The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  The Park raid ended on that day, 23 November 1887, when Sheriff Fraser caught up with a group of men and read them the Riot Act, complete with explanatory Gaelic sub-titles. They went home peacefully. Their job was done. In the words of Joni Buchanan, a chronicler of the Lewis land struggle, ‘the people of Lochs had, in a superbly effective manner, put their case to the nation – a fact reflected in the massive media coverage and subsequent parliamentary attention given to the raid.’

  The effect of their coup de theatre would be quickly indicated by incidents elsewhere in Lewis and by the response of the arms of the law. The sympathetic William Gladstone had been removed from Downing Street and replaced by a Conservative administration. Substantial detachments of the military sailed from the mainland to Stornoway in the company of police reinforcements, and four fighting ships of the Royal Navy augmented by a mailboat and a Fishery Board cruiser were ordered to make their presence known in the Minch. This sub-colonial gunboat diplomacy was not new to the Highlands and Islands, where armed police and the military and men-of-war had been deployed to face down land-grabs on previous occasions. But the scale of the response to the Park raids indicated that the authorities were anxious to preserve rather more than Mr Joseph Platt’s shooting rights.

  In the event all that manpower effected the charging and arraigning before the High Court in Edinburgh of just six men. An original list of sixteen was trimmed down on the advice of the Lord Advocate, who wished to see only the ‘instigators’ brought before the full majesty of the law. The six – who included schoolteacher Donald MacRae despite his not having marched or hunted on the raid, but because the authorities (with perfect accuracy) suspected him of planning and supporting it – surrendered willingly.

  The affair was not closed. It could never be closed on such terms. To the Scottish Gael the issue was a moral one, more black-and-white than any legal formulation, and considerably more easy to comprehend. As the eye-witness James Cameron suggested: ‘Does any man in his senses suppose that this country will stand by and see a whole parish simply starve to death, merely because a few Highland lairds are determined to turn fertile lands into deer runs and sheep walks?’

  In the middle of December, just four weeks after the incident at Park and shortly after Donald MacRae and his five colleagues had consented to a jury trial in Edinburgh, several hundred men from Borve, Shader and Barvas on the broad north-western fringe – just about as far away from South Lochs and Park as they could be while remaining on Lewis – marched up their cliff-top machair to the farm at Galson. They demanded that the tenant there depart once his lease had expired, and that the pasture land should be turned over to crofting. Their efforts would be rewarded by an interview with Lady Matheson in Stornoway Castle. The proprietress advised them ‘to emigrate to new countries, where you can get lands cheap, and send your sons to the army and navy . . . The land under sheep and deer is my property and I can do with it what I like.’ Similar demonstrations took place elsewhere in the west-coast parishes of Ness and Uig.

  Following a march on two east-coast farms on Christmas Eve 1887, Stornoway constabulary was in receipt of disturbing rumours. On New Year’s Day 1888, it was whispered, there would be raids on the enclosed sheep-runs of Aignish and Melbost at either side of the Point causeway.

  Point, or the Eye Peninsula, protruded like an affirmative thumb from the body of Stornoway itself, jutting out and up into the Minch to form the sea walls of the sheltered inlets to the north and south of the metropolis. The thumb was almost severed: only a thin, short, tide-swept artery of land connected the bulk of agricultural Point to the paved streets of Stornoway. These parts of the town and the country were close enough to shout at one another, albeit in different languages. A raid on a deer run in Park and a march on a sheep farm at Galson constituted to most citizens of Stornoway scintillae of trouble in faraway countries of which they knew little. A raid on Aignish and Melbost farms, those neat patches of green overlooking the Point causeway, would be like a riot on the front lawn.

  And raided they were. Not on 1 January, when a handful of men contented themselves with seeing in 1888 by destroying 300 yards of dyke and fencing at Aignish in the first dark hours of the new year, but eight days later, when the pitched battle which had been seen by both sides as inevitable finally occurred.

