10

WILLIAM LEVER

Global tycoon

On Saturday, 16th November 1912, Sir William Lever stepped aboard the SS Leopoldville bound for the ‘dark heart of Africa’. Newly knighted, and accompanied by his devoted wife Elizabeth, a phalanx of his closest advisers and one Dr Horn (special emissary of the King of the Belgians), the sixty-one-year-old tycoon was setting sail to see one of the greatest ventures of Britain’s greatest global business, deep in the Belgian Congo.

As he boarded ship, he left behind in London swirling rumours of his latest benevolence: his offer to the prime minister to buy the fabulous Stafford House, in St James’s, for the nation.*1 In Liverpool, his architects were finalizing plans for what would become the Lady Lever Gallery, designed to adorn Port Sunlight – his Merseyside company village. In the courts, his lawyers were squaring up to the chemical magnate Sir John Brunner, for the corporate battle of the early century. In Boston, the best minds in advertising were at work in his American headquarters. In Japan and South Africa, his builders were readying new factories; in Sweden, Norway, South Africa and Australia his deal-makers were preparing to snap up his rivals, while in the Pacific islands thousands toiled away on his vast plantations, hundreds of thousands of acres wide. In France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, Austria, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, thousands made and sold his most famous product to millions of customers, with the boast that ‘Sunlight Soap... is used from Lands End to John O’Groats... in American log cabins... in Canadian homesteads... by the South African miner... in the Australian bush.’1 Now William Lever was about to take on the challenge of his life, a task that was ‘little less than the reorganisation of a principality’ in one of the most notorious spots on earth.2

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Congo Free State – the vast, personal fiefdom of the Belgian King Leopold – was dripping in blood, and the world knew it. The ‘infamous, infamous, shameful system’ of its vast, slave plantations was blown open in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) and in the eye-witness report (1904) by British consul Roger Casement. The outcry forced the king to yield control of his dominions to his elected government in 1908, and the following year its ministers, desperate to wipe the stain off the country’s soul, called in William Lever.

‘Lever is... a commercial genius,’ wrote Belgian Colonial Minister Renkin, ‘enormously, fabulously rich, probably of good heart but also hard, who sees humanity as a vast engine of production without soul or desires.’3 Within a year, the Belgian Parliament had ratified an extraordinary £1million plan, signed on 14 April 1911, to let Lever build a huge Congo palm oil industry spread across 2 million acres – half the size of Wales. The five sites, each 40 miles wide, were separated by impenetrable jungle.

At first sceptical, Lever now had a convert’s enthusiasm. ‘The inrush of a herd of wild elephants would be trifling to the inrush there will be to the Congo,’ he predicted, ‘if we prove a success.’ Lever set to work; he was empowered to create canals, railways, telegraphs, telephone systems, harbours and fifty mills – and a monorail for moving to the mills the jungle’s palm fruit, which grew in reddish golden bunches atop 40-foot trees. ‘Not a building was erected unless the plans had been passed by him,’ wrote his son; ‘it is no exaggeration to say that the organisation... from the shipping base at the port of Matadi and the administrative headquarters at Kinshasa to the farthest area of Elizabetha, over a thousand miles from the Congo mouth – was his personal creation.’

Just before Christmas 1912, Lever and his party disembarked from their ship at Matadi, just below the Congo river’s rapids, to meet a special train bound for the capital Leopoldville (Kinshasa). There the party met the steamer Lusanga and sailed up-river among the hippos, elephants, missionary stations and native villages to inspect his creation for the first time.

Before he left Liverpool, Lever had been honest about the task he faced. ‘Words cannot tell the value to myself and, I hope, to our business, of this journey, I feel more confidence in our great undertaking than ever, although the difficulties are greater than I judged.’4 Deep in the Congo he was not disappointed. On New Year’s Day 1913, he committed his thoughts to his diary: ‘the palm valleys and hill-sides’, he wrote, were quite simply ‘the grandest sight I have seen in any part of the world’.5 ‘Leverville’ would bear his name for nearly another sixty years.*2

*

William Lever was born in Bolton, on Monday, 15 September 1851, during a beautiful run of sunny weather in the month before the Great Exhibition closed, and as the last of the English harvest was gathered in. His birthplace, once a humble Saxon hamlet on the Lancashire moors, was settled in the fifteenth century by Flemish weavers migrating to Manchester. Among them was the Lever tribe, which took its name from the Flemish Leur and dated its definite Lancashire origins to one Adam de Lever of Great Lever ( fl. 1420).6

In the nineteenth century, Lever’s hometown was, wrote Friedrich Engels, ‘badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes and back alleys’, its main street (Deansgate) ‘even in the finest weather a dark and unattractive hole’. Sixty thousand people were crammed into a hotspot of Victorian enterprise, energy and filth.7 Through the ‘ruinous and miserable’ old town ran a dirty brook like a string of puddles, where houses without furniture crowded in and Irish immigrants huddled in cellars that bred typhus. Here the cotton baron Richard Arkwright made his start in life, as a barber. Samuel Crompton, pioneer of the spinning jenny, had lived just up their road,*3 and by Lever’s teenage years, 70 cotton mills, print works, and bleach and dye works employed 18,000 people, while another 5,500 laboured away in 33 iron-foundries, engine-works and coal mines.

In a small oasis of middle-class comfort in the middle of town was Wood Street, a short, neat Georgian terrace, where the young William Lever grew up among his family of shop-keepers. Like so many Victorian entrepreneurs, the Levers were Non-conformists, and like so many Non-conformists they worked all the hours God sent. William’s father, James (born 1809) had started life as a Manchester grocer’s apprentice*4 and under his master’s influence joined the Congregationalist Church, where he met his wife, Eliza Hesketh, the daughter of a cotton-mill manager.

Their son, William, was by all accounts a precocious boy. An early reader, he took great delight in arranging books – in height order – on the family bookshelf, and from the age of six was sent a few streets away to the local private school, where he proved better in the swimming pool than in the classroom or on the sports field. The moors of Rivington Pike above the town were his wandering grounds, while the local library kept him well supplied with books. David Copperfield was a lifelong favourite, along with the Psalms; but his life’s inspiration was not a Victorian school but a Victorian sage – Samuel Smiles and his ‘bible of Victorian liberalism’, Self Help. ‘It is impossible for me to say how much I owe to the fact that in my early youth I obtained a copy of Smiles’ Self Help,’ he later wrote, and over the course of his life he gave thousands of copies away to schoolchildren.8 Published in 1859, the book sold 20,000 copies in its first year, and a quarter of a million by the time of Smiles’ death in 1904. Its impact on William was immediate. From the day he read it, said his son, Lever ‘cultivated the habit of reckoning out almost each hour of the day and spending it to advantage, making his life a voyage westward with those extra minutes gained each day which are non-existent to him who stands still’.9

The young Lever was lucky in friendship, love and work. At school, he met both his lifelong companion Jonathan Simpson and his future wife Elizabeth Ellen Hulme, the daughter of a wholesale draper down the street and while his mother had ambitions for him to become a doctor, his father had other plans.

Long before William was born, James Lever had had a lucky break. A Manchester friend had married a local widow who owned a grocery business and who needed help running the shop. When the couple retired, in 1864, James Lever had taken over the business, shut the shop, and opened a wholesalers – packaging potted meat, mustard, soap, starch, milk, butter and eggs for the stores of prospering Bolton. He needed help, and so, in 1867, aged sixteen, William Lever began his apprenticeship to his father. ‘I was never asked if I wanted to go into the grocery business,’ William said later in life, ‘and it was perhaps a good thing that I was not. My father told me, one day, that I had better get ready to come into the family grocery business, and as the holidays were nearly over, I thought I might as well begin next morning, and I did.’10

William’s day began at 7am, taking down shutters, sweeping up, and preparing orders, slicing and wrapping bars of soap for the salesmen to deliver. But he was not an apprentice for long. Within five years, he had reorganized the company’s accounts, before persuading his father to let him out on the road as a salesman in a one-horse gig, a life that came with one crucial perk: the chance to court the girl he loved.

Elizabeth Hulme’s family had moved 35 miles away to Southport, and William’s freedom to travel was a freedom to visit. They were engaged at the end of 1872, and, delighted, William’s father promptly made his son a partner, on £800 a year. On 15 April 1874, William and Elizabeth were married at St George’s Road Congregationalist Church by Reverend W. Hope Davison, the man who had baptized them both.11

William Lever’s advance now accelerated. The following year, his father semi-retired, and William moved in as general manager, just as a boom-time for English grocers dawned.12 Soon, Lever was proving his entrepreneurial credentials, searching abroad in Brittany and Ireland for the best supplies, until one day in 1877, Lever decided that it was time to strike out of town for new business. Finishing his rounds at 3.30pm, he ventured south to Ince and, five stores later, had acquired a handful of new orders. It was the beginning of the family’s spread across England’s north-west. ‘If I had not had an insatiable thirst for expansion and for the trial of novel methods,’ Lever later wrote, ‘if I had felt at 3.30 that merely because the usual day’s work was completed I could return home and do nothing more for the remainder of the day, the present business could never have been built up.’13

Before long, Lever’s Wigan business needed a warehouse of its own, and when Omerod & Co., a failing local wholesaler, came up for sale, Lever snapped it up. With new advertising and bigger imports, Lever & Co. was, by the early 1880s, one of the largest wholesale grocers between Manchester and Liverpool. Now aged thirty-three, William Lever boasted a good income, a thriving partnership and a happy family. It was, he thought, time to quit the trade that made his first fortune – and to start something rather new.

