The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  Lewis was not bought –contra the Stornoway Gazette – by Lever Brothers, whose directors and shareholders (as they would demonstrate in the early summer of 1925) would have baulked at such an investment, but by Lord Leverhulme himself, underwritten by his immense personal holdings in Lever Brothers. The Gazette managed both to anticipate the transaction, which was not actually finalised until May 1918, and to run behind its readers, for the purpose of Leverhulme’s visit the previous October had been widely noised around Lewis.

  The deal was done early in 1918. From that February onwards Leverhulme spoke of Lewis as if he already owned the place. He wanted it, he had the money and he was not accustomed to failure. He was merely using the interval mercilessly – and almost automatically – to beat down by a full 25 per cent Duncan Matheson’s asking price. It was a buyer’s market. Over the previous thirty years the value of British estates had plummeted. The grip of titled families on their ancestral (and not-so-ancestral) lands had been relaxed by death duties and other despised taxations, and loosened further by the wholesale importation of cheaper food from abroad. British latifundia, the agricultural properties which had been a measure of wealth and prestige since William the Conqueror, seemed suddenly a shaky investment.

  Why then did he want it? He himself may not fully have known the answer. His explanations were uncharacteristically coy and contradictory. He had memories, certainly, of that blissful summer holiday with Elizabeth in 1884, in the last carefree months of their lives, before Sunlight Soap, before Lever Brothers, before parliament, baronetcy, untold riches, old age and death. He spoke publicly and privately about the limits of his ambition. His devoted niece, Emily Paul, who was present for much of his Hebridean adventure, would later insist that her uncle had been unforgettably ‘charmed’ by Lewis in 1884, and had become ‘sympathetic with the difficulties under which he soon discovered the Islanders laboured’.

  Being always on the lookout for some person or community to whom he could bring help and happiness, and some place he could improve, he reflected that if ever the Island of Lewis should come onto the market and he should be rich enough to buy it, buy it he would, and do his utmost to make it a happy and prosperous Island. Philanthropic gifts he was ready and willing to make as occasion arose, but well-paid work amid congenial surroundings was his goal when planning to give prosperity to a place.’17

  Emily Paul’s observations are not to be dismissed, but they have the advantage of recollections in tranquillity (her words were not written until 1939). It was not exactly an impulse buy, but it is unlikely that William Hesketh Lever had coveted and nursed plans for Lewis over thirty-three unrequited years, as Emily suggested, until he spotted that it was for sale in 1917. (If he had been so inclined he would presumably have instructed his representatives to put out feelers, and they could have reported to him many years earlier that the island estate was available.) He had then, he said himself, no object other than to spend a peaceful last few years in a healthy and beautiful place with friendly neighbours. The fact that a villa in Tuscany or Torquay would have filled most, if not all, of those requirements at a hundredth of the cost was apparently irrelevant.

  The judgement of his son would be more pragmatic. For his father, wrote William Hulme Lever,

  recreation meant a change of occupation and, next to the development of a business, he found his greatest pleasure in the development of an estate.

  It was in search of an estate, therefore, that he went, not with feverish haste, but quietly and with deliberation. As a matter of fact, he gave serious consideration to and nearly decided to buy an important estate in the Midlands which was then for sale, but its development had already been begun, and he preferred to find one which he could mould to his own ideas from the start.

  ‘One which he could mould to his own ideas from the start . . .’ The pretence that he had bought the entire island of Lewis on an old man’s fancy as nothing more than a gigantic pre-inhabited retirement garden would not be sustained for many months. He did not believe that Lewis could be an especially profitable speculation, despite the low purchase price. Rather, he considered that the place had too many unexploited resources and underused assets for its own good – and certainly too many for an improving businessman to ignore.

  He consulted; he sought advice. That spinner of Hebridean whimsy Alastair Alpin MacGregor later recalled in a moment of lucidity that ‘I well remember his discussing with my father in Edinburgh the projects he had in mind’. The latter assured him that the people of the Western Isles, ‘though they always voted Radical [were] the most stubborn conservatives on Scotland’. It was doubtful, opined MacGregor Senior, whether Leverhulme would ever live to take a penny out of Lewis, but ‘he would find in its peat-mosses ample scope for sinking a million or two. However, Leverhulme was not to be discouraged by such frank talk, for he was a visionary as well as a man who had been highly successful in the world of business.’18

  It was not as though the Hebrides had palm-oil reserves. Leverhulme in later, more stressful times would unconvincingly attempt to persuade his banks and his associates of the potential worth of Scottish fish-oils, but he gave in 1917 and 1918 no evidence of the slightest interest in such by-products. The London correspondent of The Scotsman (following, no doubt, a great deal of editorial head-scratching) came up with the obvious alternative answer: those peat-mosses! As old Mr MacGregor had drily jested (with some authority, as he had been born in the island and was a Gaelic writer), Lewis was literally covered with peat. A sodden, unfathomable mattress of peat lay over large parts of the island. There was not much of anything else in abundance on Lewis, but there was certainly a lot of peat – which once harvested and dried could be deployed as a fuel or a bedding soil. Could his Lordship be intending to diversify out of global soap production and into the industrial exploitation of peat? ‘If I wanted peat,’ replied Leverhulme drily, ‘an island would not be the most attractive investment. It would be much better to keep to the mainland, where the railway service could be made available and where there is plenty of peat.’

