The Soap Man E-Book

Roger Hutchinson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 461

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

In 1918, as the First World War was drawing to a close, the eminent liberal industrial Lord Leverhulme bought - lock, stock and barrel - the Hebridean island of Lewis. His intention was to revolutionise the lives and environments of its 30,000 people, and those of neighbouring Harris, which he shortly added to his estate. For the next five years a state of conflict reigned in the Hebrides. Island seamen and servicemen returned from the war to discover a new landlord whose declared aim was to uproot their identity as independent crofter/fishermen and turn them into tenured wage-owners. They fought back, and this is the story of that fight. The confrontation resulted in riot and land seizure and imprisonment for the islanders and the ultimate defeat for one of the most powerful men of his day. The Soap Man paints a beguiling portrait of the driven figure of Lord Leverhulme, but also looks for the first time at the infantry of his opposition: the men and women of Lewis and Harris who for long hard years fought the law, their landowner, local business opinion and the entire media, to preserve the settled crofting population of their islands.

Leseprobe

THE SOAP MAN

THE SOAP MAN

LEWIS, HARRIS ANDLORD LEVERHULME

Roger Hutchinson

This eBook edition published in 2011 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QSwww.birlinn.co.uk

First published in 2003 by Birlinn Ltd

Copyright © Roger Hutchinson 2003

The moral right of Roger Hutchinson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-074-6

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

CONTENTS

List of Plates

Preface

Maps

1. The University of Life

2. A Land Apart

3. Organise, Deputise, Criticise

4. Signs of Coming Dawn

5. Fit for Heroes

6. With Me or Against Me

7. Nothing There But Slavery

8. Dignified Retreat

9. The Requiem

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF PLATES

William Hesketh Lever in 1877 at the age of twenty-six

A new kind of packaging: Sunlight Soap aims for the working man’s wife

‘There’s nothing there but slavery’: workaday scenes from Port Sunlight

Bringing home the peats in Lewis

The battle of Aignish, 1888

A busy mercantile centre: South Beach Street in Stornoway in the early 1900s

Cottars’ cottages on the outskirts of Stornoway, 1900

Members of the Lewis Royal Naval Reserve, winners of the Fleet Rowing Race in 1916

Baron Leverhulme of Bolton-le-Moors in full Masonic costume as Junior Grand Warden of England, 1918

Lews Castle from Stornoway harbour

The windswept lighthouse at the Butt of Lewis

The new laird of Lewis: Leverhulme in 1919

Homes fit for heroes: Leverhulme houses in Stornoway

Machair grazing at Coll, north of Stornoway, following resettlement

Obbe in South Harris shortly before being renamed Leverburgh

Tarbert, the main township in Harris

Sir Harry Lauder, Lord Leverhulme and Provost Roderick Smith at the opening of Stornoway’s new bowling green in 1922

The Tarbert Hotel in Harris, with one of the estate’s Ford motor cars parked outside

Lord Leverhulme in 1919

A prayer aboard the Metagama before her departure for the New World in April 1923

The Hebrideans are coming: Canadian newspapers anticipate the depopulation of the islands

The opening ceremony at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, 16 December 1922

Viscount Leverhulme of the Western Isles

The castle on the hill

PREFACE

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland have seen a greater variety of landowning thugs, philanthropists, oafs and autocrats than any comparable region of the western world. Of them all, William, Viscount Leverhulme must be the most perplexing. He owned the largest single landmass in the Hebridean chain for less than a hundred months, yet in that short period he succeeded in dividing and confusing more intelligent people than seems possible.

To his family and his friends he was a good and simple soul brought low by Highland intransigence. To his acquaintances in Scottish government he became an irritant hardly to be borne. To the Gaelic Society of Inverness he was an English interloper trampling on a fragile heritage. To his fellow businessmen and directors of Lever Brothers he was an old but still formidable widower building castles in the sky. To the people of Lewis and Harris he was all of those things, occasionally at the same time, and ultimately another in a very long line of proprietors who could not bring themselves to understand the attachments and exigencies of their Hebridean lives.

Leverhulme’s impact on Lewis and Harris in the first quarter of the twentieth century can still be felt today, and will resonate into the future. The period spent researching and writing this book coincided with the passage of a Land Reform Bill in Scotland. This piece of legislation offers to Highland crofters the right to purchase through their communities the land upon which they live and work.

For most Scottish crofters this represents an historical opportunity: their first chance to take control of their inherited home. Those in Lewis, however, might have enjoyed this privilege for more than eighty years, had their grandparents and their parents accepted an extraordinary offer made by Leverhulme during his brief period as their landlord. Some of them took advantage of this offer, and their democratically accountable landowning trust has subsequently stood for almost a century as a beacon on the bare northern hills. Others, for reasons which have previously been too often misrepresented, were obliged to decline. Only now are their descendants in western Lewis and in Harris able to reconsider the matter.

We may never understand the dead, but we can always try. The story of Lewis and Harris between between 1918 and 1925 was not only the story of a Lancashire industrialist’s twilight dream. It was also the legend of the men and women that he encountered at the end of the trail. Many people helped me towards a tentative comprehension of what happened in the northernmost Hebrides in those years, some without knowing it. I am indebted to them all, and especially to Joni Buchanan, Derek Cooper, Torcuil Crichton, James Hunter, Iain MacIver, Cailean Maclean, John MacLeod, Suisaidh MacNeill, Ian McCormack, John Murdo Morrison, Ishbel Murray, and Brian Wilson. All errors of fact and interpretation are, of course, mine.

It is the wish of every author of such a documentary as this to uncover an emblematic tale; one single anecdote as defined as a woodcut, that might stand forever as a metaphor of the whole tangled narrative. No such perfect item here exists, but one comes close. One of the medical officers for Lewis in Leverhulme’s time, Dr Harley Williams, dined out for years on legends of the fall. He told a story which - unlike, I hope, most of what follows – has been set in type at least twice before. Apocryphal or not, it bears a third rendering in the fresh light of what we now know of Viscount Leverhulme’s character and motivations in the early 1920s, of the company he kept, and of the evidence before our eyes of the proud persistence of community life in the island of Lewis.