*

In the summer of 1884, William Lever spent his first holiday in years cruising around the Scottish islands, together with Elizabeth and their friend Simpson. Out on deck he thought about his future. For years, he had watched, first hand, the boom in the soap trade. Back in 1875, he had even registered a trademark, ‘Lever’s Pure Honey Soap’. It was, he concluded, now time to go ‘all in’ and so returning home, Lever prepared to leap with a genius that would transform an industry, centuries-old, with science and sales techniques on an industrial scale.

The art of soap-making was very old. For centuries, people had made their own soap, but by the thirteenth century the first soap industry had taken shape in Marseilles. By the seventeenth century, the major cities of England were served by soap businesses that stretched back generations, making good soap from olive oil and tallow boiled together for hours, mixed with potash and slacked with lime. Britain’s soap-makers sucked up oil supplies brought in by the Muscovy, Greenland and Levant companies, and by King Charles I’s day the industry was big enough for a monopoly – the London Society of Soap-Boilers – and prominent enough to be roundly attacked in the Long Parliament: ‘like the frogs of Egypt,’ it was complained, they were to be found ‘in the washbowl and powdering tub’.14

It was said to be the Duke of Wellington who popularized the idea of a daily bath. Certainly, the country was filthy enough to need the habit. In 1790, Britain produced some 10 million tonnes of coal; by 1900, it was 242 million tonnes. Over the long nineteenth century, as the cities grew and industry flourished, the nation’s air became filled with soot, smoke and fumes. Dirt was everywhere, and bathing became commonplace by the 1860s for anyone who could afford the coal to heat the water and the staff to fill the tub. Soap demand boomed. In 1801, Britain made just over 24,000 tonnes of soap a year – about 3.5 pounds a head – but over the course of the century, consumption per head grew nearly five-fold to 17 pounds per head. As the population tripled, soap output increased fifteen-fold, reaching 353,000 tonnes a year by 1907.

Soap-making businesses proliferated. In 1851, there were 103 firms exhibiting their wares at the Great Exhibition, and by the 1880s hundreds of companies were producing anything up to 26,000 tonnes a year. The north was dominated by family partnerships, such as William Gossage & Sons, Joseph Crosfield’s of Warrington and Joseph Watson in Leeds. The west was dominated by Christopher Thomas’s, which had started in 1743 and boasted a close relationship with Nobel’s for the supply of glycerine. London was ruled by great firms such as John Knight, founded in 1817, which bought up London’s tallow supplies; and Pears, founded by a Soho barber, Andrew Pears, in 1789.

By Lever’s day, science, salt and steamships had allowed the industry to produce what had become a global product. Chemists were the key to change. In 1793, the Frenchman Nicolas Leblanc had discovered a process whereby sodium carbonate (caustic soda, or soda ash) could be created from salt. In the early nineteenth century, another Frenchman, Michel Eugène Chevreul, investigated the chemistry of animal fats, identifying the alcohol glycerin and fatty acids. Chevreul’s discoveries inspired, among other things, a technique called ‘saponification’, which allowed soap-makers to blend oil or fat – typically tallow (rendered beef fat) and cooking grease – with water and lye (an alkali created by filtering water through wood ashes).

Britain’s soap-makers were now in a fortunate position, for the once rare ingredients they now needed could be delivered to the ports by Britain’s global network of steamships. For a reasonable price, mutton tallow could be shipped from Australia, beef tallow from the Americas, palm oil from West Africa, copra oil from the coconuts of the South Sea Islands, and cottonseed oil from the southern United States. The great port of Liverpool, a few miles from Lever’s Bolton, was not only the centre of this new trade, but also bang in the middle of the Cheshire salt flats. There were few better places for a soap business. William Lever’s genius was to bring everything together – to build a business that exploited Britain’s international networks, sourcing the ingredients to put into branded packets in a recipe repeated in local businesses in every major market on the planet. And it was all built on the profits from the fast-rising tide of late-Victorian consumerism.

*

Over the second half of the nineteenth century, the combination of a population increasing by a million people every decade, rising wages and falling prices, transformed the spending power of Britain’s consumers, creating the world’s first mass consumer society. Between 1870 and 1900, the great surge in national trade helped to push up the average income per head by 50 per cent,*5 and this in turn helped power growth in household consumption after 1886. Free trade blessed the country with a comparatively cheap cost of living. The average Briton was now some 30–40 per cent richer than his or her French or German neighbour. By the First World War, the nation still produced a third of the world’s goods and boasted the global British services industry, headquartered in London.

In this new market, the firms making and selling consumer products flourished. Daily they brought to the increasing numbers of consumers employed in steady jobs an ever-growing range of products –starch, polish, tea, cocoa, chocolate, jam, biscuits, syrups, sauces, potted meats, newspapers, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals and drugs, ready-made clothing and footwear, and, of course, soap. The products were customer-ready – bottled, canned, packeted and branded, using skills now decades old. Bryan Donkin’s Crosse & Blackwell had opened the country’s first food-canning business in 1812, and John Horniman had begun selling packaged tea in 1826. By 1848, Thomas Beecham was putting pills into branded boxes. The Wills family gave their tobacco brand-names such as ‘Best Bird’s Eye’ and ‘Bishop Blaze’ (in 1847), while John Player perfected its pre-packaged cigarettes after 1877. Bryant and May’s introduced standard, pre-packaged safety matches in 1870s, and in the years after the American Civil War British entrepreneurs began to import the new techniques of the great American firms – such as Quaker Oats, William Kellog, Henry Heinz, Joseph Campbell, Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola.

Consumers could buy these new goods on the new British high street, transformed by the new cornerstones of British retail. In the 1850s, W. H. Smith & Sons, J. Menzies and Singer’s sewing-machine retail chain all emerged, soon joined by John Hepworth’s, Boots and the new ‘chain stores’ or ‘multiples’, which numbered around 1,500 in the 1880s, burgeoning to 11,645 by 1900. By the First World War, 168 firms boasted more than 25 branches each,15 but among them were giants: the butchers Eastman’s; James Nelson’s, which ran over 1,000 stores; and Home & Colonial Tea, the Maypole Diary Co., Lipton Ltd and the Boots Pure Drug Company, which each held more than 500 stores. The greatest of them all was the Co-operative Wholesale Society. With 1.7 million citizens as members, in 1,439 organizations, it was, by the turn of the century, probably the biggest company in the world. Between them, the Co-operative societies, the department stores and the multiples (twice as productive as their German rivals) controlled some 20 per cent of total retail sales.

Key to the success of many of these new consumer products was the new art of advertising. By the 1860s, the pill-seller Thomas Holloway was already spending £40,000 a year on advertisements, and advertising was key to Thomas Lipton’s success in building a national chain of grocery stores, from his humble start in 1871. Lipton’s was not simply a master of window dressing, but also of highly imaginative stunts: elephants hired out to drag huge cheeses through the streets, or the fattest pigs from the market paraded in public, their stencilled flanks announcing their forthcoming demise and sale as chops.

By the 1880s, the new consumer kingpins – in medicines, in chocolate, in soap – had transformed the world of marketing. It oozed everywhere. Picture advertisements in magazines began to appear, along with colour posters, from the 1890s, by which time, Beecham’s was spending an extraordinary £110,000 a year on promotions. For many, it was a world of horror. ‘We live in an age of advertisement,’ lamented Lord Randolph Churchill, ‘the age of Holloway’s pills, of Colman’s mustard, and of Horniman’s pure tea’.16 ‘Advertisements are turning England into a sordid and disorderly spectacle from sea to sea,’ complained a letter-writer to The Times in 1892.17 But in this new world, William Lever realized that – like his competitors at Pears – real money could be made by adding to the fruits of the foreign shores and the science of chemistry the magic ingredient of advertising.

For a while, soap-makers had been among the leaders of this new movement. Thomas Barrett, who married into the Pears family, was perhaps the first to realize that a good brand, a catchphrase and a celebrity endorsement could move thousands of pounds of sales. ‘Good morning, have you used Pears soap?’ was a famous early slogan. Lillie Langtry, the celebrity actress (and for a while mistress of the Prince of Wales), was employed to declare that ‘for years I have used your soap and no other’, in a campaign backed by a huge £120,000 annual spend.

William Lever intuitively understood that a good advertisement was the key to a good return. And so he turned to the best trademark and patent agent in Liverpool, W. P. Thompson, for advice on a brand that would break through. Thompson wrote down half a dozen ideas on half a sheet of notepaper, but, said Lever; ‘really at first blush, none of those names appealed to me. I had big ideas of some sort of name – I did not know what.’18 For days, Lever doodled away, until suddenly the inspiration hit him. ‘When that occurred to me I had to go straight off to Liverpool and ask Thompson to register it at once: I was all in a tremble to have it registered, for fear somebody else had go it.’19 It turned out his brand-name – ‘Sunlight soap’ – was unregistered in every major market.

With a brand in hand, Lever and his brother James – who joined him, in 1884 – now needed a recipe, a factory and a sales force. With typical energy, Lever had all three in the space of months. At first, he had planned to buy unbranded soap, stamp it and enjoy the mark-up. His brother had found an oil-based soap that seemed to offer a perfect combination of sweetness and lather. ‘I liked this soap very much,’ remembered William; ‘I made a speciality of it, and called it “Sunlight Self-Washer”, for I claimed that it could wash of it itself.’20 But when Lever’s supplier promptly threatened to jack up prices, Lever realized that serious money would require him to become both maker and marketeer.

The brothers’ father was decidedly unsure about his sons’ move into manufacture: ‘A cobbler’, he said, ‘should stick to his last.’21 But with characteristic confidence, William persuaded not only his father, but also friends and financiers, to donate or lend the sum of £27,000 – £2.4 million in today’s money – to buy the rights to a new recipe and to lease a Warrington soap-works, Winser & Co., to make it. The Lever soap subsidiary was founded. In August 1885, with two inherited experts in tow, Lever spent months perfecting a blend of copra oil, tallow, cotton oil and resin to produce a pure soap that finally rolled off the production line in January 1886, still called ‘Sunlight Self-Washer’.

