The Soap Man

by Roger Hutchinson

  The very people who were being so forcefully reminded ‘of the uncertainties of fishing’ were those who were also being exhorted by Lord Leverhulme to dispense with their old attachment to crofting in favour of a new salaried job and a house, both of which would be tied to the fishing industry. Geddes was wrong, as we shall see, to suggest that Leverhulme himself said nothing to indicate that he was aware of the crisis. As the landowner, as an associate of such fishcurers as Provost Murdo Maclean and as the chairman of Stornoway Pier and Harbour Commission, let alone as a capable businessman, it could not plausibly have escaped his attention. Not even his near-monopoly of British high street fishmongeries would help him to evade the pressures of the market, as he appreciated better than most. If MacFisheries were obliged by the rules of capitalism to buy their raw material from Fleetwood or Fraserburgh steam drifters rather than from Lewis, then they would patronise Lancashire and Buchan.

  He was slow in pointing to the decay of his foundation stone. He may have hoped that the stormclouds would pass; that the markets would correct themselves. If so he was to be disappointed. Not until late in 1921, when he had already decided that he could supply no answer to ‘the Lewis question’ and was ready to withdraw, would he publicly confirm Arthur Geddes’s suspicions.

  By then Leverhulme had become accustomed to crisis and disappointment. The fact that men were reoccupying dairy farms on the east coast of Lewis and that the Hebridean herring fishery had collapsed did not loom large in the concerns of the other shareholders of Lever Brothers Limited in 1920. They had more troublesome regions on their minds.

  The post-war international spending boom of 1919 burst like a bubble in the first months of 1920. By March of that year ‘the Lever management was noting with some concern the growing stocks of unsold soap, a marked slackening in trade, and above all the considerable fall in raw material prices.’42 Port Sunlight went onto a four-day week, laid workers off and suffered from strike action. Between February and July 1920 the price of palm kernel oil fell by more than half, from £115 to £55 a ton. In the same six months ‘ordinary’ palm oil collapsed from £98 to £53 a ton. Lever Brothers were at the time holding stocks of such raw materials which they had purchased for a total of £18 million. They may have lost in half a year as much as £9 million (which eighty years later would be the equivalent of £270 million) in realisable asset value.

  Leverhulme – who as the main holder of preferential shares in Lever Brothers found his paper fortune most seriously debilitated – responded as ever to adversity, by acquisition rather than retreat. He bought the Niger Company.

  It was an extraordinary purchase at an extraordinary time of an extraordinary business. The Niger Company was a British product of the European scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century. It originated in the exploits of a kenspeckle colonial adventurer who was, when Lever Brothers inherited his creation in 1920, still alive and venerated as the 74-year-old ‘founder of Nigeria’, Sir George Dashwood Taubman Goldie. Goldie had made it his vocation to become the Cecil Rhodes of west Africa. He devoted himself to consolidating, and then securing, and then expanding British interests on the extensive banks of the River Niger. Using devices which were becoming familiar – gunboats and disciplined European squadrons and Christian ruthlessness and Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim’s rapid-firing automatic repeater rifles – Goldie had by the end of the nineteenth century claimed for Britain the 500,000 square miles of fertile, mineral-rich and well-populated Africa which in 1897 was christened Nigeria.

  Goldie’s Royal Niger Company had in 1897 been operating for eleven years in Africa under charter, as a quasi-governmental organisation. In 1900 the charter was surrendered, Nigeria became a colony administered directly from Whitehall, and the Niger Company was free to concentrate – as a virtually monopolistic exploiter of considerable resources – solely on making money. It did so with glee, registering throughout the Great War annual profits of £250,000.

  Lord Leverhulme’s interest in this further great swathe of Africa, a thousand miles north of his considerable Congolese commitments, was largely predicated on the fact that in 1919 100,000 tons of oil seeds passed through the hands of the Niger Company. It was a comprehensible reason for taking a serious interest. It was no justification for acting like a child in a sweet shop.

