Chocolate Wars

by Deborah Cadbury

  In the fashionable districts of downtown Manhattan, Milton found there was stiff competition. Countless sweetshops in town already offered every kind of delight that could be whipped up from boiled sugar and water. Even novel forms of eating chocolate were on sale, such as chocolate drops, sticks, and bonbons. Undaunted, Hershey relied on his expertise in candy making to give him an advantage over his rivals. He leased a shop on Sixth Avenue between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets near the elevated railway and began laboring seven days a week in the kitchen basement. It was his second candy business, and this time it prospered. Feeling optimistic, he moved to larger premises on Forty-second Street, only to find he had made a critical mistake. He had accidentally overstayed at the original shop by a few days, and consequently the landlord sued him for a year’s rent.

  Faced with having to pay two rents, his mother and Aunt Mattie came to his aid once again. Always willing to provide free labor, they wrapped and packed, determined to win through. Yet just when it seemed that Milton Hershey might finally turn the corner, his father turned up.

  Once again, the dashing Henry Hershey, full of seductive ideas and an unreasonable amount of self-confidence, urged his son to seize the moment. Winter was coming, flu was predicted, and New Yorkers would need cough drops. Despite all the puritan homilies and all the hard work, Milton found himself unable to resist a gamble. He borrowed $10,000 to purchase the necessary equipment. Once again, the son’s success and the mother’s peace of mind were hostage to the errant father’s dream.

  BOURNVILLE, BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND

  In 1882, the year that Hershey embarked on his venture in New York, in Birmingham, England, Richard Cadbury’s oldest son, nineteen-year-old Barrow, was due to start full-time work at Bournville. His Uncle George suggested that he should first take a tour of the New World to investigate the chocolate market in North America. “It was one of Uncle George’s generous and thoughtful propositions,” Barrow wrote in his diary. He was to travel with William Tallis, the works foreman, and young Barrow appreciated his companionship and business insights. Richard Cadbury took them to Liverpool and saw them off on the beautiful steam-propelled White Star liner SS Republic. The ship had four masts, with full sails rigged on each one. “I remember this,” says Barrow, because it was a stormy crossing and “in a strong gale one of the top sails burst with a loud explosion.”

  As part of their North American trip, William Tallis and Barrow Cadbury visited Canada. In chilly Montreal, where an ice railway had been laid two kilometers across the vast Saint Laurence River, they went to see the company’s Canadian agent, Edward Lusher. Montreal was in pole position to benefit from a network of railways, lakes, and canals that were forging paths through great swathes of virgin territory. Travelling west, cities like Toronto were already within reach, and the Canadian Pacific Railway was inching its iron feet towards the vast snowy peaks of the Rockies. Going east, rail and shipping routes made connections to the booming Atlantic coastal towns of Canada and America. Wherever they ventured in this mighty landscape, they saw, cheekily stacked in shop windows, the bright yellow tins of Fry’s Breakfast Cocoa.

  Of all the cities on Barrow’s tour, New York was the greatest wonder. Here Barrow Cadbury could see what Hershey had patiently researched. Sugar candy was everywhere; chocolate was not. No one in America had tapped the full potential of the little black bean. If Barrow passed Milton Hershey’s dreary kitchen on Sixth Avenue, there was nothing yet to intimate a great confectionery rival in the making.

  America, land of opportunities, lay in wait; a vast map studded with possibilities. Hershey saw it. He believed his God-given country was rich in potential, and he would prove it one day. But the saintly Barrow Cadbury, his horizons bounded by temperance movements and pacifist societies, picked his way through the brash American landscape, failing to spot the right opening.

  CHAPTER 9

  Chocolate Empires

  In the 1880s, it was the mysterious continent of Africa that held Europeans in thrall. Unmapped, unknown, a vast continent of possibilities could be glimpsed from forays inland from coastal settlements. The land with the largest desert on earth also had an immeasurable tropical rain forest along the Congo, wide open savannahs burning in a shimmering haze, and vibrant towns dotted along its eastern coast set against the enticing blue of the Indian Ocean. It was all the more vivid seen through the eyes of the great adventurers of the 1860s and 1870s, such as Dr. David Livingstone.

  The British already controlled land along the coast of West Africa, including Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast. Now the empire builders of Britain saw a grand extension of Victoria’s realm in a great swathe of land across the continent from the Cape of Good Hope in the south to Cairo in the north. But they faced new rivals. Recently formed European states wanted to compete with Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal to seize their own colonies and build their military and industrial might. Germany, formed in 1871, claimed land in southwest Africa. Belgium, created in 1831, eyed the great Congo Basin. Italy, founded in 1861, was maneuvering for Abyssinia. The scramble for Africa was so intense that just thirty years later, only Liberia and Abyssinia would be independent of the Europeans.

  The expansion of European empires in the late nineteenth century was mirrored by changes in trade—and chocolate was no exception.

