Chocolate Wars

by Deborah Cadbury

  To finance the extra staffing, they discussed how to manage the business more efficiently. The brothers’ solution was to return to their puritanical roots: “work, and again work, and always more work.” George enthusiastically planned to cut all indulgence from his life: games, outings, music, every luxury would go. Every penny he earned would be ploughed back into the business. This was harder for Richard. He was planning to marry in July.

  A photograph survives of Richard’s fiancée, Elizabeth Adlington, whose classic good looks are evident in spite of her serious expression and the limitation imposed on any enhancement of feminine Quaker beauty. Her face appears unadorned, her hair parted down the middle and pulled back severely. She wears a full skirt and crinoline, covered by a long black cloak and dark bonnet—the Quaker forefathers having deemed this quite enough excitement to attract a male. Richard was drawn to her “bright and vivacious” manner. In preparation for bringing home a wife, he had purchased a house on Wheeley’s Road, about two miles from the factory. Spare moments were spent preparing the garden, transferring cuttings of his favorite plants from the rockery in his father’s garden. “My little home is beginning to look quite charming now it is nearly completed,” he told his youngest brother, Henry. There was just the furniture to buy before his wedding in July.

  During the spring of 1861, the tone of the brothers’ discussion changed. As Quakers they were accustomed to finding answers in silent prayer. They had a duty to the workforce, and there were family obligations to consider. Since their mother died, their sister Maria had taken her place, caring for the younger members of the family. Now their father was in urgent need of help. They too must listen to the clear voice of conscience, mindful of a debt to man and God. They too must endeavour to do their best. Whatever their misgivings, they had no real choice. They made their decision. In April the two young brothers took over the running of the factory.

  There was one last hope. They each had inherited £4,000 from their mother. Determined to save the family dream of a chocolate factory, they staked their inheritance down to the last penny. If they failed to turn the business around before the capital was gone, they would close the factory.

  CHAPTER 2

  Food of the Gods

  Richard and George soon found they were running down their inheritance fast just to keep afloat. The first year was worrying. By the end of 1861, Richard’s share of the loss was recorded at 226 pounds and George registered a similar figure. More capital from their inheritance would be needed. Richard, who had the added responsibilities of married life, imagined the next year’s losses. Perhaps they were not businessmen. Was this the beginning of a slow and inevitable decline to bankruptcy?

  The brothers tried to calculate how long their capital would last. In the absence of any other source of funds, they had to make further cutbacks. Even basic pleasures such as drinking tea and reading the morning paper were now sacrificed. Each day started at six in the morning and did not end until late in the evening, with a supper of bread and butter eaten at the factory. “This stern martyrdom of the senses,” observed one of George’s colleagues years later, “drove all the energy of his nature into certain swift, deep channels,” creating an extraordinary “concentration of purpose.” Any small diversion or treat was dismissed as a “snare” that might “appeal to the senses” or absorb precious funds.

  While George focused on purchasing, policy, and development, Richard tackled sales. The infrequent office visits by Dixon Hadaway, their Northern traveller, made a vivid impression on the staff. “It was a red letter day,” said one office worker. “It was real fun to listen to his broad Scotch, as we could only understand a sentence here and there.” Hadaway loved his worn Scotch tweed coat, which he had worn since the Crimean War, “and I can still remember him extolling the beauties of the cloth and its wearing qualities.” Richard joined Hadaway and frequently took out the pony and trap to drum up business. He also hired additional full-time travellers. Samuel Gordon was to target Liverpool and Manchester. John Clark, recommended through a Quaker cousin, was hired to take on the whole of England south of Birmingham. Richard sent him first to London, but in a matter of weeks, Clark found business there so bad he begged to be transferred back to Birmingham. He feared he was wasting both his and the firm’s time. A letter survives from Richard, urging Clark not to give up on London and its suburbs:We do particularly wish this well worked, as we believe it will ultimately repay both us and thyself to do so, and thou may depend if thou dost thoroughly work it, we will see nothing is lost to thee whether with or with out success. . . . [Richard’s italics] It is important for us both to pull together for we have so much to do to conquer reserve and prejudice, and thou may be assured we will do our part in this in the way of improvements in style and quality of our goods.

  To cover more ground, George also began to travel, and letters from Richard’s young wife show that his journeys away from home became more frequent. “We have come nearly to the end of another day and think of thee as that much nearer returning,” Elizabeth wrote to her husband in Glasgow a year after their marriage in July 1862. “We shall all be happy together if thou hast had a prosperous time.” In his enthusiasm to increase turnover, Richard himself would go into the warehouse to package the orders, “not only in the early days when hands were few, but even in his later years.”

  During 1862, since both brothers were often away, they hired more office staff. One young worker who showed great promise was William Tallis. Orphaned as a child, he had had very little education but impressed everyone with his ability and enthusiasm. They also employed their first clerk, George Truman, who recalls “working, as did Mr. George, till eight or nine every night, Saturdays included.” George Truman evidently also tried his hand at selling to the shops in Birmingham. A novice salesman, he generously offered samples for customers to try. The free chocolate goodies proved popular. He soon ran out and returned “in great distress” because “one customer had eaten half his samples!” He was reassured when “Mr. George said he could have as many samples as he wanted and he went out the next day quite happy.”