  Sheriff Fraser was authorised to use his Marines and Royal Scots at Aignish on 9 January. With his regular constabulary this afforded him 100 uniformed men to face the grassy knolls of Point and deny its people access to Aignish Farm. They were not enough. The crofters started coming over the hill from Knock and Swordale in the late morning. By midday there were between 700 and 1,000 men, women and children busily clearing livestock from the pastures and driving them across the isthmus towards Stornoway. There was a stand-off between the military and the police and the demonstrators, the Riot Act was read (with, once again, helpful expositions in Gaelic), scuffles broke out and thirteen men were arrested and locked up in Stornoway jail. It became a part of the town’s legend that schoolboys in class at their Francis Street school ‘heard the tramp of the soldiers marching past with their prisoners towards the jail, they all rushed to the windows, and there saw . . . the fiscal, riding in front on a horse, hatless and with a bleeding bandage round his forehead . . .’7

  There was undoubtedly violence at Aignish. Whether it was more disturbing or threatening a scene than any other nineteenth-century workers’ demonstration is less certain. Faced with policemen who attempted to arrest their fellows and with fixed lines of soldiers backing up the policemen, many of the young men of Point reacted comprehensibly, by trying to free their friends and by hurling clods of earth at the uniforms. But despite that dramatic sighting of the Procurator Fiscal no policeman and no soldier required medical treatment, and no Leodhasach was badly hurt. Had the demonstrators not attempted, as they certainly did attempt, to curb each other’s fury at being confronted by armed British troops on their own soil, and had even the prisoners not warned their friends to leave them to their fate and not agitate the nervous trigger finger of an imported Marine, there could have been a butcher’s bill to pay. Aignish was as much of a dramatisation as Park. The difference was that the Park performance had been allowed gracefully to play itself out, whereas the curtain had no sooner lifted on the Aignish show than the stage was invaded by armed men waving warrants.

  Three days later, on 12 January 1888, those thirteen prisoners were transferred for security reasons – it was feared that attempts might be made to spring them from captivity in Lewis – to Dingwall. They were incarcerated there until being put on the southbound train to await trial in Edinburgh.

  On 13 January 1888 the six Park defendants left Lewis for the mainland railhead at Strome on the same mailboat as various witnesses for and against their side of the case. At the end of their trial an Edinburgh jury took thirty minutes to decide that Donald MacRae and his colleagues were ‘not guilty as libelled’ on all charges of mobbing, rioting and breaking the Trespass Act.

  On 30 January the thirteen Aignish defendants traced their footsteps into the High Court. They would suffer a different fate. Their offence was deemed to be greater, in part because of their proximity to Stornoway, which geographical detail had led them into open confrontation with seconded military squadrons and with a number of the town police. Despite the fact that a number of privately-owned animals had been killed and eaten at Park, and despite the widespread press coverage of the raid from Balallan and Lochs, the massively supported demonstration at Aignish had to official eyes far more of the trappings of an ugly urban brawl. The acquittal of the Park defendants had also led to squawks of anxiety from the Northern Police, the Scottish Office, the landed fraternity and the press (one journalist who had enjoyed the hospitality of the raiders on that November night had agreed to offer evidence for their prosecution).

  The Aignish charges were modified to include the more pliable accusation of ‘forming part of a riotous mob’, a sterner judge was g
iven the reins, and all thirteen men were pronounced guilty. In Victorian Britain any such verdict on a working person, even one with so impeccable a private life and so previously unblemished a record as the average devout Hebridean crofter, meant jail. One man got six months, three men got nine months, seven were sent away for a year and two older fishermen from Aird at the furthest easterly tip of the Point peninsula were imprisoned for fifteen months.

