William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme Quotes

William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme 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 Belgian 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. Wikipedia  

✵ 19. September 1851 – 7. May 1925
William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme photo
William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme: 6   quotes 0   likes

Famous William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme Quotes

“Aye, nay, we won't argue: you're wrong.”

William Lever, quoted in: Adam Macqueen (2011) The King Of Sunlight: How William Lever Cleaned Up The World. Phrase he often used with employees — and he never changed his mind.

“Half my advertising is wasted but I do not know which half.”

Lord Leverhulme, as cited in: John Sherman Wright, ‎John E. Mertes (1974), Advertising's role in society, p. 78
This quote has also been attributed to John Wanamaker and George Washington Hill

“It is my hope, and my brother’s hope… to build houses in which our work-people will be able to live and see comfortable. Semi-detached houses, with gardens back and front, in which they will be able to know more about the science of life than they can in a back slum, and in which they will learn that there is more enjoyment in life than a mere going to and returning from work, and looking forward to Saturday night to draw their wages.”

Messrs. Lever’s New Soap Works, Port Sunlight, Cheshire. Full Reports of the Ceremony of Cutting the First Sod, and Proceedings at the Inaugural Banquet, 1888, pp.28-29; Cited in: Viscount William Hulme Lever Leverhulme, ‎William Hulme Lever Leverhulme (2d viscount) (1927). Viscount Leverhulme, p. 49

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