  To address the problem of the product getting eaten before it left the factory, a system known as “Pledge Money” was put into effect. At the end of each day, a penny was awarded to any worker who successfully managed not to succumb to temptation. Every three months the pledge money was paid out, and one particularly abstemious employee remembers he accumulated so much that he was able to buy a pair of boots. Workers were also rewarded for punctuality. For those who arrived promptly at 6:00 AM, there was a breakfast of hot coffee or milk, bread, and buns.

  Despite long sales trips away from home, the brothers soon found a lack of public enthusiasm for Iceland Moss, the product in which they had invested their early hopes. They continued to develop new lines of higher quality. They introduced a superior Breakfast Cocoa, as shown in their detailed sales brochure of 1862. This was followed a year later by Pearl Cocoa and then Chocolate du Mexique, a spiced vanilla-flavored cake chocolate. They improved existing brands such as Queen’s Own Chocolate, Crystal Palace Chocolate, Dietetic Cocoa, Trinidad Rock Cocoa, and Churchman’s Cocoa—a sustaining beverage for the sick. “So numerous are the sorts,” reported the Grocer magazine, “the purchaser is much puzzled in his choice.” So puzzled in fact that nothing seemed to excite the palate of Birmingham’s growing population.

  Richard was keen to find new ways to promote the company’s range of nutritious beverages. Apart from notifying the trade through the Grocer, in 1862 he designed a stall to exhibit their products at the permanent exhibition in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in South London. The brothers also paid for a stall exhibiting their wares in the Manchester Corn Exchange. But these efforts were not enough. An elusive, appetizing “something” was missing from their products, deepening their worries and underscoring the risky nature of exploiting the delicious cocoa bean. The travellers returned with disappointing orders, putting the struggling cocoa business i
n still further jeopardy.

  In battling to save the Bridge Street factory, there was one issue that the brothers had failed to tackle. However inventive their new recipes, and however adventurous the palate of the English public, by turning cocoa beans into a drink, they were faithfully following centuries of tradition. Despite its long and colorful history of cultivation, by the mid-nineteenth century the dark cocoa bean was mostly consumed in liquid form, largely unprocessed and unrefined. The Cadbury brothers were still thinking along lines rooted in ancient history.

  Like many Victorians, Richard Cadbury had a passion for foreign culture and history. With his life circumscribed by long hours of labor in provincial English towns, he longed to travel beyond Europe and had been brought up on vivid tales of the foreign lands where cocoa originated and the exotic history of its cultivation. “It was one of the dreams of our childhood,” he wrote, “to sail on the bosom of that mighty river whose watershed drains the greater part of the northern portion of the continent of South America, and to explore the secrets of its thousand tributaries that penetrate forests untrodden by the foot of man.” He was particularly interested in the long and colorful history of cocoa in South America and Mexico, a history that gave intriguing glimpses as to how it might best be cultivated and consumed.

  Richard had never seen a cocoa plantation and exercised his curiosity by collecting stories of explorers. While the traders he met in Mincing Lane were never short on anecdotal accounts, he could learn more by corresponding with experts at the tropical botanical gardens in Jamaica and the Pamplemousse Botanic Gardens in Mauritius. Closer to home, knowledge of tropical species was increasing through the iconic glasshouses at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The magnificent Palm House had recently been completed, and in the early 1860s, work was just beginning on the Temperate House. Botanists knew cocoa by its scientific name, Theobroma cacao or food of the Gods, a label assigned to the plant in 1753 by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linnaeus.

  “This inestimable plant,” Richard wrote, “is evergreen, has drooping bright green leaves . . . and bears flowers and fruit at all seasons of the year.” He knew it flourished in humid tropical regions close to the equator and was acutely sensitive to slight changes in climate. The cocoa pod itself he described accurately as an oval pointed shape, “something like a vegetable marrow . . . only more elongated and pointed at the end.” In contrast to European fruit trees, the pods grow directly off the trunk and thickest boughs from very short stalks rather than from finer branches. The outer rind of the pod is thick and when ripened becomes a firm shell. Inside, embedded in a soft, pinkish-white acid pulp are the seeds or beans—as many as thirty to forty within each pod.

  Richard’s romantic idea of cocoa plantations also came from reading travel narratives that were occasionally featured in fashionable magazines, such as the Belgravia. One such article described a magical tropical paradise, a million miles from Victorian Birmingham. “The vista is like a miniature forest hung with thousands of golden lamps,” enthused a report in Belgravia, “anything more lovely cannot be imagined.” Taller trees such as the coral tree were planted around the cocoa trees to provide shade. In March, the coral tree becomes covered in crimson flowers, and “at this season, an extensive plain covered with cocoa plantations is a magnificent object,” declared the Belgravia. “The tops of the coral tree present the appearance of being clothed in flames.” Passing through the shady walkways of the plantation was like being “within the spacious aisles of some grand natural temple.”