Leverhulme (said Williams) was one day visiting a rural village. An elderly woman standing at the door of her house noticed him, and wondered aloud: ‘An e sin bodach an t-siabainn?’ – ‘Is that the old soap-man?’

‘She is asking,’ explained the proprietor’s translator, ‘ “Is that the Soap King?”, my Lord.’

Roger Hutchinson, Isle of Raasay, 2003

1

THE UNIVERSITY OF LIFE

Port Sunlight was the embodiment in bricks and mortar of the social and industrial philosophy of William Hesketh Lever. In 1887 it was an unpromising windswept area of marshland on the eastern coast of the Wirral peninsula, overlooking Liverpool and the broad Mersey estuary. In search of a new site for his expanding manufactory that year, Lever had boarded stopping trains up and down each bank of the Mersey from Warrington to the sea. He arrived at this reach of sodden fields and clutch of ramshackle shanties named Bromborough, turned to his companion and said: ‘Here we are.’1

Thirty years later there were those who chuckled at Lever’s apparent naivety in buying for development 770 square miles of Hebridean bog and stone. They may not have been familiar with Bromborough in 1887. ‘It was mostly,’ said one contemporary, ‘but a few feet above high water level and liable at any time to be flooded by high tides and thus to become indistinguishable from the muddy foreshores of the Mersey. Moreover, an arm of Bromborough Pool spread in various directions through the village, filling the ravines with ooze and slime . . . it did not, at first sight, seem fitted for human settlement.’2

One year later, in 1888, William Lever’s wife Elizabeth cut the first wet sod out of the Bromborough turf, the shanties and cabins and the very placename itself were quietly removed, and Port Sunlight – christened in honour of Lever’s celebrated brand of household soap – slid optimistically onto the map. There were hard-headed business reasons for this relocation, insisted Lever characteristically at the banquet in Liverpool which followed the turf-cutting ceremony. Bromborough/Port Sunlight was beyond the grasp of Liverpool’s harbour dues, saving him four shillings and tenpence on every ton of tallow. The festering mire of Brom-borough Pool could be converted to an anchorage with straightforward access to the shoreside soapworks. And that very anchorage in the sheltered waters of the inner Mersey River would release Lever Brothers from their expensive dependence on rail haulage. He could export his cargo by ship to the grimy, soap-hungry hordes of late-Victorian London. That might teach the railways to become competitive, and William Lever was ever in favour of teaching others the necessity of competition.

What was more, Bromborough came cheap. Who else in their right mind would bid for such a waterlogged wasteland on the depressed southern outskirts of Birkenhead? He walked straight into a buyer’s market; into negotiations with local landowners who were delighted to exchange their unproductive swamp for a handsome handout from the nouveau riche. William Lever initially bought 56 acres at Bromborough. By 1906 he had 330 acres of the place. Ninety of those acres were occupied by the Lever Brothers’ industrial plant. A further 100 acres were held in reserve. And 140 acres of reclaimed land were devoted to the mock-Tudor houses, gardens, broad avenues lined with spreading chestnut trees and fluting with birdsong, streams and quaint stone footbridges that comprised the model workers’ village of Port Sunlight.

William Lever was far from being the first such improver. The notion that capitalism’s servants might enjoy longer, healthier and more productive lives if released from the fearful urban stews had been proposed since the earliest years of the Industrial Revolution. Seventy years before Lever first set eyes on Bromborough Pool the socialist Robert Owen had constructed a workers’ mini-state at New Lanark Mills, and had recorded to his great satisfaction improved per capita production. In 1851 the wool-stapling millionaire Titus Salt had built a haven of sanitary terraced housing and schools for his workers beside the River Aire in Yorkshire. Even Queen Victoria’s lamented consort Albert had involved himself in the design and construction of new dwellings for the working Londoner.

Sir Titus Salt, Lord Mayor of Bradford, and Prince Albert were, unlike Robert Owen, no proto-communists, and neither was William Hesketh Lever (both Salt and Lever adhered, in fact, to William Gladstone’s Liberal Party). They were undoubtedly motivated by some sense of pity for the human flotsam of the nineteenth century. Lever cannot but have been aware of what a paradise a two-up-two-down semi-detached residence in Port Sunlight must have seemed to a worker’s family imported from the slums of Birkenhead. But socialist he was not. Trade union officials would repeatedly insist that Lever was the most autocratic and unreasonable employer in their considerable experience of autocratic and unreasonable employers. What agitated the Lancastrian industrialist William Lever was not the Rights of Man. ‘There could be no worse friend to labour,’ he would pronounce in 1909, ‘than the benevolent, philanthropic employer who carries his business on in a loose, lax manner, showing “kindness” to his employees; because, as certain as that man exists, because of his looseness and laxness, and because of his so-called kindness, benevolence, and lack of business principles, sooner or later he will be compelled to close.’3

This was not entirely logical. Benevolence and philanthropy and kindness are not automatically anathema – as Lever implied – to efficient ‘business principles’. But it was a typically uncompromising statement of intent, and one which would echo down his entrepreneurial years until the end of his life, touching and deeply affecting such distant quarters as West Africa, the Solomon Islands and the Outer Hebrides.

Profits came first. Even Port Sunlight, the young entrepreneur’s flagship venture, would have to pay its way before workers could be re-housed. The first twenty-eight ‘cottages’ (they were actually, by twenty-first as well as late nineteenth-century standards, reasonably-sized houses) would not be built until the soapery workplace was up and running. But once they were built the houses were model dwellings: strong, weatherproof, roomy and warm.