  Imprisonment was no solution, of course, and the court authorities knew it. They had heard Samuel Newhall, the Aignish farm lessee, testify that on the previous Christmas Eve he had been approached by some 300 men carrying red flags and asking him politely but firmly to evacuate. They had heard that at least 700 people had attended the 9 January fracas on Newhall’s ovine meadows. They knew the size of the population of this district, and the authorities could do their sums. They were clearly faced with the long-term logic of becoming obliged to imprison every man, woman and child on the Point peninsula to quell the unrest, to say nothing of the thousands from Ness, Uig and South Lochs . . .

  Seventeen years later, in 1905, the farm at Aignish was removed from private tack, divided into crofts and let to thirty-two different tenants, all from the district of Point. No such happy fate was immediately scheduled for Park. Twice more it was raided before the turn of the old century, and twice more it was emptied again – on the second occasion in 1891 costing twelve men two weeks in Porterfield Prison, Inverness. When that martyred dozen resurfaced they attended a Land League gathering in the Highland capital and heard the Reverend Charles MacEachern demand rhetorically of the Mathesons and Platts and Newhalls and tacksmen of Galson and Melbost and Dell – ‘Why displace those who would make [the land] valuable? And why persecute and imprison those who would make it valuable? What we say is what Cromwell said to a like-minded class: “Give place to honester men.”’

  Somewhere in the north of England, William Hesketh Lever was eagerly plotting his model village on the useless bog of Bromborough marsh. 46

  In the 1920s a man named Harley Williams, who gained national celebrity later in life as an author of popular medical books, was appointed Medical Officer in Lewis. As chance would have it, this posting offered Williams the opportunity to observe at close quarters not only the island and its people, but also William Lever. Twenty years later, in 1947, Dr Williams published a quasi-psychological study of eminent persons which he titled Men Of Stress. His fourth subject, in a 35,000-word essay, was the late William Hesketh Lever.

  The man was, judged Williams, a human dynamo. His unforgiving daily routine was almost Spartan. He slept in a bedroom with only three walls; the other being open to the Cheshire elements. He rose as early as 4.30 a.m., exercised with dumb-bells and horses, and then dictated business matters – more loudly as the years passed and his deafness grew – to a relay team of secretaries and executives.

  He balanced the management of a multinational company interested in both hemispheres and four continents with a spell as a Liberal Member of Parliament, several political campaigns, housing developments, collecting art, satisfying a thirst for the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, global travelling and a million other diversions. Such a life was only partially attributable, as Williams suggested, to the fact that Lever did not drink. ‘. . . The obsession of [his] daily schedule,’ pronounced the doctor, ‘suggests some deep conflict, something he was trying to forget . . .’

  Lever attempted to analyse his own drive, and deduced that its primary motivation was fear. ‘What has caused me,’ he would ask, ‘to begin work at 4.30 in the morning for the last two or three years and to work laborious hours, and to have only one absorbing thought, namely my own efficiency and the maintenance of the task I have to perform; I am bound to confess it has not been the attraction of dividends, but fear, cowardly fear – the growing fear that I have placed myself in the position of accepting money from . . . widows, spinsters, clergymen and others who might possibly have to forego their dividends which would mean the probable curtailment of what they depended on for their day-to-day food, clothing, rent . . .’

  Those were the words of a slightly deluded politician. Dr Harley Williams treated with proper disdain the self-analysis of such an obsessive, competitive, controlling personality.

  To say that he feared Lever Brothers might have to pass dividends on their preference shares tells us much less than half the truth. Men do not work at such diabolical intensity merely so that spinsters, widows and clergymen may pay their rent.

