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.
Today, among the gleaming black facades of Mincing Lane in the City, there is little to give away its colorful past as one of London’s thriving trading markets. But when John Cadbury visited in the 1820s, there was a teeming market where colonial brokers met to trade in different commodities from Britain’s growing empire. There were salesrooms where frenetic auctions were taking place for tea, sugar, coffee, jute, gums, waxes, vegetable oils, spices, and cocoa. Prices and details of business were written on a black board. Samples of goods from warehouses in docks along the nearby Thames were on display. They included the cocoa bean or “nib” from South America, which looked like a huge chocolate-colored almond, still dusted with the dried pulp that surrounded it in the cocoa pod and baked by a tropical sun.
At a time when cocoa was purchased primarily to produce a novelty drink for the rich, John tried to ascertain whether there might be a future in the unpromising black bean.
John Cadbury, like his father before him, had set out as an apprentice to learn his trade at a young age. In 1816, aged fifteen and proudly dressed in the best-quality cloth from the family draper’s shop, John took the hazardous coach journey to Leeds, where he was apprenticed to a Quaker tea dealer. It appears he made a good impression. His aunt, Sarah Cash, who visited the following year declared, “John is grown a fine youth, he possesses a fine open countenance, is vigorous of mind and body and desires to render himself useful.” Others also commented that the plain Quaker boy formed a contrast to “some of the rough Yorkshire boys.” He wore “a neat white linen collar and black ribbon round his throat tied in a bow at the front.” It seems the owners were soon content to leave the care of their tea business with John when they had to travel, and he was rewarded on his departure after seven long years with a fine encyclopedia.
John went to London and apprenticed at the teahouse of Sanderson Fox and Company. While in London he had a chance to see the warehouses of the East India Company and witness the sale of commodities such as coffee and cocoa. The 23-year-old was soon able to tell his father that he was convinced there was potential in the new exotic bean, although he was not yet clear what that potential was.
In 1824 John returned to Birmingham and set up a tea and coffee shop of his own on Bull Street, right next to his brother Benjamin’s draper’s shop. John’s father lent him a small sum of money and said “he must sink or swim,” there were no further funds. John proudly announced the opening of his shop in the local paper, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, on March 1. After setting out his considerable experience “examining the teas in the East India Company’s warehouses in London,” he drew the public’s attention to something new. He wished to bring “to particular notice” a substance “affording a most nutritious beverage for breakfast . . . Cocoa Nibs prepared by himself.”
John Cadbury took advantage of the latest ideas to attract business to his shop, starting with the shop window. While most other shops had green-ribbed windows, John had a myriad of small squares of plate glass set in a mahogany frame that it is said he polished himself each morning. This design feature alone was such a novelty that “people would come from miles around.” On peering through the windows, prospective customers were intrigued by the unusual, a touch of the Orient in the heart of smoky Birmingham. The many inviting delicacies were displayed among handsome blue Chinese vases, Asian figurines, and ornamental tea chests. Weaving his way through all the exotica was a Chinese worker in Oriental dress, weighing and measuring, promising something different, a promise that was assured on opening the door by the lingering aroma of chocolate and coffee. John ground the cocoa beans in the back of the shop with mortar and pestle.
Word of John Cadbury’s quality teas and coffees soon spread among some of the wealthiest and best-known families in Birmingham; his customers included the Lloyds, Boultons, Watts, Galtons, and others. Meanwhile, through the Quaker network, John met Candia Barrow of Lancaster. The Lancashire Barrows and Birmingham Cadburys had developed very close ties through marriage. In 1823 John’s older sister Sarah had married Candia Barrow’s older brother. This was followed in 1829 by the marriage of John’s older brother Benjamin to Candia’s cousin Candia Wadkin. In June 1832, when John Cadbury married Candia Barrow, it was the third marriage in a generation to link the two Quaker families and proved to be a very happy union.
As John’s shop prospered, he could see for himself the growing demand for cocoa nibs. He took advantage of the large cellars under the shop to experiment with different recipes and created several successful cocoa powder drinks. So confident was he of the popularity of this nutritious and wholesome drink that he decided to take a further step—into manufacturing.
In 1831, John rented a four-storey premises close by on Crooked Lane, a winding back street at the bottom of Bull Street, and began to produce cocoa on a larger scale. Using machines to help process food was in its infancy, so to help with the roasting and pressing of beans, he installed a steam engine, which evidently was a great family novelty. According to his admiring aunt, Sarah Cash, everyone in the family “had thoroughly seen John’s steam engine.” After ten years he had developed a wide variety of different types of cocoa for his shop: flakes, powders, cakes, and even the roasted and crushed nibs themselves.
