DLA096-0077  Transcription

Review of Reviews, 15 [illegible date]

THE LATE LORD LEVERHULME.

Mr. Harold Spender, who was a neighbour of the late Lord Leverhulme at Hampstead, contributes a sketch of him to the Contemporary Review. He says:

He was at his best when he was talking of his workpeople at Port Sunlight. He loved his people. After all, he had lived their life himself. He was proud of his origins. I heard him once give an account of his success to our little literary club, The Whitefriars. “I travelled for my father in soap. Other people’s soap. They took half the profits. So it suddenly occurred to me—’Why not make the soap ourselves?’ I asked my father if I could do so in the backyard.” His father assented and there, in that little backyard in Bolton, were the beginnings of Sunlight Soap. He never quite lost this spirit of adventure and initiative. He never relapsed into the rich man’s habit of repose. His motto was: “On, and always on.”

Last time I visited him he took me down to see his ballroom—a long room with a swinging floor, which he had built partly for himself. Two young ladies had come to stay, chiefly for him to dance with. He clasped one of them and proceeded to march down the long room with the solemn two-step of these days, rigid, precise, very serious. He was not a dancer. He lacked the genius of easy movement. He took dancing as a duty—fatal! He gave his body no rest. He was as cruel to it as St. Francis. He defied death, that oldest of fighters, with its unbroken record of victories. He had no intention to die when death took him. All his talk was about the future. He intended to live on. Well! Perhaps that is the best way to approach the remorseless river. “It had to come. I lived my life.” I can hear him saying it.

He collected a large and interesting gallery of pictures at his Hampstead house, although I never felt quite confident as to several. A fine portrait of himself by De Laszlo [6043] looked down the full length of his ballroom. His rough treatment of the Orpen and John pictures really showed his view of modern English portraiture. He could never understand the modern artist’s idea of seizing a portrait commission as an opportunity of insulting the victim. It clashed with his sense of trade. He paid the artists; it was their business to do their best for him. If not, he hit back, for he was ever a fighter.

MD

02/02/2008