THE SOAP MAN
THE SOAP MAN
LEWIS, HARRIS AND
LORD LEVERHULME
Roger Hutchinson
This eBook edition published in 2011 by
Birlinn Limited
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First published in 2003 by Birlinn Ltd
Copyright © Roger Hutchinson 2003
The moral right of Roger Hutchinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-074-6
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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CONTENTS
List of Plates
Preface
Maps
1. The University of Life
2. A Land Apart
3. Organise, Deputise, Criticise
4. Signs of Coming Dawn
5. Fit for Heroes
6. With Me or Against Me
7. Nothing There But Slavery
8. Dignified Retreat
9. The Requiem
Notes
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF PLATES
William Hesketh Lever in 1877 at the age of twenty-six
A new kind of packaging: Sunlight Soap aims for the working man’s wife
‘There’s nothing there but slavery’: workaday scenes from Port Sunlight
Bringing home the peats in Lewis
The battle of Aignish, 1888
A busy mercantile centre: South Beach Street in Stornoway in the early 1900s
Cottars’ cottages on the outskirts of Stornoway, 1900
Members of the Lewis Royal Naval Reserve, winners of the Fleet Rowing Race in 1916
Baron Leverhulme of Bolton-le-Moors in full Masonic costume as Junior Grand Warden of England, 1918
Lews Castle from Stornoway harbour
The windswept lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis
The new laird of Lewis: Leverhulme in 1919
Homes fit for heroes: Leverhulme houses in Stornoway
Machair grazing at Coll, north of Stornoway, following resettlement
Obbe in South Harris shortly before being renamed Leverburgh
Tarbert, the main township in Harris
Sir Harry Lauder, Lord Leverhulme and Provost Roderick Smith at the opening of Stornoway’s new bowling green in 1922
The Tarbert Hotel in Harris, with one of the estate’s Ford motor cars parked outside
Lord Leverhulme in 1919
A prayer aboard the Metagama before her departure for the New World in April 1923
The Hebrideans are coming: Canadian newspapers anticipate the depopulation of the islands
The opening ceremony at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, 16 December 1922
Viscount Leverhulme of the Western Isles
The castle on the hill
PREFACE
The Highlands and Islands of Scotland have seen a greater variety of landowning thugs, philanthropists, oafs and autocrats than any comparable region of the western world. Of them all, William, Viscount Leverhulme must be the most perplexing. He owned the largest single landmass in the Hebridean chain for less than a hundred months, yet in that short period he succeeded in dividing and confusing more intelligent people than seems possible.
To his family and his friends he was a good and simple soul brought low by Highland intransigence. To his acquaintances in Scottish government he became an irritant hardly to be borne. To the Gaelic Society of Inverness he was an English interloper trampling on a fragile heritage. To his fellow businessmen and directors of Lever Brothers he was an old but still formidable widower building castles in the sky. To the people of Lewis and Harris he was all of those things, occasionally at the same time, and ultimately another in a very long line of proprietors who could not bring themselves to understand the attachments and exigencies of their Hebridean lives.
Leverhulme’s impact on Lewis and Harris in the first quarter of the twentieth century can still be felt today, and will resonate into the future. The period spent researching and writing this book coincided with the passage of a Land Reform Bill in Scotland. This piece of legislation offers to Highland crofters the right to purchase through their communities the land upon which they live and work.
For most Scottish crofters this represents an historical opportunity: their first chance to take control of their inherited home. Those in Lewis, however, might have enjoyed this privilege for more than eighty years, had their grandparents and their parents accepted an extraordinary offer made by Leverhulme during his brief period as their landlord. Some of them took advantage of this offer, and their democratically accountable landowning trust has subsequently stood for almost a century as a beacon on the bare northern hills. Others, for reasons which have previously been too often misrepresented, were obliged to decline. Only now are their descendants in western Lewis and in Harris able to reconsider the matter.
We may never understand the dead, but we can always try. The story of Lewis and Harris between between 1918 and 1925 was not only the story of a Lancashire industrialist’s twilight dream. It was also the legend of the men and women that he encountered at the end of the trail. Many people helped me towards a tentative comprehension of what happened in the northernmost Hebrides in those years, some without knowing it. I am indebted to them all, and especially to Joni Buchanan, Derek Cooper, Torcuil Crichton, James Hunter, Iain MacIver, Cailean Maclean, John MacLeod, Suisaidh MacNeill, Ian McCormack, John Murdo Morrison, Ishbel Murray, and Brian Wilson. All errors of fact and interpretation are, of course, mine.
It is the wish of every author of such a documentary as this to uncover an emblematic tale; one single anecdote as defined as a woodcut, that might stand forever as a metaphor of the whole tangled narrative. No such perfect item here exists, but one comes close. One of the medical officers for Lewis in Leverhulme’s time, Dr Harley Williams, dined out for years on legends of the fall. He told a story which - unlike, I hope, most of what follows – has been set in type at least twice before. Apocryphal or not, it bears a third rendering in the fresh light of what we now know of Viscount Leverhulme’s character and motivations in the early 1920s, of the company he kept, and of the evidence before our eyes of the proud persistence of community life in the island of Lewis.
