The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  The chase was the thing. What William Lever misdiagnosed in his aubade as the chill fear of letting others down, was actually an adrenaline rush. It was the fear not of impoverishing spinsters, but of failing to win with the poker hand he dealt himself at dawn each day.

  He rarely did fail, if only because few of his competitors at the green baize table could outlast his pace or outbid his stake. His fortune and that of his firm and family growed like Topsy. When he celebrated his fiftieth birthday at the beginning of the twentieth century William Lever was one of the richest individuals and most celebrated entrepreneurs in the Western world. He would mock the suggestion that he had never known a setback, but could hardly deny that while small skirmishes may occasionally have slipped away from him, the major battles had inexorably fallen to his will. Even the setbacks had a way of righting themselves, if diligently pursued. In 1906 he was elected – after three unsuccessful local campaigns – as Liberal Member of Parliament for the Wirral. He would have a conscientious, if brief (he stepped down in 1909) and undistinguished career in the House of Commons, where his workmates were less obedient than in Port Sunlight.

  More auspiciously, in 1906 Lever Brothers began seriously to farm coconuts in the Solomon Islands.

  In common with all his overseas adventures, the South Pacific experiment was undertaken in the name of commercial realism. In order to make soap William Lever needed plentiful quantities of smooth and sweetly scented vegetable oil. The Polynesian colonies were admirably suited to the growth of the coconut palm, whose dried kernels, or copra, could then conveniently be diverted to his oil mill at Sydney, Australia.

  A mode of operation was established in the Solomon Islands which would be repeated, local conditions permitting, in other distant Lever interests. He would bring investment and employment to an apparently needy district, in his name and on his terms. Lever Pacific Plantations Limited expanded mightily, from producing 100 tons on 51,000 acres in 1906 to turning 1,000 tons out of 300,000 acres in 1913. The benevolent nawab of the concern went so far as to announce his plans to build a new model South Seas capital and port. It would be called Ladylever (a name which, as we shall see, he must have chosen with some emotion) and its orderly bungalows would extend up the side of a mountain to the cool and healthy conditions which pertained at 3,000 feet.

  There were problems in the Solomon Islands, partly with the bureaucrats of the Colonial Office, but also with the incomprehensible attitude of the locals to work, money and the ethos of Lever Pacific Plantations Limited. During what would turn out to be a valedictory visit to the Solomons at the end of 1913 William visited a chief’s hut and was dismayed to find certain Western consumer goods – a gramophone, a thermos flask, three sewing machines – littered inconsequentially ‘amid general dirt and disorder’.

  ‘Mr Woodford states,’ he mused, ‘that the natives are making so much money out of copra at present that they have no idea what to do with their earnings or profits, and either waste them on useless purchases or hoard them in some hole in the ground. He said he had no doubt this old chief could produce hundreds of pounds hidden away somewhere. ‘They won’t bank their cash, and really, they don’t know what to do with it.’10

  Such wilful fecklessness made the indigent people of the Solomon Islands quite unsuitable as managers, or even as dependable daylabourers. Positions of responsibility at Lever Pacific Plantations were almost always occupied by imported Australian bushmen, but Lever’s efforts to introduce ‘Hindoos from the teeming millions of India’ to work his crops were thwarted by the Colonial Office.

  The model township of Ladylever never appeared in the Solomon Islands and after 1913 Lever Brothers reduced their Pacific activities. Another patch of the earth beckoned, wherein the coconut palm thrived but not the British Colonial Office. Lever leased land in the Belgian Congo.

  His interest in Africa fermented over many years. There were not many places in the world amenable to the coconut palm with which William Lever was not familiar. Those parts of West Africa which lay within the British fiefdom did not immediately recommend themselves because – as in the Solomon Islands – the British Colonial Office stood there between Lever Brothers and the land. The Colonial Office’s policy in West Africa was, if anything, even more obstructive to the outside entrepreneur than in the South Seas. It was settled policy that ‘the native populations of West Africa under British rule should have secured to them rights to hold their ancestral soil without disturbance, to cultivate it as they would, and to do with its produce what they thought fit’. That was not much good to a man looking to service the world with soap from boundless palmeries.