  He did not want peat. At least, peat was not the first thing on his mind. William Grant in the Stornoway Gazette was happy to conclude, two weeks after his announcement of the imminent purchase, that ‘Lord Leverhulme had no business intentions with regard to his purchase, his desire being to acquire Lewis solely as a residential retreat . . . In this respect Lord Leverhulme is one of the now considerable number of notable Englishmen who in recent years have been attracted by the notable beauties of our Highland North and West, and, one by one, have been acquiring, in whole or in part, the ancient patrimonies of the old Clan families.’ To batten down its point the paper then printed a roll of honour of the seven peers of the realm who owned in 1918 ‘a portion of the Shire of Ross’ – the Marquises of Northampton and Zetland (Lochluichart and Letterewe), the Earl of Lovelace (Ben Damph), Lords Middleton and Wimborne (Applecross and Achnashellach), the Countess of Cromartie (Castle Leod and Coigach), and now, with 400,000 acres and 30,000 people, the majority of whose breadwinners were crofters or cottars, Lord Leverhulme (Lewis). A small amount of inquiry would have corrected the Gazette’s misapprehensions about the last name on the list. Unlike the other six, Lord Leverhulme – a son of the new industrial bourgeosie – had little or no time for deer-stalking and salmon fishing. ‘We are sure it will be found,’ miscalculated William Grant, ‘in the case of the new proprietor, that as the years go by the relations between proprietor and people will go on in ever-increasing cordiality.’

  The answer lay in the very question. Leverhulme did not want Lewis in spite of its 30,000 people and vast, undeveloped acreage. He wanted the island because of them. The fact that Lewis was, in the words of The Scotsman, ‘the largest territorial property in the United Kingdom’, the fact that its proprietor held dominion, constrained though he was by crofting and criminal law, over a little land entire unto itself was to Leverhulme the salient selling point. While anxious at the outset not to sta
rtle the women and children, he hinted as much. In between all that boilerplate about friendly neighbours and pretty scenery and a healthy climate (a gale had blown and it had poured with freezing rain throughout his tour of inspection in October 1917), his inchoate plans were emerging from their invisible ink: ‘I feel that I can take a great interest in the life of the isle,’ he said. ‘If there are any economic problems I shall be glad to work with the people for their solution.’

  If there are any economic problems . . . his first sighting of a black-house had provoked the exclamation: ‘Not fit for kaffirs’. These were British citizens who lived – in the eyes of William Lever – in more poverty and squalor than South Sea islanders or Congolese tribesmen. He had never been a passive landlord or employer and he was not about to break that habit in a neglected portion of the United Kingdom. This student and admirer of Napoleon Bonaparte was perhaps aware of the Corsican’s short shift a hundred years earlier as Emperor of the island of Elba. In the ten months of his administration roads were built and olive groves organised; farms were planned and public buildings were erected; the few thousand people of Elba were hauled blinking into the nineteenth century. Napoleon had been a young man then and Elba was ultimately unsatisfying. He had left them for a larger destiny. Lord Leverhulme was sixty-seven years old and rather less Napoleonic. An Elba would perhaps suffice.

  There was another motivation, which was acknowledged more at the time than it would be later. Following a celebrated revolution in November 1917 (which was still October in the old Russian Julian calendar) Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s Bolshevik Party had assumed power in Moscow, with the avowed intention of establishing the world’s first Communist workers’ republic. The international effect of this accession would dominate the rest of the twentieth century. In the short term it presented the politicians and the plutocrats of the rest of western Europe with a challenge for which most of them were quite unprepared: how to demonstrate that the dispossessed masses and the working poor could improve their lot without overthrowing the established order and putting the royal family in front of a firing squad?

  William, Lord Leverhulme believed he knew the answer, but he had never previously had to frame it in such a context. Beforehand his ‘improvements’ in living and working conditions had been proven only when set beside the hideous alternatives elsewhere in Britain. After 1917 they would inevitably also be judged by comparison with the achievements of a colossal socialist nation.

  His philosophy, like that of any thinking person, instantly reflected the change of circumstances. His political and economic thoughts after 1917 occasionally (and unworthily) adopted the blustering tone of an apoplectic Blimp or Baron. ‘Talk to the man who would carry the “Red flag” through the land,’ wrote Leverhulme unconvincingly in 1918, ‘talk to the Socialist or Anarchist of increasing production, or of volume of output and its relation to the costs of production and you receive a vacant stare from out his bloodshot eyes and a scornful reference to “Capitalism” and “Wage Slavery”.’ But capitalism was good and wage slavery was actually liberty: ‘Any attempt at limiting the powers of the individual to acquire Wealth is like endeavouring to lower someone’s standard of health because it was higher than the average. The healthy members of a community are a source of strength to others, and so are the wealthy. What we require to do is not to weaken the strong or impoverish the wealthy, but to show to the weak and the poor the way to become healthy and wealthy.’

