Daily Mail

HOW I SEE IT

- By Robert Hardman

THE lord and master of this great enterprise no longer peers down on the workforce from his glassfront­ed office, barking orders to a trio of quivering stenograph­ers.

Local residents no longer have to attend mandatory self-improving courses in art or music. They no longer run the risk of being ejected from their homes for drinking or chewing tobacco or having an ‘objectiona­ble’ spouse. Yet the legacy of William Lever has been transforma­tive, even life-changing, for millions of workers all over Britain.

For Lever was a pioneering, progressiv­e force of nature at the height of Britain’s industrial and imperial might. And when he built Port Sunlight in the late 19th century, he was not merely building utopian staff accommodat­ion for his workers on the southern side of the Mersey. He was establishi­ng ideas and values which influence the way many of us live today.

That is why the potential departure of Unilever’s head office from the UK to Holland is not merely a shoddy exercise in combative accountanc­y.

It will, if it happens, bring down the curtain on one of the most extraordin­ary chapters in our social and industrial history. The founding father must be rolling in his black marble sarcophagu­s.

William Lever was remarkable in so many ways. Here was a millionair­e – a billionair­e in today’s terms – who owned numerous homes, and yet refused to have a roof over his bedroom in any of them, insisting on sleeping under the stars (even after his wife died of pneumonia); a man who chewed every mouthful 32 times (much like his political hero, the Liberal leader William Gladstone).

Born in 1851, the son of a Bolton chemist, he was educated at the local church school and left at 16 to work in his father’s shop. There one of his jobs was to cut chunks of soap from large slabs for the housewives of the Lancashire mill towns.

HE soon had the idea of making his own soap, using vegetable oil instead of animal fat, and producing pre- cut bars in attractive packaging. With his brother James, he hired a factory in Warrington and adopted the latest American advertisin­g techniques to ram home the message that his soap was better than anyone else’s.

The business ballooned and in 1888, the brothers set about building a factory of their own. Yet this would not just be an industrial site. It would be a visionary new way of living and working, a place with a radically different relationsh­ip between boss and worker.

Ten years earlier, the Cadbury family had embarked on a similar project with Bournville, a factory village by their chocolate works outside Birmingham.

The Lever Brothers would go even further, after acquiring a large patch of marshy land on the Wirral. There would be clean housing, clean factories, an art gallery and

wholesome company- sponsored activities to prevent staff being lured in to sinful pursuits when not at work. Hence the alcohol-free pub, the outdoor swimming pool, the faux-Gothic church and the keep-fit classes at the company gymnasium – a full century before the advent of the office gym.

As far as the Lever brothers were concerned, they were not being philanthro­pists. It was, in part, a moral obligation but it made commercial sense, too. ‘There is no room for sentiment in business. The truest and highest form of enlightene­d self-interest requires that we pay the fullest regard to the welfare of those around us,’ said William, who took overall charge after the health of his invalid brother declined. Nor did he believe in channellin­g surplus profits back into the workers’ pockets. Any bonus, he wrote, is ‘soon spent, and it will not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whiskey, bags of sweets, or fat geese for Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave this money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything which makes life pleasant – viz, nice houses, comfortabl­e homes, and healthy recreation.’

Today, some would decry him as a capitalist scoundrel. Yet he was the creator of his very own welfare state, offering paid holidays, eighthour days, payments to sick workers and even hot baths for female staff – on company time, to boot.

And embodying all these ideas was Port Sunlight itself, with some 900 homes housing more than 3,000 people. It wasn’t much of a port, being built next to a muddy inlet on the Mersey. As for the sunlight, this patch of coastal Cheshire was no sunnier than the rest of North-West England. However, its design embodied the values of its makers.

Factory buildings were low-lying, with glazed roofs and as much natural daylight as possible. Homes were not uniform box dwellings, but designed by a school of more than 30 different architects, with no one set of houses the same as another. No house could be overlooked at the rear. The level of detail was astonishin­g, with half-timbers, gables and crenellati­ons that are now listed and rigorously preserved. Lever’s wife, Elizabeth Hulme, daughter of a Bolton mill manager, helped fill the handsome art gallery which would be named in her honour. Certainly, there was a level of management intrusion that seems shocking today: Lever once despatched a private detective to spy on an executive whom he suspected of ‘laziness’. Meanwhile, women had to leave work half an hour before the men, for fear they might be tempted in to ‘indecency’.

Yet, as Lever’s biographer Adam McQueen has pointed out, in the same year Port Sunlight was built, workers in East London were striking because they were expected to work 14-hour days without respite. In Lever’s home

town of Bolton, child mortality rates were so bad the average life expectancy of the local population was 18. In relative terms, Port Sunlight was a paradise.

When early clean air legislatio­n was finally introduced in 1901, the Lever Brothers’ factory was found to be 15 times cleaner than the regulation­s demanded. One reason for this was the relatively low density of housing and the large amount of space between buildings. To this day, the roads which run through the place are surprising­ly broad.

Little wonder that experts came from far and wide. ‘One must have visited the industrial English towns to understand the surprise which the sudden appearance of Port Sunlight produced,’ wrote French sociologis­t Georges Benoit-Levy in 1904. ‘One feels as if one’s leaving the towns of the Devil and suddenly entering the Garden of Eden’.

Lever’s vast fortune did not buy him happiness. He was heartbroke­n by the death of his wife in 1913 and subsequent business ventures in the Outer Hebrides and Africa proved disastrous. Yet he became a pillar of the Establishm­ent and a friend of the Royal Family. Given a peerage in 1917, he decided to merge his own name with that of his wife and became Lord Leverhulme (he was elevated to Viscount five years later). After his death in 1925, more than 30,000 people attended his funeral.

The empire would be inherited by his son, who would lead the merger that created Unilever. William’s sense of public duty continued on to the next generation. The 3rd (and last) Lord Leverhulme, who died in 2000, was the longest- serving Lord-Lieutenant in history, spending more than 40 years as the Queen’s unpaid representa­tive in Cheshire.

However, it is Port Sunlight for which William Lever is best remembered, a towering achievemen­t which would go on to shape and inspire 20thcentur­y town planning and modern practice in the workplace. From the 1980s, tenants no longer had to work for Unilever to live in these houses, since when some have become private homes. Many, however, are now preserved and let by a trust.

Lever’s dream lives on. The question now, as the corporate arm-wrestle continues, is what comes next for this great empire?

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 ??  ?? Pioneer: William Lever in 1920, left. Top, women staff at his Port Sunlight soap factory in 1897
Pioneer: William Lever in 1920, left. Top, women staff at his Port Sunlight soap factory in 1897

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