Identity area
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Authorized form of name
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Description area
Dates of existence
History
William Hesketh Lever was born and educated in Bolton, Lancashire. He started working in the family grocery business as a young man and his talent for marketing increased the success of the firm dramatically. The Sunlight and Lux brands are soap are among the products associated with him, as well as the Port Sunlight complex of factories and workers' accommodation that he built in Cheshire. Some of his other ventures, including attepts to develop the fishing industry in the Outer Hebrides and the palm oil industry in the Belgian Congo, were less successful. Lever served briefly as Liberal MP for the Wirral, Cheshire, between 1906 and 1909. He was created a baronet in 1911 and became Baron Leverhulme in 1917; the peerage was raised to a viscountcy in 1922.