Leverhulme (said Williams) was one day visiting a rural village. An elderly woman standing at the door of her house noticed him, and wondered aloud: ‘An e sin bodach an t-siabainn?’ – ‘Is that the old soap-man?’
‘She is asking,’ explained the proprietor’s translator, ‘ “Is that the Soap King?”, my Lord.’
Roger Hutchinson, Isle of Raasay, 2003
1
THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE
Port Sunlight was the embodiment in bricks and mortar of the social and industrial philosophy of William Hesketh Lever. In 1887 it was an unpromising windswept area of marshland on the eastern coast of the Wirral peninsula, overlooking Liverpool and the broad Mersey estuary. In search of a new site for his expanding manufactory that year, Lever had boarded stopping trains up and down each bank of the Mersey from Warrington to the sea. He arrived at this reach of sodden fields and clutch of ramshackle shanties named Bromborough, turned to his companion and said: ‘Here we are.’1
Thirty years later there were those who chuckled at Lever’s apparent naivety in buying for development 7
70 square miles of Hebridean bog and stone. They may not have been familiar with Bromborough in 1887. ‘It was mostly,’ said one contemporary, ‘but a few feet above high water level and liable at any time to be flooded by high tides and thus to become indistinguishable from the muddy foreshores of the Mersey. Moreover, an arm of Bromborough Pool spread in various directions through the village, filling the ravines with ooze and slime . . . it did not, at first sight, seem fitted for human settlement.’2
One year later, in 1888, William Lever’s wife Elizabeth cut the first wet sod out of the Bromborough turf, the shanties and cabins and the very placename itself were quietly removed, and Port Sunlight – christened in honour of Lever’s celebrated brand of household soap – slid optimistically onto the map. There were hard-headed business reasons for this relocation, insisted Lever characteristically at the banquet in Liverpool which followed the turf-cutting ceremony. Bromborough/Port Sunlight was beyond the grasp of Liverpool’s harbour dues, saving him four shillings and tenpence on every ton of tallow. The festering mire of Brom-borough Pool could be converted to an anchorage with straightforward access to the shoreside soapworks. And that very anchorage in the sheltered waters of the inner Mersey River would release Lever Brothers from their expensive dependence on rail haulage. He could export his cargo by ship to the grimy, soap-hungry hordes of late-Victorian London. That might teach the railways to become competitive, and William Lever was ever in favour of teaching others the necessity of competition.
What was more, Bromborough came cheap. Who else in their right mind would bid for such a waterlogged wasteland on the depressed southern outskirts of Birkenhead? He walked straight into a buyer’s market; into negotiations with local landowners who were delighted to exchange their unproductive swamp for a handsome handout from the nouveau riche. William Lever initially bought 56 acres at Bromborough. By 1906 he had 330 acres of the place. Ninety of those acres were occupied by the Lever Brothers’ industrial plant. A further 100 acres were held in reserve. And 140 acres of reclaimed land were devoted to the mock-Tudor houses, gardens, broad avenues lined with spreading chestnut trees and fluting with birdsong, streams and quaint stone footbridges that comprised the model workers’ village of Port Sunlight.
William Lever was far from being the first such improver. The notion that capitalism’s servants might enjoy longer, healthier and more productive lives if released from the fearful urban stews had been proposed since the earliest years of the Industrial Revolution. Seventy years before Lever first set eyes on Bromborough Pool the socialist Robert Owen had constructed a workers’ mini-state at New Lanark Mills, and had recorded to his great satisfaction improved per capita production. In 1851 the wool-stapling millionaire Titus Salt had built a haven of sanitary terraced housing and schools for his workers beside the River Aire in Yorkshire. Even Queen Victoria’s lamented consort Albert had involved himself in the design and construction of new dwellings for the working Londoner.
Sir Titus Salt, Lord Mayor of Bradford, and Prince Albert were, unlike Robert Owen, no proto-communists, and neither was William Hesketh Lever (both Salt and Lever adhered, in fact, to William Gladstone’s Liberal Party). They were undoubtedly motivated by some sense of pity for the human flotsam of the nineteenth century. Lever cannot but have been aware of what a paradise a two-up-two-down semi-detached residence in Port Sunlight must have seemed to a worker’s family imported from the slums of Birkenhead. But socialist he was not. Trade union officials would repeatedly insist that Lever was the most autocratic and unreasonable employer in their considerable experience of autocratic and unreasonable employers. What agitated the Lancastrian industrialist William Lever was not the Rights of Man. ‘There could be no worse friend to labour,’ he would pronounce in 1909, ‘than the benevolent, philanthropic employer who carries his business on in a loose, lax manner, showing “kindness” to his employees; because, as certain as that man exists, because of his looseness and laxness, and because of his so-called kindness, benevolence, and lack of business principles, sooner or later he will be compelled to close.’3
This was not entirely logical. Benevolence and philanthropy and kindness are not automatically anathema – as Lever implied – to efficient ‘business principles’. But it was a typically uncompromising statement of intent, and one which would echo down his entrepreneurial years until the end of his life, touching and deeply affecting such distant quarters as West Africa, the Solomon Islands and the Outer Hebrides.
