A bully with a heart of gold
Jonathan Keates
THE KING OF SUNLIGHT: How WILLIAM LEVER CLEANED UP THE WORLD by Adam McQueen Bantam, £12.99, pp. 328, ISBN 0593051858 philanthropists are a boring lot these days. Your modern seven-figure donor is either resolutely anony
mous or else determined to be seen as approachable Mr Average, quiet and unassuming, who just happened to have the chequebook handy. Gone for ever, it seems, is the splashy, domineering article familiar to our great-grandparents, combining a certain Dickensian whiff of Bounderby and Pecksniff with an innocent delight in showmanship, exercising his benevolence as a kind of pantomime 'Grand Transformation Scene', ending in paeans of praise from a grateful proletariat.
William Hesketh Lever never wanted to be seen as philanthropic, and was always at pains to emphasise the self-interest of any step he might take towards improving other people's lives. Yet his career, as founder of the soap empire which subsequently became Unilever, and as creator of Port Sunlight, that extraordinary late-Victorian essay in what the Italians call urbanistica, was marked by acts of faith and idealism consistently undermining the image of a granite-faced capitalist unmoved by anything more sublime than the rattle of sovereigns in the till.
Sunlight soap. 'so purifying and cleansing', according to the billboards, 'that the dirtiest clothing can be washed in lukewarm water with very little rubbing', started as a sideline of the grocery wholesaler's business Lever took over from his Lancashire father
in 1872. Publicity took the form of such shameless slogans as 'buy our soap or your husband will divorce you', a householdhints compendium including a silk-cleaning recipe involving dilution of the magic suds in a pint of gin, giant reproductions of W. P. Frith's Royal Academy painting 'A New Frock', intended to cock a snook at Millais' 'Bubbles' for the rival firm of Pears, and sponsorship of the first London-to-Brighton motorcar run. Having cornered the European market, secured a royal warrant and seen off a dirty-tricks campaign by the Daily Mail, disgruntled at the withdrawal of an advertising contract, Lever turned to realising his vision of an industrial utopia amid the Merseyside marshes.
Adam McQueen's two chapters on the building of Port Sunlight offer a good illustration of his evenhandedness as Lever's biographer. He is justly admiring of the village's spacious layout, with its 12-foot pavements, its manicured lawns, communal allotments and sedulously observed architectural variety among housing whose designers included the youthful Edwin Lutyens. Yet the whole achievement is also seen as symbolic of Lever's dictatorial, incurably meddlesome approach to his workforce from management to shopfloor. The Sunlighters, in return for tennis courts. a ping-pong team, something called 'the Old English Choir', the Bridge Inn (firmly shut on Sundays) and free lectures at the Mutual Improvement Society, were expected to abide by an obsessively detailed set of rules. Tenants of the ideal villas could find themselves evicted for slothfulness, gambling, reluctance to participate in community activities or even failing to grow the species of flowers approved by the boss.
Once the Merseyside experiment was seen to work, Lever, with a restlessness typical of his breed, set off for the Congo to found Leverville. a model palm-oil plantation in the realms of Mistah Kurtz and wicked King Leopold. As an MP in the 1906 Liberal landslide he introduced an old-age pensions bill which laid the foundation of Lloyd George's later and more loudly trumpeted welfare reforms. A further experiment in social engineering begun in the Hebrides after the Great War, however, was doomed to failure when the crofters of Lewis, with sabbatarian dourness, stonewalled his attempts to turn them into worker ants in the 'Venice of the North' he had intended Stornoway to become. What eventually broke him, hardened physically though he was by a lifetime's devotion to cold baths and open-air bedrooms, was a devastating financial purge of the company in 1921 by the slash-andburn accountant Francis D'Arcy Cooper and an ideological assault by the trade unions on the whole profit-sharing enterprise at Port Sunlight.
The place, together with the art gallery founded by his ill-favoured, well-meaning 'better three-quarters' Elizabeth, survives as a monument to him, as does the Unilever conglomerate itself, in which soap-boiling rubs shoulders nowadays with the demotic gastronomy of Marmite, Hellmann's, Bird's Eye and PG Tips. Adam McQueen's style is often a touch too jokey-blokey for an otherwise serious, well-researched biography, but the course of his narrative is lucid and precise. Though Lever may have been a fusspot, a bully and a martinet, his desire to do good was invincible and if his hands, for an entrepreneur's, stayed surprisingly clean, this was not altogether due to regular washing with Sunlight.
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