The Soap Man

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by Roger Hutchinson


  Laws, wisely administered, will secure men in the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, whether of mind or body, at a comparatively small personal sacrifice; but no laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights . . .

  Daily experience shows that it is energetic individualism which produces the most powerful effects upon the life and action of others, and really constitutes the best practical education. Schools, academies, and colleges give but the merest beginnings of culture in comparison with it. Far more influential is the life-education daily given in our homes, in the streets, behind counters, in workshops, at the loom and the plough, in counting-houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of men. This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which Schiller designated ‘the education of the human race’, consisting in action, conduct, self-culture, self-control – all that tends to discipline a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the duties and business of life – a kind of education not to be learnt from books, or acquired by any amount of mere literary training.

  William Hesketh Lever digested those sombre sentences and others like them from Smiles’ book, along with Dickens and Shakespeare. He never forgot them, for they dignified and justified his young existence. He had been obliged to relinquish ‘schools, academies and colleges’ in favour of the shop counter and the street. When his tasks at James Lever’s warehouse – sweeping the place out before dawn, breaking up wholesale bars and loaves of soap and sugar into retail sizes, stacking delivery carts – seemed an arduous apprenticeship he could fall upon Smiles’ wisdom and thank the Lord for delivering him from mere literary training into the infinitely more valuable University of Life.

  William naturally progressed more quickly up the business ladder than the other apprentices at his father’s warehouse. He started as a dogsbody at a shilling a week. By the age of nineteen in 1870 he was drawing thirty times that amount and working from a pony and trap as a commercial traveller. When he was twenty-one it was judged that he had learned enough about the trade to become a junior partner on £800 a year.

  Those were the wages of a prosperous young man. Eight hundred pounds in the 1870s would be worth almost £60,000 today. William Lever paid income tax at only 10 per cent, and the comparative purchase value of the pound sterling was greater than it would be 130 years later. What better to spend his riches on than a wife? He sought out Elizabeth Ellen Hulme and her widowed mother. In April 1874 the childhood friends were married – by the pastor who had baptised them both – at Bolton’s Congregational Church.

  Having established his bride in a comfortable, newly decorated town house the 23-year-old returned to immersion in the Lancashire grocery trade. He was still working as a traveller for his father, taking orders for butter, eggs, mustard, starch, sugar and soap in the corner stores and village shops of industrial Lancashire. While on the road in 1879 he had noticed a failing grocery concern at Wigan. William bought it out and opened there his own branch of Lever & Co. He then visited Ireland to make contact with dairy farmers and began to receive eggs and butter directly from their source. Having established a cheap, wholesome and plentiful supply William Lever wrapped weighed chunks of butter in greaseproof paper, labelled them ‘Ulster Fresh Lumps’, distributed them to grocery outlets throughout Lancashire . . . and, daringly, advertised his product extensively in the local press.

  Groceries before the 1870s were largely unpackaged, unprocessed and unadvertised. Produce was bought in bulk, marked up and sold off. Eggs were eggs and butter was butter; sugar and salt came in loaves and cakes, and soap in large rectangular bars. Brand names were rare. William Lever would make his astonishing fortune by seizing on one particular essential product, adding extra value to it at source, and transforming it through packaging and advertising from an unremarkable everyday item into an elixir of life, a symbol of leisure and luxury.

  He was not the first to do so. As we have seen, in 1867 his first job involved breaking up loaves of sugar for retail. Five years later, in 1872, another former grocery assistant from Lancashire named Henry Tate patented a sugar-cubing machine which suddenly enabled him to package this commodity in standard sizes and allowed his customers to exercise product control. ‘Tate’s Cube Sugar’ lumps very quickly made their 54-year-old inventor very rich – so rich that within twenty years he had assembled the greatest single collection of British contemporary art. They also helped to revolutionise the world of grocery marketing, launching its speedy transit away from the traditional generics of the street-stall into the Modern Age of pre-packaged and branded goods. Tate had not invented a product: sugar had been widely available for centuries. He had invented a new way of selling that product for a greater profit margin. His rapidly escalating business was unlikely to escape the attention of an ambitious young grocer from Bolton.