  At their distinguished chairman’s urging, in 1920 Lever Brothers paid for the Niger Company much more than it was worth, more than they needed to pay, and more than Lever Brothers could afford to pay. They did so in such a hurry that no real investigation was made of the Niger Company’s accounts. When the books were finally examined Leverhulme and his fellow directors discovered that they had bought for an inflated price of £8 million not only the Niger Company’s assets but also the Niger Company’s substantial liabilities, including an incompetent management and a previously undisclosed overdraft of £2 million which was repayable almost immediately to the bank.

  Clarence Knowles, his longstanding director with responsibility for raw materials, was given responsibility for the Niger Company purchase negotiations early in 1920. When Knowles had finalised the deal he received a congratulatory telegram from Leverhulme which acknowledged, ‘Price high but suicidal if we had let opportunity lapse.’

  Knowles’s offer included the bizarre clause – which was also accepted by Leverhulme and the others as part of the necessary cost of their prize – that between January, when the deal was agreed, and July, when the final payments were made, the Niger Company would continue to be run by its old management and directors. This agreement meant that for more than five months in 1920 when the oils and fats market was in turmoil, £8 million of Lever Brothers’ money was committed to an enterprise whose pilots were completely beyond their control and who had already amassed at least £2 million of debt.

  Unsurprisingly Lever Brothers’ broker, Sir Robert Nivison, refused to underwrite the purchase. Leverhulme scraped together the £8 million by floating a new, unsupported share issue and by recapitalising Lever Brothers Limited. Having found the money to complete the Niger Company purchase he was given a few more weeks – until the middle of August 1920 – to repay the £2 million overdraft to the Niger Company’s bankers. He turned to other bankers, who politely declined to throw good money after bad. ‘It would be in the interests of everybody,’ advised one, ‘that Lever Brothers should dispose of the shares in the Niger Company.’

  Predictably enough Leverhulme responded to this advice not by shedding his Niger Company shares but by bidding for control of another equatorial corporate giant, the African and Eastern Trade Corporation. ‘The business,’ he explained to nervous associates, ‘can well rest after I have gone to view the daisies from the underside . . . I recognise that expansion may not be so rapid after my death.’ (He was later persuaded to withdraw from this attempted acquisition.)

  Such bravado may have been intended to impress the banks. It certainly failed to mollify them. By February 1921 the £2 million owed by the Niger company had still not been repaid and the creditors threatened Leverhulme with a writ. If the writ had been delivered, considered the company historian Charles Wilson, ‘Liquidation would [have been] the inevitable consequence.’ It was a situation of unprecedented severity. His markets were slumping, his workers were restless and the banks were foreclosing. ‘Holding off the creditors with one hand he negotiated with the other terms for a loan from Barclays Bank – terms which, though onerous, were yet to prove the salvation of the Lever group.’43

  He got the loan by complying uncharacteristically with all of Barclays’ demands. He had no choice. Company results showed that Lever Brothers had in 1920 lost £2 million in the value of raw material stocks alone. ‘What the losses of the Niger Company were,’ says Charles Wilson, ‘it is difficult to say: certainly they were far larger than Lever Brothers’ own.’

  Business and banking confidence in Lord Leverhulme’s judgement, which had for thirty years been beyond sensible reproach, was in 1920 and 1921 shaken to the core.
His rash refusal to heed moderating counsel at a time of crisis led to what had previously been unthinkable: people within Lever Brothers began to wonder whether or not the group might be better off without its chairman and founder. ‘The Niger purchase had not only changed the structure of the company: by demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that the personal autocracy by which the business had [been run] was no longer adequate, it was to change the whole ethos of the business.’44 A substantial overhaul of the company’s management and directorship was commenced in 1921; this would continue for several years and would not be completed until after the grand old man’s death.

