Port Sunlight War Memorial

The founder of the village and employer of its residents, William Lever, was anxious to have a memorial to commemorate those of his workers who had been lost in the First World War.

As early as 1916 he commissioned Goscombe John to design a war memorial, which was completed and unveiled in 1921 by two of his employees.

Port Sunlight is the site of a soap factory founded by William Lever (1851–1925), later 1st Viscount Leverhulme, who also created a model village for his workers.

As an invasion would threaten the people left at home, Lever was keen to invoke a sense of social cohesion, and so figures of women and children would be included in the memorial as well as military personnel.

A ballot of all the Lever ex-servicemen was held, and those chosen were Sergeant Eames, who had been blinded at the battle of the Somme, and Private Robert Cruickshank who had been awarded the Victoria Cross for his actions in Palestine.

[1] A Pathe Newsreel recording this event can be viewed on YouTube http://www.britishpathe.com/video/blind-hero-unveils-memorial/query/William The memorial stands in the most prominent position in the centre of the village, at the intersection of its broadest avenues, The Causeway and The Diamond.

[5] The figures on the plinth depict three soldiers, one of whom is wounded and is being attended by a nurse; a seated woman cradling a group of infants; a girl with her brother; and a Boy Scout.

[11] And they were not to the taste of the company's architect, James Lomax-Simpson who thought the composition was too complicated, and would have preferred something "more straightforward, more symbolical and monumental".

[8] The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner considered that it is a memorial that is "genuinely moving and which avoids sentimentality".