By  Onome Amawhe
He was a Victorian grocer’s son who made a fortune from soap. William Hesketh Lever combined hard work, great business acumen and marketing skills to develop his enterprise into a global giant, Lever Brothers the British manufacturer founded in 1885 by William Hesketh Lever and his brother, James.

It merged with Margarine Unie in 1930 to form Unilever. Born in Wood Street, Bolton, in September 1851, he was the first son for a couple who had previously raised six daughters. William started work in his father’s grocery business at 16, cutting and packing soap. In those days, soap was cut from a slab by the shopkeeper.

The teenager was instilled in the ideas of hard work and self-improvement, and started on a weekly wage of one shilling, toiling from 7am until late into the evening. William Lever and his brothers entered the soap business in 1885 by buying a small soap works in Warrington. In 1872, he became a partner in the business. Seeing growth in the market for basic consumer goods, he hit on the idea of mass producing soap and selling it in pre-wrapped bars.

He came up with the brand name Sunlight and started manufacturing soap in Warrington in 1884, using glycerin and vegetable oils such as palm oil, rather than tallow, to manufacture soap, they produced a good, free-lathering soap, called “Sunlight Soap”, at a rate of 450 tons per week.  Later, the business he established with his brother James moved to Port Sunlight on the Wirral, where he created an industrial village. Lever Brothers was one of several British companies that took an interest in the welfare of its employees.

The model village of  Port Sunlight was developed between 1888 and 1914 adjoining the soap factory to accommodate the company’s staff in good quality housing, with high architectural standards and many community facilities. By 1887, the business was making 250 tons a week and by the turn of the century it was selling 40,000 tons a year and had expanded into Europe, America and Africa with palm oil plantations and factories. Lever Brothers launched Vim in 1904 and continued to make acquisitions, including Wall’s and Pears Soap, as it expanded into the margarine, fish, and sausage and ice-cream markets.

William gained a reputation as a philanthropist and social reformer, served as a Liberal MP for the Wirral between 1906 and 1909 and became the 1st Viscount Leverhulme, although he was criticized for his treatment of African workers. He left some of his wealth to good causes and, after he died in 1925, the Leverhulme Trust was established. It gives millions a year in grants for educational and research purposes. William met his future wife, draper’s daughter Elizabeth Hulme, at school in Bolton and he never forgot his roots.

He bought Hall i’th’ Wood, equipped it as a folk museum and presented it to Bolton.  in 1899, he assisted in the building of Bolton School, and Leverhulme Park bears his name. Shortly after buying the Rivington estate with around 400 acres, he donated much of it to the people of Bolton.

He was made a freeman of Bolton in 1902 and was the town’s mayor in 1918. It was not until in 1930 that Unilever was created, by the merger of Dutch margarine company Margarine Unie with Lever Brothers. Nowadays, the Anglo-Dutch giant is one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of household goods, including ice cream, spreads, frozen foods, tea, mayonnaise, soap and detergents.

By 1900 “Lifebuoy”, “Lux” and “Vim” brands had been added and subsidiaries had been set up in the United States, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Germany and elsewhere. By 1911 the company had its own oil palm plantations in the Congo and the Solomon Islands and obtained a right to use, within ten years, up to 750,000 hectares of palm-bearing land in Africa.

He called his Congo base ‘Leverville’ and wrote of the African, ‘He is a child and a willing child but he wants training and handling with patience.’ Lever Brothers soon needed vast amounts of edible oil and wanted to control their sources of supply. Levers quickly took over the Niger Company and the African and Eastern Trade Corporation. These two ‘giants of Africa’ were merged to form the United Africa Company (UAC) in 1929.

The two Companies estimated exports in the four UK colonies of West Africa amounted to 60 per cent of palm oil, 60 per cent of groundnuts, 50 per cent of cocoa and 45 per cent of palm kernel. In 1939 a UK Commission revealed that UAC and other traders were acting together to keep down prices paid to West African farmers. After the Second World War this practice continued.

The farmers continued to receive low prices for their cash crops. UAC was able to diversify into textiles, beer, engineering and more profitable trading activities. UAC prospered as the rising West African elite realized that their interests were similar. Lever’s success was built by the exercise of power over his work-force, heavy brand advertising and a supply of cheap raw materials. Lever bought out competing firms and by 1890 had set up soap factories in Australia, Canada, the US, Germany and Switzerland.

The First World War increased women’s purchasing power in the UK and brought prosperity to the US, pushing up sales of Lux soap flakes. In the same period, Lever increased glycerine production for munitions and began to make margarine, using cheap oils kept out of Germany by the British naval blockade. Lever rode the cresting late-Victorian consumer revolution to build a vast industrial empire spread across the globe. Four years after William Lever’s death in 1925 his enterprises were amalgamated as Unilever. By 1930 it employed a quarter of a million people and, in terms of market value, was the largest company in Britain.

The Lever Brothers name was kept for a time as an imprint, as well as the name of the US subsidiary, Lever Brothers Company, and a Canadian subsidiary, Lever Brothers Ltd. The convenience foods market beckoned as the Second World War ended and as the West began to enjoy a consumer boom. Ice creams, frozen meals and oven-ready foods were developed. Now Unilever is developing its exotic products: out-of-season flowers and fruits.

Unilever grows carnations in Kenya. The flowers are air-freighted to markets in Europe, to supply customers all the year round. In 1922 Lever Brothers bought Macfisheries and the Wall’s meat company to extend their product range. In the summer when demand for Wall’s sausages was weak, the subsidiary began to make ice cream. ‘Stop-me-and-buy-one’ ice cream tricycles were introduced and later Wall’s supplied refrigerators to retail shops. Unilever bought up Liptons UK in 1972.

They already owned Liptons in Canada and the US. In 1984 Unilever made a successful £389 million ($618 million) takeover bid for Brooke Bond, another UK based Tea Company. The two purchases gave Unilever a dominant 35 per cent stake in the world black tea market. Unilever (through its companies Bushells and Liptons) has 62 per cent of the Australian market, 30 per cent of tea sales in Britain and Canada and 49 per cent of the US market. Unilever has 95 per cent of packet tea sales in India and Pakistan. It is able to buy cheaply in the Third World where costs are low and has invested heavily in processing to make things such as ‘instant tea’ which add value when retailed. Unilever grows tea in East Africa and is a major buyer at all the tea auctions.

And is the market leader in most consuming countries.  Unilever is now developing global uniformity amongst its products. Factories are being shut in Europe as production is centralized into fewer, bigger units – vast factories and expensive machines can earn more than human workers. Unilever is now spending increasing amounts of its annual budget on advertising in order to make its goods seem different from each other. The advertisements are designed to capture new types of buyers – slimmers one year, male shoppers another, the health-conscious the next.

Advertisements are designed to whet jaded taste-buds and to convince consumers that Unilever products – not always better than local versions – are more desirable. Changes in our diet introduced by Unilever could change health patterns. William Hesketh Lever extended his business activities in ways that both served and profited from the rapid rise of a mass market for basic consumer products.

Coming Up: Business Legendary 100,  a special feature supplement on trans-generational businesses and their founders will be published as a follow up to this series