Meanwhile, Candia and John started a family and moved to a house with a garden in the rural district of Edgbaston. Their first son, John, suffered intermittently from poor health. Richard Cadbury, their second child, was born on August 29, 1835,
and was followed by a sister, Maria, and then George, born on November 19, 1839. To the boys’ delight, their parents placed a strong emphasis on the pursuit of a healthy outdoor life. Their house had a square lawn, recalled Maria: “Our father measured it round, 21 times for a mile, where we used to run, one after another, with our hoops before breakfast, seldom letting them drop before reaching the mile, and sometimes a mile and a half, which Richard generally did.” Only then were they allowed in for breakfast, “basins of milk . . . with delicious cream on top and toast to dip in.” After this early morning ritual, their father, John, set off to work. “I can picture his rosy countenance full of vigour,” says Maria, “his Quaker dress very neat with its clean white cravat.”
Another memorable delight for the boys was the arrival of the railway in Birmingham. Britain was in the grip of railway fever. The first train line, the Grand Junction Railway, steamed into Birmingham from Manchester in 1837. Within a year, a line opened that covered the hundred miles between Birmingham and London. The treacherous two-day journey to London by horse and coach became a two-hour journey by steam train, opening up dramatic new possibilities for trade.
Although Richard and George were close, Richard was sent away at the age of eight to join his older brother, John, at boarding school. George studied with a local tutor who had a decidedly individualistic view on the best way to deal with boys. He aimed to instil mental and physical fortitude with a diet of classics and combative sports, including occasional games of Attack, which he devised himself and involved arming the boys with sticks. Somehow George came through the experience with a sound knowledge of French and Virgil—and a keen appreciation of home life. George’s spartan childhood was “severe but happy” with an emphasis on “iron discipline.” Their lifestyle was “bare of all self indulgence and luxury.”
Both George and Richard formed vivid impressions of trips to see their mother’s family at Lancaster. Their grandfather, George Barrow, in addition to running a draper’s shop in Lancaster, had created a prosperous shipping business with trade to the West Indies. His grandchildren were allowed to climb the tower he had built on the grounds of his house, from where they had a stunning view of Morecambe Bay and on occasion his returning ships, sometimes banked up three at a time on the quayside. Sea captains came to visit and would invariably regale the children with tales of wide seas and foreign lands, the wonders of travel, and the horrors of the slave trade.
By 1847 John Cadbury’s Crooked Lane warehouse had been demolished to make way for the new Great Western Railway. Undeterred, John expanded his manufacturing operation into the Bridge Street premises and was soon joined by his brother Benjamin. By 1852 the two brothers were in a position to open an office in London and later received a royal accolade as cocoa manufacturers to Queen Victoria. It was around this time that John and Benjamin dreamed up a plan to create a model village for their workers away from the grime of the city and even designated one of their brands of cocoa The Model Parish Cocoa.
In 1850, when he was almost fifteen, Richard joined his father and his uncle at Bridge Street and was doubtless aware of these grand ambitions. With his father often away, he threw himself into the business “with energy and devotion.” Despite his commitment to work, Richard found time for his love of sport. He was passionately fond of skating and in winter would rise very early to enjoy an hour on the ice before work. “Richard used fairly to dazzle us with his skating,” said one young friend of his sister, Maria. But events were conspiring against such relaxed pursuits.
Cocoa sales had begun to decline during the economic depression of the “Hungry Forties,” when a slump in trade, rising unemployment, bad harvests, and a potato blight in England and Scotland in 1845 combined to create widespread hardship. Many small businesses struggled, but for the Cadburys, the irrevocable blow came in the early 1850s when Candia was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
These painful years left their mark on Richard and George. They witnessed the inexorable decline, first of their mother, then of their father, then the neglect of the factory as though it too were burdened with a malady for which there could be no happy conclusion. John still occasionally walked through the factory in his starched white choker and neat black ribbon tied in a bow, but the enthusiasm that had prompted him to grow the venture over a period of 30 years was gone. He paid scant attention to the piles of cocoa beans accumulating in the stockroom. His hard-won accolade as cocoa manufacturer to Queen Victoria no longer excited him. A year after Candia’s death, he dissolved the partnership with his brother Benjamin. Gradually his absences became more prolonged as he searched for a cure for his arthritis, and the family firm began to lose its good name.
These were the pressing concerns in young George Cadbury’s mind when at the age of seventeen, in 1857, like his father and grandfather before him, he too was sent away to learn his trade as an apprentice. His sister, Maria, had taken his mother’s place in the home looking after the younger children. His older brother Richard was taking on more responsibility for his father’s business. George was keen to master the trade by working in a grocery shop in York run by another Quaker, Joseph Rowntree.