Just like the Cadbury brothers twenty years before him, Lever understood the marketing appeal of ‘purity’, and while his recipe was special, his marketing was revolutionary. Lever had noticed the way that his soap, stacked in parchment-covered blocks in grocers’ windows, failed to offer much of an image. So, instead of selling long bars to grocers for them to slice up, Lever decided that Sunlight Soap should be cut at source, wrapped in parchment and boxed in brightly coloured cardboard emblazoned with the Sunlight logo. Serious money was now spent on advertising, around Bolton and beyond. A £50 contract was taken out with local railway companies to emblazon stations with posters proclaiming ‘Sunlight Self-Washer Soap: See how this becomes the House’.22 As he later boasted, ‘I was the first to advertise extensively a tablet soap... The result was I lifted Sunlight Soap into a class by itself where it has remained ever since.’23 He bustled with mercurial energy, driven by a focus on sales. Agents were sent out to shop-keepers and direct to the doorsteps of customers. Lever was full of tips, about everything from persuading children to handle the goods, to closing gates, to the importance of not stamping mud into customers’ homes.

But Lever knew that bigger sales needed bigger marketing. His philosophy was simple. As he explained to his sales staff, ‘Advertising is as near bringing the manufacturing conditions of repetition to the selling side of the business as possible’.24 Crucially, he had begun to bring in American techniques and adapt them for the British market. He was, for example, among the first in Britain to take up the idea of issuing booklets devoted to getting the best from soap. Thus, Sunlight Soap and How to Use It appeared in 1886, full of advice on cleaning everything from clothes to carpets. That was, however, but one trick in a veritable magic set designed to attract attention. Donations to good causes voted on by customers followed; when the Royal National Lifeboat Institution won, Lever donated a boat named Sunlight Number One, and pictures of it were splashed across the Illustrated London News.

Lever stole shamelessly from his competitors, and with great effect. One such inspiration was Thomas Barrett’s ‘Bubbles’ campaign of 1886. Barrett had bought John Everett Millais’s painting, A Child’s World, of a golden-locked boy, inscribed the words ‘Pears’ soap’ on reproductions, and created a hugely popular image. Lever borrowed the idea and three years later, in 1889, acquired William Powell Frith’s painting of a little girl, The New Frock, because ‘mothers always like to look at a nice little girl’. Snapping it up for 150 guineas, Lever plastered it all over billboards with the caption ‘So Clean’. The artist was furious. ‘Lively... was my surprise’, Frith fumed to the Pall Mall Gazette, ‘when I found a large representation of my picture with the new title of “so clean” forming the part of an advertiser for a firm of soap manufacturers.’ The ensuing row guaranteed huge coverage in the Gazette, and its editor, W. T. Stead, declared the paper ‘wholly in favour of this high-class method of pictorial advertisement’.25

Within just a year of opening his factory in 1886, demand for Lever’s product was outpacing its ability to make it. And so, in 1887, together with their father, William and his brother James decided to float the old family firm. The Lever Wholesale Grocery Company Ltd was listed with a capital of £60,000, raised so that Lever Brothers could expand production from 20 tonnes a week in early 1886 to 450 tonnes a week by December 1887. By the end of 1888, soap production was up more than five-fold.*6

Now short of cash for an even bigger factory, Lever encountered a problem. His bankers were reluctant to advance a loan, not least because Warrington was home to a bigger beast than Lever – the country’s second-biggest soap-maker, Joseph Crosfield. Lever told his father that he wanted out of the family firm. To his great surprise, the seventy-seven-year-old James Lever not only agreed with his son, but went one further. He too would sell. And so, while the old business was floated off to W. H. S. Taylor, and cash in hand, William Lever set off to find a new base. It would be called Port Sunlight.

*

On Saturday, 3 March 1888, to the cheers of crowds, William Lever and a heavily pregnant Mrs Lever, together with 150 companions, stepped off the smartly dressed steam-barge the Warrington into a field at Bromborough Pool soaked by the ebbing Mersey. It was time to cut the first sod of the 62-acre site for the Sunlight works.26

The architect, William Owen, was asked to say a few words. Apologizing for this latest Lancastrian invasion of Cheshire, he assured the crowds of the ‘right hand of fellowship’, and he handed a handsome silver spade to Mrs Lever to plunge into the ground. ‘I wish you all success,’ she declared to loud cheers, ‘success to the new works, success to the firm and success to all interested in the sale and manufacture of “Sunlight Soap”,’ whereupon the party repaired to its steamer and then to the Bear’s Paw Restaurant in Liverpool. That evening, among the many who offered toasts, the old works manager, Mr Winser, spoke with pride of how the assembled company had, in a few short years, built one of the biggest businesses in Britain. Port Sunlight would soon help Lever Brothers become one of the biggest businesses in the world.

William Lever had been influenced by the innovative model village of Agneta Park in Delft, where the great Dutch industrialist J. C. van Marken had set out to build a novel, and more inclusive way of doing business than the grinding, cut-throat norms of much of European capitalism. As Lever explained at the Bear’s Paw, ‘our idea is that profit sharing should be so managed that those who take profits are those who are working at the works’. Homes, therefore, would be built on site, available at reduced rent – and they would be beautiful. ‘It is my hope... to build houses in which our work people will be able... to know more about the science of life than they can in a back slum.’27 Here was the genesis of Lever’s business philosophy that would blossom over the course of his career, to ‘socialise and Christianise business relations, and get back again in the office, factory and workshop to that close family brotherhood that existed in the good old days of hand labour’.28 And so, at Port Sunlight, Lever set out to create from muddy fields not simply a model village but a model society.

The site, at first, was barren. ‘Anything more unprepossessing than this site can hardly be imagined,’ wrote W. L. George, for it was ‘a few feet above high water level and liable at any time to be flooded by high tides’.29 But Lever was a visionary. On sheets of white foolscap, Lever set out intricate designs bursting with technical notes in red and black ink for his master planner, Owen, and a team of thirty architects to formalize. ‘The architects he employed’, wrote Lever’s son, ‘all looked upon him as unique amongst their clients. He did not employ them – he collaborated with them.’

What emerged has been described as a spectacular ‘Ersatz version of Merrie England’,30 an ivy-clad, hollyhocked English village of yore, with seven houses per acre, each designed to resemble a half-timbered Lancashire manor house, and fronted with a variety of late-medieval, Jacobean and Queen Anne-style façades, along wide streets christened after the places of Lever’s Bolton. The homes were surrounded by green spaces. For Lever, a home required a ‘garden in front of it, just as a cup requires a saucer’.31

Around his village, Lever built his village society, encompassing all that he could conceive would be useful and good: a primary school; a post office; tennis courts and a bowling green, and football and cricket pitches; a horticultural society; amateur dramatics, a philharmonic society and an English choir; a mutual improvement society, along with clubs for cycling, walking, croquet and quoits; a free library and a museum, replete with the bugle that had sounded the Charge of the Light Brigade; a swimming pool; an auditorium; a parish church – Christ Church; and a pub, which from 1903 was even allowed to sell beer.32 On their birthdays, the children of Lever’s staff received books signed by the Lever family. Twice a season, the works’ women were invited to dances. In the summer, there were trips to Anglesey or Blackpool, to see the Diamond Jubilee, and even to Paris and Brussels.

Down the road from Port Sunlight, Lever set up as lord of his new dominions by acquiring Thornton Manor, into which he moved in 1891, with Elizabeth and his eleven-day-old son, William. He gave the place a spectacular overhaul, adding new wings, a new frontage, stables, gardens, a 20-acre lake (replete with canals), a bathing pool, a lagoon and an island, and a somewhat haphazard collection of art. Here, he could enjoy his new eccentricities of sleeping in an open-air bedroom on the roof, sheltered only by a slanting glass panel, until woken every morning at 6.30am for his bath, which was kept a few degrees above freezing. And here he could entertain like a lord, with garden parties for his staff, enlivened with merry-go-rounds, swings, donkey rides, boating on the lake, Punch and Judy shows, and the music of the Port Sunlight Prize Band.

The rules of this new society were Lever’s. Every worker was free to apply for a home. At a rent of 7–10 shillings a week for a home with a parlour, they were well within the reach of a male worker on 25 shillings a week; but anyone who lost their job had to move. Lever insisted that his tenants’ private lives were none of his business; but only flowers of which he approved could be grown in the front gardens, and the names of any men a girl invited to the dances were vetted by the ‘Social Department’.33

But Lever never lost sight of business. The genius of Port Sunlight was its profitability. When Lever made his toast in the Bear’s Paw restaurant, he explained that not only would the new site be connected by the neighbouring railway to every town in the country, but, as it was up estuary from the Port of Merseyside, Port Sunlight was free of the crippling Mersey dock charges on tonnes of imported ingredients. The result, said Lever, was that ‘they would be able to produce soap at a cost below which no one could go’.34

By the summer of 1889, Port Sunlight was open for business, the first factory (‘Soapery’), a glycerine plant and 300-foot chimney towering over the fields and the homes rising brick by brick from the mud. At the centre of it all, Lever controlled everything. He was, wrote the journalist A. G. Gardiner, ‘a bit of human granite’. Short, at 5 feet 5 inches, he was thick set with a sturdy upright body and a massive head topped with a cockatoo crest of thick curly hair, generally topped with a hat. ‘He is of the Napoleon breed,’ wrote Gardiner, ‘born to marshal big battalions and win empires, if not in war, then in peace.’35

After rising at 6.30am, Lever typically breakfasted at 7.30, practised his gymnastics most days, and set off to work dressed in his grey tweed suit, with a Victorian-era collar and carelessly worn tie. In the office, he was surrounded by stenographers, who took his dictation for an hour each morning, from comments scribbled on the piles of papers read overnight. At 10am he began his meetings, and throughout the day, from a fabulous glass-walled office in the middle of Port Sunlight, came an unending stream of commands, prophecies and exhortations. Managers everywhere were kept up to the mark with minutely detailed letters, until Lever headed home, to retire to bed no later than 10.30pm, and often as early as 9pm.

