William Lever’s talent, then and always, was not so much to invent a product as to increase its value and market-share by sophisticated packaging and inventive advertising. He was aware of this – ‘He was not a creator,’ commented an associate. ‘He admitted himself that a great deal that he did in connection with his vast business was not original in creation – but he had a genius for adaptation, and could seize on the possibility of an idea that contained no suggestion for the less adventurous mind.’
A certain uniqueness would be expected of Sunlight soap, a neutrally-scented frothiness which, in homage to Ann Radcliffe, was diligently cultivated in the early months of the Warrington works. But soap was soap, whether it smelled of lemons, of pine oil or of industrial waste. It was a simple and easily duplicated item, and Lever was hypersensitive to the fact that his brand image was crucial.
He quickly established two marketing essentials. He identified the biggest, most neglected and most rapidly expanding consumer sector as being the households of the industrial working class – and so when Sunlight Soap was first sent out to the shelves every part of its promotion ‘was brought down to the level of a working man’s needs’. And he recognised that the working man himself would not go shopping for his soap. That task would be undertaken by his wife. So the packaging and advertising were aimed at women, which led to much emphasis on the sweetness of Sunlight, on its facility for removing stains and for washing fabrics as well as men’s grimy necks, and to some extraordinary copy and illustrations. Oil paintings of pretty little girls in new frocks and lines such as
’Twill make your brow as snowy white
As free from grief and care,
As when with youth your eyes were bright
And cheeks beyond compare . . .
were not designed to appeal to the purchasing instincts of Liverpool dockers or engineers on the London and North Western Railway, but to their mothers, their wives and their daughters.
It worked with astonishing speed. Within two years the demand for Sunlight Soap in the north of England alone was such that he had expanded the output of his Warrington works 22-fold. Within three years he was at the Bear’s Paw Restaurant in Liverpool to toast the removal of the first sod of land at Bromborough on the Wirral to make way for Port Sunlight. By 1890, just five years after his Warrington factory had begun to churn out 3,000 tons of soap a year, the Port Sunlight factory was producing almost 16,000 tons. William Lever had identified and successfully breached an effectively infinite market. It had all appeared so quick and easy that he was unusually sensitive to allegations of extreme good fortune and felt obliged to repudiate ‘those who think we have just held our mouths open and success has dropped in. I do not know whether you have heard the story about Mahomet. When he was told to trust in God and leave the camels free, he replied: “Tie them up and trust in God . . .”’
His army of travelling salesmen – or ‘district agents’ – was vitally important to such an industrialist. A decade after removing to Port Sunlight Lever interviewed and employed in that capacity a young Geordie named Angus Watson, who would remember for the rest of his life the atmosphere of the citadel on the west bank of the Mersey: ‘The whole village was dominated by the spirit of Soap. All of its occupants were employed in the industry; not only were they engaged in it all day, but it was a constant source of conversation at night. You could no more escape from its influence than from the odour (not at all an unpleasant one) permeating it from the great factory plant . . .’
Watson, who had personal experience of urban destitution in the north-east of England, arrived for the first time at Port Sunlight directly from ‘the grey city’ of Liverpool by way of the Mersey Tunnel. It appeared in contrast a kind of Shangri-La.
The sun was shining, and the trees were breaking into the bright-green leafage of early spring . . . I seemed to have been suddenly transported into another world.
The pleasant little semi-detached red-brick houses each had before them a small garden plot of flowers; trees lined the spacious streets on both sides; the various public buildings were tastefully designed, and the church in the centre of the village was a beautiful building. Even the great factory and suite of offices dominating the whole were attractively laid out. There was an air of freshness and prosperity about the whole place.
After a short walk down the main thoroughfare I found my way into the great offices in which, I was told, there worked some 3,000 employees. I felt that at last here was Industry carried on under ideal circumstances.