The price demanded of his workforce for such domestic luxury was their acceptance of benevolent dictatorship. The inhabitants of the New Jerusalem by the side of the Mersey would be asked to relinquish virtually all self-determination, and most of their collective rights, in return for a golden security in the young and infinitely promising twentieth century. Their employer, William Hesketh Lever, would become rather more than a dispenser of wage-packets operating in a free market of commodities and labour. He would determine not only the future and conditions of the industry which supported them all, but also the future and conditions of his workers’ private lives.

Lever saw no reason to be shamefaced or shy about this presumption. Why should he? ‘If I were to follow the usual mode of profit-sharing,’ he proclaimed, ‘I would send my workmen and work girls to the cash office at the end of the year and say to them: “You are going to receive £8 each; you have earned this money: it belongs to you. Take it and make whatever use you like of your money.”

‘Instead of that I told them: “£8 is an amount which is soon spent, and it will not do you much good if you send it down your throats in the forms of bottles of whisky, bags of sweets, or fat geese for Christmas. On the other hand, if you leave this money with me, I shall use it to provide for you everything which makes life pleasant – viz. nice houses, comfortable homes, and healthy recreation.” Besides, I am disposed to allow profit sharing under no other than that form.’

Eight pounds in 1890 was the equivalent of more than £500 at the start of the twenty-first century. It would have bought a lot of confectionery. The late-Victorian Merseyside proletariat would doubtless have preferred the opportunity to eat goose and drink whisky as well as live in comfortable homes. But it was given only the choice between decent housing and relative destitution. It opted naturally for teetotal Port Sunlight, a model village which had, on the order of its proprietor, no public house. For the late-Victorian Merseyside proletariat had suffered a hundred years of squalor, disease and early, miserable death. Having known nothing else, its priority was to stabilise itself in the face of a future which, however uncertain, could hardly be worse. Trades unionists may have heard Lever’s words and grumbled; doctrinaire socialists may have cursed him as a tyrant; but the bulk of his workforce scrambled to accept both his terms and the keys to his cottages.

Thirty years after Elizabeth Lever cut those first turfs at Bromboough, thirty years after William Lever told his employees at an early works outing that they must improve his profits and then trust him to improve their livelihoods, another group of British men and women 400 miles to the north of Port Sunlight would listen to identical sentiments. But the response of the people of the islands of Lewis and Harris would be so unanticipated, so unconquerable, so radically different that it broke the resolve of William Hesketh Lever, and in so doing seemed to break the man himself.

William Lever was born in Bolton on 19 September 1851. His father, James Lever, the scion of an old Lancashire family which had turned to trade, was a partner in a wholesale and retail grocery business. The Lever family was Nonconformist. James had met his wife, Eliza Hesketh, at chapel. They made their home in a three-storeyed Georgian terraced house in a comfortable middle-class district of Bolton. And there, in an improving smoke-free atmosphere of abstinence and duty, Eliza gave birth in quick succession to six girls. William was her seventh child and the first boy.

His childhood was unexceptional. Like so many other sons of the northern merchant classes he was thoroughly educated. At the age of six he was sent to a small local private preparatory school run by two maiden ladies. In the day care of the Misses Aspinwall he met two other children: an attractive draper’s daughter named Elizabeth Ellen Hulme and a talented boy called Jonathan Simpson. He would marry the former and befriend for life the latter.

William and Jonathan progressed together to a middle school and then, at the age of thirteen, to a Church of England secondary institute. Both boys decided that they wished to study architecture. Eliza Lever wanted her son to become a doctor. William and Eliza were both frustrated. At the age of fifteen William was withdrawn from the Church Institute by his father and put to work in the family grocery concern. Jonathan Simpson remained to study and, finally, to qualify as an architect.

It would not have mattered whether or not the 15-year-old William Hesketh Lever was a bookish child. As it happened he was not: he preferred carpentry to academia; making things to parsing phrases. But as the eldest son of a mid-Victorian north-of-England Nonconformist grocer William was destined for the family company from birth, regardless of his other ambitions and interests. James Lever celebrated the accession of his heir by giving the boy for his sixteenth birthday in 1867 a copy of Samuel Smiles’ best-selling manual for character improvement, Self-help. Once more, this was not extraordinary. Thousands of teenaged boys had been donated Self-help since the book’s publication in 1859. The genius of Smiles was not so much to blaze new philosophical trails as perfectly to express the half-formed principles of the Victorian working bourgeoisie. William Lever may have been among the most prominent men to credit Smiles with granting him a template for life, but he was not the only one.

Laws, wisely administered, will secure men in the enjoyment of the fruits of their labour, whether of mind or body, at a comparatively small personal sacrifice; but no laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy, and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights . . .

Daily experience shows that it is energetic individualism which produces the most powerful effects upon the life and action of others, and really constitutes the best practical education. Schools, academies, and colleges give but the merest beginnings of culture in comparison with it. Far more influential is the life-education daily given in our homes, in the streets, behind counters, in workshops, at the loom and the plough, in counting-houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of men. This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which Schiller designated ‘the education of the human race’, consisting in action, conduct, self-culture, self-control – all that tends to discipline a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the duties and business of life – a kind of education not to be learnt from books, or acquired by any amount of mere literary training.

William Hesketh Lever digested those sombre sentences and others like them from Smiles’ book, along with Dickens and Shakespeare. He never forgot them, for they dignified and justified his young existence. He had been obliged to relinquish ‘schools, academies and colleges’ in favour of the shop counter and the street. When his tasks at James Lever’s warehouse – sweeping the place out before dawn, breaking up wholesale bars and loaves of soap and sugar into retail sizes, stacking delivery carts – seemed an arduous apprenticeship he could fall upon Smiles’ wisdom and thank the Lord for delivering him from mere literary training into the infinitely more valuable University of Life.

