever Brothers entered the United States market in 1895 and acquired Mac Fisheries, owner of T. Wall & Sons, in 1925. Lever Brothers was one of several British companies that took an interest in the welfare of its British employees. Its brands included "Lifebuoy", "Lux" and "Vim". Lever Brothers merged with Margarine Unie to form Unilever in 1930.
Starting with a small grocery business begun by his father, William Lever (later created, in June 1917, The 1st Baron Leverhulme and, in December 1922, further elevated to being The 1st Viscount Leverhulme) and his brother James entered the soap business in 1885 by buying a small soap works in Warrington. The brothers teamed up with a Cumbrian chemist, William Hough Watson, who became an early business partner. Watson invented the process which resulted in a new soap, using glycerin and vegetable oils such as palm oil, rather than tallow.[1]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-watson-1) The resulting soap was a good, free-lathering soap, at first named Honey Soap then later named "Sunlight Soap". Production reached 450 tons per week by 1888. Larger premises were built on marshes at Bromborough Pool on the Wirral Peninsula at what became Port Sunlight,[2]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-bbcbusiness-2) then part of Cheshire. Though the company was named Lever Brothers, William Lever's brother and co-director James never took a major part in running the business. He fell ill in 1895, probably as a result of diabetes, and resigned his directorship two years later.[3]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-3)
Lever Brothers entered the United States market in 1895, with a small New York City sales office. In 1898, it bought a soap manufacturer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Curtis Davis Company, moved its U.S. headquarters to Cambridge and started production at a factory located at what is now Technology Square. By 1929, Lever Brothers employed 1,000 workers in Cambridge, and 1,400 nationwide, making it the third-largest soap manufacturer in the U.S.[4]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-4)[a]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-5)
In 1925, Lever Brothers acquired Mac Fisheries, owner of T. Wall & Sons.[5]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-6)
Employee welfare and use of forced labour
Lever Brothers was one of several British companies that took an interest in the welfare of its British employees.[6]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-lewis-7) The model village of Port Sunlight, then in Cheshire, was developed between 1888 and 1914 adjoining the soap factory to accommodate the company's staff in good quality housing, with high architectural standards and many community facilities. The paternity found at Port Sunlight did not exist in the operations of its subsidiary in the Belgian Congo, where Lever Brothers, through their subsidiary Huileries du Congo Belge (HCB), utilised forced labour between 1911 and 1945.[7]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-8)[8]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-9)[9]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-10)
Brands
By 1900 Lifebuoy, Lux and Vim brands had been added and subsidiaries had been set up in the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Germany and elsewhere. By 1911, the company had its own oil palm plantations in the Belgian Congo and the Solomon Islands. Lever Brothers Ltd also acquired other soap companies including A&F Pears, John Knight of London,[10]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-11) Gossage's of Widnes, Watson's of Leeds, Crosfield's of Warrington, Hazlehurst & Sons of Runcorn and Hudson's of Liverpool. The town of Leverville (the present-day Lusanga) was founded in the then district of Kwango, later part of the Province of Léopoldville, in the western part of the Belgian Congo and was named after William Lever (later Viscount Leverhulme).[11]^(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_Brothers#cite_note-12)published CD's first novel A Study in Scarlet 1888
Life and loves of Dr Susan soap radio