  But William Lever would be unable to reproduce Tate’s trademark success with ‘Ulster Fresh Lumps’ butter. There were important differences between dairy produce and sugar. Butter was quickly degradable, had a limited storage- and shelf-life, was virtually impossible to transport over any great distance, and was therefore disturbingly dependent upon an efficient ratio between supply and demand. No amount of trips across the Irish Sea would invent refrigeration or inject urgency into the Hibernian herdsman. So William Lever remained, for the time being, a wholesale and retail general grocer rather than a manufacturer of consumer goods.

  It would have been a satisfactory life for most. Lever & Co thrived and William was able to nurse his own outlet, commissioning his old schoolfriend Jonathan Simpson to design new premises for the Wigan store. By 1884 Lever & Co in Wigan was the biggest wholesale grocer in the north-west of England outside Liverpool and Manchester. William and Elizabeth Lever need never have worked again. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of their wedding, in the summer of that year the couple took off on a cruise of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. They took ship from Liverpool, called at Oban, and on a fine August day their vessel put in to Stornoway, the main town of the island of Lewis. There they met a waiting Jonathan Simpson, who would accompany them for part of the rest of the voyage. And there, for five or six hours, they saw for the first time the land and the people who were to provide the coronach to William Hesketh Lever’s lonely final years.

  2

  A LAND APART

  William Lever saw at Stornoway in 1884 a place of ‘natural beauty and variety of scenery’ inhabited by people of ‘charm and attraction’. There is far more significance in what he did not see.

  Lewis was another land, entire unto itself. The largest and most heavily populated of all the Hebrides, it encompassed the placid and picturesque lochside villages in the shadow of the mountains which separated them from Harris, the urban centre of Stornoway and the northerly windswept fishing parish of Ness. It ran from fertile machair soil on the north-eastern seaboard to rocky, cliffbound inlets on its distant south-western shore. A vast, brooding, uninhabited moor of peatbog and low hills dominated its northern inlands, and to the south a kaleidoscope of miniature lochs shone under a flat and shifting sky. These no-man’s-lands were deceptive in scale and proportion. While entirely visible from north to south and – mostly – negotiable on foot in a day, they were hostile, uncharted territory to any stranger. From the beginning of recorded time the stern heart of his island had offered refuge to the Lewisman, sanctuary from the incursions of violent invaders or officers of lowland law.

  It was and would remain a proud and foreign place. Its size and variety of landscape had meant that, almost uniquely within the Hebrides, Lewis was largely self-supporting. It had been able to survive, if not to prosper, far from and free from the compromises of the British mainland. Its Gaelic language was, in 1884, intact. Its faith was unitary. Its sons and daughters were far-flung, but their belief in themselves as Le
odhasaich was strong. Even their accent, in Gaelic and English, was starkly different from that of any other Hebridean island. It was an intelligent, curious, obstinate voice, fully aware of and wholly indifferent to its insistent inflection.

  The very size and variety which lent strength to Lewis also divided the place. Men and women would be raised on the eastern peninsula of Point or the northern village of Tolsta who had never seen, nor had any intention of seeing, the western tidal island of Bernera or the southern townships of Uig. They knew of each other, of course, and frequently they knew each other, but Barvas Moor lay like an ocean – or like a mainland mountain range – between them. From Carloway to Mealista there stood whole settlements of black houses: low, thatched, stone dwellings for beast and man that had changed little since the Iron Age. But Stornoway was a modern Victorian port and market town. Since earlier in the nineteenth century its neat rows of dwelling places and commercial and administrative premises had almost all been roofed with slate. In the late 1840s the new proprietor – Sir James Matheson of the Hong Kong opium-dealers Jardine Matheson & Company – had built high above the town a Gothic revival of Stornoway’s fortified mansion house which he named, in anachronistic homage to the island’s ancestral English name, Lews Castle. Matheson died in 1878, leaving his widow as chatelaine of the building and proprietress of the island.

