The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  The Nonconformist Englishman William Lever may have briefly thought that he understood the Free Church in Lewis. He shared many of its precepts: its respect for the Sabbath; its distaste for alcoholic excess; its belief in social responsibility; its knowledge – and frequent practical appliance – of the chapters of the Old Testament. But he would have been deceiving himself, for this was a sterner, more demanding, more integral faith than ever had sunk roots in the respectable terraces of Bolton. Lever’s was a comparatively softer, southern religion; one which allowed for his disbelief in the afterlife, for example, and which could be mollified by the occasional act of worship and address to the village Sunday School.

  Most crucially, he would never have encompassed the Free Church’s lack of regard, verging on contempt, for landownership. When, in the 1880s, land agitation and land hunger became important social issues in the Hebrides barely a voice would be raised from behind a Lewis pulpit in support of the proprietorial interest. How could the Free Church support that interest, when in the years following 1843, well within living memory, its ministers and its congregations had been locked by landowners out of their places of worship, had been forced to meet and pray on rainswept open ground, to conduct services from the relative immunity of boats anchored offshore?

  How could the Free Church, which owed its existence to the principle that the landed classes should not impose their choice of spiritual advisor upon the people, accept that the same landowners should be allowed to dictate in secular matters? It could not and usually it did not. When the war between Lewis crofter and Lewis factor erupted, the man of most respect and influence in any Lewis community – the Free Church minister – may not have helped to man the barricades, and may have preferred to talk down ‘wild talk and wild plans among the younger men’, but he significantly failed to speak up for the big house. This often entailed remaining silently aloof, which irritated more than one agitator. But there is little reason to doubt the judgement of the historian of the Disruption, James Lachlan MacLeod, that there was ‘a depth of feeling within the Free Church in support of the crofters which has been underestimated’.5

  Just one year before William Lever looked out upon the enchanting prospect of Stornoway momentous and highly divisive issues had been discussed in the town. In March 1883 Sir William Harcourt, the Liberal Government’s Home Secretary, had announced a Royal Commission of Inquiry ‘into the conditions of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’. It would become known as the Napier Commission after its chairman, a 63-year-old lowland landowner and career diplomat who had recently been ennobled as the Baron Napier and Ettrick, and its findings and influence would be epochal.

  The seven-strong commission (one chairman, one secretary and five members) wasted little time in bending to their task. Their hearings opened in May at a schoolhouse in Braes on Skye, and for the next six months the Napier roadshow performed at venue after venue, night after night, throughout the Highlands and Islands. The voluminous testimony that Lord Napier and his colleagues recorded would stand for ever as a political and social history of the nineteenth-century Gaidhealtachd. Its clarion-call was identifiably similar from island to island, parish to parish – ‘Give us land out of the plenty that there is about for cultivation. Give us land at a suitable rent’ – but under cross-examination the witnesses’ infinite variations on a theme held their hearers, and their subsequent readers, in thrall. The spectre of injustice and land hunger haunted the Highlands and Islands, and it was a spectre with many forms.

  The principle which informed so much of the Highland and Hebridean land campaign of the late nineteenth century was one not so much of crofting expansion, as of restitution. Traditional Gaelic attachment to the land meant that any form of private charter which removed it from the communal, clannish township and placed it into the assets column of an individual’s accounts was regarded as being as illegitimate as common theft. Throughout the nineteenth century this simmering grievance was exacerbated by a good deal of actual common theft.

