Curtain Up on Sophie’s Second Act 

Port Sunlight’s village dramatic society had been based at the Gladstone Hall since it was established in 1894. In 1921, they renamed themselves The Port Sunlight Player and Sophie became an important member; writing, performing, organising performances, and serving as the society’s chair. Theatre also became key to the charitable and fundraising activities she was heavily involved in. During the Second World War she chaired a group that brought together all the dramatic societies in the area to stage fundraising entertainments in aid of troops and families affected by the war. Further afield, Sophie was involved in Liverpool’s theatre. Her one-act comedy An Empress Intrudes - written under the pen name of George Hewitt – was produced at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1925. Sophie’s significance to Port Sunlight’s theatre was memorialised in the Sophie Somers trophy, awarded at Unilever’s drama festivals during the mid twentieth century.

The wide range of theatrical, public, and civic activities Sophie Somers was involved in also brought her in regular close contact with the Lever family. When the Bebington Soroptimists were founded in 1945, Freda Leverhulme (William Hulme’s second wife) was elected vice president to Sophie’s president. More familiar for most were the village pantomimes written by Sophie and William Hulme Lever during the 1930s. Staged annually at the Gladstone Hall, they became a Port Sunlight tradition. The scripts and photographs that remain are still funny, packed with in-jokes about people, places, and activities targeted at the local community, and with wider political and social commentaries. Sophie was - for several years - the lead writer on the shows, with William Hulme contributing songs and some content. As the decade progressed, Lever became more involved, with the two taking a block of time in the Summer to write the script for each Christmas event.

For Sophie Somers Port Sunlight’s theatre offered a way to develop a public professional identity. As a single, professional woman it also likely offered a sense of community outside of the office. The early twentieth century was the age of personality; in business and in the wider world. A consistent strand in records, accounts, and images of Sophie Somers is her charismatic personality, and particularly her sense of humour. Reviews of her stage roles and writing, including one in The Stage, record that she was funny - a particularly strong comic performer and writer of comedies. On- and off- stage, she was – it seems –skilled at telling a good story and cracking a good joke, and these were talents she used in her later professional and public life as a public speaker and BBC broadcaster on Women’s Hour and Make Do and Mend. Reports tell us of her ‘easy manner, very witty turn of phrase and pleasantly modulated voice’ that kept her listeners engaged and laughing during the regular after dinner speeches she gave to local groups. Sources of these comic speeches were often stories of the factory’s people and events. As ‘Sonia’ her factory magazine articles were funny, warm, compassionate responses to the demands of everyday life for women in the aftermath of the Second World War.

When Sophie Somers retired from Lever Bros in 1947, the two-page article on her life and career in the factory magazine was entitled – simply – ‘Sophie’. There was no need for her surname. People knew who she was. In 1965, an article in The Liverpool Echo stated that in Sophie Somers we can find ‘one of the most outstanding figures in Port Sunlight history’. Her obituary made the front page of The Birkenhead News. Seventy-five years later, she has more-or-less disappeared from history. But her story is important, because it offers a glimpse of how significant women leaders and theatre were in Lever’s factory and village and helps us better understand their rich, entangled business, social and cultural histories.