Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (3 page)

But almost ten years had passed since Walter White’s visit, and the “school of morality and industry” had been quietly dying of neglect. Twenty-one-year-old 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 harbored 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 in 1852. But in the intervening years, he had been almost completely broken by the death of his wife, Candia. John had watched Candia’s struggle against consumption for several years, her small frame helpless against the onslaught of microorganisms as yet 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 she was confined to 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 started to suffer from 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, their workforce declined, and their reputation suffered.

Richard and George knew that their father’s cocoa works was the smallest of some thirty manufacturers who 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 bewitching little bean imported from the New World. There was no concept of mass-produced chocolate confectionary. In the mid-nineteenth century, the cocoa bean was almost invariably consumed as a drink. Since there was no easy way to separate the fatty cocoa oils, which made up to 50 percent of the bean, from the rest of the bean, 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.

Their father, like his rivals, followed the established convention of mixing cocoa with starchy ingredients to absorb the cocoa butter. As their business had declined, the volume of these cheaper materials had increased. “At the time we made a cocoa drink of which we were not very proud,” recalls George Cadbury. “Only one fifth of it was cocoa—the rest was potato flour or sago and treacle: a comforting gruel.”

This “gruel” sold to the public under names that were common at the time for cocoa dealers such as Cocoa Paste, Soluble Chocolate Powder, Best Chocolate Powder, Fine Crown, Best Plain, Plain, Rock Cocoa, Penny Chocolate, or even Penny Soluble Chocolate. Customers
did not buy it in the form of a powder but as a fatty paste made 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 milk if they could afford it. It is a measure of how badly the Cadbury cocoa business was faring that three-quarters of their trade from the Bridge Street factory came from tea and coffee sales.

Although promoted as a health drink, cocoa had a mixed reputation. Unscrupulous traders sometimes colored 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 that could turn rancid and was actually harmful.

Although the prospects for the business in 1861 did not look hopeful, the alternatives for Richard and George were limited. As Quakers, higher education was not an option for them. Like all nonconformists, they were legally banned from Oxford and Cambridge, the only teaching universities in England at the time. As pacifists, Quakers could not join the armed services. Nor were they permitted to stand as members of Parliament, and they faced restrictions on 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 honor a business agreement or falling into debt was seen as a form of theft and punished severely. If the cocoa works went under owing money to creditors, Richard and George would face the censure of the Quaker movement or, worse, they would be disowned completely and treated as outcasts within their circle. Quite apart from these strict Quaker rules, in Victorian society business failure and bankruptcy could lead to the debtors’ prison or the dreaded poorhouse, either option raising the prospect of an early grave.

Ahead was a battle. Defeat was all too possible. The brothers did not have to dedicate themselves to this small space, with their offices
scarcely bigger than a coffin. “It would have been far easier to start a new business, than to pull up a decayed one which had a bad name,” George admitted. “The prospect seemed a hopeless one, but we were young and full of energy.”

To the remaining employees 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.

R
ichard and George Cadbury were the third generation of Cadbury tradesmen in Birmingham. It was their grandfather, Richard Tapper Cadbury, who had been instrumental in breaking centuries of long association with the West Country and leading the family in a new direction as shopkeepers in the town. At the close of the eighteenth century, as Napoleon prepared for his long march over Europe, the Cadburys, like countless others at the time, exemplified the Britain that the French leader dismissed as a mere “nation of shopkeepers.” And just as Napoleon’s scathing remark underestimated his enemy’s real wealth and capacity for war, so it was easy not to see the huge potential emerging from a new generation of shopkeepers whose connections were only just beginning to reach out across the world.

“Very little is known of his early life,” writes Richard of his grandfather. “He left home in Exeter when he was fourteen on the top of the coach . . . to serve as an apprentice to a draper.” The young Richard Tapper remembered the morning of his leaving: “My father and mother got up early to see me off by the stage . . . and I thought my heart would break.”

Richard Tapper was apprenticed in 1782 to a draper 150 miles away in Kent who supplied army uniforms to troops fighting in the American War of Independence. Within a year the war ended, troops were demobilized, and the business went bankrupt. Richard
Tapper then secured another opening as an apprentice in Gloucester, where, by the age of nineteen, he was proud to receive wages of £20 a year. After “scrupulously and conscientiously” avoiding any “unnecessary gratification,” he reassured his parents in Exeter, it was possible for him to pay for his own washing and “appear so respectable as to be invited as guest among the first families of Gloucester.” His next move was to London to work for a linen draper and silk dealer in Gracechurch Street. His wages eventually rose to £40 a year, which not only enabled him “to maintain a respectable appearance” but also to “purchase many books.”

