Knight of the Bath

William Hesketh Lever married Elizabeth Ellen Hulme in 1874. In 1917, four years after her death, he was elevated to the peerage and took the title Lord (Viscount) Leverhulme. Last week, he died in London of pneumonia, aged 74. He left behind him a catenation of businesses ' capitalized at -L-56,627,000 ($275,000,000) and one son, William Hulme Lever, Viscount Leverhulme.

At 16, Mr. Lever came out of the sooty town of Bolton, Lancashire, where he was born, and entered the soap business for life. He began as a soap cutter, rose to a white collar job, married, did not settle down, but acquired an insignificant factory. He began to advertise. Soon Britishers began buying his soap rather than another's. Presently non-Britishers began to buy. Eventually millions of women felt the necessity of Lux, Lifebuoy, Welcome or Sunlight.

Then began the idyl of Port Sunlight near Liverpool. This was a tract of some 462 acres on which he erected gaunt old-English houses with red tile roofs, latticed windows, gardens. These he rented at $2 a month to his employes, with whom he also shared his profits and from whom he required only six hours of daily toil.

Meanwhile, his requirements went out to the ends of the earth. Explorers invaded the African jungles for new vegetable oils. Whalers ranged the seas. Pith-helmeted men grew coconuts. Tars skippered his freighters.

And if he hacked his portrait by Augustus John in order to fit it into his safe; and if he refused to pay Sir William Orpen the full contract price of a portrait because it did not include his legs -- surely he was still one of the greatest of England's new great.

The most significant commentary on his labor policy was that he him self worked 16 hours a day or nearly that. He kept himself in the pink of condition. His last adventure was a trip to Africa on a yacht which was specially equipped with gymnasium, including an electric horse. When, after his return, he fell ill in London, no one was alarmed. The first Viscount Leverhulme was not as other men. Yet he died.