William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme
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Lord Leverhulme is the most familiar name of William Hesketh Lever, (19 September 1851 – 7 May 1925), an English Industrialist, philanthropist and colonialist who was created 1st Viscount Leverhulme.
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[edit] Life
William Lever was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1851, and educated at the Bolton Church Institute. After training with his father's wholesale grocery business, in 1886 he established a soap manufacturing company called Lever Brothers (now part of Unilever) with his brother James. It was one of the first companies to manufacture soap from vegetable oils, and in conjunction with Lever's business acumen and marketing practices, produced a great fortune. James Lever never took a major part in running the business. A recent biography by Adam Macqueen suggests that James suffered from diabetes throughout his life, and that perhaps his symptoms (prior to the discovery of insulin and effective treatment of the condition) were mistaken for mental instability [1]
From 1888, Lever began to put his philanthropic principles into practice through the construction of Port Sunlight, a model community designed to house and support the workers of Lever Brothers, who already enjoyed generous wages and innovative benefits. Lever's philanthropy had definite paternalistic overtones, and life in Port Sunlight included intrusive rules and implied mandatory participation in activities. With accommodation tied to employment, a worker losing his or her job could be almost simultaneously evicted. Nonetheless, conditions, pay, hours, and benefits far exceeded those prevailing in similar industries.
In the early 1900s, Lever was using palm oil produced in the British West African colonies. When he found difficulties in obtaining more palm plantation concessions, he started looking elsewhere in other colonies. In 1911, Lever visited the Belgian Congo to take advantage of cheap labour and palm oil concessions in that country. Lever's attitudes towards the Congolese were paternalistic and racist, and his negotiations with the Belgian coloniser to enforce the system known as travail forcé (forced labor) are well documented. As such, he participated in this system of formalised labour. The archives show a record of Belgian administrators, missionaries and doctors protesting against the practices at the Lever plantations. Formal parliamentary investigations were called for by members of the Belgian Socialist Party, but despite their work, the practise of forced labor continued until independence in 1960.[2]
Lever lived in the Rivington area of Bolton for many years. In 1913, his house there was destroyed by a suffragette — ironically, as he was in favour women's suffrage. He had a large mansion created to replace this original home, and turned a large portion of the grounds over to the town of Bolton as a public park, including a small zoo stocked with emu, yaks, zebra, wallabies and a lion cub. His own Japanese-style garden, based on the design of the willow-patterned plate, included a lake complete with its own flock of flamingos.
Each of Lever's homes was equipped with an open-air bedroom, in which, following his wife Elizabeth's death in 1913, he frequently slept with only a small glass canopy to protect his bed from the elements. Ironically he died of pneumonia in 1925.
Lever was a lifelong supporter of William Gladstone and the Liberal cause, and was often called upon to contest elections for the Liberal Party. He served as Member of Parliament for one of the seats in the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral between 1906 and 1909, using his maiden speech to the House of Commons to urge Henry Campbell-Bannerman's government to introduce a national old age pension, as he already provided for his own workers. He was High Sheriff of Lancaster in 1917 and Mayor of Bolton in 1918.
Lord Leverhulme is remembered as a philanthropist. Port Sunlight is now the home of the Lady Lever Art Gallery; he endowed a school of tropical medicine at Liverpool University; he gifted Lancaster House in London to the British nation; and endowed the Leverhulme Trust. The garden of his former London residence The Hill in Hampstead, is open to the public. He was a major benefactor in his home town of Bolton. He bought Hall i' th' Wood (Samuel Crompton's birthplace) and donated to the town, he made many donations to Bolton School and wanted to completely redesign Bolton town centre but his offer was not accepted by the council.
In 1918, Lever bought the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, with the intention of making Stornoway an industrial town and building a fish cannery, his intentions were received badly by the islanders. He gave Lewis to its people in 1923, and concentrated his efforts on the southern portion of the island, known as Harris.
He was created Baron Leverhulme on 21 June 1917, and Viscount Leverhulme on 27 November 1922 - the hulme section of the title being in honour of his wife, Elizabeth Hulme. The Leverhulme viscountcy passed to his son William Hulme Lever in 1925, and became extinct on the death of the third viscount, Philip William Bryce Lever, in 2000.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Adam Macqueen, "The King of Sunlight: How William Lever Cleaned Up The World, Corgi 2005, PP 146-149
- ^ Jules Marechal, "Travail forcé pour l’huile de palme de Lord Leverhulme L’Histoire du Congo 1910-1945". Part III. Editions Paula Bellings. pp.348-368.
[edit] References
- Lever, William Hulme. 'Viscount Leverhulme by his Son' George Allen & Unwin Ltd. London 1927
- Macqueen, Adam. The King of Sunlight : How William Lever Cleaned Up the World, Bantam Press, 2004. ISBN 0-593-05185-8
- Marechal, Jules. Travail forcé pour l’huile de palme de Lord Leverhulme L’Histoire du Congo 1910-1945, Part III. Editions Paula Bellings. 396 pages.
[edit] Further reading
- Jolly, W. P., Lord Leverhulme, Constable, London, ISBN 0-09-461070-3
- Smith, Malcolm David, Leverhulme's Rivington, Wyre Publishing, Lancashire, ISBN 0-9526187-3-7, The Story of the Rivington 'Bungalow'.
- Mawson, Thomas H,, Bolton A Study In Town Planning & Art
[edit] External links
Lever's Hampstead house and its garden (Hill Garden) are described in