  Fear by itself is paralysing. Any prudent business man could have shown Lever dozens of ways of reducing the risks to his preference shareholders. The average director of the average company would have advised him to stop philanthropy, and to give up such pastimes as the Congo enterprise, and extending his garden village. If Lever had ever in his life suffered from fear of worldly consequences he would never have broken away from his father’s excellent business . . .8

  William Lever worked those days, subjected himself to an athlete’s training regime, devoted his lengthy waking hours to improvement of business and character because the process – rather than the result – thrilled and enlivened him. He could never lose control; never be seen by himself or anybody else to relax his authority. He genuinely believed that the late-Victorian and Edwardian working classes deserved a fuller and more rewarding life (and that they would actually make better employees if healthy and happy), but he could never admit the role of their own trade unions, or even of the state, in providing such benefits. ‘No man of an independent turn of mind,’ the secretary of the Bolton branch of the Engineers’ Union would tell him in 1919, ‘can breathe for long the atmosphere of Port Sunlight. That might be news to your Lordship, but we have tried it.’9

  Improvement had to come from him and from him alone: the benevolent, sagacious patron. His commercial mantra of ‘Organise, Deputise, Criticise’ was only two-thirds revealing. He organised and criticised with assiduity; he deputised reluctantly and never in full. ‘I have always viewed you,’ he wrote (at telling length and with revealing force) to an ambitious underling who had presumed to offer advice about an imminent meeting, ‘as thoroughly alive to what is correct and proper for a Secretary to take upon himself. I am always glad to have your free expression of opinion on all matters that I may discuss with you. But until I do discuss a matter with you, I think you will agree with me that it is not within your province to lay your views before me. I hope that this will be the last time on which you will venture an expression of opinion as to what course I should take at a Meeting unless in response to a request from myself that you should do so.’

  It is unoriginal but valuable to describe the man as Napoleonic, chiefly because Lever – perhaps because he felt he ought to be in sympathy with another short, stocky, pop-eyed autocrat – made the parallel himself. When the pretentious Lady Lever Art Gallery was built at Port Sunlight he insisted on a special Napoleon room, based on the Empress Josephine’s bedroom, with First Empire palmettes, swags and a frieze of urns. (Two of the eminent architects on the project, who survived long enough to write their employer’s obituary, could not resist suggesting in two different published essays that their experience of being contracted to William Lever was comparable to that of junior staff officers under Bonaparte.) It is more interesting to note that he considered there to be similarities between himself and the emperor, than that many similarities actually existed. They were both driven men, both incapable of delegation, both fully alive only when immersed in their vocation. But it is unlikely that William Lever had it in him to slaughter the civilian populations of cities or invade Russia. At a certain crucial point his autocracy stopped short of absolute tyranny. A wry levity rarely deserted him. The sentimentality which informed so many of his activities, from buying art to building workers’ homes and fighting for his family firm, subverted the ruthless dictatorial impulse. Once Lever had become one of the richest, best-regarded and most influential businessmen in the world, he would still enter –
with a self-conscious humility that was anything but Napoleonic – on the decennial census form his ‘profession or occupation’ as ‘soap maker’.

  But if and when his administration was so much as questioned, let alone threatened, Lever felt obliged to retaliate openly and with quite unsentimental force. When the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror ran a legitimate investigation into the business ethics of the soap barons, Lever – against the orthodox advice of most legal and public relations experts – sued their publishing company, Lord Northcliffe’s Associated Newspapers. He won a very personal victory. His formidable leading counsel, the former solicitor-general Sir Edward Carson, made a point of placing his client in the witness stand for cross-examination, knowing that the steely little Lancastrian would never crack – and then invited the opposition to put Lord Northcliffe through the same ordeal. Northcliffe threw in his hand. His representatives conceded the case on the following morning.

  When the disreputable financier Ernest Terah Hooley visited Port Sunlight and made an impertinent offer to buy Lever Brothers, William greeted the Irishman with disarming hospitality. In the course of their conversation Hooley – who drove through his deals more often than not, until he was arrested by the law – confessed to being tempted to buy the Bovril Company. Lever excused himself briefly from the room, and returned to announce that Lever Brothers was not for sale. When Hooley shortly afterwards examined the Bovril portfolio he discovered that a large block of its inflated shares had recently been snapped up cheaply by William Lever. (Who would have been doubly delighted to discover, many decades later, the whole of the Bovril concern nestling comfortably in the embrace of the multinational company named Unilever.)