LORD LEVERHULME

Star (Christchurch), Issue 20044, 6 September 1920, Page 6

LORD LEVERHULME

RICHEST MAN IN ENGLAND. A recent list of new British peerages shows that during the last forty years four hundred and thirty-three titles of nobility have been bestowed by eight Premiers—for though the King is nominally the “ fountain of honour,” it is really the Prime Minister who selects the recipients. The new peers came from all the arts, crafts, and trades, so that the House of Lords can hardly be said, nowadays, to represent the old feudal families. Lord ■ Devonport represents groceries; Lords Iveagh and Hindlip represent beer, and Lord Leverhulme represents soap. Leverhulme is probably the richest man in England. He is better known as Sir 'William Lever, of Port Sunlight. Ho was made a ; baronet in 1911 and a peer in 1917; is sixty-eight years of I age j-began his career as an errand boy j in his father’s grocery shop at Bolton, a mill town in Lancashire; was a commercial traveller at twenty-two, and has. j his oaaTi soapAvorks at Port Sunlight iin 1890. When the Avar came, he also had Avorks in Brussels, at Mannheim in Germany, and’at Olten in SAvitzerland, Avith branches as far afield as Boston, Toronto and Sydney. Port Sunlight, across the Mersey from Liverpool, is a model toAvn occupied exclusively by Lover employees. Lyverville, on the Congo, is another toAvn he oAvns, and besides he has bought two islands in the Pacific. In 1913 he purchased Stafford House, the London homo of the Duke of Sutherland, and presented it to the nation hs a museum for London antiquities. He Avanted jit called Lever House, but London j laughed, and finally compromised by j calling; it Lancaster House. During the last two or three years, ' when so many of the old English and Scottish estates have been in the mar- . ket, Leverhulme has become one of the most extensive landoAvner in Great Britain. His largest single purchase Avas the island ui LcAvis, one of the Hebrides, which has an area of nearly half a million acres and a population of • about thirty thousand people. LeAvis once belonged to the kings of Norway, hut was seized bv the Mac Donalds, passed into the hands of Clan M’Lcocl. and eventually fell to the Seaforths. 11l luck, according to Scottish, legend, ever followed the Seaforths Aintil they ,sold the island, eighty years ago, for a million dollars to the late Sir James Mathgson, Avho spent two millions more in building a groat house’ on it, StoruoAvay Castle. What Lovorimlme paid Mathcson’a heirs for the lordship of Lewis has nob been stated, but it is understood that he aims to : make the island a part of his great international fishery syndicate. That tlie islanders are not in entire sympathy , with his plans is sboAvn by agrarian out- ' breaks and raids reported from' Stornoway. The crofters and fishermen seem to have revolted against the new oavuer’s inroads on old customs.

Increases in the cost of telephone "material were quoted .in a lecture at Canterbury College on Saturday night, as follows; Marline cable hangers. 80 per cent; cable rings, i(K) per c-cul; uauqs, per cent-; copper sleeves, LU per cent, “in laet,” said the lecturer, " there is an all-round increase to thn trade of just under 50 per cent,”