  To harvest the marrow-like cocoa pods, the plantation workers would break them open with a long knife or cutlass. The seeds or beans were scooped out with a wooden spoon, the fleshy pulp scraped off, and the beans dried in the sun until the pale crimson seed turned a rich almond brown.

  Richard could not know just how far into the past the history of cultivating cocoa beans extended. Recent research has revealed three millennia have elapsed since the Olmec, the oldest civilization in the Americas, first domesticated the wild cacao tree. Eking out an existence in the humid lowland forests and savannahs of the Mexican Gulf coast around 1500 to 400 BC, little survives of Olmec culture. Evidence that these early Mexicans consumed cocoa comes principally from studies in historical linguistics. Their word ka ka wa is thought to be the earliest pronunciation of cacao.

  When the Maya became the dominant culture of Mexico, they extended the cultivation of cocoa across the plains of Guatemala and beyond. In Mayan culture, the rich enjoyed a foaming hot spicy drink. The poor took their cocoa with maize as a starchy porridge-like cold soup that provided easily prepared high-energy food. It could be laced with chili pepper, giving a distinct afterburn, or enhanced with milder flavorings such as vanilla.

  Mayan art reveals that cocoa was highly prized. Archaeologists have found images decorating Mayan pottery of a “Cacao God” seated on his throne adorned with cocoa pods. There is evidence suggesting that Mayan aristocrats were buried with lavish amounts of food for the afterlife, including ornate painted jars for cocoa and cocoa flavorings. The earliest image of the preparation of a chocolate drink appears on a Mayan vase from around the eighth century AD, which curiously also depicts a human sacrifice. Two masked figures are beheading their victim, while a woman calmly pours a cocoa drink from one jar to another in order to enhance the much-favored frothy foam.

  “European knowledge of cocoa as an article of diet,” Richard found in his survey, “dates from the discovery of the Western world by Christopher Columbus.” On August 15, 1502, during Columbus’s fourth trip to the New World, he reached the island of Guanaja near the Honduran mainland. Two very large canoes suddenly appeared on the horizon. The Spanish captured them and found they were Mayan trading ships laden with cotton, clothing, and maize. According to Columbus’s son, Ferdinand, there were a great many strange-looking “almonds” on board. “They held these almonds at great price,” he observed. “When any of these almonds fell, they all rushed to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.” The Europeans could not understand how these little brown pellets could be so valued.

  Spanish conquistadors, who arrived in Mexico in 1519, realized that cocoa was highly prized. The bean had special value in Aztec society since it was used as coinage—an idea that gave rise to the expression, “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” The Spanish saw that the Aztec people in the provinces paid tributes to their emperor, Montezuma, with large baskets of cocoa beans. The emperor kept a vast store in the royal coffers in the capital city of Tenochtitlan of no less than 40,000 loads: almost 1000 million cocoa beans. The Spanish soon worked out its value. According to one Spanish chronicler, “A tolerably good slave” was worth around one hundred beans, a rabbit cost ten beans, and a prostitute could be procured for as few as eight.

  It is now known that the Aztecs, like the Mayans, used their favorite drink in a number of religious rituals, including human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that their most powerful gods required appeasement, and prisoners of war had to be sacrificed each day to sustain the universe. In one macabre ritual, the heart of a slave was required to be cut out while he was still alive. The slave was selected for his physical perfection because until the time of his sacrifice, he represented the Aztec gods on earth and was treated with reverence. According to the Spanish Dominican friar Diego de Duran, who wrote The History of the Indies of New Spain in 1581, as the ritual approached its climax and the true fate of the victim was made known, the slave was required to offer himself for death with heroic courage and joy. Should his bravery falter, he could be “bewitched” by a special cocktail to embolden him, prepared from chocolate and mixed with the blood of former victims and other ingredients that rendered him nearly unconscious.

  The cocoa bean found its way to Europe, where it was introduced to the Spanish royal household. The Spanish court initially consumed cocoa the South American way, as a drink in a small bowl, and then gradually replaced the corn and chilies with sugar and sometimes vanilla or cinnamon. In time elabor
ate chocolate pots were developed to skim and settle the heavy liquid before pouring, but the Spanish essentially ground the beans in the same way as the South American Indians, crushing them between stones or grinding them with stone and mortar to produce a coarse powder.

  Richard Cadbury found one written account of cocoa preparation in Madrid from 1664 in which one hundred cocoa beans, toasted and ground to a powder, were mixed with a similar weight of sugar, twelve ground vanilla pods, two grains of chili pepper, aniseed, six white roses, cinnamon, two dozen almonds and hazelnuts, and achiote powder to lend a red hue. The resulting paste was used to make a cake or block of cocoa, which could be ground to form a drink. But whether mixed with maize or corn to absorb the fatty cocoa oils the Mexican way, or blended with sugar, the cocoa oils made the drink heavy and coarse, and cocoa continued to receive mixed reviews in Spain. Josephus Acosta, a Spanish writer at the turn of the seventeenth century, considered the chocolate drink much overrated, “foolishly and without reason, for it is loathsome . . . having a skum or frothe that is very unpleasant to taste.”