At Port Sunlight’s opening, five times more soap rolled off the production line than the business had made just three years previously, and before long, thousands were coming from all over Europe to marvel at the place, including, on 28 November 1891, a very special visitor.36

William Gladstone had been invited to open the first of the new village halls, to be named after him – the mock-Tudor Gladstone Hall, which still stands outside Lever Hall today. Lever explained just how much he owed to the great statesman:

It was in April 1853 that you removed the duty on soap, and thereby made the manufacture on a large and scientific scale possible. It was in 1861 that you removed the duty from paper, and so gave the country its greatest boon, a free and cheap press... without a large circulation it would be useless to advertise... and the day is coming when advertising will take its place as a useful and beneficial art.37

In reply, Gladstone explained how much the country owed to Lever:

A very powerful writer said we were approaching a period when cash payment was to be the only, is the only, nexus, the only link between man and man... In this hall I have found living proof that cash payment is not the only nexus between man and man... ‘Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.’ This day must inspire great thankfulness for the last, more hopefulness for the future.38

They were words that had a profound effect on Lever. ‘I could not sleep much that night... I had to walk up and down the park thinking of him. He made an extraordinary impression.’39 Within three years of Gladstone’s speech, William Lever would float his business for the modern equivalent of £150 million. It was a remarkable accomplishment for a business less than a decade old. Yet, Lever’s brilliance was not simply to build a business in Britain’s booming consumer market, but to build a huge company from a small island by going abroad. The lessons he learned abroad he brought home to build one of the world’s first great global brands. The good ideas he found anywhere, became good business everywhere. And he thrived even as the walls of protectionism began to rise, dividing the world’s great markets into smaller plots.

*

While free trade had become a British national religion since the days of William Jardine, few of Britain’s neighbours saw things in quite the same way. Even Britain’s imperial markets, such as Canada, had tariffs as early as 1858, and in the 1870s a slow-down in global growth had coincided with US and German efforts to nation-build after their respective civil war and unification. The result was that tariffs soared, as politicians everywhere sought to build a world of walled gardens.40 Post-Civil War America created tariffs six and a half times higher than Britain’s, while on the Continent the 1870s saw the beginning of a twenty-year tariff war.

Britain refused to bargain or use its vast power to retaliate. Indeed, Robert Giffen, the head of the Board of Trade, summed up the ‘official’ Whitehall mind in a letter to the pro-tariff Joseph Chamberlain in 1903: ‘Only a free-trade country, or rather a free import country, can be the centre of the world’s international commerce, as we are, which brings us an enormous business and gain, whatever special disadvantages it may have in the shape of “dumping” and so on.’

The result of tariffs elsewhere, however, was that while British exports were a remarkably stable part of the nation’s economy between 1871 and 1911, contributing between a quarter and a fifth of output, the country increasingly sold ‘old’ products to old customers. Textiles, coal, iron and steel accounted for 85 per cent of British exports between 1870 and 1879; and whereas back in 1870 less than a quarter of exports headed to imperial markets, by 1914 the figure was more than one-third. By 1900, Britain could boast two-thirds of world exports in ‘declining sectors’, but under one-fifth of the new, expanding markets.

Faced with a world market divided up by tariff walls, Lever knew that he needed to build foreign foundations – and he set about the task even before Port Sunlight was open. In September 1888, he left for New York to help his brother-in-law set up shop,*7 eventually travelling 15,000 miles across the United States and Canada, installing an old Warrington hand, A. J. Wolfendale, in New York and an old school friend, Alfred Robinson, in Canada. Once home, he set out immediately for the Continent, where, in 1889, he blazed a trail across Belgium, Germany and France, where he stopped off to inspect his advertisements at the Paris Exhibition.

Tariffs were not the only obstacle to selling abroad, as Lever well understood: ‘The most serious obstacle to international trade in manufactured articles is the great difficulty – I might also say the impossibility – while living in one country, of appreciating the tastes and requirements of another.’41 And so he set about assembling an extraordinary team to stretch the business across Europe. From Rotterdam, A. P. van Geelkerjen sent salespeople in blue uniforms, riding wagons in Sunlight colours, around the Dutch countryside.*8 Lever’s export clerk, Ernest Brauen, was sent to open up business in Brussels, while Brauen’s brother opened up in Hamburg. In Switzerland, Lever hired a trained Egyptologist with a background in running charities, the gigantically talented F. H. Lavanchy-Clarke, after he had wandered into the Port Sunlight yard one afternoon: he was sent to start a Swiss business in a blaze of worldwide publicity, holding a washing competition – the ‘Fête des Blanchisseuses’ – on the shore of Lake Geneva.42

Lever understood that to expand fast he needed to keep raising money. And so, on 27 May 1890, Lever brothers – then making £50,000 profit a year – converted to a private limited company with an authorized capital of £300,000.43 The basis of Lever’s financial strategy was crystallized at the time. Having searched for expansion capital, he was approached by company promoters keen to float his firm for £600,000, selling two-thirds of the shares to the public. When he confessed his doubts, Lever was asked: ‘What does it matter to you, when once you have got the money?’ Disgusted, Lever withdrew and decided henceforth that ordinary shares – and control of the firm – would stay with him and the family. Only company debt – in the form of debentures and preference shares – would be issued.

With new cash, Lever built faster than ever. In 1892, he set off travelling once again, with his wife and four-year-old son, for a tour of New York, the World’s Fair in Chicago, the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), New Zealand and Australia.*9 The Canadian business was reorganized, and new factory land was negotiated with the Mayor of Toronto. Lever expressed wonder at the modernity of Honolulu, before comprehensively reorganizing business in Australia and New Zealand. En route, he dispatched 879 letters to staff and another 600 to family and friends. For conversation, he spent his journey home debating free trade with the future Lord Curzon.

By 1894, Lever Brothers was finally ready to float. In one of the commercial events of the year, a prospectus was issued on 26 June proposing an initial capital of £1.5 million. The offer was four times over-subscribed, surpassing Lever’s wildest expectations. And yet there was little pause for breath; he was once again back to sea, to prise open the market that was proving far and away the toughest to crack: the United States. Between 1894 and 1898, Lever returned there annually, in what he called his ‘Battle of the Nile’.44 ‘It is the biggest undertaking I ever had on hand and I fancy it has depressed me... I should hate to face a failure here,’ he wrote to his father in 1895, ‘and we have to run the risk.’

*

Lever had now proved that great businesses could be built by taking aim at the prize offered by Britain’s booming cities, full of ever richer workers, and which offered one of the greatest consumer markets on earth. In these markets, Lever’s generation proved that for the right idea, it was perfectly possible to raise the requisite finance to grow – by issuing stocks, preference shares and bonds. Britain lacked the investment banks of the United States and Germany, and when British investors were spoilt for choice with a range of tempting foreign investments paying between 6 per cent and 8 per cent a year, new domestic firms needed to offer excellent potential to win investment.45 The great challenge for Lever’s generation, therefore, was how to build big companies from a small island in a world where few nations shared the British passion for free trade and where, at home, it was hard to acquire the three crucial ingredients new industries needed in order to prosper: scale, science and skill. They were assets the United States offered in abundance, for the nation had now surpassed the United Kingdom to become the world’s economic Number One.

Appearances could, of course, be deceptive. When Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee on 22 June 1897, a quarter of the world’s population got a day off. As the ageing queen processed past the deafening crowds, through streets ‘beautifully decorated... with flowers, flags and draperies of every hue’, 50,000 soldiers from every corner of the British Empire marched through London, while at Plymouth there lay at anchor 165 ships bristling with 3,000 guns. It was, said Gladstone, ‘the day on which is completed the longest and perhaps the happiest reign ever known’.46 ‘I remember the atmosphere,’ wrote future historian Arnold Toynbee, ‘it was “Well, here we are on top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there forever.”’

In terms of sheer might and reach, the British Empire was yet to peak.*10 But the British economy was already second-best, overtaken in overall economic size, at least, three decades earlier by the United States. As the American frontier swept westwards, so the pioneers, railways, telegraphs – and modern corporations – spread, all flourishing in the years after the American Civil War. In 1830, there were just thirty-one stocks traded on the New York Exchange. By 1850, hundreds of thousands of shares were traded every week; in one four-week period, a million shares changed hands.47 As early as 1851, the newly founded Economist predicted that ‘the superiority of the United States over England is ultimately as certain as the next eclipse’,48 and by 1859 huge new Wall Street banks had channelled over $1 billion into the railways.49 They, in turn, unlocked a continental-sized marketplace, in which giant firms began to flourish.

Before 1880, few American businesses were worth more than $1 million. By 1901, the billion-dollar corporation was born, when J. P. Morgan merged Andrew Carnegie’s steel business with its rivals to create the $1.4 billion US Steel Corporation. In the merger frenzy between 1897 and 1904, more than 4,000 firms merged into just 257 gigantic combinations, such as Standard Oil and American Tobacco. Forty per cent of American manufacturing was controlled by just 300 companies.*11

Across this vast marketplace, American manufacturing workers were already more productive than their British counterparts as early as 1820,50 and over the decades that followed the US productivity lead in services – transport, communications, commerce and the public services – streaked further ahead.*12 American offices soon widely embraced the innovations of telephones, typewriters, duplicators and modern filing, leaving Britain lagging behind. Britain could not match this productivity or market scale, and soon, the average American citizen was the wealthiest in the West; in 1820, the average Briton was a third richer than the average American. By 1902, the Americans had drawn level.