  In 1884 the island of Lewis, without Harris, held some 25,500 people. Ten thousand of them were listed as belonging to the parish of Stornoway, but as Stornoway parish included several densely-populated outlying crofting communities, it is possible that the township itself contained just 3,000 souls. Town and country were important divisions in Lewis. The minority of townspeople exercised a disproportionate influence on the island’s life. Outside Stornoway the vast majority of the 20,000 rural dwellers – small-scale agriculturalists and fishing families – were mainly or solely Gaelic-speakers (more than 65 per cent of people over the age of twenty-five in the whole of Lewis in the 1880s spoke only Gaelic). Inside Stornoway, English – an accented, biblical, precise and colloquial English – was virtually universal among the shopkeepers, harbour staff, soldiers and sailors, inn-keepers and ministers, school-teachers and pupils.

  Stornoway, one authority had written thirty years before the Levers set foot on Lewis soil,

  . . . is well and regularly built, and its streets are lighted with gas. Most prominent of its buildings are the Parish Church, Free Church and Episcopal Church, several schools, jail and the Masonic Lodge. On an eminence overlooking the town is the magnificent mansion of the proprietor, recently erected in the castellated Tudor style. The castle grounds are extensive, and laid out with great taste . . .

  The masonic lodge contains elegant assembly rooms, reading rooms and a public library. Stornoway has a branch office of the National Bank of Scotland, customs house, a savings bank, sailors’ home, hospital and a gas and water works. There are also commodious piers and a building dock . . . fitted to haul up ships of 800 tons burden.

  To the north, south, east and west of this tidy and prosperous little burgh perhaps 15,000 people lived and worked on crofts: the small acreage of arable and grazing land which, it had been estimated in the nineteenth century, could support them at subsistence level for only half of the year. And yet Lewis exported, through the commercial hands of Stornoway, a million-and-a-half eggs a year from those crofts; 90 tons of wool; 400 sheep and lambs and almost 2,000 cattle. The island’s fishermen, most of whom worked in small sailing boats in hazardous Atlantic seas out of such ramshackle jetty complexes as were to be found at Port of Ness, sent to the mainland through Stornoway as many as 40,000 barrels of herring a year. At 30 shillings a barrel this haul earned for Lewis some £60,000 per annum (which would be worth £4 million today). Substantial quantities of cod, ling, salmon and lobster were also carted to Stornoway, boxed and shipped to the mainland.

  On that hot day in August 1884 William Lever observed not only charm and scenic beauty, but also a busy and affluent little port. The 33-year-old may have been surprised to find such respectable mercantile prosperity perched so precariously at the edge of Europe. A short, trim, athletic figure with a mop of dark, well-tended hair, mutton-chop whiskers, an incisive edge to his clean-shaven mouth and chin and deep, fearless, penetrating eyes, he looked out over a calm and sheltered harbour, at the ships lying at anchor and boats drawn up on the shore, at the sturdy stone facings on the front, at the union flag fluttering from the highest turret of Lady Matheson’s castle, at the blue-brown hills which lowered in the distance. Like any other tourist, he could never have sensed (had he five or six days, five or six weeks, let alone five or six hours) the rumbles of discontent and expressions of insecurity which disturbed the peaceful tenor of rural Lewis. Nobody in Stornoway, certainly no mason, no banker, no customs officer or harbourmaster was likely to draw those unfortunate phenomena to the visitor’s attention. Yet what he failed to see or hear was more important than the tiled roofs, street lights and commodious piers.

  A land war was simmering in this island where the sense of land and place was absolute. Leodhasaich shared with their fellow Gaels an attachment to their country which the disinherited Sasuinn would regard as almost mystical. By the late nineteenth century they and their forebears had occupied the same rough patch of land for longer than any other group, indigenous or otherwise, in the United Kingdom. Their millennial unbroken tenure of the Highlands and Islands had resulted in a deep familiarity with and respect for its earth and sand. Every hillside, every lochan, every erratic rock told a story and had a name. They moved from such gnosis only under duress, and they took it with them like a charm.