William naturally progressed more quickly up the business ladder than the other apprentices at his father’s warehouse. He started as a dogsbody at a shilling a week. By the age of nineteen in 1870 he was drawing thirty times that amount and working from a pony and trap as a commercial traveller. When he was twenty-one it was judged that he had learned enough about the trade to become a junior partner on £800 a year.

Those were the wages of a prosperous young man. Eight hundred pounds in the 1870s would be worth almost £60,000 today. William Lever paid income tax at only 10 per cent, and the comparative purchase value of the pound sterling was greater than it would be 130 years later. What better to spend his riches on than a wife? He sought out Elizabeth Ellen Hulme and her widowed mother. In April 1874 the childhood friends were married – by the pastor who had baptised them both – at Bolton’s Congregational Church.

Having established his bride in a comfortable, newly decorated town house the 23-year-old returned to immersion in the Lancashire grocery trade. He was still working as a traveller for his father, taking orders for butter, eggs, mustard, starch, sugar and soap in the corner stores and village shops of industrial Lancashire. While on the road in 1879 he had noticed a failing grocery concern at Wigan. William bought it out and opened there his own branch of Lever & Co. He then visited Ireland to make contact with dairy farmers and began to receive eggs and butter directly from their source. Having established a cheap, wholesome and plentiful supply William Lever wrapped weighed chunks of butter in greaseproof paper, labelled them ‘Ulster Fresh Lumps’, distributed them to grocery outlets throughout Lancashire . . . and, daringly, advertised his product extensively in the local press.

Groceries before the 1870s were largely unpackaged, unprocessed and unadvertised. Produce was bought in bulk, marked up and sold off. Eggs were eggs and butter was butter; sugar and salt came in loaves and cakes, and soap in large rectangular bars. Brand names were rare. William Lever would make his astonishing fortune by seizing on one particular essential product, adding extra value to it at source, and transforming it through packaging and advertising from an unremarkable everyday item into an elixir of life, a symbol of leisure and luxury.

He was not the first to do so. As we have seen, in 1867 his first job involved breaking up loaves of sugar for retail. Five years later, in 1872, another former grocery assistant from Lancashire named Henry Tate patented a sugar-cubing machine which suddenly enabled him to package this commodity in standard sizes and allowed his customers to exercise product control. ‘Tate’s Cube Sugar’ lumps very quickly made their 54-year-old inventor very rich – so rich that within twenty years he had assembled the greatest single collection of British contemporary art. They also helped to revolutionise the world of grocery marketing, launching its speedy transit away from the traditional generics of the street-stall into the Modern Age of pre-packaged and branded goods. Tate had not invented a product: sugar had been widely available for centuries. He had invented a new way of selling that product for a greater profit margin. His rapidly escalating business was unlikely to escape the attention of an ambitious young grocer from Bolton.

But William Lever would be unable to reproduce Tate’s trademark success with ‘Ulster Fresh Lumps’ butter. There were important differences between dairy produce and sugar. Butter was quickly degradable, had a limited storage- and shelf-life, was virtually impossible to transport over any great distance, and was therefore disturbingly dependent upon an efficient ratio between supply and demand. No amount of trips across the Irish Sea would invent refrigeration or inject urgency into the Hibernian herdsman. So William Lever remained, for the time being, a wholesale and retail general grocer rather than a manufacturer of consumer goods.

It would have been a satisfactory life for most. Lever & Co thrived and William was able to nurse his own outlet, commissioning his old schoolfriend Jonathan Simpson to design new premises for the Wigan store. By 1884 Lever & Co in Wigan was the biggest wholesale grocer in the north-west of England outside Liverpool and Manchester. William and Elizabeth Lever need never have worked again. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of their wedding, in the summer of that year the couple took off on a cruise of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. They took ship from Liverpool, called at Oban, and on a fine August day their vessel put in to Stornoway, the main town of the island of Lewis. There they met a waiting Jonathan Simpson, who would accompany them for part of the rest of the voyage. And there, for five or six hours, they saw for the first time the land and the people who were to provide the coronach to William Hesketh Lever’s lonely final years.

2

A LAND APART

William Lever saw at Stornoway in 1884 a place of ‘natural beauty and variety of scenery’ inhabited by people of ‘charm and attraction’. There is far more significance in what he did not see.

Lewis was another land, entire unto itself. The largest and most heavily populated of all the Hebrides, it encompassed the placid and picturesque lochside villages in the shadow of the mountains which separated them from Harris, the urban centre of Stornoway and the northerly windswept fishing parish of Ness. It ran from fertile machair soil on the north-eastern seaboard to rocky, cliffbound inlets on its distant south-western shore. A vast, brooding, uninhabited moor of peatbog and low hills dominated its northern inlands, and to the south a kaleidoscope of miniature lochs shone under a flat and shifting sky. These no-man’s-lands were deceptive in scale and proportion. While entirely visible from north to south and – mostly – negotiable on foot in a day, they were hostile, uncharted territory to any stranger. From the beginning of recorded time the stern heart of his island had offered refuge to the Lewisman, sanctuary from the incursions of violent invaders or officers of lowland law.

It was and would remain a proud and foreign place. Its size and variety of landscape had meant that, almost uniquely within the Hebrides, Lewis was largely self-supporting. It had been able to survive, if not to prosper, far from and free from the compromises of the British mainland. Its Gaelic language was, in 1884, intact. Its faith was unitary. Its sons and daughters were far-flung, but their belief in themselves as Leodhasaich was strong. Even their accent, in Gaelic and English, was starkly different from that of any other Hebridean island. It was an intelligent, curious, obstinate voice, fully aware of and wholly indifferent to its insistent inflection.