Watson discovered Lever at his command post, a glass-walled office at the centre of the works from which he could survey the whole of his staff. Significantly, the twenty-five-year-old applicant considered ‘the Chief’ to be ‘about forty years of age’. The year was 1898: William Lever was almost fifty. Not many people forgot their first encounter with the ‘short and thickset’ Napoleon of this utopian industrial empire, and Angus Watson would recall his introduction – amplified by four succeeding years of business association – vividly four decades later.
At this time, ‘his physical and mental zenith’, Lever had
a sturdy body set on short legs and a massive head covered with thick, upstanding hair, he radiated force and energy. He had piercing, blue-grey, humorous eyes, which, however, flashed with challenge when he was angry. A strong, thin-lipped mouth, set above a slightly receding chin, and the short neck and closely set ears of a prize-fighter.
He possessed great physical strength, and a gift of sleep which was always available at his command. His dress was almost always the same. A grey tweed suit, a Victorian-fashioned collar, with a carelessly-worn made-up tie, and a tall grey hat. A white silk shirt, and black shoes on his small, shapely feet. Hands carefully attended to, which were also small. An expression always alert, but rather strained because of the slight deafness, which increased as he grew older . . .
This stern and strangely dainty man had become a committed member of William Gladstone’s Liberal Party; a party which in government had exceeded the general expectations of the Napier Commission and passed in 1886 reforms which greatly benefited the crofters of the Scottish Highlands. There is no evidence that William Lever either knew of or cared about such Gaelic intricacies at the time. His mission then was firmly based in the industrial south of Britain: he stood unsuccessfully in 1892 and 1895 for the parliamentary seat of Birkenhead. The double rejection by his Wirral electorate reduced neither his political ambitions nor his growing conviction that he could change the world as effectively from outside Westminster as within it. He was, said Angus Watson, ‘not one man, but three or four . . .’.
First, there was the business man, brisk and keen. He could seize the heart of a business proposal almost instantly, and before the problem was fully presented to him he had arrived at his decision upon it. His restlessly active mind was constantly turning over some new enterprise; no sooner had he reached one goal, but another and a greater appealed to him.
Money for its own sake had little attraction for him, but acquisitiveness in its deeper sense was a passion. He had a genius for organisation, and would take infinite pains with tireless patience to achieve his object. He loved to think on a big scale, and would not readily accept defeat when he had decided on his course of action.
He had a keen sense of humour, so much so that he carried in his pocket a little note-book in which he recorded any amusing story or circumstance that presented itself to him. He used this to his own advantage when the opportunity offered. If he was not making progress with a business negotiation he would suddenly break off to tell a story which had tickled him, and this he did so humorously that in the hearty laugh which followed this recital he seized upon the situation and gained his point.6
Sharp and pugnacious, William Lever was shot through with sentiment and insecurity. As he perceived those delicacies to weaken his personality (and weakness was not to be tolerated) he masked them. Humour clearly did not come to him naturally, so he armed himself with a
stand-up storyboard. Recreation – even sober recreation – was a foreign concept, so he forced himself to exercise each morning with dumb-bells and skipping ropes, and when time and the weather permitted by walking or riding before breakfast. He had a self-made man’s profligacy with large sums of ‘private’ money and parsimony with the business pennies – ‘I have watched him for a quarter of an hour while he re-worked a cable so as to save two shillings in its transmission, and I have also seen him spend five thousand dollars on a fur coat for a friend in financial embarrassment whom he knew would not accept money from him.’
He was always aware of the ‘somewhat narrow’ secondary education of the Victorian middle classes that he had received. The answer was to become an auto-didact. His reading as an adult progressed along ‘definitely limited lines’, but progressed nonetheless. He had always been interested in architecture, and his eye for building design – domestic, commercial and civic, all of which were required at Port Sunlight – was probably the most advanced of his cultural sensitivities.