  Such valiant late-in-the-day defences of an economic system which until very recently had appeared to require no defending at all were echoed by the ‘Stornoway Merchant’ who wrote in his local newspaper in September 1918 that Lord Leverhulme (and not, by implication, the vacant, bloodshot anarchist) was ‘a true socialist’. He did not feel the need to flatter himself with the description, but by his deeds ye shall know him. Leverhulme’s whole life – unlike that of most self-styled ‘socialists’ – had been devoted to the improvement of the lot of working people.

  ‘His employees are not mere “hands” and “machines”,’ continued this Lewis disciple, ‘but men and brothers and are treated as such . . . all the world knows that he has built at Port Sunlight a garden city which remains to this hour one of the best object-lessons in the Science and Art of industrial housing.’ The Baron Leverhulme was kind to children and devoted to the betterment of humanity. If all the world were Port Sunlight, ‘Capital and Labour would not be antagonistic to one another, but would work hand in hand for the common good. Then we would hear less about labour unrest, and “strikes” would be few and far between . . .’

  All the world could not be Port Sunlight, but perhaps all of Lewis could. Leverhulme did not decide to add the northern Hebrides to his empire because there was an imminent danger of the hammer and sickle being raised over Stornoway Town Hall. But the challenge of extending the range of liberal capitalism, of demonstrating to the overheated world of western politics that Leverism could work its beneficial magic even in the most unpromising areas more quickly and more powerfully than any repugnant ideology from eastern Europe, was not only on the mind of admiring merchants from Stornoway. It was part of the mental framework of the elderly Lord Leverhulme himself.

  The Leodhasaich saw no harm in extending a hand of welcome. They had no intention of establishing a workers’ soviet; they knew of him; they used his soap; he could be no worse than earlier satraps. William Grant offered his newspaper’s heartfelt appreciation. Stornoway Town Council and the Lewis District Committee, in joint session, despatched a telegram to Cheshire congratulating Leverhulme on the purchase.

  The response of the Lewis Crofters’ and Cottars’ Association would attract ironic attention at a later, wiser date, but it was merely a model of decorous Hebridean good manners. ‘The smallholders and cottars of Lewis,’ announced the association’s president, Alexander Morrison, ‘are delighted that Lord Leverhulme has purchased the island, and they beg to congratulate his Lordship on the historic occasion, assuring him of their hearty goodwill and support. Lord Leverhulme’s fame as a just and model employer of labour has reached Lewis before him. The manhood of the island being away fighting for the Empire on the field of glory, where many of them made the supreme sacrifice, the old folk at home desire to send this greeting to his Lordship on this memorable occasion, and they hope that he may be long spared to live amongst them.’

  There was no reason for any crofters’ representative to say otherwise. The Lewis Crofters’ Association was not the Lewis Land League; it had a comparatively moderate remit, to secure for its members the best possible deal from the prevailing situation. Colonel Matheson had proven himself to be indomitably opposed to the extension of crofting tenure and the return of privatised community land. He had been trying to realise his assets by selling the whole kit and caboodle for at least five years. Rumours of official intervention to buy Lewis and translate the island into a crofting paradise were just that: rumours, so much smoke, and crofters had long ago learned to mistrust smoke. One aspect at least of an uncertain situation had been resolved. The new owner had money and a good reputation. Alexander Morrison and his colleagues, while tellingly describing themselves to the proprietor as ‘smallholders’, must have feared worse.

  When William, Lord Leverhulme next stepped onto the pier at Stornoway at Easter 1918 he arrived as heir apparent. His main guide would be – as in the previous autumn – Charles Orrock, the chamberlain, or factor, of what was technically still Colonel Matheson’s estate. Orrock duly escorted his new employer into the company of several ‘leading men’ of Stornoway. No minutes were taken of those meetings and no first-hand recollections have survived. But only a naif could suppose that Leverhulme was not by the April of 1918 at least on nodding terms with the land struggle that had marked Lewis for the last forty years. And nobody could imagine that he was not advised on the nature of this discontent by Orrock and his fellow ‘leading men’.

  One of those men, the editor of the Stornoway Gazette, chose the week
of Leverhulme’s second visit to editorialise on a recent meeting in Stornoway of the Highland Land League. Whether or not his lengthy diatribe was aimed specifically at the attention of his Lordship, it neatly expressed the views of many of those leading men of Stornoway who would offer advice to Leverhulme in the following days. The ‘independent and public-spirited’ people of Lewis had apparently ‘snubbed’ the Land League and all of its doings. There had been a time, conceded William Grant, when the Land League was vital and relevant to local concerns. But that glorious era was now over. A movement which had once been composed of ‘patriotic Highlanders’ was now dominated by a ‘body of London meddlers’ whose primary goal was to ‘prepare the way for Labour men as candidates for the Highland constituencies’. What right had such people, wondered William Grant, ‘to demand a hearing or to command a following in our Highlands and Islands’?

  Answer came there: none. The day of the militants was at an end. The reforms which had been won were sufficient for any reasonable man, and Leodhasaich were reasonable men. They would, Mr Grant was confident, reject the impertinences of socialist agitators ‘whether Highland born or mere Highland for convenience.’