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the avanti group In the latest of our series commemorating the life and work of people honoured with blue plaques, Adam Sonin explores the fascinating history of soap manufacturer and philanthropist William Lever. Soap-boiler, social reformer, MP, tribal chieftain, multi-millionaire and Lord of the Western Isles. He employed workmen from the Mersey to the Congo and they all called him 'Chief'. His peers knew him as William Lever, later to become first Viscount Leverhulme. When he was made a Baronet in 1911 he chose the motto Mutare Vel Timere Sperno: "I spurn to change or fear." Throughout his life his favourite novel was Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1850). He owned a string of grand houses packed full of antiques, artworks and treasures, all "guarded" by tiger-skin rugs. He was known to often sleep outdoors, in all weathers, and on a simple iron bed. Evelyn Waugh, a near neighbour, described his house, then under construction, as "Italianite". His model village, Port Sunlight, near his soapworks in Birkenhead, ranks alongside Henrietta Barnett's Hampstead Garden Suburb as one of England's great experiments in town planning. Barnett was also a near neighbour. The food manufacturer, Sir Angus Watson (1874-1961), described him as "thickset in stature, with a sturdy body set on short legs and a massive head covered with thick, upstanding hair, he radiated force and energy". Sir Angus continued: "He had piercing, blue-grey eyes which, however, flashed with challenge when he was angry," and "the short neck and closely-set ears of a prize-fighter". William Hesketh Lever, first Viscount Leverhulme (1851-1925), soap manufacturer and philanthropist, was born on 19 September, at 16 Wood Street, Bolton. Seven years earlier, writing in The Condition Of The Working Class In England, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) described the town as "one of the worst in Britain... badly and irregularly built, with foul courts, lanes and back al