Once past York’s famous city walls, seventeen-year-old George Cadbury found himself in a maze of winding streets with irregular gabled houses, the overhang of their upper storeys making the streets feel narrow and dark. As he crossed the center of town, the road opened onto a busy thoroughfare called Pavement. Almost directly opposite, he found the Rowntrees’ shop at No. 28, a handsome eighteenth-century terraced house, tall and narrow, with subsidence that made it appear crooked. The colorful thoroughfare outside disguised the austerity and long hours that awaited George inside the shop.
Joseph Rowntree issued a memorandum that clearly set out the strict rules of conduct that he expected his numerous apprentices to follow. “The object of the Pavement establishment is business [his italics]. The young men who enter it as journey men or apprentices are expected to contribute . . . in making it successful. . . . It affords . . . a full opportunity for any painstaking, intelligent young man to obtain a good practical acquaintance with the tea and grocery trades. . . . The place is not suitable for the indolent and the way ward.” The memorandum specified every detail of the boys’ lives: no more than twenty minutes for a meal break, only one trip home a year, and the exact hour at which the young men were to return each night. In June and July they were allowed to walk outside in the evenings until ten o’clock; during all other months the curfew was earlier.
Living at the house were Joseph Rowntree’s sons, including twenty-one-year-old Joseph and nineteen-year-old Henry Isaac. Joseph was tall and dark with an intensity of features, the natural severity of his own character complemented by years of Quaker upbringing. His father had taken him to Ireland on a Quaker relief mission in 1850 during the Irish potato famine, and the experience had left a lasting impression. Joseph remembered the look of death as starvation slowly turned the young and comely into the walking dead. Numberless unknown dead lay in open trenches or where they had fallen by the side of the road, alongside those still living, their faces showing their terror. For the serious-minded Joseph, it had been a formative experience and a shocking lesson on the effects of poverty. His younger brother, Henry, formed a contrast to Joseph’s austerity. Somehow the full Puritan weight of Quaker training did not sit quite so readily on his young shoulders; he had a sense of fun and could be relied upon to lighten the mood.
By 1860 George Cadbury had returned to Birmingham, although he had barely completed three years as an apprentice. Whether his father recognized his ability and recalled him to help at home or whether the move was instigated by George because he was hungry to get started is not known.
To the employees at Bridge Street, the two young Cadbury brothers were curiously “alike and unalike.” Richard was seen as “bright and happy with a sunny disposition.” He claimed he would be happy simply to rescue the business and turn it around to make a few hundred pounds a year. Geo
rge was much more driven. In the words of his biographer, Alfred Gardiner, he “had more of an adventurer’s instinct. . . . The channel of his mind was narrower and the current swifter.” Despite his ambition, he could see no simple solution. As the brothers deliberated during the spring of 1861 in the gloomy Bridge Street factory, the prospect seemed a dismal one. From their cramped office, they could see the empty carts banked up in the yard awaiting orders. It was not immediately obvious what they could do together that their father and uncle had not already tried and that would make the crucial difference.
The great hope, of course, was to come up with a breakthrough product. They did in fact have something in mind that their father had been working on before family difficulties drained his energy. It was a product very much of the moment, with healthful overtones, called Iceland Moss. The manufacturing process involved blending the fatty chocolate bean with an ingredient that was thought to improve health: lichen. It was fashioned into a bar of cocoa that could then be grated to form a nutritious drink. Richard had a flair for design. He could see the possibilities for launching Iceland Moss. It would be eye-catchingly displayed in bright yellow packaging with black letters that boldly proclaimed the addition of lichen, complete with the image of a reindeer to show how different it was. They aimed to promote the health properties of Iceland Moss, but would the untried combination of fluffy-textured lichen and the very fatty cocoa bean appeal to the English palate?
Apart from developing new products, the brothers also had to find new customers. Their father had only one salesperson, known at the time as a “traveller.” His name was Dixon Hadaway and he alone covered a vast swathe of the country from Rugby in the south high up to the Scottish highlands, visiting grocers’ shops to promote their line of cocoa wares. He took advantage of the new trains to cover the long distances between towns but was also obliged to travel by pony and trap or even on foot. Despite the challenges of getting around, Dixon Hadaway was evidently determined to keep up appearances, smartly attired with a tall top hat and dark tweed coat, although it was invariably crumpled from long hours of travelling. It seems he was appreciated by his customers, who claimed that he was so punctual that they could set their clocks by his visits. But punctuality and enthusiasm alone were not enough to secure new orders. People could not be expected to buy Cadbury’s goods if they had never heard of them. George was clear. They needed more capital to fund a sales team.
Chocolate Wars Page 3