Soap Magnate

COMMONWEALTH (BRITISH COMMONWEALTH OF NATIONS)

" At the age of 73, rather deaf but very active," there arrived in the U. S. Viscount Leverhulme, King of Port Sunlight, the home of soap, on board the S. S. Majestic. He was accompanied by his son, the Hon. William Hulme Lever, also by an old school fellow, Jonathan Simpson, and by five directors of his various companies.

Queried, he said that Premier Baldwin's Protection was a "quack political remedy " for unemployment. He expected Lloyd George would return to power. Asked about the much mooted payment of the debt owed by France to England he said:

" That does not matter. England will pay her debts because that is the just and honorable thing for a nation to do. If other nations do not pay their War debts it will make no difference to England. We shall go on paying to the end."

As William Hesketh Lever he started life as a helper in his father's grocery store. Some 20 years later he began to manufacture soap on a small scale and eventually built up a business valued at some $500,000,000 out of his famous Sunlight Soap and Lux (sold in the U. S. by Lever Bros.). He himself is a model of efficiency and a hard worker, up at five-thirty every morning, at his desk at six, "through for the day" at seven p. m.

His recreation is dancing, and even at his advanced age he is no wallflower. His hobby is collecting works of art. Once he created an international artistic storm by cutting out the head of a portrait of himself that he had had painted by Augustus John. He contended that as he had paid $5,000 for the canvas it was his to treat as he liked, but artists could not agree with him. His favorite authors are reputed to be Shakespeare, Emerson, Dickens, 0. Henry, Ingersoll.

Lord Leverhulme entered the political arena for four years and did magnificent work for the Government both during and after the War. His elevation to the peerage took place in 1917 and he chose the name Leverhulme, a combination of his own name, Lever, with his wife's name, Hulme.