In 1887 William Hesketh Lever, the ‘soap king’, bought 56 acres of land in the Wirral and building work started on his Port Sunlight soap factory and village.Lever’s aims were ‘to socialise and Christianise business relations and get back to the office, factory and workshop that close family brotherhood that existed in the good old days of hand labour.’
Between 1899 and 1914, 800 houses with a population of 3,500 were built at Port Sunlight, together with a generous supply of allotments and public buildings.At the opening of the recreation and dining hall for men, the Prime Minister Gladstone declared ‘In this hall I have found living proof that cash payment is not the only nexus between man and man.’[1]
Another hall for women was opened (Lever believed in keeping men and women apart – the factory had separate entrances, for reasons of propriety) and Lever hung both halls with paintings from his extensive private collection.In 1922 he opened an art gallery, in memory of his wife.
Other facilities included a cottage hospital, schools, a concert hall, open air swimming pool, church, and a temperance hotel.Two years after the hotel opened a referendum showed that 80% of villagers wanted it to sell intoxicating drinks and Lever reluctantly bowed to the wishes of the majority.
It was certainly a healthy community by the standards of the day: in the early 1900s infant mortality in Port Sunlight was 70 per 1,000 compared to 140 per thousand in nearby Liverpool.
The Sunshine Girl
Port Sunlight was widely celebrated and in 1912 it became the subject of a successful West End musical comedy‘The Sunshine Girl’ with music by Paul Rubens, which also had the distinction of first introducing the tango to England. The celebrity actress Phyllis Dare starred as Delia Dale, a young woman in the soap factory, and there were choruses of factory workers:
We do the toilin' work,
Boilin' work, oilin' work,
We do the soilin' work,
All the 'ole day through!
We do the killin' work,
Grillin' work, swillin' work,
Five-hours-a-shillin' work,
And we earn it too!
Profit sharing
Lever claimed that Port Sunlight was an exercise in ‘profit sharing’. But rather than share profits with the workers directly, he invested them in the village, as he explained in his most patronising manner:
It would not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the form of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese at Christmas.On the other hand, if you leave the money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything that makes life pleasant – viz nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation. [2]
In 1909, however, Lever went further and established a Co-Partnership Trust, which effectively made employees ordinary shareholders by issuing certificates which attracted an annual dividend calculated in proportion to the company’s profits.To qualify, workers had to be over 25 and to have worked for Lever Brothers for five years.Certificates could be cancelled in cases of ‘neglect of duty, dishonesty, intemperance, immorality, wilful misconduct, flagrant inefficiency or disloyalty’.Initially 1,000 employees were made co-partners under this scheme, and by 1925 the number had risen to 18,000.
Social reform – on his terms
In many ways the millionaire Lever led a Spartan life.He built a glass canopy supported by stilts on the roof of his house, with only minimal protection from the weather, and slept there every night.He once said ‘the conduct of a successful business merely consists in doing things in a simple way, doing them regularly and never neglecting to do them.’[3]
Lever was elected to Parliament in 1906, and in 1907 introduced a private members bill to provide state old-age pensions.He also tried to introduce a six hour day, but proposed that this should be combined with a two hour compulsory education and physical training programme.This part of the proposal was not well received and his attempts to introduce this system in his own factory were defeated by trade unions.
‘Port Fishlight’: offer of community land ownership rejected
Lever visited the remote Western Isles in 1884 and when the island of Lewis came on the market in 1917 he bought it.Two years later he also purchased the adjoining island of Harris.
He then embarked upon a bold plan to transform the economy of the islands by modernising the fishing industry.There would be an ice-making factory at Stornoway, refrigerated cargo ships to take fish to a depot at Fleetwood, herring-curing facilities, a canning factory, and a plant installed to make fish-cakes, fish-paste, glue, animal feed and fertiliser. To create a market for the islanders’ fish, he bought up no less than 350 fishmongers’ shops throughout Britain, creating the Macfisheries chain.
But in 1919 demobilised servicemen, who had been promised ‘smallholdings fit for heroes’ after the war, started a land invasion by occupying plots of farmland and erecting shelters for themselves and their families.Lever condemned the squatters and ordered them off his land.This created considerable local animosity as indeed did Lever’s high-handed attitude towards the crofting way of life, which he regarded as an archaic impediment to progress.The Scottish Office took the side of the squatters, and these disputes, alongside financial problems faced by Lever Brothers, meant that works slowed down and the grand plan was never fully realised.
In September 1923 Lever announced that he intended to leave the island.At the same time he offered to gift all the crofters the freehold of their land, and to hand over the rest of the island to district trusts. This was exactly what some of the islanders had been campaigning for.But by now mistrust ran very deep, and the Highland Land League representing the crofters and all the district councils (with the exception of Stornoway) turned down the offer, and so the islands were sold, once again, to absentee landlords.
Sources
Ian Campbell Bradley, Enlightened Entrepreneurs, 1987.
Chris Coates, Utopia Britannica: British Utopian Experiments 1325 – 1945, 2001.
[1] Ian Campbell Bradley, Enlightened Entrepreneurs, 1987. p 188.
[2]Bradley, p 187.
[3] Bradley, p 201.