The very size and variety which lent strength to Lewis also divided the place. Men and women would be raised on the eastern peninsula of Point or the northern village of Tolsta who had never seen, nor had any intention of seeing, the western tidal island of Bernera or the southern townships of Uig. They knew of each other, of course, and frequently they knew each other, but Barvas Moor lay like an ocean – or like a mainland mountain range – between them. From Carloway to Mealista there stood whole settlements of black houses: low, thatched, stone dwellings for beast and man that had changed little since the Iron Age. But Stornoway was a modern Victorian port and market town. Since earlier in the nineteenth century its neat rows of dwelling places and commercial and administrative premises had almost all been roofed with slate. In the late 1840s the new proprietor – Sir James Matheson of the Hong Kong opium-dealers Jardine Matheson & Company – had built high above the town a Gothic revival of Stornoway’s fortified mansion house which he named, in anachronistic homage to the island’s ancestral English name, Lews Castle. Matheson died in 1878, leaving his widow as chatelaine of the building and proprietress of the island.

In 1884 the island of Lewis, without Harris, held some 25,500 people. Ten thousand of them were listed as belonging to the parish of Stornoway, but as Stornoway parish included several densely-populated outlying crofting communities, it is possible that the township itself contained just 3,000 souls. Town and country were important divisions in Lewis. The minority of townspeople exercised a disproportionate influence on the island’s life. Outside Stornoway the vast majority of the 20,000 rural dwellers – small-scale agriculturalists and fishing families – were mainly or solely Gaelic-speakers (more than 65 per cent of people over the age of twenty-five in the whole of Lewis in the 1880s spoke only Gaelic). Inside Stornoway, English – an accented, biblical, precise and colloquial English – was virtually universal among the shopkeepers, harbour staff, soldiers and sailors, inn-keepers and ministers, school-teachers and pupils.

Stornoway, one authority had written thirty years before the Levers set foot on Lewis soil,

. . . is well and regularly built, and its streets are lighted with gas. Most prominent of its buildings are the Parish Church, Free Church and Episcopal Church, several schools, jail and the Masonic Lodge. On an eminence overlooking the town is the magnificent mansion of the proprietor, recently erected in the castellated Tudor style. The castle grounds are extensive, and laid out with great taste . . .

The masonic lodge contains elegant assembly rooms, reading rooms and a public library. Stornoway has a branch office of the National Bank of Scotland, customs house, a savings bank, sailors’ home, hospital and a gas and water works. There are also commodious piers and a building dock . . . fitted to haul up ships of 800 tons burden.

To the north, south, east and west of this tidy and prosperous little burgh perhaps 15,000 people lived and worked on crofts: the small acreage of arable and grazing land which, it had been estimated in the nineteenth century, could support them at subsistence level for only half of the year. And yet Lewis exported, through the commercial hands of Stornoway, a million-and-a-half eggs a year from those crofts; 90 tons of wool; 400 sheep and lambs and almost 2,000 cattle. The island’s fishermen, most of whom worked in small sailing boats in hazardous Atlantic seas out of such ramshackle jetty complexes as were to be found at Port of Ness, sent to the mainland through Stornoway as many as 40,000 barrels of herring a year. At 30 shillings a barrel this haul earned for Lewis some £60,000 per annum (which would be worth £4 million today). Substantial quantities of cod, ling, salmon and lobster were also carted to Stornoway, boxed and shipped to the mainland.

On that hot day in August 1884 William Lever observed not only charm and scenic beauty, but also a busy and affluent little port. The 33-year-old may have been surprised to find such respectable mercantile prosperity perched so precariously at the edge of Europe. A short, trim, athletic figure with a mop of dark, well-tended hair, mutton-chop whiskers, an incisive edge to his clean-shaven mouth and chin and deep, fearless, penetrating eyes, he looked out over a calm and sheltered harbour, at the ships lying at anchor and boats drawn up on the shore, at the sturdy stone facings on the front, at the union flag fluttering from the highest turret of Lady Matheson’s castle, at the blue-brown hills which lowered in the distance. Like any other tourist, he could never have sensed (had he five or six days, five or six weeks, let alone five or six hours) the rumbles of discontent and expressions of insecurity which disturbed the peaceful tenor of rural Lewis. Nobody in Stornoway, certainly no mason, no banker, no customs officer or harbourmaster was likely to draw those unfortunate phenomena to the visitor’s attention. Yet what he failed to see or hear was more important than the tiled roofs, street lights and commodious piers.

A land war was simmering in this island where the sense of land and place was absolute. Leodhasaich shared with their fellow Gaels an attachment to their country which the disinherited Sasuinn would regard as almost mystical. By the late nineteenth century they and their forebears had occupied the same rough patch of land for longer than any other group, indigenous or otherwise, in the United Kingdom. Their millennial unbroken tenure of the Highlands and Islands had resulted in a deep familiarity with and respect for its earth and sand. Every hillside, every lochan, every erratic rock told a story and had a name. They moved from such gnosis only under duress, and they took it with them like a charm.

In an island, any island, such Gaelic sentiment was if anything intensified. The indisputable boundary of the hostile sea limited the homeland as no stone dyke or mountain range could do. Lewis had been created as strictly finite. Its people might settle to the west of Timsgarry, east of Portnaguran or south of the Clisham, but corporeal Lewis would remain behind them, no more and no less than 770 square miles of precious heath.

Every fraction of those square miles was consequently dear. It was in fact beyond price. It had been held in trust by the generations who gifted their patronyms to every Leodhasach. In return it had presented them with house-sites and fuel and crops and grazing land. The men and women who had emerged following the dissolution of the clan system at the end of the eighteenth century, men and women who seemed somehow to believe that they could buy and sell the earth and rock like trinkets, were regarded at best with suspicion and at worst with dull, uncomprehending hostility. The private ‘landowner’ would be tolerated on Lewis by its proud people for only as long as his or her blasphemous presumptions did not impact severely upon the life and faith of the Leodhasaich.