No sooner were the profits pouring into his account than he began to collect art. His taste was commonplace: moderate and patriotic. The pre-Raphaelites were by the 1890s a safe enough choice, as was Wedgwood pottery and Regency needlework. Much of his representative art was bought with an eye on the advertising of soap. Canvasses of winsome children in need of a bath were especially favoured. (Although on at least one occasion his gauge of public taste betrayed him. Lever acquired an oil portrait of a reclining nude by the immigrant Dutchman Lawrence Alma-Tadema, presumably on the grounds that it was titled ‘The Tepidarium’ and depicted the lady languorously cleaning herself. His colleagues appear to have pointed out that Alma-Tadema’s lubricious realisation of the fully naked adult female form, while slightly qualified by the strategic presence of an ostrich feather, was too explicit even for a fin de siècle poster campaign.)
As his later political comments and actions would illustrate, he was a supporter more of the indomitable person of William Gladstone than of the ‘modern’ Liberal Party. The Grand Old Man of British politics was invited – while leader of the opposition at the age of eighty-three – to open Gladstone Hall in Port Sunlight, a men’s recreation centre and (teetotal) dining room. Gladstone was charmed both by the compliment and by the industrialist’s brusque affection.
Lever was markedly uxorious. He would often comment that he could never remember life without Elizabeth, and ‘in his domestic circle he was deeply affectionate. Those who were bound to him by ties of blood were never forgotten, and remembered with generosity and tenderness.’
Behind the piercing eyes and beneath the ruthless negotiator there lay a sentimental soul. Angus Watson’s job interview on that day in 1898 almost foundered on the matter of wages. Lever was disinclined to pay the bright young Geordie his required rate, until he learned that Watson’s father had recently died and there was a widowed mother and two sisters to support, whereupon ‘he immediately agreed to give me what I asked’.
‘By temperament he was a sentimentalist,’ concluded Watson. ‘It was easy to appeal to his emotions, and he was readily stirred by any story of distress or misfortune.’
One more thing was readily apparent. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, William Hesketh Lever was possibly the wealthiest sentimentalist in Britain.
3
ORGANISE, DEPUTISE, CRITICISE
The last two decades of Queen Victoria’s reign saw an unquiet peace in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. William Gladstone’s well-founded fear that the peasant Gaels of the far north-west might follow the Gaels of Ireland into riot and uprising had led him to do for one what he could not do for the other.
The failure of Gladstone’s ambition to give Ireland Home Rule sundered parliament and the nation, and fatally divided his party. Few people in Scotland were at that time requesting anything like Home Rule. The people of the north and west were undeniably a part of Scotland, and what they wanted was land reform – from whichever source it may arrive. So before retiring finally from political office William Gladstone intervened and outflanked the recommendations of Baron Napier’s Commission.
This was especially remarkable from a prime minister who personally owned large tracts of private land on the Celtic fringes, and who in common with much of the rest of his class took occasional holidays in the Highlands as a guest of the nawabs of recreational estates. It is a tribute, perhaps, to his famous incorruptibility that William Gladstone was able to ignore the familiar tones of the drawing room and the shooting lodge and hear instead the foreign language of the Highland rural labourer.
Or perhaps it was the echo of history to which this other sentimental Liberal listened. His appointed investigator, Baron Napier, had delivered his report at the end of 1883. The baron recommended that larger crofting tenants should be given a form of secure tenure, but that poorer tenants should be helped to emigrate; and that the subsequent future of crofting should be formalised around a township system which administered common grazings. In offering these solutions Napier put clear blue water between himself and the Land League’s demand for the ‘Three Fs’ – fixity of tenure, free sale and fair rent for all. This would still not be enough to mollify the Highland landowning community. The two members of the northern acreocracy who sat on the commission, Sir Kenneth Mackenzie of Gairloch and the Inverness-shire Tory MP Donald Cameron of Lochiel, both insisted on publishing abstentions from the recommendations, with Lochiel accusing Napier of falling for the romantic fable of a prelapsarian Highland golden age before the dawn of private capital.