  Estate sheep farms were built and expanded upon what had previously been common grazing or arable land. Vast areas of moor and heath were enclosed and turned into game parks: playgrounds for the shooting of grouse and deer, where a common native of Lewis dared to set foot only in the very real danger of being captured and arraigned as a poacher of ‘private’ wildlife. Between 1818 and 1886 almost 50,000 acres of the peninsula of Park in south-eastern Lewis had been methodically fenced off, firstly for sheep-farming and latterly as a deer-run. Age-old villages were emptied; their names – Valamus, Ceann Chrionaig, Ceannmore – would henceforth be heard only in legend or in song, and their ruined walls would turn to ridges in the bracken. Many of the dispossessed emigrated to Canada or to Scotland. Those that stayed huddled together on tiny plots of bad land in the vestigial coastal communities: by 1881 an estimated 1,700 people were crowded into nine villages in Park. Those nine villages had between them just 181 crofts. The Matheson Estate itself would grudgingly admit in 1883 that it had spent £100,000 on ‘improving’ its land – of which huge sum only the pitiful fraction of 1.5 per cent had been newly invested in crofting townships.

  On 8 June 1883 the Napier Commission arrived in Stornoway. Precisely one week earlier, on Friday 1 June, the town had been the setting of a large political demonstration. Between 2,000 and 4,000 people (the lower figure is the estimation of the conservative national press; the higher the guess of the organisers) marched through its streets. They were led by pipers and carried red banners inscribed in white and black with such phrases as ‘Land To The People’. They came from most parts of rural Lewis; many of them had walked thirty or more miles to attend the rally, and many had sacrificed a valuable day’s fishing at the height of the season. They were addressed by Alexander Morrison and other officials from the Stornoway branch of the Lewis Land Law Reform Association, who urged them to testify with the utmost frankness to the Napier Commission.

  There would be people in later years eager to testify that land hunger was a minority concern in Lewis, and that land reform was the clarion of a few unrepresentative malcontents. The June demonstration in Stornoway would be in itself sufficient to dispel that illusion. At least one-tenth and possibly one-fifth of the island’s rural population marched on that day from Bayhead to the Marybank market stance. As they were almost all men, it is arguable that barely any of the extended family households of Lewis was unrepresented beneath the banners and flags.

  This was far from being the only such mass protest. Three months earlier, immediately after the Napier Commission had been announced, more than 2,000 people had trekked from as far afield as Uig in the south-west to Perceval Square in Stornoway (which had been named in tribute to Lady Matheson’s family) where, following a prayer led by the Church of Scotland minister Reverend Angus MacIver, twenty speakers were heard and signatures were collected for a petition to William Gladstone at 10 Downing Street. And a few months later the rural forces came once more to town to emphasise their need for land reform.

  The burghers of Stornoway did not all smile upon their country cousins. Throughout the Highlands and Islands there existed a sharp divide between the landed and merchant classes and the folk who worked the soil and sea. Until the Third Reform Act of 1884 barely any crofters, who comprised the great majority of the population, had the vote. Even then only those who paid more than £10 in annual rental were enfranchised – which is part of the reason why when crofting rents came to be assessed and fixed, so many of them were fixed at the (relatively substantial) rate of £10 or more per annum.

  A gulf between town and country, between the landed and the landless, between the enfranchised and the unrepresented yawned in Lewis as clearly as in mainland Ross-shire and Inverness. Within the sealed world of the Hebrides it was complicated by social, familial and religious factors. Many an affluent Stornoway tradesman had his roots in the hungry villages of Lochs; many a rural minister considered the campaign for land reform to
be a satanic distraction from the work of God. But it would be futile to deny the difference between terrace and thatch. The one, living and bartering beneath Sir James Matheson’s towering turrets, either had little concern about the distribution of land on the other side of Barvas Moor, or thought the land campaigners to be arrant socialists, misled by mainland ne’er-do-wells and set to steer Lewis on a course towards anarchy and fiscal despair. The other, reaping meagre harvests from a patch of overworked earth, could see no future without land redistribution and therefore no point at all to a public polity which did not cater for land hunger. ‘It is well known,’ another islander would remark at a later date, ‘that Stornoway seldom, or never, represents Lewis opinion’.

