At a time when bathing once a week was the norm,fridays were good and the family would all use the same bath water of course,a sudden change took place and William Lever,founder of the now famous Lever Brand,was in a good position to market his soaps,he was the first to recognise that the practice of retailers at the time would cut soap of a solid block and hand and wrapped it themselves,normally underselling the weight,its an old trick,Lever saw this as an opening to sell factory pre packed blocks of soap,Lifebouy,Pears,Sunlight, are still well known brands,they were soon the spoaps to buy as you knew the product was good and the closed packing ensured what you paid for was what you got.
The King of Sunlight: how William Lever cleaned up the world, by Adam MacQueen (CORGI £7.99)
At 16, William Lever began an apprenticeship in his father's grocer's shop in Bolton, at a time when J Sainsbury's and Liptons were just emerging as dominant forces in the business. By dint of hard work and canny salesmanship, he expanded the family firm into a thriving local concern until 1866, by which time he'd raised enough capital to begin a new business making, packaging and selling Sunlight Soap. Poised to take advantage of a handy confluence of social changes - the dirty industrial revolution, the fashion for bathing every day begun by the Duke of Wellington, and the new arts of patenting and branding - Lever's became an industrial empire employing 185,000 people around the world.
MacQueen's biography provides an adequate account of Victorian industry, empire and values, and of the birth of modern commerce. But its real value is as an entertaining portrait of a progressive thinker, ballroom dancer, art-collector, philanthropist, MP and genuine English eccentric. As an example, on his 45-acre estate, with its full-scale replica of Liverpool Castle and free-roaming zebras and lions, Lever preferred to sleep in an entirely exposed wing of his mansion, frequently under a blanket made of snow. MacQueen's brisk and jocular telling of his life is fast-moving, and full of exactly the kind of trivial but colourful detail that's needed to give the measure of such a singular man as Lever.
Type: Heritage / Visitor Centre
In 1887 William Hesketh Lever, a successful soap manufacturer, began looking for a new site for his factory as his business had outgrown its original premises on the banks of the River Mersey in Warrington. He needed land on which to build his new works and have space for future expansion. The site also needed to be near to a river for importing raw materials, and a railway line for transporting the finished products. The marshy, uninspiring ground that he discovered was eventually to be transformed into the village of Port Sunlight, which was named after his famous soap.
Port Sunlight is now a designated Conservation Area, still within its original boundaries. Today the village and the Heritage Centre are now managed by The Port Sunlight Village Trust and although houses can be bought on the open market, the Trust remains responsible for the environment and landscape in Port Sunlight
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