The certainties of religion replaced the securities of the old order. Throughout the nineteenth century Lewis was intermittently swept by bush-fires of evangelism. In 1843 one-third of the ministers of the established Church of Scotland walked out of the General Assembly to form the Free Church of Scotland, taking with them 50 per cent of the lay membership. The Great Disruption – ‘probably the most important event in the history of nineteenth-century Scotland’ according to one ecclesiastical historian – was hugely pervasive in the Highlands and Islands. It was a social as well as a denominational revolt. A major touchstone of division between the Moderates (who stayed) and the Evangelicals (who walked) was the patronage of the landowner. The men who followed Thomas Chalmers into the Free Church of Scotland did not believe that the proprietor of an estate should have the right to nominate a parish minister regardless of the wishes of his congregation.

This principle may not have lit many fires in the bourgeois burghs of the south, but it blazed through the industrial cities and through the Gaidhealtachd, whose citizenry had by 1843 a greater appreciation than most of the damage done by unfettered landowning power. Here was one area – a person’s communion with their God – into which no factor’s interfering hand should stray. Lewis walked, almost to a man and a woman, into the Free Church of Scotland. In 1874 the local presbytery itself estimated that, from a population of 23,479, only 460 Lewis souls were not adherents of the Free Church. Others suggested that non-communicants were slightly, only slightly more numerous: perhaps as many as 1,000 (the figure of nineteen out of twenty Victorian Leodhasaich belonging to the Free Church is commonplace).

But few would dispute the overwhelming appeal of the radical democratic Presbyterian Church on the island. In 1882, two years before William and Elizabeth Lever first visited Stornoway, Reverend Alexander Lee of Nairn told a Lewis joke to the General Assembly of the Free Church. It concerned an elderly woman on the island who was asked by her catechist:

‘“Can you tell me now what we are to understand by the term: the invisible church?” To which, after due consideration, and with all that air of respect that our Highland people ever manifest towards their spiritual overseers, she gravely replied: “Well, no, unless it be the Established Church.”’

‘And . . .’ continued Reverend Lee as the laughter subsided, ‘and, verily, as far as spiritual work and moral power is concerned, that answer most truly describes the condition of the State church not only in Lewis but also throughout the Highlands generally.’4

Throughout the Highlands generally, perhaps . . . but it was Lewis, that large and self-contained world apart, which became the acme of a Free Church society – the home of the largest congregations outside a Scottish city, and the only substantial, clearly defined community in Britain over which a Presbyterian church held virtually unchallenged dominion. It would be difficult to overstate the powerful and enduring relationship between the Free Church and the Leodhasaich. One hundred and fifty years after Reverend Lee’s creed had first been welcomed by the thankful islanders, another theologian would write movingly of his grandparents in Lewis, of men and woman who walked with their God, free and proud, belonging to a church which ‘lived by the principle that the strong should help the weak’.

The Nonconformist Englishman William Lever may have briefly thought that he understood the Free Church in Lewis. He shared many of its precepts: its respect for the Sabbath; its distaste for alcoholic excess; its belief in social responsibility; its knowledge – and frequent practical appliance – of the chapters of the Old Testament. But he would have been deceiving himself, for this was a sterner, more demanding, more integral faith than ever had sunk roots in the respectable terraces of Bolton. Lever’s was a comparatively softer, southern religion; one which allowed for his disbelief in the afterlife, for example, and which could be mollified by the occasional act of worship and address to the village Sunday School.

Most crucially, he would never have encompassed the Free Church’s lack of regard, verging on contempt, for landownership. When, in the 1880s, land agitation and land hunger became important social issues in the Hebrides barely a voice would be raised from behind a Lewis pulpit in support of the proprietorial interest. How could the Free Church support that interest, when in the years following 1843, well within living memory, its ministers and its congregations had been locked by landowners out of their places of worship, had been forced to meet and pray on rainswept open ground, to conduct services from the relative immunity of boats anchored offshore?

How could the Free Church, which owed its existence to the principle that the landed classes should not impose their choice of spiritual advisor upon the people, accept that the same landowners should be allowed to dictate in secular matters? It could not and usually it did not. When the war between Lewis crofter and Lewis factor erupted, the man of most respect and influence in any Lewis community – the Free Church minister – may not have helped to man the barricades, and may have preferred to talk down ‘wild talk and wild plans among the younger men’, but he significantly failed to speak up for the big house. This often entailed remaining silently aloof, which irritated more than one agitator. But there is little reason to doubt the judgement of the historian of the Disruption, James Lachlan MacLeod, that there was ‘a depth of feeling within the Free Church in support of the crofters which has been underestimated’.5

Just one year before William Lever looked out upon the enchanting prospect of Stornoway momentous and highly divisive issues had been discussed in the town. In March 1883 Sir William Harcourt, the Liberal Government’s Home Secretary, had announced a Royal Commission of Inquiry ‘into the conditions of the crofters and cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland’. It would become known as the Napier Commission after its chairman, a 63-year-old lowland landowner and career diplomat who had recently been ennobled as the Baron Napier and Ettrick, and its findings and influence would be epochal.

The seven-strong commission (one chairman, one secretary and five members) wasted little time in bending to their task. Their hearings opened in May at a schoolhouse in Braes on Skye, and for the next six months the Napier roadshow performed at venue after venue, night after night, throughout the Highlands and Islands. The voluminous testimony that Lord Napier and his colleagues recorded would stand for ever as a political and social history of the nineteenth-century Gaidhealtachd. Its clarion-call was identifiably similar from island to island, parish to parish – ‘Give us land out of the plenty that there is about for cultivation. Give us land at a suitable rent’ – but under cross-examination the witnesses’ infinite variations on a theme held their hearers, and their subsequent readers, in thrall. The spectre of injustice and land hunger haunted the Highlands and Islands, and it was a spectre with many forms.