  On 19 September 1921 Leverhulme celebrated his seventieth birthday. It has been tempting for those who observed only one section of this man’s encyclopaedic life to assume that he reached that milestone while disturbed chiefly, or even only, by uncontrollable events in the Outer Hebrides. It would be more accurate to say that Lewis and Harris figured small in his concerns. He spent the best part of 1920 and 1921 obsessed not by the question of Lewis but by his company. Lever Brothers was firstly in danger of liquidation, and having survived that threat Leverhulme himself was ever after aware of rumours of regicide, of suggestions that he should relinquish his reins to another driver. It left a seventy-year-old with not much excess energy or sympathy to spend on what had in large part been acquired as a retirement adventure playground.

  At this time it became clear that Lewis and Harris, however joined they may have been in geography and their new proprietor’s own perception, really were two separate cases. The very size of Lewis, the insular kingdom which had firstly attracted and excited Leverhulme, dictated that only big schemes and ambitious planning could possibly salve its diverse difficulties. For as long as one huge but realisable project such as the sea fishing seemed suited to underpin a score of others, the answer to the Lewis question was in sight. If, however, question marks appeared around the sea fishing project, as they did in 1920 and 1921, then the validity of the whole vast initiative was suddenly in doubt. Herb meadows and commercial peat cuttings were all very well as secondary, supportive activities, but they would not keep 30,000, let alone 200,000 people alive. House building and railway lines would obviously employ workers, but there was no call for houses in Stornoway if the fisheries could not employ their occupants, and no purpose to a railway if nobody travelled on it. Sea fishing had been set in place, with great ceremony and under the sceptical gaze of all of Scotland, as the massive, essential foundation slab of Lord Leverhulme’s Hebridean enterprise. If it were removed then very little else could be built in Lewis – and there was a real danger of those few small affiliated structures which had been raised tumbling into dust.

  For as long as the equation balanced, Leverhulme could convince himself and others that there was a purpose and a future to what he was doing in Lewis. He could live with, and even thrive upon, the stridency of debate with land reformers, politicians and belligerent returned servicemen. But not even his own unquenchable spirit could absorb month after month the realisation that his sums no longer added up, that there were not enough fish in the North Atlantic Ocean to subsidise even a part of his Utopia, and return willingly to the fray. In such circumstances the island of Lewis was in danger of being transformed from a delightful and infinitely challenging social experiment, into just another dispiriting outpost of a troublesome and overstretched empire.

  His involvement in Lewis was schizophrenic. It was neither entirely philanthropic nor wholly business-like. It was not solely an old man’s whimsy, but neither was it thoroughly planned in advance. He would most characteristically begin from some solid common ground. Once that had been satisfactorily occupied he would proceed to extemporise. His earliest inclinations certainly pointed him towards modernising and expanding the Lewis sea fishery, but after that many of his decisions were made on the hoof; they were fanciful projections no sooner imagined than publicly incorporated into some vast strategy. That strategy in fact never really existed. He knew that whatever could be done in Lewis probably had not previously been attempted by its earlier succession of proprietors. He had a deep faith in his own intuition. If Leverhulme pictured a railway line between Stornoway and Tarbert or dairy ranches at Gress and Coll, then he could see no good reason why there should not be steam trains puffing through Balallan or vast herds of dairy cattle roaming on the machair. If he was capable of projecting a Lancastrian density of population onto the Outer Hebrides, he was not prepared to understand why Lewis may be a better place with a population of fewer than 200,000. He left it to others to sort out the practical details, to lay the rails and erect the fences. He left it to others to fall into line behind his vision. When they proved incapable of doing so his patience expired.