  In an island, any island, such Gaelic sentiment was if anything intensified. The indisputable boundary of the hostile sea limited the homeland as no stone dyke or mountain range could do. Lewis had been created as strictly finite. Its people might settle to the west of Timsgarry, east of Portnaguran or south of the Clisham, but corporeal Lewis would remain behind them, no more and no less than 770 square miles of precious heath.

  Every fraction of those square miles was consequently dear. It was in fact beyond price. It had been held in trust by the generations who gifted their patronyms to every Leodhasach. In return it had presented them with house-sites and fuel and crops and grazing land. The men and women who had emerged following the dissolution of the clan system at the end of the eighteenth century, men and women who seemed somehow to believe that they could buy and sell the earth and rock like trinkets, were regarded at best with suspicion and at worst with dull, uncomprehending hostility. The private ‘landowner’ would be tolerated on Lewis by its proud people for only as long as his or her blasphemous presumptions did not impact severely upon the life and faith of the Leodhasaich.

  The certainties of religion replaced the securities of the old order. Throughout the nineteenth century Lewis was intermittently swept by bush-fires of evangelism. In 1843 one-third of the ministers of the established Church of Scotland walked out of the General Assembly to form the Free Church of Scotland, taking with them 50 per cent of the lay membership. The Great Disruption – ‘probably the most important event in the history of nineteenth-century Scotland’ according to one ecclesiastical historian – was hugely pervasive in the Highlands and Islands. It was a social as well as a denominational revolt. A major touchstone of division between the Moderates (who stayed) and the Evangelicals (who walked) was the patronage of the landowner. The men who followed Thomas Chalmers into the Free Church of Scotland did not believe that the proprietor of an estate should have the right to nominate a parish minister regardless of the wishes of his congregation.

  This principle may not have lit many fires in the bourgeois burghs of the south, but it blazed through the industrial cities and through the Gaidhealtachd, whose citizenry had by 1843 a greater appreciation than most of the damage done by unfettered landowning power. Here was one area – a person’s communion with their God – into which no factor’s interfering hand should s
tray. Lewis walked, almost to a man and a woman, into the Free Church of Scotland. In 1874 the local presbytery itself estimated that, from a population of 23,479, only 460 Lewis souls were not adherents of the Free Church. Others suggested that non-communicants were slightly, only slightly more numerous: perhaps as many as 1,000 (the figure of nineteen out of twenty Victorian Leodhasaich belonging to the Free Church is commonplace).

  But few would dispute the overwhelming appeal of the radical democratic Presbyterian Church on the island. In 1882, two years before William and Elizabeth Lever first visited Stornoway, Reverend Alexander Lee of Nairn told a Lewis joke to the General Assembly of the Free Church. It concerned an elderly woman on the island who was asked by her catechist:

  ‘“Can you tell me now what we are to understand by the term: the invisible church?” To which, after due consideration, and with all that air of respect that our Highland people ever manifest towards their spiritual overseers, she gravely replied: “Well, no, unless it be the Established Church.”’

  ‘And . . .’ continued Reverend Lee as the laughter subsided, ‘and, verily, as far as spiritual work and moral power is concerned, that answer most truly describes the condition of the State church not only in Lewis but also throughout the Highlands generally.’4

  Throughout the Highlands generally, perhaps . . . but it was Lewis, that large and self-contained world apart, which became the acme of a Free Church society – the home of the largest congregations outside a Scottish city, and the only substantial, clearly defined community in Britain over which a Presbyterian church held virtually unchallenged dominion. It would be difficult to overstate the powerful and enduring relationship between the Free Church and the Leodhasaich. One hundred and fifty years after Reverend Lee’s creed had first been welcomed by the thankful islanders, another theologian would write movingly of his grandparents in Lewis, of men and woman who walked with their God, free and proud, belonging to a church which ‘lived by the principle that the strong should help the weak’.

 

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