  The exotic cacao tree that once thrived only in South and Central America reached the shores of Africa. Portuguese colonialists were the first to take the hardier variety, Forestero, from Brazil in 1824 to plant on the island of Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea. Spaced about three feet apart under the shade of banana or plantain trees, the cocoa trees flourished in the hot, humid climate to form a thick canopy. Cocoa eventually became the island’s leading export, and Forestero spread to the neighboring island of Principe and made its way along the coast across the colonies of Portuguese Africa.

  In Europe the price of beans began to fall. Ever greater quantities were shipped from Africa and South America to satisfy the rapacious demand of the West. Delicious concoctions, once available only to the wealthy, were reaching an expanding industrial workforce through Dutch firms, such as Van Houten, Peter, and Lindt in Switzerland, in addition to the French and British manufacturers. Imports of the cocoa bean rose fast. In Britain, demand soared from just over 1,000 tons a year in 1850 to almost 5,000 tons by 1880. And Britain’s chocolate dynasties followed the trail of the colonial empire builders as immense global horizons opened up.

  George and Richard’s new factory at Bournville was well placed to benefit spectacularly from the boom in global infrastructure. The British passion for railways would lead to continents conquered as tracks of iron and steel hurried to reach profitable new markets. The railway at Bournville became double track and was part of the main-line into Birmingham, linking their chocolate works to all British ports. New waterways joined the canal route at Bournville, connecting it to both the Liverpool docks and the Bristol Channel, where ever larger steamships sailed around the world. By 1880, Britain was linked to her colonies by almost 100,000 miles of cable spun under the world’s oceans. Telegraph messages could be relayed across the world overnight. Cadbury—like Fry—had firmly established its national reach and began to explore international links to the furthest reaches of the British Empire.

  The Cadbury brothers’ exploration of Africa began with a single traveller, Harry Gear. Gear had been pioneering sales in New York but in 1886 set sail for Cape Town. He soon wrote back asking for help, which arrived in due course in the form of a clerk from Scotland, R. B. Brown, who answered the call to adventure. Brown’s ambition was considerable, and he requested the whole of southern Africa as his “patch.” He must have been a singular sight on his pony, traversing wide tracts of land, his stock of cocoa and chocolate wares like nothing recognizable in Africa, constantly fingered in a meltingly hot sun. Blazing a trail through thousands of miles of bush, he went where no confectionery salesman had ever been seen before, forging a route from the
cape to Northern Rhodesia, Portuguese East Africa to Southwest Africa, and encompassing Madagascar on the way.

  The Frys also sent travellers to the South African coast. Their literature shows they found the dangers of travel in Africa “immense” and were stunned by the sheer scale of the unexplored interiors. Nonetheless, “the Dark Continent,” they wrote, was beginning to open up “to the enlightening influences of trade.” Their best markets were in the towns that sprung up around the South African diamond and gold mines. Fry found that the boys working in the heat of the gold mines more than 9,000 feet underground would start to shiver with cold once they climbed above ground. And Fry had a remedy for those chills: cocoa. Demand rose, and they established branches of the company in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

  Meanwhile Cadbury’s overseas travellers were also making headway in Australia. Their first Australian traveller, Thomas Edwards, informed the Richard and George that there was so much interest in their products that he required assistance. He was joined by William Cooper, a personal friend of George Cadbury. Their goal was wildly ambitious. The two travellers took a map and divided the continent between them. Edwards would promote Cadbury’s goods in South and West Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand from his Melbourne office, while Cooper tackled Sydney, New South Wales, and Queensland.

  William Cooper launched his sales efforts from a cramped apartment in a run-down part of Sydney. “The houses or hovels are perched higgledy-piggledy on the rocks,” he wrote to his Birmingham colleagues, adding that from his window he had a splendid view of “goats wandering about at will, chewing off the posters as high as they could reach.” It was an inauspicious start, but Cooper had a boyish sense of adventure and asked his brother to join him. Initial sales for the continent were little more than for a single small English town, but they grew exponentially.

  Fry’s overseas department followed Cadbury into South Australia. There they promoted their products across the country region in an original way, taking advantage of local sensibilities. “Please shut the Gate and Drink Fry’s cocoa” was the printed slogan they pinned to farm gates. Fry also ventured to India, where they faced difficulties arising from the huge variations in temperature from tropical regions in the south to much colder regions in the north. The same problem greeted Fry’s traveller in South America. Their cocoa drink proved popular in Bolivia at La Paz at an altitude of 12,000 feet, but in the humid lowland plains, they needed to devise sealed packages to keep the product fresh.

  In the race to meet the global challenge, George and Richard Cadbury set up an export department in 1888 with a modest staff of six. Travellers spread to far-flung corners of the globe. That year, their Australian traveller, William Cooper, enlarged his territory and introduced the Indian citizens of Ceylon, Calcutta, and Karachi to the homely English fireside drink. His success encouraged the firm to assign a permanent traveller to the region, and they hired J. E. Davis to cover India, Burma, and Ceylon. Davis worked ceaselessly, in spite of illness, to bring the English drink to countries as strange and exotic as the Arabian Nights.

