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Lord Leverhulme was a grocer's son, He learned to sell when he was young, And all the tune that he could play Was "Advertising Makes It Pay" Over the hills and across the skies, By God it pays to advertise.*
At a curve in London's Thames Embankment, midway between the Houses of Parliament and the Tower, stands a massive granite pile, boldly convex. Its 16 grey Ionic columns give an impression of opulent security worthy of a king's exchequer. This is Unilever House. In front stands a statue of Queen Victoria, symbol of Empire. The juxtaposition is apt. For Unilever House is an empire within the Empire, the greatest industrial realm in the British world.
It all grew from a yellow soap bearing the trademarked name "Sunlight." To sell it, the Lancashire grocer's son flooded England with ads asking a magic question: "Why does a woman look old sooner than a man?" No one ever answered that.
But the million-times repeated question made William Hesketh Lever England's biggest soapmaker.
Soon "Sunlight" was shining around the world, and the grocer's son was a peer, Lord Leverhulme (pronounced leave-er-hume), Viscount of the Western Isles. By the time brusque, autocratic, globetrotting Lord Leverhulme † died in 1925, his mercantile empire was well on its way to preeminence. By last week it had few equals anywhere in size, prosperity, diversity and complexity.
Now, functioning as Lever Brothers & Unilever Ltd. (with a British-controlled twin in The Netherlands, Lever Brothers & Unilever N.V.), this private empire is a prime bulwark of Britain's reconstruction economy. As it waxes or wanes, so will much of the economic life of the Empire grow stronger or weaker. Through more than 400 subsidiaries operating more than 800 factories in 37 countries (notable exception: Soviet Russia), Unilever dominates the world's soap and margarine businesses. It also sells ice cream, baby food, rubber, cocoa, salad oil, lye, paper, candles, copra, perfume, toothpaste, vitamins, fish, silks, cattle cake, fertilizer.
It operates two million acres of palm-oil plantations in the Belgian Congo, 300,000 acres of coconut plantations in the Solomon Islands. It has its own freighter service between West Africa and England, sends three fleets of its own trawlers into the North Sea for fish (until midway in World War II, Unilever operated 17 of the world's fastest whalers).
For good measure, Unilever controls the Lipton Tea Co., has exclusive rights to use Bird's Eye frozen-food processes outside the U.S., runs a General Motors agency in the Union of South Africa. At the model town of Port Sunlight, near Liverpool, Unilever runs the world's largest private printing press, the world's largest private dock, has built acres of Tudor-style, neatly landscaped cottages for workers. They get a guaranteed wage from Lever, have their children educated by Lever, their doctor bills paid by Lever —and are buried by Lever.
From all these activities, imperial Unilever last year grossed a staggering $1,200,000,000.