The challenge for British entrepreneurs was that in most new industries, British competition was so fragmented that entrepreneurs lacked the market dominance that could yield returns to match what could be earned by British investors abroad; in the car industry for instance, eighty-one new car firms opened their doors between 1897 and 1913 – and, unlike Germany or America, Britain did not foster great monopolies protected by great tariff walls.

But Lever’s success underlined the truth that Britain had no shortage of great entrepreneurs51 – including innovators in the new automotive, aerospace, chemicals or electrical-engineering industries. However, Britain found it hard to match both foreign scale and foreign skill. The land of great minds seriously struggled to create great institutions to power the nascent knowledge economy. The nation’s education system was lamentable, its technical education amateurish. Modern universities were slow to emerge, government was ‘hands off’ in nurturing industry, and regulation encouraged fragmentation rather than scale.

Men like Charles Babbage, the computer pioneer, were warning as early as the Great Exhibition that the country needed ‘a more intelligent and better educated class of foremen, managers and workmen’.52 Of course, there was progress of sorts. Mechanics institutes, born in the 1820s, numbered 700 by 1851. Eleven universities opened between 1851 and 1902, often modelled on the German design, and a raft of polytechnics emerged from 1880s to sit alongside the rather patchy science being taught in schools, science colleges and technical schools (which all subsisted without a lot of help from the state). The City & Guilds training organization was founded in 1879, and new laws of 1889 allowed councils to levy rates to build technical colleges, augmented by ‘whisky money’ in 1898: 160 colleges were built in this way. From the 1890s, the number of engineers multiplied; but technical education remained a second-class education, overwhelmingly part-time and linked to work. Crucially, it was a system dwarfed in scale by Britain’s competitors; in 1901–02, there were 3,000 students in British technical collages, compared with 10,700 in German technical universities. In Germany, universities were funded at a completely superior level; by 1900, they enjoyed six times as much investment in science and technology as universities in England; at the same time, some 2,000 graduate scientists were at work in British industry, contrasting with 45,000 in Germany.53 Over the next fifteen years, nearly a third of Nobel prizes went to Germany, while just 8 per cent went to Britain. The contrast with America was just as stark. Britain simply lacked the research infrastructure of American corporations such as Bell Telephone Labs or General Electric or Eastman Kodak.54 By 1906, Members of Parliament were forced to conclude that while ‘England compared not unfavourably with other countries in the provision made for... lower and intermediate grades of technical education... The principal deficiency... appears to lie in the sphere of the highest technical education’.55

*

Lever knew, therefore, that global success required him to ‘go west’, to the ‘El Dorado of commercial prosperity’ of the United States.56 And so, in between hunting in Arkansas and haggling in New York, he bought an old oil mill in Vicksburg in the heart of the American south. With cash from his flotation, he expanded his mills and set up a new Lever Brothers New York office, before setting sail in September 1895, first for South Africa (to met Cecil Rhodes at Rondebosch and explore the country) and then for Australia, where he bought a factory site in Sydney and laid out plans for the first oil mill south of the Equator. In December 1895, Mrs Lever cut the first sod, before they sailed home.

The timing of Lever’s global push was significant. The cut-throat competition in Britain’s soap market brought, in 1896, the first fall in sales, of 5 per cent. It was Lever’s American business that would now provide him with access to a crucial ingredient to fight back: advertising genius. ‘I am certain that if there is any body of people who understand the art of salesmanship and the advertising of domestic articles, it is the Americans,’ he once observed.*13

In today’s Unilever company archives at Port Sunlight, overlooking the vast factory site, lie the battered buff and green folders containing Lever’s business correspondence with his friends. Reading through the letters, written like Edwardian email, it is clear how, from the mid-1890s, Lever was intensely studying everything American. He was an avid consumer of US newspapers, political speeches, magazines, and books on everything from parks and reservoirs to international relations. Lever scrutinized American direct-sales catalogues, such as those produced by Sears Roebuck, which ran a premium and trading-stamp scheme. ‘I understand the books published by MOPH [sic] of Chicago are worth studying from the point of view of those who are interested in giving prizes for wrappers...’ ran one letter to Lever Brothers America in 1907; ‘The wrapper prize for soap is becoming a great craze in England this year.’57

Most important was the stream of intelligence from the frontline of his American salesmen. By 1895, his friend Wolfendale was already providing a detailed read-out from conferences of the firm’s American sales-team, on everything from competitors’ tactics, such Babbitt’s distribution cards, to door-to-door sales, advertising, to the best ways of rewarding salespeople. Over the years that followed, Lever was able to draw on salesmen’s reports from New York to Kansas and New Orleans, covering an incredible wealth of retail detail: sampling, pricing, advertising, rebates, product strategy, to salaries, sales expenses, shipping costs and box-printing machines, as well as scrappage, waste, ingredients and insurance.

To tame the competition in the United States, Lever realized that he would have to buy it, so in 1897 he acquired three-fifths of the Boston-based Curtis Davis Company; two years later, he bought out Benjamin Brooke & Co., makers of Monkey Brand, the most popular soap in America. He swiftly moved production to Port Sunlight, but crucially he retained the services of the American company’s advertising guru, Sydney Gross. Sydney’s brother, H. B. Gross, initially stayed on to help run the US business, before resigning a few years later, unhappy at Lever’s interference (as he saw it); another brother, Anthony Gross, was sent to Port Sunlight to learn the British business first hand. But it was Sydney who would make the decisive impact as he set to work with Lever.

‘Most advertisers’, remarked Lever, ‘are the slaves of habit and the followers of custom. Not so Mr Gross. Originality marked him at every step.’58 Between the two of them there now formed a relationship that allowed Lever to harness the best of American marketing savvy, and deploy it to pioneer modern marketing in Britain. The two men became neighbours in Hampstead, and over the years they exchanged ideas, doggerel, and books on anything from water-softening to exercises in bed. They remained intimate for the rest of Gross’s life, and day to day worked intensively together, as their correspondence from just a single month, from mid-December 1902 to January 1903, illustrates. In page after page, the friends and partners swapped ideas on everything from the theory of advertising to the details of wrappers for a new toilet soap, ‘Plantol’, prize schemes, distribution plans for ‘YZ’ disinfectant, and a new advertising booklet – the designs, typeface, pictures and proofs deconstructed in minute detail.59 The theory and practice of American marketing is woven throughout. In the exchange of letters on 15 December 1902, along with some notes on glycerine sales, ledger books and thoughts on advertisements for the disinfectant soap ‘Lifebuoy’, Gross was opining on the virtues of prize schemes. In the United States, he noted ‘prizes tend to lower the esteem of the goods’,60 to which Lever responded: ‘I would mention that all the leading soap firms in America are giving away prizes of some sort or other... from Colgate’s to Procter & Gamble’.61 The same day, Gross was replying with thanks for Lever’s praise for his new advertisements: ‘I’m glad you think our advertisements tell the tale’, for, unlike chocolate, ‘soap has to be imported in a picture’.62 The next day he returned to the subject of prizes and the American trend for ‘giving away prizes to such extent’ that the firm seemed to be no longer primarily soap-makers; ‘I hope that we shall never be in that position,’ he averred, adding that Lever Brothers could not afford to have a consumer who ‘gets his toilet soap thrown in gratuitously’.

The design of their ‘Plantol’ wrapper was a subject of intense discussion. On 23 December 1902, Lever was rejecting designs, though by January the wrapper was in better shape. ‘I think that both the green and the white make good colours,’ noted Gross.63 In January 1903, Gross sent over an American advertising sample as an inspiration: ‘I enclose you our American Lifebuoy pamphlet which appears to me to be about the right size.’64

Throughout it all, Lever never missed a trick when it came to spotting market opportunities, as when an outbreak of disease in his hometown looked promising for soap sales. ‘My dear Gross,’ he wrote on 10 January 1903, ‘It appears there is an epidemic of smallpox in Bolton at present. I enclose an advertisement of Wright’s Coal Tar Soap. Perhaps it would [be] as well to push Lifebuoy and YZ in our Bolton advertising at present.’65

The fruits of the Lever–Gross relationship were remarkable. Lever was quickly able to route American products through his British sales channels. He noted approvingly to Gross in 1901 that, despite the fact that ‘the soap business is going through trying times at present owing to the high price of raw materials’, British sales of Monkey Brand were up by 40 per cent; ‘This is of course to be expected seeing that we have a force of 200 selling agents who are now carrying it into every shop in the UK.’66 Critically for Lever, Gross helped transform Lever’s British products. Faced with falling sales, Lever changed his wrapper schemes, but more importantly pushed ahead with new products such as ‘Lifebuoy’67 and, in 1899, Sunlight Flakes – which, after experiencing poor sales, was repackaged by Gross in boxes decorated with a happy-looking baby and a new, successful brand-name: ‘Lux’.

