William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme

English industrialist, philanthropist, and politician

Date of Birth: 19-Sep-1851

Place of Birth: Bolton, England, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 07-May-1925

Profession: businessperson, politician

Zodiac Sign: Virgo


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About William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme

  • William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (; 19 September 1851 – 7 May 1925) was an English industrialist, philanthropist, and politician.
  • Having been educated at a small private school until the age of nine, then at church schools until he was fifteen; a somewhat privileged education for that time, he started work at his father's wholesale grocery business in Bolton.
  • Following an apprenticeship and a series of appointments in the family business, which he successfully expanded, he began manufacturing Sunlight Soap, building a substantial business empire with many well-known brands such as Lux and Lifebuoy.
  • In 1886, together with his brother, James, he established Lever Brothers, which was one of the first companies to manufacture soap from vegetable oils, and which is now part of the Anglo-Dutch transnational business Unilever.
  • In politics, Lever briefly sat as a Liberal MP for Wirral and later, as Lord Leverhulme, in the House of Lords as a Peer.
  • He was an advocate for expansion of the British Empire, particularly in Africa and Asia, which supplied palm oil, a key ingredient in Lever's product line.
  • His firm had become associated with forced labour and atrocities in the Belgium Congo by 1911.An aspiring patron of the arts, Lever began collecting artworks in 1893 when he bought a painting by Edmund Leighton.
  • 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.
  • Lever's response was to acquire similarly illustrative works, and he later bought 'The New Frock' by William Powell Frith to promote the Sunlight soap brand.
  • In 1922 he founded the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight in Cheshire which he dedicated to his late wife Elizabeth.

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