  As his exasperation grew he could cushion his retreat with the economic clause. It had always been nonsensical for Lord Leverhulme to suggest, as he so often did, that philanthropy played no part in his schemes. If the fishing had turned out to be as hugely profitable as he had hoped, if his company had enjoyed a post-war golden age of seamless profiteering, if everybody in Lewis had trooped obediently behind him, he would still have found himself injecting millions of pounds of unrecoverable capital. The grandchildren of Lewis may conceivably have benefited. Lord Leverhulme certainly would not. He was prepared to spend money – although, after 1920 and 1921, a severely reduced amount – on a grateful, industrious and receptive island. But he was not going to throw vast sums into a cauldron of discontent. As the fishery failure could be mentioned only obliquely if at all, for to acknowledge it directly would have meant recognising the frailty of his own proposals, he was obliged to fix upon a relatively minor obstacle: the land hunger north of Stornoway. Leverhulme can never have convinced himself that the success or failure of his gargantuan plans for the island hung solely on the question of whether Gress and Coll should be given over to cattle farms or to crofts. But he was in search of an emblematic hard case; he needed a point of principle to illustrate both his own resolve and the increasingly apparent unsuitability of the Leodhasaich to enact his dreams.

  He was already embittered in the autumn of 1920 when the raiders withdrew again from Gress and Coll. They did so for three reasons: to demonstrate their preparedness to give their proprietor’s grand schemes time to flourish, to give the Board of Agriculture’s diplomacy another chance, and because they had less use for croft land in the winter months. His response was to halt the job-creation road-building schemes, to reduce all apparent industrial development in Stornoway, to abandon his plans for canning Lewis fish, to suggest that east-coast malcontents might move to live on the west coast of the island, to voice public criticism of the Scottish Office and to call for a vote of confidence from every parish in Lewis.

  He won that vote. At meeting after meeting from Back to Barvas the people of Lewis repeated what they had always said, that they fully supported all of Lord Leverhulme’s proposals to bring employment to the island. They saw no contradiction in simultaneously supporting, as they did, the struggle of their sons and daughters to achieve security of tenure on a strip of croftland. As Colin Macdonald had tried unsuccessfully to explain, the contrariety was in his eyes only.

  He disengaged himself slowly but inexorably. The process of withdrawal was as complex and stuttering and improvised as had been the happier months of his entanglement. The people, having watched throughout the winter their worst suspicions of yet another fair-weather landowner coming true, moved once again on Coll and Gress (and Orinsay and Galson) in the early summer of 1921. With little left to lose but his authority, Leverhulme now cancelled almost every work scheme in Lewis and pressed Scottish Secretary Robert Munro to take punitive action against the raiders. The castle and the croft were engaged in an elaborate ritual dance, a masquerade of cause and effect from which neither was prepared to retreat. The more he took away, the more they retrieved. The greater his exasperation grew, the firmer was their resolve. The less work he provided in Lewis, the more land they occupied
. He launched or relaunched small temporary labouring initiatives, and they took a step back. He stopped them again and they strode forward. Munro, who had ever been prepared to allow for Leverhulme’s suggestions, however grandiose or absurd, who had given him more leeway than would have been admitted to any other proprietor, saw finally that this vain schottische must end in exhaustion, and that its finish was in sight.

  Leverhulme had lost his argument. The evidence of defeat arrived in small, droll packages as well as in grand pronouncements. One week he shipped a small group of village elders to Port Sunlight, to witness there the bricks and mortar of prosperity, to see how one year’s vision could become next year’s reality. They were suitably impressed and they admitted as much to their host. But upon their return they agreed with one another that: ‘Ach an deigh na h’uile car, cha’neil cal an sud ach an trailleachd.’ ‘After all, there is nothing there but slavery.’

  He lost his castle piper, Donald MacLeod, reportedly in illuminative circumstances. Donald warned Leverhulme one spring evening that in a fortnight he would need to spend a week back at his croft planting potatoes. Leverhulme refused him the holiday – ‘You are now in regular employment . . . You now earn as much money in a week as will buy sufficient potatoes for you and your family for a year. I require you here. I cannot agree to let you off for a week to plant potatoes . . . If you go without my consent you should clearly understand that by so doing you will lose your job.’