Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry. Deborah Cadbury

      Horse-drawn omnibuses carried the Cadbury brothers’ first poster campaign.

      While pressing on with the launch of Cocoa Essence, the Cadbury brothers also followed Fry’s lead with experimental types of eating chocolate. Their father, John Cadbury, had tested out a French eating chocolate before, but now that they had a large volume of creamy cocoa butter as a by-product of their pure cocoa drink they could dramatically increase the manufacture of eating chocolate. Rather than mimic Fry’s rough chocolate bar, Richard and George wanted something altogether more luxurious. They found that when the excess cocoa butter was mixed with sugar and then cocoa liquor was folded back into the mix, it produced a superior dark chocolate bar. Then they went one step further. They wanted to launch a new concept that they hoped would bring the exotic products of the French chocolatier to the popular market. Richard called it the Fancy Box.

      Had the Cadbury brothers not been in charge of a chocolate factory that was still faltering slightly, the lavish contents of the Fancy Box would undoubtedly have violated their principles. It represented the most un-Quakerly immoderation and extravagance. Generations of Quakers before them had maintained a beady-eyed vigilance in the pursuit of ‘truth and plainness’. The senses on no account were to be indulged; the path to God demanded a numbing restraint and self-denial. But Richard and George, the apparently devout Quakers, had come up with the ultimate in wanton and idle pleasure. For each Fancy Box was a sensual delight.

      The lid opened to release the richest of scents, the chocolate fumes inviting the recipient with overwhelming urgency to trifle among the luxurious contents as a whiff of almond marzipan, a hint of orange, rich chocolate truffle, strawberries from a June garden encrusted with thick chocolate beguiled the very air, all begging to be crushed between tongue and palate. Each one had a French-sounding name, adding yet more forbidden naughtiness: Chocolat du Mexique, Chocolat des Délices aux Fruits, and more.

      It is ironic that George and Richard dreamed up these chocolate indulgences at a point when their own lives had become most Spartan. ‘At that time I was spending about 25 pounds a year for travelling, clothes, charities and everything else,’ George wrote. ‘My brother had married, and at the end of five years he only had 150 pounds. If I had married, there would have been no Bournville today, it was just the money I saved by living so sparely that carried us over the crisis.’ It is arguable that the brothers’ unremitting self-denial fuelled their appreciation of sensual extravagance.

      In the pursuit of plainness, Quakers spurned most artistic endeavour as a worldly distraction that could divert them from the inner calm that led to God. As a result George and Richard’s father never allowed a piano in the house, and had given up learning his treasured flute. Any form of aesthetic enjoyment, such as theatre or reading novels, was discouraged; only texts of a suitably thoughtful tone such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Foxe’s Book of Martyrs were acceptable. As for painting, this was considered a superfluous indulgence that could lead a Quaker astray with a false appreciation of something ‘worthless and base’. But now Richard overturned these rigid rules. Revelling in exuberant splashes of colour, he began a series of paintings himself to be pasted on the covers of the Fancy Box.

      Richard had travelled to Switzerland and made sketches of the Alpine scenery. Now these drawings, along with images of the seaside and even his own children, formed the basis of his designs, which were chosen to appeal to Victorian sentimentality. His own young daughter Jessie loved to pose with her favourite kitten. ‘Among the pictorial novelties introduced to the trade this season, few if any excel the illustration on Messrs Cadbury’s four ounce box of chocolate crèmes,’ enthused the Birmingham Gazette on 8 January 1869. ‘It is chaste yet simple, and consists of a blue eyed maiden some six summers old, neatly dressed in a muslin frock, trimmed with lace, nursing a cat.’ To strike a real note of luxury, Richard decided that some of the Fancy Boxes should be covered in velvet, lined with silk, and include a mirror. In every way, Cadbury’s chocolate was to stand for quality. The reviewer writing for the Chemist and Druggist magazine of 15 December 1870 was certainly won over. ‘Divine,’ he declared. ‘The most exquisite chocolate ever to come under our notice.’

      It was one thing to dream up recipes for the Fancy Box, but quite another to mass-produce them. ‘When I think how we were cramped up in small rooms at Bridge Street,’ recalled Bertha Fackrell of the Top Cream room, ‘the wonder is to me now that we turned out the work as well as we did.’ A lack of space was the least of their problems. ‘Oh the job we had to cool the work!’ Bertha continued. Although there were small cupboards with ventilators around the room, all too often when staff from the box room came to collect the crèmes and chocolate balls they were still too warm. ‘I remember once we girls put our work on the window sill to cool when someone accidentally knocked the whole lot down into the yard below.’

      Sales of the Fancy Boxes increased, and gradually more staff were hired. One new worker, the crème beater T.J. O’Brien, was amazed to find the owners grafting with the workers. ‘During these trying times I never knew men to work harder than our masters who indeed were more like fathers to us,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes they were working in the manufactory, then packing in the warehouse, then again all over the country getting orders.’ O’Brien’s work beating the crèmes was heavy, and ‘often Mr George and Mr Richard would come and give me a help’.

      But for all their hard work, reward was not to come easily to the Cadbury brothers. For Richard, busy pouring all his energy into the factory, the enjoyment of success, so longed for, so hard won, was wiped away. His adored wife Elizabeth died at Christmastime in 1868, ten days after giving birth to their fourth child. Suddenly his achievements seemed as nothing. The very centre of his family was gone.

      At thirty-three, Richard was left with four very young children. Barrow was the oldest at six, followed by Jessie, who was three, one-year-old William and the new baby, named after Richard. ‘He was everything to our baby lives,’ said Jessie of her father. ‘I can well remember riding on his shoulders and going to him with all our troubles.’ However pressed Richard was at work she recalled, ‘He was so much to us always.’ The loss of his wife, in a Quaker household, required ‘humble submission to God’s will’. The children learned fortitude from their father. For Jessie, the certainty of her father’s love made her feel ‘it was worth braving anything’.

      Perhaps because Richard grew much closer to his children after their mother’s death, during the spring of 1869 he found the time to set up a crèche for poor or abandoned children and infants in the neighbourhood, renting a house for the purpose and enlisting the help of a friend, the motherly and highly competent Emma Wilson. Mrs Wilson had been widowed seven years earlier, and had managed to earn an income and raise seven children on her own. She became indispensable, not only in the nursery but also by helping out with Richard’s children at their home in Wheeley’s Road.

      Sometimes Richard’s children accompanied him to his office. Barrow had a vivid memory of going to Bridge Street with his father, and delighting in watching boxes being unloaded from the colonies. ‘One day a large boa constrictor emerged and was chased by two men who held it down with sugar and cocoa bags,’ he recalled. ‘It was a revelation that the boa constrictor could bend its body with such force whatever the strain.’ When the frightened boy fled to the Cocoa Essence sieving room, he was soon discovered, ‘and given a lecture on the impropriety of being there’. Hygiene was all-important; no leniency was given even when hiding from a boa constrictor.

      Although the Cadbury brothers’ financial position had improved, they could not yet feel secure. None of their capital remained. Their livelihood and their future depended on the public buying their confections, charmed by an image of a blonde, blue-eyed girl holding a kitten and smiling sweetly from the lid of a chocolate box.