Chocolate Wars: From Cadbury to Kraft: 200 years of Sweet Success and Bitter Rivalry. Deborah Cadbury
whose intensity of focus and air of concentration is not relaxed even for the photographer. ‘I fixed my eye on those who had won,’ George admitted later. ‘It was no use studying failure.’ He had, said his friends, ‘boundless ambition’. And he needed it. The family firm was haemorrhaging money.
By chance, Walter White toured the Bridge Street factory, and has left a vivid account of what it was like in 1852. Leaving behind the storehouse crammed with sacks of raw cocoa beans from the Caribbean, he entered a room that blazed with heat and noise: the roasting chamber. With its four vast rotating ovens, ‘the prime mover in this comfortable process of roasting was a 20 horse steam engine’.
After this, ‘with a few turns of the whizzing apparatus’, the husk was removed by the ‘ceaseless blast from a furious fan’ and the cocoa, ‘now with a very tempting appearance’, was taken for more ‘intimate treatment’. This occurred in a room where ‘shafts, wheels and straps kept a number of strange looking machines in busy movement’. Following yet more pressing and pounding, finally a rich, frothing chocolate mixture flowed, ‘leisurely like a stream of half frozen treacle’. This was formed into a rich cocoa cake which was shaved to a coarse powder ready for mixing with liquid for drinking. Upstairs, White found himself in a room where management ‘had put on its pleasantest expression’. The female employees, all dressed in clean white Holland pinafores, were ‘packing as busily as hands could work. No girl is employed,’ he added, ‘who is not of a known good moral character.’ Such a factory, he concluded, was ‘a school of morality and industry’.
Cadbury’s cocoa works at Bridge Street, Birmingham, in the mid-nineteenth century.
But almost ten years had passed since Walter White’s visit, and the ‘school of morality and industry’ had been quietly dying of neglect. George Cadbury was quick to appraise the desperate situation. ‘Only eleven girls were now employed. The consumption of raw cocoa was so small that what we now have on the premises would have lasted about 300 years,’ he wrote. ‘The business was rapidly vanishing.’
During the spring of 1861, George and Richard wrestled with their options. Pacing the length of the roasting room in the evenings, the four giant rotating ovens motionless, the dying embers of the coke fire beneath them faintly glowing, the brothers could see no simple solution. George had harboured hopes of developing a career as a doctor. Should he now join his brother in the battle to save the family chocolate business? Or close the factory? Would they be able to succeed, where their own father had failed?
It was their father, John, who had proudly shown Walter White around the factory in 1852. In the intervening years he had been almost completely broken by the death of his wife, Candia. John had watched her struggle against consumption for several years, her small frame helpless against the onslaught of micro-organisms unknown to Victorian science. Equipped only with prayers and willpower, he took her to the coast hoping the fresh air would revive her, and brought in the best doctors.
But nothing could save her. By 1854, Candia had gratefully succumbed to her bath chair. Eventually she was unable to leave home, and then her room. ‘The last few months she was indeed sweet and precious,’ wrote John helplessly. When the end came in March 1855, ‘Death was robbed of all terror for her,’ he told his children. ‘It was swallowed up in victory and her last moments were sweet repose.’ Yet as the weeks following her death turned into months John failed to recover from his overwhelming loss. He was afflicted by a painful and disabling form of arthritis, and took long trips away from home in search of a cure. After years of diminishing interest in his cocoa business, Cadbury’s products deteriorated, its workforce declined and its reputation suffered.
Richard and George knew their father’s cocoa works was the smallest of some thirty manufacturers that were trying to develop a market in England for the exotic New World commodity. No one had yet uncovered the key to making a fortune from the little bean imported from the New World. There was no concept of mass-produced chocolate confectionery. In the mid-nineteenth century, the cocoa bean was almost invariably consumed as a drink. Since there was no easy way of separating the fatty cocoa oils, which made up to 50 per cent of the bean, from the rest, it was visibly oily, the fats rising to the surface. Indeed, it often seemed that the novelty of purchasing this strange product was more thrilling than drinking it.
John Cadbury, like his rivals, followed the established convention of mixing cocoa with starchy ingredients to absorb the cocoa butter. As his business had declined, the proportion of these cheaper materials had increased. ‘At the time we made a cocoa drink of which we were not very proud,’ recalled George Cadbury. ‘Only one fifth of it was cocoa – the rest was potato flour or sago and treacle: a comforting gruel.’
This ‘gruel’ was sold to the public under names such as Cocoa Paste, Soluble Chocolate Powder, Best Chocolate Powder, Fine Crown, Best Plain, Plain, Rock Cocoa, Penny Chocolate and Penny Soluble Chocolate. Customers did not buy it in the form of a powder but as a fatty paste, made up into a block or cake. To make a drink at home, they chipped or flaked bits off the block into a cup and added hot water, or if they could afford it, milk. It is a measure of how badly the Cadbury cocoa business was faring that three-quarters of the Bridge Street factory’s trade came from tea and coffee sales.
Although promoted as a health drink, cocoa had a mixed reputation. Unscrupulous traders sometimes coloured it with brick dust and added other questionable products not entirely without problems for the digestive system: a pigment called umber, iron filings or even poisons like vermilion and red lead. Such dishonest dealers also found that the expensive cocoa butter could be stretched a little further with the addition of olive or almond oil, or even animal fats such as veal. The unwary customer could find himself purchasing a drink which could not only turn rancid, but was actually harmful.
While the prospects for the family business in 1861 did not look hopeful, the alternatives for Richard and George were limited. Quakers, like all non-conformists, were legally banned from Oxford and Cambridge, the only teaching universities in England at the time. As pacifists, they could not join the armed services. Nor were they permitted to stand as Members of Parliament, and they faced restrictions in other professions such as the law. As a result, many Quakers turned to the world of business, but here too the Society of Friends laid down strict guidelines.
In a Quaker community, a struggling business was a liability. Failing to honour a business agreement or falling into debt was seen as a form of theft, and was punished severely. If the cocoa works went under owing money Richard and George would face the censure of the Quaker movement; at the worst, they could be disowned completely and treated as outcasts. Quite apart from these strict Quaker rules, in Victorian society business failure and bankruptcy could lead to the debtors’ prison or the dreaded workhouse, either of which could lead to an early grave.
Ahead was a battle in which defeat was all too possible. The brothers did not have to dedicate themselves to this struggling enterprise, with its cramped premises in which their offices were scarcely bigger than coffins. ‘It would have been far easier to start a new business, than to pull up a decayed one which had a bad name,’ George said later, looking back on his life. ‘The prospect seemed a hopeless one, but we were young and full of energy.’
George Cadbury in 1861, aged twenty-one, at the time that he took over the failing factory at Bridge Street.
Richard Cadbury in 1861, aged twenty-six.
To the remaining employees of the company, who now had reason to fear for their jobs, ‘Mr Richard’ appeared jovial, relaxed and ‘always smiling’, while ‘Mr George’ was cut from a different cloth, ‘stern but very just’. His unremitting self-discipline and his ability to focus every aspect of his life on one goal became legendary. ‘He was not a man,’ a colleague later observed, ‘but a purpose.’ And what George and Richard decided to do next would become the stuff of family legend.