The preparations to launch their new product were further constrained by a double tragedy in the family. In January 1866, their younger brother, twenty-two-year-old Edward, died unexpectedly after a short illness. When John, their thirty-two-year-old brother, wrote home in May from Brisbane to express his grief at the loss, Maria was alarmed to see that his writing appeared unsteady and his letter was unsigned. Doctors in Australia confirmed that John was suffering from “colonial fever,” a form of typhus. News of John’s death on May 28 followed almost immediately.
The unexpected loss of two brothers in such quick succession made Richard and George feel their responsibilities ever more keenly. The survival of the family business rested with them. Hopes of future family prosperity depended on this last throw of the dice. In the coming months, they streamlined production of the new drink. By the autumn, Richard was ready to start designing the artwork for the packaging. At last, in the weeks before Christmas 1866, Cocoa Essence was launched.
It soon became apparent that there was a problem. Unlike competitors whose cocoa went further with the addition of cheaper ingredients, such as starch and flour, Cocoa Essence was pure and by far the most expensive cocoa drink on sale. The launch faltered. Customers were scarce. The strain on the brothers was beginning to exact a toll.
To the Frys, watching their competition from Bristol, the Cadbury brothers’ move hinted at desperation. Under the management of Francis Fry, sales reached a staggering £102,747 during 1867. Following Fry’s contract with the Navy, their workforce rose to two hundred. With the Fry name established across England, “it was an extremely hard struggle,” George Cadbury admitted. “We had ourselves to induce shopkeepers to stock our cocoa and induce the public to ask for it.” It looked as though George’s gamble had failed.
In 1867, George and Richard made one last effort, exploiting something that Quaker rivals such as the Rowntrees in York spurned on principle: advertising. Plain Quakers, like the Rowntrees, believed that the business should be built on the quality and value of their goods. Nothing else should be needed if the product was honest. Advertising one’s goods was like advertising oneself—abhorrent to a man of God. To Joseph Rowntree, who was proudly settled as “Master Grocer” in his shop in York, advertising seemed a slightly shabby and unprincipled enterprise, in which promotion was somehow elevated above the quality of the product. Even though he could see that his younger brother Henry’s cocoa works at Tanner’s Moat was not taking off as hoped, nonetheless he did not consider advertising to be the answer. He dismissed it as mere “puffery”; he even objected to fancy packaging and was content to alert his customers to a new product with a restrained and dignified letter. His deeply religious sensibility was offended by the idea of hyped-up claims or exaggeration of any kind.
The Frys had similar Quaker sensibilities when it came to excessive promotion. With the confidence that comes with over a hundred and fifty years as a successful family business, Francis Fry saw little need for change. “Our early advertisements had a certain coy primness about them,” conceded Fry’s management in the company’s 1928 Bicentenary Report. Their “venerable announcements” of their original drink in the eighteenth century, Churchman’s Chocolate, consisted of long-winded essays trying to explain why the product was unique and how to obtain it—by Penny Post or in “the hands of errand boys.” This progressed in the early nineteenth century to little homilies that advised the public on how to prepare the drink and why it was good for them. Even the language was old-fashioned, describing the firm as an apothecary. “We were full of innocent pride in that period,” wrote the management. Certainly they had nothing that would stop you in your tracks. No gorgeous girl of forthright demeanor with glossy lips and an unmistakable message in her eyes as she sipped her cocoa. Nothing to actually hit you in the eye or stimulate the taste buds: just a message, hardly readable in small typeface, telling of Churchman’s Chocolate.
To the Cadbury brothers, however, it seemed that advertising could do more. Another company, Pears, was taking advertising to new levels. In 1862, Thomas Barratt had married into the Pears family and saw a way of turning a little-known, quality product, Pears soap, into a household name. Barratt broke through with a simple, attention-grabbing message. He began by enlisting the help of eminent medical men such as Sir Erasmus Wilson, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, as well as members of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. At a time when many soap products actually contained damaging ingredients, the medical men were happy to endorse Pears because it was “without any of the objectionable qualities of the old soaps.” Barratt created posters and packaging adorned with eye-catching images of healthy children and beautiful women with the brand name boldly written across the package. For the consumer, the message was immediate and simple: use this soap and you will be healthy and beautiful. Barratt is often described as the father of modern advertising.