The principle which informed so much of the Highland and Hebridean land campaign of the late nineteenth century was one not so much of crofting expansion, as of restitution. Traditional Gaelic attachment to the land meant that any form of private charter which removed it from the communal, clannish township and placed it into the assets column of an individual’s accounts was regarded as being as illegitimate as common theft. Throughout the nineteenth century this simmering grievance was exacerbated by a good deal of actual common theft.

Estate sheep farms were built and expanded upon what had previously been common grazing or arable land. Vast areas of moor and heath were enclosed and turned into game parks: playgrounds for the shooting of grouse and deer, where a common native of Lewis dared to set foot only in the very real danger of being captured and arraigned as a poacher of ‘private’ wildlife. Between 1818 and 1886 almost 50,000 acres of the peninsula of Park in south-eastern Lewis had been methodically fenced off, firstly for sheep-farming and latterly as a deer-run. Age-old villages were emptied; their names – Valamus, Ceann Chrionaig, Ceannmore – would henceforth be heard only in legend or in song, and their ruined walls would turn to ridges in the bracken. Many of the dispossessed emigrated to Canada or to Scotland. Those that stayed huddled together on tiny plots of bad land in the vestigial coastal communities: by 1881 an estimated 1,700 people were crowded into nine villages in Park. Those nine villages had between them just 181 crofts. The Matheson Estate itself would grudgingly admit in 1883 that it had spent £100,000 on ‘improving’ its land – of which huge sum only the pitiful fraction of 1.5 per cent had been newly invested in crofting townships.

On 8 June 1883 the Napier Commission arrived in Stornoway. Precisely one week earlier, on Friday 1 June, the town had been the setting of a large political demonstration. Between 2,000 and 4,000 people (the lower figure is the estimation of the conservative national press; the higher the guess of the organisers) marched through its streets. They were led by pipers and carried red banners inscribed in white and black with such phrases as ‘Land To The People’. They came from most parts of rural Lewis; many of them had walked thirty or more miles to attend the rally, and many had sacrificed a valuable day’s fishing at the height of the season. They were addressed by Alexander Morrison and other officials from the Stornoway branch of the Lewis Land Law Reform Association, who urged them to testify with the utmost frankness to the Napier Commission.

There would be people in later years eager to testify that land hunger was a minority concern in Lewis, and that land reform was the clarion of a few unrepresentative malcontents. The June demonstration in Stornoway would be in itself sufficient to dispel that illusion. At least one-tenth and possibly one-fifth of the island’s rural population marched on that day from Bayhead to the Marybank market stance. As they were almost all men, it is arguable that barely any of the extended family households of Lewis was unrepresented beneath the banners and flags.

This was far from being the only such mass protest. Three months earlier, immediately after the Napier Commission had been announced, more than 2,000 people had trekked from as far afield as Uig in the south-west to Perceval Square in Stornoway (which had been named in tribute to Lady Matheson’s family) where, following a prayer led by the Church of Scotland minister Reverend Angus MacIver, twenty speakers were heard and signatures were collected for a petition to William Gladstone at 10 Downing Street. And a few months later the rural forces came once more to town to emphasise their need for land reform.

The burghers of Stornoway did not all smile upon their country cousins. Throughout the Highlands and Islands there existed a sharp divide between the landed and merchant classes and the folk who worked the soil and sea. Until the Third Reform Act of 1884 barely any crofters, who comprised the great majority of the population, had the vote. Even then only those who paid more than £10 in annual rental were enfranchised – which is part of the reason why when crofting rents came to be assessed and fixed, so many of them were fixed at the (relatively substantial) rate of £10 or more per annum.

A gulf between town and country, between the landed and the landless, between the enfranchised and the unrepresented yawned in Lewis as clearly as in mainland Ross-shire and Inverness. Within the sealed world of the Hebrides it was complicated by social, familial and religious factors. Many an affluent Stornoway tradesman had his roots in the hungry villages of Lochs; many a rural minister considered the campaign for land reform to be a satanic distraction from the work of God. But it would be futile to deny the difference between terrace and thatch. The one, living and bartering beneath Sir James Matheson’s towering turrets, either had little concern about the distribution of land on the other side of Barvas Moor, or thought the land campaigners to be arrant socialists, misled by mainland ne’er-do-wells and set to steer Lewis on a course towards anarchy and fiscal despair. The other, reaping meagre harvests from a patch of overworked earth, could see no future without land redistribution and therefore no point at all to a public polity which did not cater for land hunger. ‘It is well known,’ another islander would remark at a later date, ‘that Stornoway seldom, or never, represents Lewis opinion’.

These were the two teams which debated before the Napier Commission in the June of 1883. And the crofting, land reform interest won the verbal contest at a canter. The Commission was faced on the one hand with the shifty plea-bargaining of estate factors, and on the other with tales of distress and injustice eloquently voiced by lay elders and communicants of the Free Church of Scotland. History judges their two starkly contrasted versions of the same era with little difficulty: one is pallid semantics; the other is infused with authentic grievance. More importantly, the gentlemen of the Napier Commission found it relatively easy at the time to recognise where justice lay.

The chamberlain of the Matheson Estate, and therefore effectively the administrator of rural Lewis, William MacKay, appeared to believe that the Commission would be satisfied by a litany of expenses incurred in small-scale industrial investment and road construction. His cause was unlikely to be helped by his assertion that a Lewis crofter could not be expected to know the extent of an acre of land (even Baron Francis Napier was by June of that year aware that if there was one measurement with which Gaelic-speaking crofters were fully conversant it was the measurement of land), and that he himself had only ‘a sort of’ Gaelic. He was ably countered by the same Alexander Morrison who had helped to organise the previous week’s march, and by Donald Martin of Back, an extensive and comparatively fertile crofting region on the flatlands between the moor and the dunes to the north of Stornoway. There is a danger that the younger men, said Martin with commendable prescience, might rise ‘as the clans of old rose, if they do not get a hold over the land of which they were deprived for the sake of sheep, deer and grouse.’