  No such niceties applied to those parts of the region which languished under the suzerainty of King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold’s hideous human rights record in Africa rendered it impolitic, however, for a British businessman – especially a Liberal British businessman – fully to exploit the old brute’s territory until after Leopold’s death in 1909, when the Belgian government introduced a reformed colonial regime.

  After considering the reports of several scouts, in April 1911 William Lever signed with the Belgian authorities a convention which brought into being La Société Anonyme des Huileries de Congo Belge. This company would lease almost two million acres of Africa in five separate districts of the Belgian Congo (which is now mostly Zaire), and grow upon it the crops needed to service at least five oil mills situated in the regional centres.

  Those would be his palmeries, his coconut ranches. It was a scheme of stunning ambition. It has rightly been suggested that in signing the 1911 convention William Lever moved out of the world of business and into the realm of international politics. Lever himself would neither have spurned that suggestion nor thought it impertinent. If his few years in parliament had confirmed him in anything, it was the belief that commerce and not democracy oiled the wheels and fed the boiler of the developing world. He knew that in accepting responsibility for the economic well-being of most of the north-western half of an enormous foreign territory he was effectively placing himself in loco regis. He knew, but did not much care. He had assumed for over twenty years a similar position in a small but blessed quarter of north-western England. (The Belgian socialists also knew but did not care. Their leader announced in Brussels that he would have opposed such concessions being offered to any other firm, but his knowledge of the working conditions at Port Sunlight allowed him to bless the intervention in Belgian Africa of Lever Brothers.)

  Port Sunlight had not, however, been christened Leverville. That would be the name of the new centre of operations in the southern section of his Congolese principality, 200 miles from the former colonial capital of Leopoldville. In June 1911 the British government – perhaps acting quickly to forestall their most incorrigible industrialist accepting the crown, sceptre, throne and imperial toga of some distant principality – made him Sir William Lever, Baronet.

  In November 1912 Baronet and Lady Lever paid a personal visit to their African interests. He had of course already been aware of the liabilities of the region. The provinces surrounding Leverville in the south and Alberta and Elisabetha in the north were separated by 600 miles of jungle and malarial swamp. There were no roads, just one railway which failed to connect any of his five isolated territories, and a single precarious telegraph and telephone line strung by the Belgian government up the course of the Congo River. A visiting European baronet and his lady wife were therefore obliged to traverse the country by river steamer.

  It had been written into the 1911 Convention that a part of the appointed task of the Huileries de Congo Belge was to introduce the natives to the joys of capitalism. The Congolese were to be weaned away from their fondness for barter and exchange, delivered from the limitations of self-sufficiency and introduced to a cash economy. To facilitate this the company was committed to delivering a minimum daily wage to people who held a franc in less regard than a fruit tree. This money was to be paid on top of their company board and rations. Th
e purpose was clearly to create a cash-in-hand surplus on the banks of the Kasai and the Kwilu, which would in due course lead to the formation of a consumer economy.

  It was not an easy task. Baronet Lever was an endlessly optimistic man. The African, he pronounced liberally, was not lazy. ‘He is a child and a willing child, but he wants training and handling with patience.’ The notion would never occur to him that the Africans, like the Solomon Islanders and like those elsewhere who lived in a mature, proud and well-established culture, might prefer to retain their familiar way of life than trade it all in for a bag of copper coins.

  The evidence of their reluctance to deal was clear to William Lever. ‘The problem of labour,’ he wrote in the Congo at the very end of 1913, ‘has grown as an ominous dark cloud.’ It stemmed mainly from the difficulty of trying to persuade with wages people who did not particularly value money.

  The fact is, the native has few wants, a little salt and a little cloth are his indispensables.