Desperation drove the Cadbury brothers to a different decision from their Quaker rivals. They knew they had to change public perception of their pure new drink. Shrugging off their Quaker scruples, they took a gamble and committed to another investment. Like the Pears team, they asked their salesmen to visit doctors in London with samples of their new product. To the delight of the brothers, they too won the support of the obliging medical press. “Cocoa treated thus will, we expect, prove to be one of the most nutritious, digestible and restorative of drinks,” enthused the British Medical Journal. Noting the brothers’ claim that their product was three times the strength of ordinary cocoas and free from “excess fatty matter,” the Lancet concurred. The product is “genuine. . . . Essence of Cocoa is just what it is declared to be by Messrs Cadbury brothers.”
The Cadburys’ timing was excellent because during the 1860s, purity of manufactured foods was a growing concern for the public. There was very little regulation of the food market. Even staples like bread could be contaminated. The public had first been warned in 1820 when the chemist Frederick Accum published A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, which argued that processed food could be dangerous. By the 1850s, Dr. Arthur Hassall had written a series of reports in the Lancet exposing typical scams in cocoa production: brick dust, red lead, and iron compounds to add color; animal fat or starches such as corn, tapioca, or potato flour to add bulk. By 1860, in response to public pressure, the government introduced the first regulations to prevent adulteration of food.
Yet still the scams continued. In one government investigation, more than half the cocoa samples tested were contaminated with red ochre from brick dust. Consumer guides appeared teaching customers how to test their cocoa and warning that a slimy texture and cheesy or rancid taste indicated the presence of animal fat. If the cocoa thickened in hot water or milk, this was evidence that starches had been added, something you could confirm if your comfort drink turned blue in the presence of iodine. Most worrying of all was the continued use of contaminants, including poisons such as red lead, which were injurious to the public’s health but which enhanced a product’s color or texture. It was small wonder then that the Grocer hurried to follow the lead of the medical press and sang the praises of the Cadbury brothers’ pure new product: “There will be thousands of shop keepers who will be glad of an opportunity to retail cocoa guaranteed to contain nothing but the natural constituents of the bean!”
With this support, in 1867 the Cadburys planned the largest advertising campaign they had yet undertaken. There was no longer a question mark over advertising. They would use it with confidence and really make the Cadbury name stand out. And best of all, the product was honest. They could shout it from the roof tops. They were, in essence, rebranding their new cocoa product—and with it, the whole image of cocoa.
Richard Cadbury came up with a slogan that capitalized on the strengths of their new product: “Absolutely Pure, Therefore Best.” They took out full-page advertisements in newspapers and put posters in shop fronts and on London omnibuses. Since the London Gener
al Omnibus Company had amalgamated more than six hundred horse-drawn buses in the capital into one fleet, it was feasible to create a unified poster campaign across the city. Soon the Cadbury name, synonymous with the purity of the product, was everywhere. It was unavoidable, rippling through the city like a refrain from a song. Given half a chance, the Cadbury brothers would have covered the dome of St. Paul’s, protested one writer. But at the chocolate works, everyone caught the mood of excitement.
The public got the message. By the autumn of 1868, the campaign was gaining momentum. The staff on Bridge Street grew to almost fifty. David Jones, a former railway goods porter who longed to be a traveller, vividly recalled his first day: “George put a sample in my hand and told me to go wherever I wanted for a week, the only stipulation being that I should not trespass on the grounds of another traveller.” Jones chose North Wales and soon had reason to regret his decision. No one had tasted anything like Cocoa Essence before. “I gave hundreds of shopkeepers a taste,” he remembered, “only to watch their faces lose their customary shape as though they had taken vinegar or wood worm.” But Jones would not give up. He managed to secure thirty-five orders and was gratified to find the Cadbury brothers were “highly pleased.” Another traveller, John Penberthy, also felt the thrill of winning orders. “The delight of travelling in those ancient days, working towns not previously visited by a Cadbury traveller, surpassed in my opinion . . . the discoveries of Shackleton, Peary or Dr. Cook!”