Profits came first. Even Port Sunlight, the young entrepreneur’s flagship venture, would have to pay its way before workers could be re-housed. The first twenty-eight ‘cottages’ (they were actually, by twenty-first as well as late nineteenth-century standards, reasonably-sized houses) would not be built until the soapery workplace was up and running. But once they were built the houses were model dwellings: strong, weatherproof, roomy and warm.
The price demanded of his workforce for such domestic luxury was their acceptance of benevolent dictatorship. The inhabitants of the New Jerusalem by the side of the Mersey would be asked to relinquish virtually all self-determination, and most of their collective rights, in return for a golden security in the young and infinitely promising twentieth century. Their employer, William Hesketh Lever, would become rather more than a dispenser of wage-packets operating in a free market of commodities and labour. He would determine not only the future and conditions of the industry which supported them all, but also the future and conditions of his workers’ private lives.
Lever saw no reason to be shamefaced or shy about this presumption. Why should he? ‘If I were to follow the usual mode of profit-sharing,’ he proclaimed, ‘I would send my workmen and work girls to the cash office at the end of the year and say to them: “You are going to receive £8 each; you have earned this money: it belongs to you. Take it and make whatever use you like of your money.”
‘Instead of that I told them: “£8 is an amount which is soon spent, and it will not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the forms of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese for Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave this money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything which makes life pleasant – viz. nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation.” Besides, I am disposed to allow profit sharing under no other than that form.’
Eight pounds in 1890 was the equivalent of more than £500 at the start of the twenty-first century. It would have bought a lot of confectionery. The late-Victorian Merseyside proletariat would doubtless have preferred the opportunity to eat goose and drink whisky as well as live in comfortable homes. But it was given only the choice between decent housing and relative destitution. It opted naturally for teetotal Port Sunlight, a model village which had, on the order of its proprietor, no public house. For the late-Victorian Merseyside proletariat had suffered a hundred years of squalor, disease and early, miserable death. Having known nothing else, its priority was to stabilise itself in the face of a future which, however uncertain, could hardly be worse. Trades unionists may have heard Lever’s words and grumbled; doctrinaire socialists may have cursed him as a tyrant; but the bulk of his workforce scrambled to accept both his terms and the keys to his cottages.
Thirty years after Elizabeth Lever cut those first turfs at Bromboough, thirty years after William Lever told his employees at an early works outing that they must improve his profits and then trust him to improve their livelihoods, another group of British men and women 400 miles to the north of Port Sunlight would listen to identical sentiments. But the response of the people of the islands of Lewis and Harris would be so unanticipated, so unconquerable, so radically different that it broke the resolve of William Hesketh Lever, and in so doing seemed to break the man himself.
William Lever was born in Bolton on 19 September 1851. His father, James Lever, the scion of an old Lancashire family which had turned to trade, was a partner in a wholesale and retail grocery business. The Lever family was Nonconformist. James had met hi
s wife, Eliza Hesketh, at chapel. They made their home in a three-storeyed Georgian terraced house in a comfortable middle-class district of Bolton. And there, in an improving smoke-free atmosphere of abstinence and duty, Eliza gave birth in quick succession to six girls. William was her seventh child and the first boy.
His childhood was unexceptional. Like so many other sons of the northern merchant classes he was thoroughly educated. At the age of six he was sent to a small local private preparatory school run by two maiden ladies. In the day care of the Misses Aspinwall he met two other children: an attractive draper’s daughter named Elizabeth Ellen Hulme and a talented boy called Jonathan Simpson. He would marry the former and befriend for life the latter.
William and Jonathan progressed together to a middle school and then, at the age of thirteen, to a Church of England secondary institute. Both boys decided that they wished to study architecture. Eliza Lever wanted her son to become a doctor. William and Eliza were both frustrated. At the age of fifteen William was withdrawn from the Church Institute by his father and put to work in the family grocery concern. Jonathan Simpson remained to study and, finally, to qualify as an architect.
It would not have mattered whether or not the 15-year-old William Hesketh Lever was a bookish child. As it happened he was not: he preferred carpentry to academia; making things to parsing phrases. But as the eldest son of a mid-Victorian north-of-England Nonconformist grocer William was destined for the family company from birth, regardless of his other ambitions and interests. James Lever celebrated the accession of his heir by giving the boy for his sixteenth birthday in 1867 a copy of Samuel Smiles’ best-selling manual for character improvement, Self-help. Once more, this was not extraordinary. Thousands of teenaged boys had been donated Self-help since the book’s publication in 1859. The genius of Smiles was not so much to blaze new philosophical trails as perfectly to express the half-formed principles of the Victorian working bourgeoisie. William Lever may have been among the most prominent men to credit Smiles with granting him a template for life, but he was not the only one.
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