[5] Lever's rival in the soap industry, A & F Pears, had taken the lead in using art for marketing by buying paintings such as Bubbles by John Everett Millais to promote its products.

In the tradition of the nineteenth-century well-to-do middle classes, William paid court to Elizabeth over several years and, when the financial circumstances allowed, he formally proposed marriage.

[9][10][1] In 1879 the Lever family business acquired a failing wholesale grocer in Wigan, affording young William an opportunity to prove his ability as a quasi-autonomous administrator.

The expanded activity necessitated a search for new suppliers, taking William to Ireland, France and other parts of Europe, appointing local agents to safeguard the firm's interests.

Having persuaded his father and younger brother that it would be a beneficial strategy, William raised sufficient capital for the takeover to take place and in August 1885 Lever and Company, wholesale grocers, added soap manufacturing to its range of activities.

Much of the Sunlight brand "message" focussed on the alleviation of drudgery in the lives of working class housewives, targeted no doubt because of the increased spending power and improved education of that large section of the British population, the skilled workers.

One subtle proposition introduced from America was designed to persuade women that the toil of housework was responsible for an accelerated aging process, and that Sunlight Soap offered a form of liberation.

Promotional literature, in the form of instructions about the best ways of using the company's products, was widely distributed, as well as allegorical accounts of their successful adoption by stylish – and totally fictional – upper-class ladies.

Including Calendar and Kindred Matter, British Colonies and Dependencies, Geography, Literature, Science, Fine Arts, Commerce, Architecture, Agriculture, Army and Navy, Sports and Pastimes, Cycling Maps, The Household, Medical, Port Sunlight, etc.

The success of these schemes soon led to their adoption by Lever's competitors, although they eventually became difficult to sustain as raw material costs began to increase during the first decade of the twentieth-century, inducing most soap makers to phase them out.

[28] The success of this venture led, by 1900, to the establishment of factories in Switzerland, Germany, Canada, the United States, Holland, and Australia with several others planned, while the Sunlight brand had been strengthened by the addition of Lifebuoy, Vim and Lux.

Port Sunlight, parodied as 'Port Moonshine', was portrayed as a sweatshop, reports by disgruntled retailers were given prominent positions and readers were urged to buy products made by non-Trust manufacturers.

Such conditions inevitably led to a reassessment of the position and, following a meeting of all firms involved in the alliance, but without the wholehearted approval of Lever himself, a decision was made to bring the organization to an end.

[40][41] The circumstances in which the trial took place were unusual in that, while Lever's legal team were accommodated at Thornton Manor, Lord Northcliffe, the principal witness for the defence, was overseas and, according to Jolly, "had no intention of returning within range of any writ server while the case was on."

[49] Sir William Lever, Baronet, as he had become in December 1911, firmly believed that paid labour alongside the schools, hospitals and rations his company promised to provide would attract workers.

"[46] Failing to find sufficient voluntary workers, HCB turned to the Belgian colonial authorities, a brutal regime notorious for their use of a system of travail forcé (forced labour).

Lord Leverhulme intended that the port should be improved and enlarged to attract landings of fish from visiting vessels to supplement catches made by local boats and his own fleet of modern drifters and trawlers.

There would be an ice-making factory, and cargo vessels with refrigerated holds to take the fresh fish to a depot on the British mainland at Fleetwood, Lancashire, which was well placed to serve the industrial towns of the North of England.

Leverhulme also expanded the herring-curing capacity and enlarged the fish processing facilities with the installation of a canning factory, and a plant to make fishcakes, fishpaste, glue, animal feed, and fertiliser, with similar equipment being established at Fleetwood.

[53] Vertical Integration was apparently one of Leverhulme's main strategies for the island fisheries venture, and to this end he acquired retail fishmonger's shops in most of the UK's larger towns and cities: all were modernised and refitted, and their previous proprietors were installed as managers.

Robert Munro, the Secretary of State for Scotland, and Donald Murray, the MP for the Western Isles, as well as a number of supporting characters including most of the House of Commons, were anxious to redress past oppression of the Highlanders who had so recently served with outstanding bravery in the First World War.

The Small Landholders (Scotland) Act 1911 had empowered the Scottish Secretary, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, to acquire certain farms in the Highlands and Islands by compulsory purchase and to have them divided up to provide more crofts.

Towards the end of the war, in the summer of 1918, the Scottish Office first proposed to Leverhulme that under the Small Landholders Act, the Board of Agriculture should take possession of certain of his farms and create something fewer than a hundred and fifty crofts.

He was also impatient with politicians' machinations and the laborious indolence of the political system that persisted with the "futile land reform" instead of adopting what he considered the most sensible course of action; to forget about new crofts and allow him, in the interests of expediency, to behave like the 'monarch' of the Western Isles.

Ranged against this at least ostensibly reasonable prediction was the formidable influence wielded by prospective crofters away fighting in France, as well as by supporters of the Highland League which was politically dedicated to land reform.

Attitudes began to harden and polarise, culminating in politicians pressing ahead with land reform and Leverhulme demanding a ten-year moratorium coupled with a thinly veiled threat to withdraw from his schemes.

With a pressing need to make significant savings, he announced his intention to concentrate his efforts on Stornoway and on Harris, and that all work in the country areas of Lewis would be abandoned forthwith.

He served as Member of Parliament (MP) for the Wirral constituency between 1906 and 1909 and used his maiden speech in the House of Commons to urge Henry Campbell-Bannerman's government to introduce a national old age pension, such as the one he provided for his workers.

Jolly, "Of the dozen or so houses that Lever lived in, and upon which he stamped his own mark of reconstruction, the three most important were Thornton Manor, The Hill at Hampstead in London, and The Bungalow at Rivington.

[5] Lord Leverhulme's Hebridean venture was satirised by Neil Munro in his Erchie MacPherson story "The Coal Famine", first published in the Glasgow Evening News of 12th January 1920.