  These were the two teams which debated before the Napier Commission in the June of 1883. And the crofting, land reform interest won the verbal contest at a canter. The Commission was faced on the one hand with the shifty plea-bargaining of estate factors, and on the other with tales of distress and injustice eloquently voiced by lay elders and communicants of the Free Church of Scotland. History judges their two starkly contrasted versions of the same era with little difficulty: one is pallid semantics; the other is infused with authentic grievance. More importantly, the gentlemen of the Napier Commission found it relatively easy at the time to recognise where justice lay.

  The chamberlain of the Matheson Estate, and therefore effectively the administrator of rural Lewis, William MacKay, appeared to believe that the Commission would be satisfied by a litany of expenses incurred in small-scale industrial investment and road construction. His cause was unlikely to be helped by his assertion that a Lewis crofter could not be expected to know the extent of an acre of land (even Baron Francis Napier was by June of that year aware that if there was one measurement with which Gaelic-speaking crofters were fully conversant it was the measurement of land), and that he himself had only ‘a sort of’ Gaelic. He was ably countered by the same Alexander Morrison who had helped to organise the previous week’s march, and by Donald Martin of Back, an extensive and comparatively fertile crofting region on the flatlands between the moor and the dunes to the north of Stornoway. There is a danger that the younger men, said Martin with commendable prescience, might rise ‘as the clans of old rose, if they do not get a hold over the land of which they were deprived for the sake of sheep, deer and grouse.’

  Another DonaldMartin from north of Stornoway, a sixty-one-year-old mason from the isolated hamlet of Tolsta, had earlier addressed the Commission in the unmistakable voice of the largest sovereign land in the Hebridean archipelago. His is not the only testimony to ring down the centuries from the transcripts of the Napier Commission, but this Donald Martin’s statement is possibly the most emblematic and identifiable witness to the conditions and the mood of rural Lewis in 1883.

  ‘I do not,’ he commenced, ‘intend to say much.’ Donald Martin then proceeded to say just enough.

  I have seen the people reduced to such poverty that they were obliged to feed upon dulse from the shore. I see them now reduced to such a hard condition that I can compare them to nothing but the lepers at the gates of Samaria – death before them and death behind them.

  I see no prospect of improvement in their condition. If one tack is set free, another tacksman comes into it to confront the people as the Philistines did who came out to battle with the people of Israel. The old people cannot be sent away without the young people. It is only the young people who can go, and it is only they who can support the old people.

  If the young people go, the old people will die; and it is hard for them to see the sheep and the deer enjoying the price of their father’s blood. I have not much more to say.

  What William Lever did not see one year later, as he walked among the charming and attractive citizenry of Stornoway, was a proud, God-fearing and independent agricultural population which was on the fragile cusp between despair and rebellion. 21

  William and Elizabeth Lever and Jonathan Simpson sailed on to the Orkney islands that summer. It became apparent to Simpson that his old schoolfriend was at a crossroads in his life. As they toured the northern isles Lever mused openly about the possibility of buying one of the smaller of the Orkneys. He had never, he said, felt more disinclined to return to the drudgery of wholesale grocery. He could drop out at the age of thirty-three, transfer his business interests to a limited liability company and live contentedly ever after, raising his family on the breezy meadows of Ultima Thule. Instead he returned to Lancashire and made a fortune from soap.

  In 1874 his father’s company had experimented briefly with distributing an in-house soap labelled ‘Lever’s Pure Honey’. It did not thrive. One year later the Trade Marks Act refused to license brand names which ‘describe the product or make implications about its quality’. ‘Pure’ and ‘Honey’ were regarded as falling into those categories. Other businesses were consequently free to steal the last two words of the name, and William Lever learned a lesson in brand identity and registered trade marks.

  But he did not forget about soap. One of his lieutenants, the Tynesider Angus Watson, would later recall his chief’s own version of the revelation which changed British industry:

  One day when on one of his local journeys, he called at the shop of a small general dealer named Ann Radcliffe, who, when ordering her usual weekly requirements, asked him whether he stocked a brand of what she described as ‘stinking soap’.

