In the
latest of our series commemorating the life and work of people honoured
with blue plaques, Adam Sonin explores the fascinating history of soap manufacturer
and philanthropist William Lever.
Soap-boiler, social reformer, MP, tribal chieftain,
multi-millionaire and Lord of the Western Isles. He employed workmen from the
Mersey to the Congo and they all called him ‘Chief’. His peers knew him as William
Lever, later to become first Viscount Leverhulme.
When he was made a Baronet in 1911 he chose the motto Mutare
Vel Timere Sperno: “I spurn to change or fear.” Throughout his life his
favourite novel was Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850). He owned a
string of grand houses packed full of antiques, artworks and treasures, all
“guarded” by tiger-skin rugs.
He was known to often sleep outdoors, in all weathers, and
on a simple iron bed. Evelyn Waugh, a near neighbour, described his house, then
under construction, as “Italianite”. His model village, Port Sunlight, near his
soapworks in Birkenhead, ranks alongside Henrietta Barnett’s Hampstead Garden Suburb
as one of England’s great experiments in town planning. Barnett was also a near
neighbour.
The food manufacturer, Sir Angus Watson (1874–1961),
described him as “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”. Sir Angus continued: “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”.
William Hesketh Lever, first Viscount Leverhulme
(1851–1925), soap manufacturer and philanthropist, was born on 19 September, at
16 Wood Street, Bolton. Seven years earlier, writing in The Condition Of The
Working Class In England, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) described the town as
“one of the worst
in Britain... badly and irregularly built, with foul courts,
lanes and back alleys”. Perhaps ironically the site later became home of The
Bolton Socialist Club (the oldest remaining independent socialist club in the
country) where guest speakers have included Eleanor Marx (1855–1898), daughter
of Karl. Lever’s childhood, however, was not set in the squalor which Engels
had documented.
Lever’s father, James, was a wholesale and retail grocer,
and his mother was a cotton mill manager. He had eight sisters and a brother
and was a precocious child. Apparently before he could walk, let alone read, he
rearranged the family’s library by height order, a ‘systemising’ which he later
said “used to give me such intense delight when I could only crawl to the
bookshelf”.
His parents kept rabbits, but not as pets, and
the young William used the opportunity to design a self-sufficient ecosystem.
He figured that by growing grass on the roofs of the hutches he could both
insulate and feed the animals, with a view to fattening them up for the family
pot. William would take the family