  After this, beads, brass rods and other luxuries. Chief Womba at Leverville can be taken as an example. Twelve months ago he and his people were poor and few in number, and were keen to bring [coconut] fruit. After twelve months or less of selling fruit he is rich and lazy, has ten wives, and his village is about four times what it was, but he gathers little or no fruit . . . The Palm tree is in these parts the Banking account of the native and he no more thinks of going to the Bank for fruit for money when his wants and ambitions are supplied than a civilised man would. His bank is always open when he wants to draw on it.

  The lifestyle, wants and ambitions of ChiefWomba were as mysterious as those of any South Seas headman to the liberal imperialist. Despite his earlier judgement, in private moments William Lever clearly did consider his African workforce to be ‘lazy’. This niggling contradiction was his creed at war with his commercial instincts. He had built a massive business concern on the principle that workers performed better if well treated and amply rewarded. In the Congo and the Solomon Islands that principle hit the buffers. Presented with the evidence that not all human beings would respond with grateful obedience to his benevolent management, Lever tussled for an explanation. He never found it, partly because he never really listened to the best advice. Cemented firmly in the conviction that his own aspirations and those of any other urban Lancastrian – for health, lifelong security and home comforts – must be the ultimate goal of all mankind, he was unable to sympathise with or even properly to imagine a society with older, more deeply rooted totems of contentment. Thirty years later his acquaintance, Dr Harley Williams, wondered:

  Did he know what it meant to substitute for that innocence of native life his own idea of ordered effort and exploitation? He was exorcising a dark spirit, he was curbing the cruel majesty of a life which had existed ever since humans appeared on the earth, and he was doing it all in the way of business. His practical mind wished to bring order and civilisation, and though he sympathised with those colonising Jesuit Fathers, he felt inwardly that his own economic gospel could make those black faces respond even more readily . . .

  It was an almost inevitable failing. Without his bull-headed obstinacy, his refusal to court alternative strategies, Lever would never have taken his company to such peaks. Had he remained within the tidy purlieu of western industrial society he may never have faced frustration or defeat. But he was drawn outside his natural bounds and into the forest, where his compass no longer worked.

  He could not give up on Africa. There were contractual reasons for persisting. The 1911 Convention had committed Lever Brothers to over two decades’ involvement in the Belgian Congo, and the business imperatives which had led Baronet Lever to sign that document were unlikely to go away. Port Sunlight and every other soapery needed oil in ever vaster quantities as the western washing population soared. Less mule-headed men would nonetheless have cashed in their chips. It was one thing to agree, as he had, to devote twenty years to building every necessary road and railway track and throwing essential telegraph lines across 350,000 square miles of tropical rain forest. It was surely quite another if, at the end of that massive investment, the workforce could only be persuaded to deliver coconuts when in need of another wife.

  But his vaunting, iron-clad pride alone would have denied him an easy exit from Leverville; his contract with the Belgian Government and the long-term hunger of his company for palm oil offered the rationale to stay.

  So, as ever, when in doubt he built. The street layouts at Leverville were pegged and repegged under his personal inspection. On the February day in 1913 that he and Elizabeth sailed for home he wrote of his renewed confidence in ‘our great undertaking’. He foresaw with something approaching glee a full quarter-century of gainful and rewarding enterprise in Africa: ‘. . . I set to work at once in the afternoon on a plan for the plantation villages . . .’

  And then his life, which had previously run a gruelling but painless course, was rocked by irreparable loss. It would never afterwards be the same.

  In the summer of 1913 Lever went on a business trip to continental Europe. In Marseilles he was told by telegram that his wife Elizabeth was severely ill with pneumonia. He raced northwards and reached her bedside a few hours before she died on 24 July. She was sixty-two and he was sixty-one years old.

  This was the woman without whom, he said, he could neither remember nor imagine life. They had known childhood and youth, marriage and middle age together. Every day that he had woken up at home for the past thirty-nine years, be it never so early in the morning, Elizabeth had personally superintended the correct preparation of his breakfast. They had borne a son, had christened him William Hulme Lever to employ both of their names, had seen him come into his majority and seen him marry. She had been a lively, cheerful daughter of Lancashire, with a ready laugh and an easy smile, vivaciously prepared to accompany her husband to the heart of Africa and beyond. Every fraction of his public success, he said, ‘came because of the confidence she inspired in me’.

