So Clean: Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilisation

by Brian Lewis

This book is an unorthodox biography of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Lord Leverhulme (1851-1925), the founder of the Lever Brothers’ Sunlight Soap empire. Unlike previous biographies, which have focused on the man’s life story and eccentricities, or just considered one aspect of his career, So Clean places him squarely in his social and cultural context and is fully informed by recent historical scholarship. Much more than a warts-and-all biography, the book uses Lever as an entry-point for contextualized and comparative essays on the history of advertising; on factory paternalism, town planning, the Garden City movement and their ramifications across the twentieth century; and on colonialism and forced labor in the Belgian Congo and the South Pacific. It concludes with a discussion of his extraordinary attempt, in his final years, to transform crofting and fishing in the Outer Hebrides. Written in an engaging and accessible style, So Clean will appeal to academics and students working in business, social, cultural and imperial history.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2009

Reviews

[Domhnall · Rating 5 out of 5]

William Hesketh Lever, first Lord Leverhulme (1851-1925), left school at sixteen to join his father's grocery business and left, on his death, a multi-national company with 187,000 shareholders and 85,000 employees which survives today as Unilever. Brian Lewis has written a biography which declines to treat Lever as anything other than a normal person, poorly educated and subject to the prevailing attitudes and beliefs of his time, capable of great insight and creativity but also capable of serious errors, large scale idiosyncrasies and some ruthless behaviour which does not look better in retrospect. His achievements were real and impressive but there were other entrepreneurial giants in competition with Lever who might perfectly well have taken his place in the market. Bringing Lever down to a human scale does not make him less interesting of course and there are enough fascinating stories attached to his life to support an even larger and more ambitious biography.

This compact book is written in a way that fits Brian Lewis' interest in social history. While it opens and closes with a conventional life story, it incorporates a number of sections which are effectively essays on specialist topics.

Lever was not unique in his ability to manufacture soap but he was exceptional in his ability to market and sell a fairly humdrum commodity with all the jazz we now recognise as branding. Lewis explores the early years of consumerism, advertising, packaging and the development of 'packaged, proprietary products.' His section on the power of advertising provokes some interesting insights. He refers to Sivulka, "Soap, Sex and Cigarettes," 1998, for evidence that in the 1920s the advertising industry's proudest boast was its success in persuading a swathe of the American population to take up the nicotine habit, which has to be appreciated in relation to their subsequent flat denial of such effects after the disastrous health effects had been fully exposed. He also refers to a 1928 book by Edward Bernays called "Propaganda" which (from memory) is also cited in Edward Said, Orientalism. The quote here is this: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democracy...those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

Lever achieved great fame and influence by the construction of Port Sunlight Village, a delightful model village to accommodate his more loyal workers, and Lewis puts this into context with an extensive discussion of paternalist capitalism, town planning, the Garden City Movement, suburbanisation and the birth of council housing in Britain. This is certainly informative, but it cannot really do justice to such a wide topic and fails to capture the related issues of policies for slum clearance, public health and hygiene, building standards, planning, savings and mortgages, housing finance and diverse alternative models for subsidised social housing both in Britain and abroad which all feed into the history of housing. Lever himself has said that building Port Sunlight Village was a mistake he would not repeat. Asking people who work together to also live together caused too many arguments.

Some other Lever projects have left curious landmarks in odd places. One is a strangely landscaped public park at Rivington, near Bolton. The book has a highly amusing account of litigation against Lever by the Liverpool City Council, which owned an adjacent reservoir, that resulted in them being required to pay Lever a handsome profit on a park which he had bought to amuse himself with and then donate to the people of Bolton. Why Liverpool ratepayers should pay for Bolton's leisure facilities remains a topic for amusement. Another is an odd set of gates, behind which a long, straight and tree lined way is overgrown and unused, representing a proposed roadway from Thornton Hough, on the Wirral, to Birkenhead, via Port Sunlight, which Lever started to build but the corporation of Birkenhead declined to adopt, so that Lever installed his gates and abandoned the roadway; another strange landmark.

The Lady Lever Art Gallery within Port Sunlight Village contains a superb collection of Pre-Raphaelite works and other art from the 18th and 19th Centuries. Lewis describes some of Lord Lever's approach to collecting. He depended on dealers rather than art experts and bought what was fashionable at the time. He lacked the educational resources to be a true connoisseur and was nicely duped in some of his dealings. Some of the most familiar pictures were purchased for use in advertising, suitably doctored.

Lever attempted to secure raw materials under favourable conditions by investing heavily in the South Pacific and, especially, in the Congo. This certainly tied him up in some complex and very ambitious projects, which were by all means audacious and adventurous, displaying huge organisational skill, but were not especially profitable or advantageous and might well have been left to others. It also brought him to participate in the imperialist theft of land and resources and exploitation of forced labour, which has only slowly been given proper acknowledgement and for too long has been obscured by euphemisms and moral evasion. The chapter on this topic represents a welcome examination of imperialism at work from the vantage point of a major capitalist enterprise and does not hesitate to expose the racist opinions and arguments deployed by Lever in this context. Lever offers an excellent case study of the mechanics of imperialism.

The book closes with an account of another colourful incident in Lever's life, when he devoted the years of his (enforced) retirement to an attempt to "modernise" the economy of the Hebrides by reducing the independent minded crofters to the disciplined ranks of factory employees in a restructured, industrialised approach to the fishing industry under his full control. He failed almost entirely, though in the process he did establish a successful chain of fishmongers, which accounts for Unilever's continued involvement in food in addition to cleaning products.

This is an excellent little biography, well worth taking the time out to read, and it offers a generous admixture of the curious, the absurd and the amusing alongside the impressive, the disturbing and the thought provoking. It leaves enough space still for an even more ambitious sequel, should an aspiring historian or writer be seeking a really colourful subject. Is that not the perfect meal - one that leaves us with an appetite for more?

[Jacqueline Nyathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating read. Less a biography, more a deeply researched account of what was going on in Lever's time, and how he both fit into it and was a product of it. Enjoyed this (except the chapter about his architectural obsessions).