Thereafter, new products proliferated. Along with the ‘Y-Z’ Disinfectant Powder, there was ‘Vim’ scouring powder and soaps in a vast variety of shapes, sizes and smells, such as ‘Velvet Skin’, ‘Plantol’, ‘Coral’, ‘Capitol’, ‘Villa’ and ‘Sealskin’. Lever was segmenting his market for the first time, with different products for different people, each targeted with distinct advertising messages. ‘Sunlight Soap’, for example, focused on the labour-saving virtues Lever had long extolled: ‘There is no labour, no experience necessary with Sunlight Soap... the Scientific Way’, for ‘It does the washing itself’ and all in all was ‘A saver of time, health and strength’. Lest consumers prove recidivists, they were warned: ‘Housewives remember the soul-wearying labour of wash-day before the advent of Sunlight Soap.’ ‘Lifebuoy’, on the other hand, rooted its appeal on its disinfecting qualities, with advertisements featuring dirty-looking children for whom the product could provide a shortcut to ‘Health and Happiness’: ‘The housewife no longer needs soap for cleaning and costly chemicals for disinfecting.’ ‘Lux’ flakes, by contrast, offered ‘a novel and unique washing preparation’ – a more luxurious offer, aimed at the caring mother. ‘To mother, the washing of the little garments is a tender duty,’ ran a typical ‘Lux’ advertisement featuring cherubic toddlers, especially for the mother who worried ‘for the sturdy growing youngsters whose health and comfort she holds as a sacred trust’.

The genius of Lever’s business now became clear, for his multinational reach lent Lever the ability to export his marketing savoir faire not simply around Britain, but around the world. For, as protectionism grew worldwide, Lever now had to shift from simply using local sales agencies to actually manufacturing in the markets where he sold. As Lever explained it: ‘The question of erecting works in another country is dependent upon the tariff or duty... When the duty exceeds the cost of separate managers and separate plant, then it will be an economy to erect works in the country so that our customers can be more cheaply supplied from them.’68 Lever’s factories began to open around the globe. In October 1898, Lever’s Swiss agent Lavanchy-Clarke had his small daughter, Christine, start the machinery at the first Continental Lever factory, the ‘Savonneries Helvetia’ in Olten. On the Rhine, land was readied for a German factory, opened in 1900, while in 1901 De Lever’s Zeep Maatschappij (Lever’s Soap Company) was incorporated in Holland. In Brussels, in 1904, Ernest Brauen opened a factory to the applause of 2,000 visiting Port Sunlighters.

Lever’s strategy tended to be simple: maximum control for the minimum of money, and so factories tended to be stand-alone ventures, co-financed by local businessmen. Lever would generally retain sufficient voting rights to control policy. In Switzerland, for instance, Lavanchy-Clarke owned 40 per cent, while the balance of preference shares were sold to a consortium of Swiss businessmen. The German business was a consortium with the Stollwerck chocolate family and eleven other shareholders.

Everywhere, Lever was able to deploy and adapt the basic advertising formulas that worked so well in Britain and America. Lever’s 1897 English advert for Sunlight Soap, for instance, set out the basic claim that ‘Grateful women from all parts of the world have expressed their full appreciation of the splendid labour saving advantages of Sunlight Soap.’ And so, Lever’s advertisements across Europe, whether for the Dutch ‘Sunlight Zeep’ or the German ‘Sunlight Seife’, carried the same basic imagery of the housewife on washing day in local dress, and the same basic appeal: ‘labour light – clothes white’.

Helpfully for Lever, he was now able to compare the performance of his firm in markets around the world. Writing to Wolfendale in 1901, he happily reported the 8 per cent return on cash secured by the Olten and Mannheim plants and the $5 profit on a case of a hundred 12-ounce bars. ‘What a beautiful state of affairs it would be if we could get $5 in Canada and the States.’69

As his firm prospered, Lever was becoming very, very wealthy. And with his fortune began a serious love affair with grand gestures and great paintings. When Rivington Pike – the dramatic landscape where he courted his wife – came up for sale in 1899, he snapped it up and offered it as a 400-acre park for the people of Bolton. Five years later, he acquired the mansion called The Hill, in Hampstead, and the beginnings of a nationally important collection of paintings, wall-hangings, furniture, sculpture and pottery.*14 He had begun picking up small objets d’art in dealers’ shops in Bolton in the 1870s, before going on to collect at scale to fill the rooms of Thornton Manor. Not much of it was adventurous or original, and he relied on dealers rather than a single specialist, but – as one dealer, Duveen, put it – Lever ‘passionately loved beauty of form and colour’ in art, as much as he did in business.

It was a passion that was about to be acutely tested as new pressures combined to put his business – and his reputation – under severe stress.

*

By 1906, about £1 million – a quarter of Lever’s capital – was invested overseas. Britain, however, was still Lever’s biggest market, and now profits were under pressure as the new margarine-makers began competing for raw materials.70

Around the turn of the century, a German chemist, Wilhelm Normanns had invented the process called ‘hydrogenation’, creating a hardened fat by adding hydrogen to fluid oils. Because the margarine thus produced sold at two and a half times the price of soap, margarine-makers could now afford to bid up the price of the crucial natural oils that Lever needed for his soap. Broadly speaking, a soap-maker could scoop up £24 per ton for soap containing 63 per cent fatty acid, while a margarine-maker could make £60 per ton for a product with 85 per cent fatty acid. For soap-makers, the costs of raw materials began to soar from a third to a half of all costs. Lever knew he could not raise prices, and so he tried to economize. First, he shaved the weight of a 1-pound soap bar to 15 ounces. But bolder steps were needed, and so Lever proposed a revolution: the first soap trust.

Cartels could be found in business everywhere, and informal organization of the soap trade was already well established, dating back to around 1867.71 By 1897, the northern makers were informally fixing prices, and at the end of the 1890s Lever moved prices up along with the rest of the trade. In 1899 he convened talks amid the ‘ruinous’ competition. By 1901, the Chairman of the Soap-Makers Association declared that it was not possible ‘to make profits without association and combination’. But five years later, Lever was proposing something completely new.

On 27 July 1906, Lever convened a meeting of the country’s soap kings in Liverpool to present his paper on ‘combines’. ‘I believe by amalgamating,’ he told them, ‘we shall be in a better position to serve the public well and give better value than ever, and also to better serve the interests of the distributors.’72 An exchange of shares was proposed to enforce an end to ‘frenzied advertising’, along with proposals to implement co-ordinated lay-offs of travelling salesman, to bulk-buy raw materials and to carry out centralized research. Quick assent was secured from Gossage’s, Crosfield’s, Thomas Watson, Christopher Thomas, Ogston & Tennant and John Barrington, together with five smaller firms (while two others agreed to sell out)73 – and Lever tripled his share capital to £12 million to build the requisite war-chest. The prize was enormous. Lever calculated he could save a massive £700,000 a year including £200,000 on advertising – starting with the cancellation of a £6,000 contract with Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail.

It was a bad place to start. Within five days of the trust’s quiet announcement, the Daily Mail was on the war-path. In the opening shots of a sustained bombardment, its headline on 18 October screamed: ‘Soap Trust Arithmetic: How 15 oz makes a pound.’ Interviews and ‘investigations’ followed with laid-off salesmen and washer-women; there were vox pops with the public and questions in Parliament, and finally a campaign to boycott Lever Brothers. The company’s share price collapsed by a third. Sales fell 60 per cent, month on month. On 23 November, the soap cartel’s members met in Liverpool and agreed to abandon ship.

When the media bombardment switched to targeting Lever’s trading practices and working conditions, he decided to sue. On 15 July 1907, in a blaze of publicity, a huge libel action opened at the Liverpool Assizes. Within days, the Daily Mail was offering to settle, eventually agreeing to record damages of £50,000. It was a large sum – but it could not, Lever calculated, replace the £500,000 he estimated he had lost in sales. ‘I consider the old highwayman of a hundred years ago was a gentleman compared to the modern newspaper proprietor,’ Lever remarked ruefully. Still, the damages won could be put to good use. Lever donated it all to Liverpool University to found the schools of Tropical Medicine, Russian Studies and Civic Design.74

A change of strategy was needed. If he could not build a cartel, Lever realized that he would have to build a conglomerate. And so began a gigantic buy-out of his competition, not just in Britain, but all over the world. A French business had already been founded, in 1905, and in 1906 Lever had bought out the owners of ‘Comfort’, his key competition in Canada; he now proceeded to roll up the country’s market in a string of acquisitions between 1907 and 1912.*15 In 1908, he floated a company in Austria, and in 1910 he opened his French factory, laid the foundations for his Japanese factory (at Tori-Shindon near Kobe), in Germany bought a half-interest in the brand ‘Dr Thompson’s Seifenpulver’ (Soap Powder) before going head-to-head with Persil.

In South Africa, Lever built a factory outside Durban and bought another in Johannesburg, and early in 1912 made arrangements for a Cape Town factory. In 1913, he added Norwegian and Swedish businesses, opened his Japanese factory, and began negotiations to buy his Australian competitor Kitchens. Two Marseilles firms were acquired in 1914, along with Dr Schlesinger, the founders of the New Transvaal Chemical Company, while in New York a deal was struck with Procter & Gamble to pool hydrogenation patents in a new Hydrogenation Company. The Dutch factory at Vlaardingen was completed in 1915. Over the next seven years, Lever steadily raised his share capital to £14 million, to buy out one competitor after another.

Lever’s ambition abroad was matched by his appetite at home. In arranging the ‘combine’, he had already acquired Hodgson & Simpson and Vinolia; to them he added (in 1908) R. S. Hudson, which was big in soap-flakes, for £1 million, and eventually launched ‘Rinso’ – a product inspired by his battles with Persil – and commenced an attack in earnest on Gossage’s export trade in bar soap. Between 1910 and 1913 Lever methodically took control of a string of companies.*16 None were bought outright; but all helped Lever limit competition or increase sales. The result was that by 1914, Lever had doubled production under his control to more than a third of British soap – 125,000 tonnes out of 335,000 tonnes.