  In the month before Elizabeth’s death William had asked a local architectural firm to draw up plans for a new art gallery (including a library and Masonic Lodge) in Port Sunlight. This building was clearly destined to be her monument, her Taj Mahal. The couple’s eclectic collection of high and low art was bursting out of their Cheshire manor house. The Lady Lever Gallery would become its ideal home.

  And so on 25 March 1914 Baronet Lever and his monarch, King George V, enacted a peculiar ritual. They stood together in Hulme Hall, the dining room for day workers at the soap plant, a quarter of a mile south of the village of Port Sunlight. Before them stood a large and detailed to-scale reproduction of the settlement. In the empty space reserved for the Lady Lever Gallery stood a small electric button-switch. At the appointed hour King George pressed the button . . . and 500 yards away on site a large foundation stone was automatically lowered into the ground, while within Hulme Hall a toy crane deposited a small counterfeit stone on the appropriate part of the model town. Everybody who was anybody in Cheshire and beyond broke into delighted applause, and signs on the base of the construction flashed out in electric light the words: ‘Stone well and truly laid’. Even on the most solemn of occasions William Lever displayed his beguiling devotion to technological wizardry and the charms of twentieth-century progress. (Progress Lodge No. 4584 would be the name of the Masonic group patronised by William, founded in the completed Lady Lever Gallery some ten years later, before moving to spend the remainder of the twentieth century, appropriately enough, in Hulme Hall.)

  Five months later the world went to war. The 26-year-old William Hulme Lever, a vice-chairman of the family company, was somehow exempted from service, but 500 of Lever Brothers’ other staff were among the first to be sent to the Western Front in August 1914. Baronet Lever topped up their husbands’ service pay to the wives of the Wirral Battalion and sent the men themselves cutlery and utensils from the kitchens at Port Sunlight. He himself became at the age of sixty-three a private in the
Birkenhead and District Volunteer Training Corps.

  And he looked after business, which thrived throughout the Great War. He could hardly have done otherwise. An unanticipated benefit of the soap trade was the by-product glycerine, which formed as a colourless liquid during the saponification of oils and fats. The more soap, therefore, the more glycerine. Glycerine was essential for high explosives, and so the government developed a keen interest in the welfare of the soap industry. The total employed capital of Lever Brothers doubled between 1914 and 1919, from £13 million to £26 million. The amount of soap produced annually by the group rose from 120,000 tons to 170,000 tons. He lost certain hostile and occupied continental markets, but expanded in a newly affluent America.

  He also accelerated his company’s previously incidental interest in margarine (which had ‘a close connection with oils and fats for the soap kettle’) when it became clear that making margarine in wartime was tantamount to minting money – ‘we could sell all that we could make at our own terms’, he informed his directors. The move into margarine would have huge historical implications for his company and for the twentieth-century food industry. Once the war was over it took Lever Brothers into direct competition with the Dutch butter-substitute pioneers Van Den Burghs and Jurgens, who had been sharing since the 1870s a comfortable European margarine monopoly from the small Friesian dairy town of Gaast. The Dutch companies had at first rendered margarine from animal fats, turning only later to imported vegetable oils. In 1927 Jurgens and Van Den Burghs decided to defend themselves against the assault from the Wirral by amalgamating into Margerine Unie. Two years later Margerine Unie and Lever Brothers combined to form Unilever, which before the end of the century had become the biggest food conglomerate in the world.

  But that was beyond the founder’s time. His laying of the immense foundation stones of Unilever was all so effortless, so simple. His Midas touch worked its alchemy almost without prompting and even while the rest of Europe haemorrhaged human blood, earthly rewards continued to visit him without invitation. In June 1917 he was made a full British baron, a member of the House of Lords. He decided to unite formally and forever his own memory and that of his wife by merging their surnames into the title Lord Leverhulme of Bolton-le-Moors. His adopted heraldic motto was equally personal: it read, ‘I scorn to change or fear’.