Lever Bros.

Margarine is a butter substitute made from vegetable oils. Soap is a cleansing agent also made from vegetable oils. Last week buttery oil and sudsy oil flowed together in a merger of a great margarine company and a great soap company. The margarine company was Margarine Unie, a Dutch concern which, with its British affiliate, Margarine Union, is Europe's largest margarine producer. The soap company was Lever Bros., which, with some 200 associated companies, is world's largest soap maker. Inasmuch as both Margarine Union and Lever Bros, control their sources of raw materials and also operate chain store systems through which their finished products reach the consumer, the merger represented one of the largest and most integrated of the world's provision trusts. Combined capital of the two companies is $301,000,000; their shares have a market value of $800,000,000. The merger (effective Jan. 1, 1930 on a share-for-share basis) will involve "no alteration in conducting the business of either or- ganization."

Sunlight. When U. S. washers think of Lever Bros., they may perhaps think of how 98% of Hollywood cinemactresses use Lux, or of how Lifebuoy soap removes Body Odor. Some oldtime U. S. washers may think of the oldtime question: Good morning, have you used Pear's Soap? Yet, though Lux, Lifebuoy and Pear's all are Lever Bros, soaps, they are not the Lever Bros. soap. Leading Lever Bros, product is Sunlight Soap. The main Lever works are at Port Sunlight on England's Mersey River. Almost unknown in the U. S. is Sunlight, largest selling soap in the world. Not much better known was the late William Hesketh Lever, Lord Leverhulme (1851-1925). Yet he had an excellent claim to the title of World's Greatest Merchant and was certainly in the front rank of the World's Greatest Advertisers. It was also Lever Bros. search for raw materials that resulted in the first great industrial concession made by a nation to a manufacturer, and it was Lord Leverhulme who developed the Belgian Congo more successfully than it had been exploited under the vigorous but scarcely humanitarian methods of Belgium's Leopold II.

William Hesketh Lever was born in Bolton, Lancashire in a three-story brick building the natural unloveliness of which was later emphasized by the addition of an extremely inappropriate bay-window. His earliest childhood recollection (1854) was the burning in effigy of Emperor Nicholas of Russia, for at that time the Crimean Wrar was going on and it appeared extremely important that the Russians should not take Constantinople. His father, James Lever, had risen from a grocer's apprentice to a retail and finally to a wholesale grocer. The family was solvent rather than affluent and William's boyhood allowance consisted of first one and later two shillings per week. At the age of 19, he entered his father's store, where one of his first duties was the cutting up of long bars of soap. At that time, the soapmaker was never the soap-seller. Manufacturers sent out soap-bars which whole- salers made into cakes and stamped with their own names. After some years in his father's business, William Lever decided that the possibilities of expansion were too limited, and, with his brother, James D'Arcy Lever, became a maker and seller of soap alone. He picked out "Sunlight" for his brand name and had it copyrighted throughout the world before he made a single bar.

Sunlight Soap, made from vegetable oils and superior to the tallow soaps then (1885) generally in use, was almost immediately successful, became inside of three years the largest selling soap in the United Kingdom. In 1887 Soapman Lever reclaimed a large area of swampy land along the Mersey River and built Port Sunlight, perhaps the earliest instance of the paternal industrialism it represents.

The remaining history of Lever Bros., after the establishment of Port Sunlight, is largely the history of expansion through branches. Mr. Lever globe-trotted all over the world. Wherever he traveled he left behind him, in strategic spots, a Lever Bros, branch or a Lever Bros, subsidiary. France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, the U. S.--even China was not too far distant. In 1906 he tried to arrange a consolidation of leading British soapmakers, but the late great Lord Northcliffe raised such an antitrust turmoil that the project was abandoned. Thereupon Mr. Lever sued Lord Northcliffe and other publishers, won some $450,000 in damages for libel.

It was in a search for raw materials-- particularly palm oil--that Lord Leverhulme became involved in the greatest of his enterprises--the development of the Belgian Congo. Situated in the least illuminated portions of darkest Africa, first explored by the famed Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the Belgian Congo consists of 900,000 square miles of tropical jungle, crossed by the Equator and watered by the Congo River. It was long-bearded, farsighted, savagely-flayed Leopold II of Belgium who first saw in the Congo district an opportunity for taking up the White Man's burden and the Black Man's resources. Leopold created the Congo Free State, fought with natives and slavers, built railroads, finally (1908) made the Congo a Belgian colony as his gift to the Belgian people. In 1909 Leopold began an attempt to interest British capital in the Congo, sent one Dr. Max Horn to Lord Leverhulme. Dr. Horn pointed out that many a fine waving palm tree grew in the Congo, that many a cake of Sunlight could be made from Congo oils. While negotiations were in progress. King Leopold died (December 1909), to be succeeded by Albert, with whom the Congo concession was finally concluded.

Ratified in 1911, the Lever concession granted to Lever Bros, some 1,860,000 acres, gave the company the authority to build roads, canals, railways and telegraph systems. In 1920 Lever Bros. acquired control of the Niger Co., a trading company which had functioned in West Africa much as famed Lord Clive's British East Indian Co. had during the previous century functioned in India. Lever Bros, remains today the dominating figure in West African trade.

In 1911, William Lever became Sir William Lever; in 1917 he became Lord Leverhulme. His political career was not outstanding, for though able and active, he was more used to commanding than to persuading and somewhat impatient with differences of opinion. Yet he was frequently in the company of George of England and Albert of Belgium. On one occasion when militant suffragettes burned one of his houses, the King sent him a personal letter regretting the outrage.

Lord Leverhulme was in many ways a typical middle class Britisher--even in his appearance he looked somewhat like the cartoonist's conception of John Bull. He was almost always out of bed by 6:30 a. m. and in bed by 10:30 p. m. On the occasion of the opening of the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight, Lord Leverhulme attributed his success to his wife's "gracious influence," adding, however, that it would be a poor compliment to her to say that she was a business woman. "She was a womanly woman and her knowledge of business was nil." During the last few years of his life he rose at 4:30 a. m., spent 20 minutes in exercises, anticipated Calvin Coolidge in the use of an electric horse. For some years, however, he rode each morning a flesh-and-blood horse, always went the same distance on the same roads, and even changed from a walk to a trot and back to a walk again at exactly the same places. Daily he read from the Bible.