A British multinational of unparalleled scale was taking shape. But Lever had known that it was not enough simply to control the making and selling of soap. Real control required ownership of the very ingredients themselves. And so, over the first decade of the twentieth century, he set out to build a global supply base, from the salt flats of Cheshire across the Pacific and to Africa. Lever’s old adviser, Joseph Meek, the head of Lever Brothers in Australia, expressed the strategy well: ‘The large soap maker in ten or twenty years from today who has not behind him a raw material scheme must go under no matter what be his advertising... Mere investments in planting schemes will be of no use; the soap maker must own the raw material scheme and have it as a background to their business.’75

Lever had first seen the potential of the Pacific on his world tour of 1892, when he grandly declared in his diary: ‘Let us make them into planters, cultivators and manufacturers of such articles as can be made out of the raw materials their lands produce.’76 A decade later he decided that his oil mills in Sydney should be supplied by an investment in the Pacific Islands Company, which aspired to grow coconuts on the ocean’s islands.*17 When that venture failed, Meek persuaded Lever to shift his sights to the Solomon Islands. With typical boldness, Lever decided, together with the enthusiastic Charles Woodford, the island’s chief commissioner, to create an enormous plantation. Woodford happily signed away a 999-year lease on 300,000 acres of the Solomon’s Russell Islands. Minuting his boss, Lord Ripon, Woodford declared that ‘It’s not every day that we find a millionaire tenant in the Solomon Islands, and I think we may assume that the rental he pays is the lesser part of the advantage the protectorate will derive from him.’77

The business never quite worked. The coconut trees were blighted, as mynah birds, imported from India, struggled to contain a plague of leaf-eating frogatti beetles. Labour conditions were appalling. Lever’s plan to import wholesale a new workforce from India drew a sharp rebuttal from the Colonial Office, which, unsympathetic to Lever’s ambitions, pronounced that it was ‘not concerned with the private interests of private individuals’. In the end, Lever’s Pacific project barely supplied enough for the soap mills of Australia, let alone any other part of his empire. And so, he turned his gaze on Africa.

Lever had long known about the potential of Nigeria, where a company investigator had reported in 1902 ‘an inexhaustible supply of palm oil and palm kernels... only awaiting development and the opening up of markets’. But the new Liberal government that swept into office in 1906 would offer him only a twenty-one-year land lease, and so Lever eventually bought the principal firms trading with Nigeria in 1910,*18 and built crushing mills in Opobo and Apapa. But when the agent of the new Belgian King Albert – Dr Max Horn – arrived in Port Sunlight in 1909, offering him 2 million acres of the Congo, Lever leapt at the chance to create a supply base to match the ambitions of his factory town in Port Sunlight.78 The first Lever mill in the Belgian colony began operating in 1911.

To this mix of foreign oils, Lever still needed Cheshire alkali, for which he was dependent on Sir John Brunner’s supplies of caustic soda, mined and refined from the Cheshire salt flats.*19 Brunner was the nation’s ‘Chemical Croesus’, founding the firm Brunner Mond (which would evolve into ICI), and he had created a powerful dominance over British alkali supplies. Keen to escape a dependence on others, Lever bought, in 1911, the Lymm estate, complete with 1,700 acres of salt-rich Cheshire countryside.

Brunner quickly hit back, buying out the ordinary capital of Lever’s two great competitors at the time – Gossage’s and Crosfield’s – which owned crucial patents for converting liquid oils into hard fats. Brunner now suggested that in return for a new long alkali contract, the sales of Lever, Crosfield’s and Gossage’s might be co-ordinated. Throughout 1912, negotiations stalled. Retaliating, Lever acquired a licence to a competing hydrogenation patent – the Testrup patent – forcing a court battle over foreign rights to the technology in February 1913, and in this first great corporate battle of the young century, the courts found for Lever. Brunner’s patents were cancelled, and on 7 May 1913, at Lever’s home at The Hill in Hampstead, the two titans agreed a profit-share deal for Gossage’s and Crosfield’s in return for a perpetual alkali contract – and Lever sold the Lymm estate.

*

On the eve of the First World War, Lever stood at the helm of one of the greatest businesses in the world. Its capital was £30 million – worth between £9.5 billion and £15.7 billion in today’s money.*20 It made half the soap in Britain, and controlled a global supply base with a worldwide chain of plantations, trading companies and foreign businesses, overseen by hundreds of staff from the fourth floor of the Royal Liver Building in Liverpool. And yet, Lever insisted, ‘I am not a lover of money as money and never have been. I work at business because business is life. It enables me to do things.’79 In Port Sunlight, one of those things he would now pioneer was a very new style of industrial relations. Port Sunlight workers had enjoyed an eight-hour day as early as 1889, for which they earned 2 shillings, along with a social life and company excursions that ventured ever further afield. Eighteen hundred staff were whisked off to see the Paris Exhibition in 1900, in a long convoy of vehicles; 4,000 went to the Isle of Man the following year, and in 1905, 2,000 staff were entertained at the Liège Exhibition, in Belgium, conveyed on special trains to Folkestone and chartered steamers across the Channel.

More important than the day trips were the pensions, introduced in 1905, followed by Lever’s long-held ambition of profit-sharing – or ‘co-partnership’ – introduced for over 1,000 staff in 1909. There were rules, of course. Share certificates could be cancelled at any time for ‘neglect of duty, dishonesty, intemperance, immorality, wilful misconduct, flagrant inefficiency, or disloyalty to employers’.80 But henceforth, more than half of Lever’s personal profits would be redistributed to staff. Seventeen thousand staff would eventually enjoy participation.

These were, however, sad years for Lever. On 24 July 1913, his adored wife Elizabeth died of ‘pneumonia’, and Lever decided to dedicate to her his greatest adornment to Port Sunlight. Lever had bought the entire art collection of the mine-owner George McCullough, including giant works such as Lord Frederic Leighton’s The Daphnephoria, and he needed somewhere better than Hulme Hall for displays. In 1913, designs were prepared for the exquisite Beaux-Arts, Portland-stone-clad museum, which Lever now named for his wife as the Lady Lever Gallery. On 25 March 1914, King George V laid the foundation stone by pressing a button on a scale model of Port Sunlight, which activated an on-site winch to lower the slab into position, in the heart of Lever’s company town. It was an exquisite addition to a tradition of English corporate philanthropy devoted to the public appreciation of art – though the interruption of war would delay the opening of its doors for nearly a decade.*21

When war came, Lever Brothers supplied more than its fair share of heroes. Within weeks, 700 Sunlighters had signed up at Gladstone Hall. On Sunday, 6 September 1914, Lever presided over a farewell service to bid ‘God speed’ and to inspire with reminders of the nation’s great qualities of ‘courage, purpose and endurance’.81 Aged sixty-three, Lever was too old to fight. But he signed up as a volunteer with an honorary rank, promised to keep open the soldiers’ jobs for their return, and guaranteed to make good the difference between Lever Brothers’ pay and the army’s pay. He now transformed himself into a ‘Whitehall warrior’, bringing to the role all his qualities of getting things done. ‘Charm, tact, decision, power radiated from the man’s every word, look, gesture,’ wrote one civil servant who worked with him; ‘I had never met a man who was so obviously megalomaniac and accustomed to having his own way’.82

Lever’s factories turned out the stuff of war – shells and glycerine – while Thornton Manor became a hospital. His scientists developed chemical weapons, including the highly toxic ‘PS’ (Chloropicrin), but on the battlefields, the war was merciless for the ‘Port Sunlight Pals’ – the 13th Service Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment, which was almost wiped out by the Battle of the Somme in 1916. By 1918 so few were left, the battalion was split and its men dispersed.

If war was brutal, it was brilliant for business. Sunlight Soap became standard issue for soldiers and when the German U-boats cut foreign margarine supplies, Lever was tasked with making a substitute. The result, ‘Plate Margarine’, was supplied by Lever’s Planters Margarine Company, and rolled off the production line from November 1914.83 It was, by all accounts, almost uneatable. ‘Several of the maids’, wrote one well-to-do customer, ‘had told the housekeeper that they would prefer to leave than eat the margarine.’

There were no borders to success. By March 1915, Lever could report new works or extensions underway in Rotterdam (in neutral Holland), Boston, Sydney, Toronto and Japan, as well as new firms targeted for acquisition in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Most important of all was the beginning of the long take-over of his greatest British rival: ‘We have acquired an interest in the Ordinary shares of Mssrs Pears,’ Lever announced, ‘who are the greatest firm of toilet-soap makers in the United Kingdom.’84 By 1917, Pears was fully part of the Lever empire.

On 4 September 1917, the prime minister, David Lloyd George, came to stay at Thornton Manor. On his last day he toured the plant. ‘I was anxious to see these world-famed works,’ he told the thronging crowd; ‘They show what can be done by one man of great organising genius who has also got a good heart. These works are a triumph of organisation and kind heartedness.’85 The nation’s Liberal leaders had long sought Lever as a candidate and a credential for their party, and Lever had responded sympathetically. ‘His liberalism’, said his son, ‘was always more than a party label, it was a deeply ingrained habit of thought.’*22 For his consistent service, Lever was rewarded with the recommendation of a peerage. On 4 June 1917, and remembering his wife, he took the title 1st Baron Leverhulme of Bolton-le-Moors. His coat of arms, enjoined with his wife’s, boasted two spotty elephants.

At the age of sixty-six, the ‘great organising genius’ was master of his industry. He began to contemplate an industrious retirement. In 1918, he accepted the Mayoralty of Bolton, and, insisting on chairing every council meeting, he drew up magisterial plans for the town’s redevelopment, published as Bolton: As It is and As It Might be. His kind offer of Leverhulme Park was gratefully received – but his blueprints were rejected.