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 scale the manufacture of eating chocolate. Rather than mimic Fry’s rough chocolate bar, the Cadbury brothers were after something altogether more luxurious. They found that when the 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 would bring the exotic qualities of the French chocolatier to the popular market. Richard called it the Fancy Box.
Had they not been in charge of a chocolate factory, 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.
The lid of each Fancy Box opened to release the richest of scents—the chocolate fumes inviting the recipient with overwhelming urgency to trifle among the decadent contents as a whiff of almond marzipan, a hint of orange, rich chocolate truffle, and strawberries from a June garden bathed in thick chocolate beguiled the very air, all begging to be crushed between tongue and palate. Each one had a French-sounding name, adding more forbidden naughtiness: Chocolat du Mexique, Chocolat des Delices 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, therefore, that their unremitting self-denial fuelled their appreciation of sensual extravagance.
In the pursuit of plainness, the Quakers also spurned most artistic endeavor. The arts were a worldly distraction that could divert a Quaker 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. 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 just as he had ignored the criticisms against advertising, Richard chose to ignore the rigid rules against making art. Revelling in exuberant splashes of color, he began a series of paintings to paste on the covers of the Fancy Box.
He chose pictures that appealed to Victorian sentimentality. He had travelled to Switzerland and made sketches of the Alpine scenery. Now these drawings, along with postcard images of the seaside and even his own children formed the basis of his designs. “Among the pictorial novelties introduced to the trade this season, few if any excel the illustration on Messrs Cadburys’ four-ounce box of chocolate crèmes,” enthused the Birmingham Gazette on January 8, 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.” It was Richard’s own daughter, Jessie, with her favorite kitten. To strike a real note of luxury, Richard decided that some of the Fancy Boxes should be covered in velvet and lined with silk and a mirror. In every way, Cadbury’s chocolate was to stand for quality. The reviewer writing for the Chemist and Druggist magazine on December 15, 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 crème 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 Box increased and gradually more staff was 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 his fourth child. Suddenly their achievements seemed as nothing. The very center of his family was gone, but he knew that for a Quaker, numbing grief must be borne with stoicism.
Richard, at thirty-two, was left with four very young children under his care. Barrow was the oldest at six, followed by Jessie, who was three, one-year-old William, and the new baby, who had been named after Richard. “He was everything to our baby lives,” says 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 recalls, “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 own father’s love made her feel “it was worth braving anything.”
Perhaps because Richard grew much closer to his children at this time, during the spring of 1869, he found the time to set up a nursery for poor or abandoned children and infants in the neighborhood. He rented a house for them and enlisted the help of a friend, the maternal and highly competent Emma Wils
on. 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 Wheeley’s Road.
Sometimes Richard’s children accompanied him to his office. Barrow remembers coming to Bridge Street with his father and delighting in watching boxes as they were 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,” Barrow 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’ position had improved, they did not yet feel secure. No capital remained. Their livelihood and their future depended on the public drinking their cocoa, charmed by a blonde blue-eyed girl holding a kitten and smiling sweetly from the lid of a chocolate box.
In York, the Rowntrees appeared to thrive with a quality grocer’s shop in the center of town and a big chocolate factory by the river. But Joseph Rowntree, successful purveyor of superior foods, was worried. The problem was his brother, Henry, and the chocolate factory at Tanner’s Moat, which looked like a medieval castle with its forbidding high walls and blackened windows. It was becoming apparent that Henry had optimistically overreached himself by investing in the rambling complex on the River Ouse. By 1869, after a seven-year struggle, his cocoa was still struggling to find a market and the firm’s future looked uncertain. The prospect of his brother failing was real.
Chocolate Wars Page 8