Another DonaldMartin from north of Stornoway, a sixty-one-year-old mason from the isolated hamlet of Tolsta, had earlier addressed the Commission in the unmistakable voice of the largest sovereign land in the Hebridean archipelago. His is not the only testimony to ring down the centuries from the transcripts of the Napier Commission, but this Donald Martin’s statement is possibly the most emblematic and identifiable witness to the conditions and the mood of rural Lewis in 1883.

‘I do not,’ he commenced, ‘intend to say much.’ Donald Martin then proceeded to say just enough.

I have seen the people reduced to such poverty that they were obliged to feed upon dulse from the shore. I see them now reduced to such a hard condition that I can compare them to nothing but the lepers at the gates of Samaria – death before them and death behind them.

I see no prospect of improvement in their condition. If one tack is set free, another tacksman comes into it to confront the people as the Philistines did who came out to battle with the people of Israel. The old people cannot be sent away without the young people. It is only the young people who can go, and it is only they who can support the old people.

If the young people go, the old people will die; and it is hard for them to see the sheep and the deer enjoying the price of their father’s blood. I have not much more to say.

What William Lever did not see one year later, as he walked among the charming and attractive citizenry of Stornoway, was a proud, God-fearing and independent agricultural population which was on the fragile cusp between despair and rebellion. 21

William and Elizabeth Lever and Jonathan Simpson sailed on to the Orkney islands that summer. It became apparent to Simpson that his old schoolfriend was at a crossroads in his life. As they toured the northern isles Lever mused openly about the possibility of buying one of the smaller of the Orkneys. He had never, he said, felt more disinclined to return to the drudgery of wholesale grocery. He could drop out at the age of thirty-three, transfer his business interests to a limited liability company and live contentedly ever after, raising his family on the breezy meadows of Ultima Thule. Instead he returned to Lancashire and made a fortune from soap.

In 1874 his father’s company had experimented briefly with distributing an in-house soap labelled ‘Lever’s Pure Honey’. It did not thrive. One year later the Trade Marks Act refused to license brand names which ‘describe the product or make implications about its quality’. ‘Pure’ and ‘Honey’ were regarded as falling into those categories. Other businesses were consequently free to steal the last two words of the name, and William Lever learned a lesson in brand identity and registered trade marks.

But he did not forget about soap. One of his lieutenants, the Tynesider Angus Watson, would later recall his chief’s own version of the revelation which changed British industry:

One day when on one of his local journeys, he called at the shop of a small general dealer named Ann Radcliffe, who, when ordering her usual weekly requirements, asked him whether he stocked a brand of what she described as ‘stinking soap’.

Not unnaturally he inquired why she wished to buy a soap having such an offensive reputation. She told him that in spite of its objectionable odour it was selling freely in the district because of its generous lathering properties. At once he became interested . . .

Lever himself told variations on the same theme – he had Ms Radcliffe enter the Wigan HQ in person to request her ‘stinking soap’, and he insisted that the soap had only been rancid on its oxidised outer surface. Once used the smelly layer was washed away – but the moral was the same: soap with a character, soap with an identifiable personality, would be recognised and requested above the common herd.

An admixture of caustic soda or potash or resin and animal tallow or olive oil to make soap had been commonplace in Britain for at least 300 years. Although some commercial soap boilers had operated in London from the beginning of the seventeenth century, it remained largely a domestic industry until the nineteenth century – and an industry chiefly patronised by the affluent.

The industrial revolution altered the soap market. It created a huge new class of people who lived and worked in grimy, soot-encrusted cities, who were consequently more concerned with personal hygiene than before, and who increasingly earned a household wage which might stretch to buying off-cuts of soap from the grocer’s slab with which to wash their clothes and linen and bodies.

The frothy ‘stinking soap’ which Ann Radcliffe encountered had been given its lathering qualities by the addition of vegetable oils instead of tallow. Vegetable oil was also cheaper than the alternatives and had from the manufacturer’s point of view the added quality of a speedier built-in obsolescence: vegetable oil soap was softer and therefore more quickly used. Its unfortunate side-effect was that ‘the blending of the vegetable oil with the caustic soda left the soap with a searching and unpleasant smell that permeated everything washed with it.’

Because cheap stinking cleanliness was by the 1880s widely considered preferable to unwashed clothes and skin, this was not an insuperable problem. But it would be better for all concerned if the smell could be eliminated. Lever learned of a product in the USA named ‘citronella’ which masked the odour with a cheap lemon-rind perfume.

He needed a brand name which carried none of the loaded implications of ‘Pure Honey’ and which had not already been registered. Immediately upon disembarking from his tour of Lewis and the Orkneys William Lever visited a patent agent in Liverpool named W.P. Thompson. Thompson heard his new client’s requirements, tore off half a sheet of notepaper and wrote down half-a-dozen possibilities.

Lever rejected them all. He recounted:

At first blush none of those names appealed to me. I had big ideas of some sort of name – I did not know what, but it was going to be such a marvel, and when I saw it written down in cold ink – the names that were possible – names that you could register and fight for, names that did not describe the article, that were neither geographical nor descriptive, did not refer to quality, and got over all the obstacles that the Trade Marks Law has very properly put in front of us – none of them appealed to me.

He put the piece of paper in his pocket and left for home a disappointed man. Some days later he realised that W.P. Thompson had actually delivered the goods. Examining the list once more Lever found himself captivated by a single written word. He panicked and left post-haste for Liverpool to ask Thompson immediately to patent the brand-name ‘Sunlight’ – ‘I was all in a tremble to have it registered, for fear somebody else had got it.’

Nobody else had got it, in Britain or elsewhere in the patented world. In ‘Sunlight’ Lever had stumbled upon a product name which would be internationally applicable.