Fate now offered Lever another canvas. The Western Isles of Scotland had long been important to him, and when two islands – Harris and Tweed – came up for sale in 1918, Lever rapidly wrote a cheque, moved into Stornaway Castle, and within months had fashioned ambitious plans to transform the ancient islands into a Scottish Port Sunlight, the ‘Venice of the North’ – a modern Edwardian fishing economy, backed with £5 million of his own cash. Over the next few years, he entertained royally at his castle home, adding to his portfolio with the acquisition, in 1919, of Cardinal Wolsey’s former estate, Moor Park, in Hertfordshire.

When peace arrived, Lever Brothers could boast, in 1919, a capital base that had grown by an enormous 50 per cent, to £60 million.86 It was muscle that Lever now deployed to continue to roll up as much of the British soap industry as possible. One after another, his competitors – Crosfield’s & Gossage’s (1919, for £4 million), Price’s Patent Candle Co. (October 1919), John Knight’s (1920) – were swallowed, leaving Lever with 60 per cent of the UK market. Abroad, the US business was now the third-largest on the American continent. New soap-works were built in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Austria, India, China and New Zealand.87 In South-East Asia, a controlling interest was taken in the Philippine Refining Corporation, and Lever Brothers bought out the Southern Whaling and Sealing Co., complete with ‘floating factories’ and a whaling station at Prince Olaf harbour on South Georgia.

This corporate appetite was, however, a prelude to a near calamity that ended any notion of Lever’s retirement.

*

By 1919, Lever’s vast soap empire needed a quarter of a million tonnes of oils and fats every year. So when the Niger Company came on to the market, blessed with 100,000 tonnes of oil seeds, Lever was minded to buy. In January 1920, he was in New York negotiating a major margarine deal when he received a telegram from his board asking his blessing for this ‘deal of the century’. ‘Congratulations,’ Lever telegraphed back, ‘Price high but suicidal if we had let opportunity lapse.’88

Suicidal it nearly was. At £6 10s a share, the deal was worth £8 million – eight times the size of Lever’s entire Congo investment. And when he returned home, Lever discovered he owned a disaster in the making. Accounts had not been checked, and control had been left with the old owners for months. Lever had bought at the top of the market, just as the post-war boom in raw materials ran out of steam.*23 Worse, the Niger Company was carrying a £2 million undiscovered debt that was about to be called in. ‘He was never nearer disaster,’ wrote the company’s historian. Barclays, the firm’s bankers for years, declined to loan anything. Henry Bell, a director of Lloyds, bluntly told Lever that ‘a good many of us feel that you have gone ahead too quickly in view of a difficult financial situation. The truth is that there is not enough money to go round.’89

Lever was forced to float new shares without an underwriter. In order to pay the Niger Company’s debts, he had to call in the firm’s accountant, D’Arcy Cooper, to negotiate a loan with Barclays, using debenture stock for collateral.

It was the alarm-bell Lever had needed. His firm had become an extraordinary conglomerate, a business that stretched from Plymouth saw mills to South Atlantic whaling stations. Now, at the age of seventy, Lever fell on his company with ruthless force. At 4.30am, the night watchman would wake him, earlier than ever, from his open-air bedroom with a loud electric buzzer – for Lever was increasingly deaf – and he would start work, scribbling in red pencil over his reports before departure for the office at 8.30am.90 Within a year, Lever knew he needed help. D’Arcy Cooper was recalled, and the corporate headquarters was moved from Port Sunlight to the old De Keyser’s Hotel on London’s Thames Embankment, near Blackfriars Bridge, where today, it remains the home of Unilever.

An accountant, from a family of accountants, Cooper had worked for Lever Brothers for years. He held the shareholders centre-stage, telling the firm’s managers that ‘we are the trustees for some 200,000 shareholders, and we have no right to spend one penny unless we are absolutely certain we are going to get an adequate return’. A state of emergency was declared. Within a year, £1.25 million was saved as departments were closed for a day a week, land and factories sold, and wages cut. Over five years, 3,000 staff were laid off. And this was not all Lever lost. By 1923, his great experiment in Harris and Lewis had ended in disaster. Homes were sold back to residents, and crofts were handed over free to occupiers. Over £1 million had been sunk in, and while Lever remained deeply absorbed by his company MacFisheries – his attempt to build a ‘sea to the slab’ national fish retail business – his investment in the islands was lost. The castle and its estate were bequeathed to Stornaway, its grounds renamed Lady Lever Park.

*

Lever was now famous worldwide. Travelling constantly, he was met by great crowds and important leaders, such as the United States’ President Coolidge, who honoured him with dinner. The Lady Lever Gallery was finally opened, by Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, in December 1922. It offered a beautiful collection: Old Masters, English watercolours, Pre-Raphaelite art, sculpture, tapestries, Chinese pottery and porcelain, Wedgwood, English furniture – and a Napoleon room of Bonaparte memorabilia. Lever, said his son, had ‘arranged the whole collection himself devoting many long and happy hours to the task’. 91

But little gave him as much pleasure as Leverville. He paid his second visit to the Congo in 1923. There he could survey the 1,000 kilometres of road, the 70 kilometres of railway track, the 10 hospitals, the 700 brick houses and schools, the 19 steamers and the 72 barges all built and running in his name. It would prove his final visit. On his way home, the ship’s captain invited him to choose and read a lesson. Lever picked Ecclesiastes 2:4: ‘I made me great works: I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards... then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.’

In April 1923, William Lever presided over his final general meetings – of Les Huileries du Congo Belge in Brussels, of the Niger Company in London, and of Lever Brothers in Port Sunlight, where he set out with pride the firm’s scale: 187,000 shareholders, 85,000 staff, 18,000 co-partners. He weekended at Rivington, and visited the Sunday school at Blackburn Road Congregational Church, before journeying back to London. En route he became feverish. Bronchitis was diagnosed, and soon pneumonia set in. On Thursday, 7 May 1924, at 4.30am – the time he normally rose for work – William Lever died. He lay in state for three days at the Lady Lever Gallery, and was buried next to his wife, beneath the western window of Port Sunlight’s Christ Church.

The company Lever had founded was now worth £57 million.92 Four years after his death, it merged with two great Dutch firms – Jurgens and Van den Bergh’s – to form Unilever, while the Niger Company was merged with the African and Eastern Trade Corporation to create the United Africa Company. Unilever, chaired by D’Arcy Cooper, was the largest industrial amalgamation in European history. Owned by 300,000 shareholders, it employed a quarter of a million people; it bought and sold a third of the world’s fats and oils, and it traded in more places, with more products, than any other firm on earth. Valued at £132 million, it was the largest and most valuable company in Britain. And by 1928, it could boast that it sold more than 2 million bars of Sunlight Soap every working day.

*1 He did buy it – and renamed it Lancaster House, after the county in which he was born.

*2 Leverville reverted to the former site’s name of Lusanga in the years following the Congo’s independence from Belgium.

*3 He had lived at Hall-in-the-Wood, an old timbered seat of the Starkies in the neighbourhood.

*4 James’s father, also called James, was a successful counterpane-maker and quartermaster of the local militia.

*5 This had risen from the equivalent of £29.90 per head in 1870 to £42.50 per head in 1900.

*6 It was up from 450 tonnes of soap a week to 14,000 tonnes a week by the end of 1888.

*7 He was setting up an American syndication service for short stories.

*8 They also took with them free samples and a free pamphlet by P. T. Barnum on How to Become Rich.

*9 They sailed home on the P&O liner Australia with Lord Curzon, who had just finished a tour of the Far East.

*10 It did not reach its maximum stretch until 1919.

*11 Half of the biggest companies at the end of the twentieth century were formed during the era between 1880 and 1930.

*12 By 1910, US railroads were more than twice as productive as British railways; US communications sectors were 43 per cent more productive; US distribution workers 19 per cent more productive, and even the finance sector 20 per cent more productive. See Broadberry, Market Services and the Productivity Race, op. cit., pp. 30–5.

*13 Indeed his trick of wrapping soap in vegetable parchment was stolen from the United States. As he wrote to his son, ‘we get enormous strength on the selling side in England by our knowledge of selling and advertising in overseas countries, especially in the United States’. Lever, Viscount Leverhulme, op. cit., p. 57.

*14 The Hill was later renamed Inverforth House.

*15 These acquisitions were consolidated into Canadian Soaps Ltd.

*16 These were Barrington & Sons (of Dublin), Tyson’s (of Liverpool), Edward Cook & Co. (of Bow), Christopher Thomas & Brothers (of Bristol), Isdale & McCallum, Richard Wheen & Sons, Joseph Watson & Co. and John Knight Ltd.

*17 The company was incorporated as the Pacific Phosphates Company and Lever Pacific Plantations was incorporated in 1902. Lever had to buy a ship, the SS Upolu, to sail the produce home.

*18 The companies were, first, W. B. MacIver & Co., the great Liverpool firm trading with Nigeria, followed by Peter Ratcliffe & Co. and Cavalla River Co.

*19 ‘Lever had never embarked on a more critical contest,’ wrote the company historian. See Wilson, The History of Unilever, op. cit., p. 130.

*20 In 1913, the company’s authorized capital was £30 million.

*21 Others included Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery (1877), the City of Manchester Art Gallery (1882) Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester (1890), the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate (1897).

*22 In February 1892, Lever had become chair of his local party, and, on condition that he would not win, stood for Parliament for Birkenhead that year, when he halved the Tory majority. He stood again in 1893, in a by-election, coming within 106 votes of winning, and then again in 1895. He was finally elected to the Commons, for Ormskirk, in the Liberal landslide of 1906, but stood down shortly thereafter. He stood once again for Ormskirk in 1910, unsuccessfully, though reducing the Conservative majority.

*23 In April 1920, the price of palm oil fell from £94 per ton to £24 10s per ton. Lever, Viscount Leverhulme, op. cit., p. 225.