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 byship 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 thenouveau 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 we
