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Lord Leverhulme is the most familiar name of William Hesketh Lever, a British Industrialist who was created 1st Viscount Leverhulme.
Lord Leverhulme was born in Bolton, Lancashire in 1851. In 1886 he established a soap manufacturing company called Lever Brothers (now part of Unilever) with his brother James, which was one of the first companies to manufacture soap from vegetable oils and produced a great fortune. He died in 1925.
Lord Leverhulme is best remembered as a philanthropist. He created the model industrial town of Port Sunlight near Liverpool, which is the home of the Lady Lever Art Gallery; endowed a school of tropical medicine at Liverpool University; gifted Lancaster House in London to the British nation; and endowed the Leverhulme Trust. The garden of his former London residence Hill Garden in Hampstead, is open to the public.
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