  Not unnaturally he inquired why she wished to buy a soap having such an offensive reputation. She told him that in spite of its objectionable odour it was selling freely in the district because of its generous lathering properties. At once he became interested . . .

  Lever himself told variations on the same theme – he had Ms Radcliffe enter the Wigan HQ in person to request her ‘stinking soap’, and he insisted that the soap had only been rancid on its oxidised outer surface. Once used the smelly layer was washed away – but the moral was the same: soap with a character, soap with an identifiable personality, would be recognised and requested above the common herd.

  An admixture of caustic soda or potash or resin and animal tallow or olive oil to make soap had been commonplace in Britain for at least 300 years. Although some commercial soap boilers had operated in London from the beginning of the seventeenth century, it remained largely a domestic industry until the nineteenth century – and an industry chiefly patronised by the affluent.

  The industrial revolution altered the soap market. It created a huge new class of people who lived and worked in grimy, soot-encrusted cities, who were consequently more concerned with personal hygiene than before, and who increasingly earned a household wage which might stretch to buying off-cuts of soap from the grocer’s slab with which to wash their clothes and linen and bodies.

  The frothy ‘stinking soap’ which Ann Radcliffe encountered had been given its lathering qualities by the addition of vegetable oils instead of tallow. Vegetable oil was also cheaper than the alternatives and had from the manufacturer’s point of view the added quality of a speedier built-in obsolescence: vegetable oil soap was softer and therefore more quickly used. Its unfortunate side-effect was that ‘the blending of the vegetable oil with the caustic soda left the soap with a searching and unpleasant smell that permeated everything washed with it.’

  Because cheap stinking cleanliness was by the 1880s widely considered preferable to unwashed clothes and skin, this was not an insuperable problem. But it would be better for all concerned if the smell could be eliminated. Lever learned of a product in the USA named ‘citronella’ which masked the odour with a cheap lemon-rind perfume.

  He needed a brand name which carried none of the loaded implications of ‘Pure Honey’ and which had not already been registered. Immediately upon disembarking from his tour of Lewis and the Orkneys William Lever visited a patent agent in Liverpool named W.P. Thompson. Thompson heard his new client’s requirements, tore off half a sheet of notepaper and wrote down half-a-dozen possibilities.

&nbs
p; Lever rejected them all. He recounted:

  At first blush none of those names appealed to me. I had big ideas of some sort of name – I did not know what, but it was going to be such a marvel, and when I saw it written down in cold ink – the names that were possible – names that you could register and fight for, names that did not describe the article, that were neither geographical nor descriptive, did not refer to quality, and got over all the obstacles that the Trade Marks Law has very properly put in front of us – none of them appealed to me.

  He put the piece of paper in his pocket and left for home a disappointed man. Some days later he realised that W.P. Thompson had actually delivered the goods. Examining the list once more Lever found himself captivated by a single written word. He panicked and left post-haste for Liverpool to ask Thompson immediately to patent the brand-name ‘Sunlight’ – ‘I was all in a tremble to have it registered, for fear somebody else had got it.’

  Nobody else had got it, in Britain or elsewhere in the patented world. In ‘Sunlight’ Lever had stumbled upon a product name which would be internationally applicable.

  It was a good time to enter the soap business. Prices of soap tallow and oils were, in the words of the London manufacturers, ‘lower . . . than we had ever previously known’, and consumer demand was rising dramatically. Lever initially bought soap in bulk from a factory, wrapped it in imitation parchment which preserved its appearance and delayed gangrenous oxidisation, labelled it as a Sunlight product, advertised it in the trade and local press, and wholesaled it to stores. In 1885 he took the logical step of buying out a failed chemical works at Warrington on the River Mersey, 18 miles east of Liverpool, and began boiling down his own tallow, oil and resin.