Napier, therefore, pleased no single party to the dispute. Worse, neither did his advice win the affections of Home Secretary William Harcourt or of William Gladstone. 1884 and 1885 were not easy years for their Liberal government either at home or abroad – the arduous months would climax in its collapse – and it is therefore instructive to note that while Harcourt appeared to be limiting his interest in the affairs of the Scottish Gaidhealtachd to persuading Highland proprietors to formulate their own plans, Gladstone found time to write a memorandum almost of rebuke to his Home Secretary.
In January 1885 William Harcourt received a letter from his seventy-five-year-old Prime Minister which asserted the astonishingly radical principle that the indigenous inhabitants of places such as the island of Lewis had a historic title to their land, which had been usurped by privateers like Sir James Matheson (a former Liberal MP as well as owner of Lewis) and – by logical extension – Cameron of Lochiel and Mackenzie of Gairloch.
It was this ‘historical fact’, wrote Gladstone, ‘that constitutes the crofters’ title to demand the interference of parliament. It is not because they are poor, or because there are too many of them, or because they want more land to support their families, but because those whom they represent had rights of which they have been surreptitiously deprived to the injury of the community.’
Having accepted, complete and undiluted, the historical analysis of the Highland Land League, it was but a short step for this Prime Minister to embrace the same solutions. A Crofting Bill was drafted. It was just as quickly shelved. In June 1885 the wider history of Gaelic discontent, in the form of the Irish Question, stepped in and through a vote of no confidence forced Gladstone and Harcourt to resign.
It was certainly never their intention, but the Irish Gaels did their Highland cousins a favour. Lord Salisbury’s Conservatives were obliged to enter a period of minority caretaker government and to call a General Election at the end of 1885. It would be the first national poll following the Third Reform Act, and therefore the first one in which some crofters – those paying more than £10 per annum in rent – would be entitled to vote.
‘Crofter candidates’ supported by the Land League were put up in every one of the crofting constituencies. Four of them were immediately returned to parliament. The four were returned from Inverness-shire, Argyll, Caithness and Ross and Cromarty. (A fifth county, Sutherland, would fall to the
crofters’ cause in the following year.) The most densely populated part of the parliamentary seat of Ross and Cromarty in 1885 was the island of Lewis.
Ross and Cromarty had since 1847 been held in the Liberal interest, almost without challenge, firstly by the proprietor of Lewis, Sir James Matheson, and then by his nephew Sir Alexander Matheson of Lochalsh. In 1884 Sir Alexander had been replaced by another landowning Liberal, the twenty-four-year-old Ronald Crauford Munro-Ferguson of Novar.
The Third Reform Act had increased by 500 per cent the Ross and Cromarty electorate. In such an area as rural Lewis the enlarged franchise was yet more dramatic, rising from a mere handful of property-owners to thousands of crofting tenants. Despite being obliged to register themselves as new voters at the Ross-shire county seat of Dingwall, more than 100 miles and at least a day’s journey away on the east coast of the mainland, a huge number of freshly enfranchised Leodhasaich were qualified to enter a polling station in the November and December General Election of 1885. Alive to the origins and aspirations of most of his county’s additional 7,000 voters, Munro-Ferguson of Novar – who previous to the passing of the Third Reform Act had been a fervid opponent of the crofters’ cause – promptly changed his mind and became in public an ardent supporter of the Land League and its Three Fs.
The electorate was unconvinced. Prior to their sitting MP’s visit to Lewis in October 1885 the Park branch of the Land League was assured by its secretary that: ‘Novar is a landlord, and that is sufficient reason why we should do all in our power to oust him at the general election. Whatever landlords say, we cannot place any confidence in their promises, when we consider how they have acted towards us during the last eighty years.’ Novar arrived in Stornoway to a violent reception: the police had to escort him from the steamer to the Royal Hotel.
The Soap Man Page 4