After ten long years mastering the trade, Richard Tapper was longing to start a draper’s business of his own. He was dissuaded from his youthful dream of sailing for America by a family friend who warned him “that the country is still far from settled.” Nor could he seek adventures in Europe with France in the frenzied grip of Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and at war with its neighbors. So in 1794, equipped with enthusiasm and, through the Quaker network, quite a few references, Richard Tapper took the stage to Birmingham with a friend, Joseph Rutter. They had heard of an opening for a “Linen Draper and Silk Mercer” in the town and seized their chance.

The draper’s shop was soon successful enough for Richard Tapper to buy out his partner and start a family. He married Elizabeth Head in 1796 and seven children followed over the next seven years. Elizabeth still found time to help in the shop, dressing the windows with fine silks and linens and taking an interest in the changing fashions. One year, they were obliged to enlarge their front door to accommodate the fashion for puffed “gigot” sleeves, strengthened with feather pads or whalebone hoops. Records show that Richard Tapper’s business was so successful that in 1816 a second shop at 85 Bull Street was also registered in his name.

Like many Victorians, the young Richard Cadbury had a fascination with family history and compiled a “family book” on his ancestors complete with news cuttings, sketches, and Quaker records. This provided a vivid portrait of his grandfather’s life. One of the problems Richard Tapper had to deal with in his shop was theft. After repeatedly losing silk that cost up to twelve shillings a yard, he felt he
had to take action but soon came to regret it. He stopped a woman in his shop who had two rolls of silk hidden under her cloak. When he went to court to hear the outcome, to his alarm the judge sentenced the woman to death. “I was appalled,” Richard Tapper told his children years later, “for I never realised what the sentence would be. Without delay I posted to London, saw the Secretary of State and got the woman’s sentence commuted to transportation.”

As a Quaker, Richard Tapper became deeply involved in community affairs and served on the Board of Commissioners for Birmingham, a precursor to the Town Council. He also worked as an Overseer of the Poor, including during the troubled year of 1800 when the harvest failed. According to the
St. James Chronicle
, the price of bread on October 8 rose to nearly two shillings for one loaf. In the parish of Birmingham, the poor were in dread of starvation, “the distress in the town was great,” and there was “an alarming disorder” in the workhouse. Richard Tapper was among those who tried to ensure that there was enough food.

Richard Tapper’s shop prospered, and his garden in the back of Bull Street was “a favourite place” for his growing family “with currants in abundance, flowers and a vine.” The accounts of Richard’s children are of particular personal interest since my own branch of the family can be traced to his oldest son, Benjamin, born in 1798. According to the
Birmingham Daily Post
, Benjamin had a passion for philanthropy. Among the many benevolent causes he supported were the local Infant Schools, the Bible Society, and the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Animals. But like many Quakers, according to the
Post
, by far “his most laborious and anxious labours” were devoted to the antislavery movement, “which more or less occupied his time and unwearied attention for upwards of thirty-five years.” Regardless of whether he possessed the same “unwearied attention” for business, it was the custom for the oldest son to inherit the father’s business, and when Benjamin turned thirty, he duly inherited his father’s successful draper’s shop on Bull Street and was happily settled for many years.

Richard Tapper Cadbury’s second son, Joel, was able to fulfill his father’s dream of seeking his fortune in America and set sail in 1815
at the age of sixteen. The Atlantic crossing took eighty days in high winds and rough seas that washed a man overboard and prompted seasoned sailors to say they “not have seen such sea.” Joel eventually settled in Philadelphia and became a cotton goods manufacturer. He had a family of eleven children and established a large branch of Quakers on the East Coast of America.

But Richard’s third son, John—the father of Richard and George—born in 1801 above his father’s draper’s shop, was destined to have a very different fate. According to an account handed down through the generations, John’s farsighted father, having passed on his business to his oldest son, Benjamin, asked John to investigate the new colonial market in Mincing Lane, London. He was curious about the new commodity, the cocoa bean, which was arriving from the New World.