  But Davis was outdone. Harold Waite from Birmingham was hard to beat. With magnificent determination and belief in his product, he won customers for Cadbury on the grand scale as he trekked by train and boat and on horseback through the West Indies and South America before tackling the Middle East, and then striking out east to Bangkok and Java. Unbelievably all those countries that the Victorians of Birmingham thought of as bewitchingly mysterious were hungry for a taste of English chocolate.

  It was small wonder that the staff at Bournville looked forward to the annual travellers party, held just before Christmas each year. The travellers brought back colorful tales of the great global odyssey: travelling mindless distances over fiery deserts and crossing alien continents carrying with ant-like patience and determination their knowledge of chocolates and of self-indulgent European sophistication. Demand for English cocoa and chocolate was so great that Richard and George Cadbury’s fast-growing export department soon grew to a travelling staff of fifty.

  At the center of all this activity, Bournville defied its critics. Sales more than quadrupled in the 1880s, rising from £117,505 in 1880 to £515,371 in 1890. Richard and George seemed unlikely figureheads at the helm of this fledgling global enterprise. The manager of the general office, H. E. Johnson, affectionately remembered “Mr George with a row of small tins on a counter in front of him, the tins filled with roasted beans just brought in from the factory, and Mr George with unerring skill testing them and pronouncing judgment.” Sometimes during these tests of quality, Richard would join him, and they sat together, happily absorbed in checking out the batches. “They consulted each other so much that no definite line seems to have existed,” continued Johnson. The two brothers “were the centre round which everything moved. It was a kindly duocracy and those who served under it . . . have nothing but happy recollections of the early days of Bournville.”

  These eccentric philanthropists, who worked for the Lord and for whom abstinence and self-denial was a way of life, showed surprising flair in devising ever more enticing forms of chocolate indulgence. Apart from their Cocoa Essence, their Fancy Boxes took increasingly luxurious forms. They were styled as a myriad of fashionable accessories: satin-lined jewelry boxes with elegant fastenings and locks, handkerchief cases or glove boxes, little cabinets to hold photographs or pens and other essentials. Each one was a work of art, with embroidered fabrics, painted illustrations, and lace trims.

  The rewards of running a growing business empire, however, presented fresh concerns for George and Richard that were increasingly in conflict with Quaker values. A Quaker business was meant to succeed, but to succeed quite so spectacularly was something they had not envisaged. Creating personal wealth on an industrial scale was a problem. Did it not say in the Bible, “It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a poor one to go through the eye of a needle?” The turning wheels of industry at Bournville were spinning a small fortune for their owners, but the Society of Friends’ code of conduct had been fashioned in an era when manufacturing on such a vast scale could not be foreseen. The austerity and self-denial of the Quaker fit in with a world where bounty for most people was still measured in terms of a good harvest.

  Banking families, such as the Gurneys and Barclays, gradually drifted away from the Society of Friends. They had come a long way from the days when Robert Barclay was so inspired by George Fox that he wrote a defense of Quakerism, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, published in Latin in 1676. When it was translated into English, it was acclaimed as “one of the most impressive theological writings of the century.” Several generations later, the rise of mass-market consumerism brought unimaginable wealth to his descendants. It proved hard to reconcile the plain living of Quaker forebears with the potential for enormous wealth. Successive generations left the Quaker movement, a path that Richard and George did not feel they could follow.

  Apart from the issue raised by personal wealth creation, the Cadbury brothers faced another challenge as staff numbers continued to expand. The Quaker creed holds that everyone is equal: The “inner light” shines in everyone. But how could the master and the worker enjoy the same close friendships that they had shared in the early days of Bridge Street, when leisurely afternoons were given over to companionship. By the late 1880s, the firm had nearly 1,000 staff. The sheer size of the business set the management apart and worked against the formation of close ties between everyone. So how did a Quaker firm acknowledge the inner light in each individual?

  One solution to this had come from Joseph Storrs Fry II, who held a meeting for all 2,000 staff members each morning. In an exchange of letters with George Cadbury, Joseph offered advice on the content and style of the service, the size of the hall, how to ventilate it, and the need for separate entrances for men and women. George and Richard found that the daily discussions they used to have with staff at Bridge Street evolved quite naturally into a ser
vice for their now larger staff. One visitor, Dean Kitchen, was much moved. He described a women’s service filled with “a vast multitude all dressed in pure white and ready for a day’s active service.” For him the “short reading, kind words and simple prayer preceded by a hymn . . . was a revelation of religious purity and simplicity at full force.” The service might set the tone for the day, but was this enough?

  George and Richard’s father, a plain Quaker to the last, found Quaker beliefs so intrinsic that even when he was old and in pain, he refused to exchange his hard, straight-backed wooden chair for one that was more comfortable. Reconciled to the physical pain of his illness, John submitted humbly to God’s will. There would be no concession to personal comfort, whatever his need. He also insisted that his daughter, Maria, no longer dedicate her life to his well-being. Although it was too late for her to have children, she married in 1881 and left home. John meanwhile lived quietly near his thriving family, a gentle old man who sat bolt upright on a hard wooden seat. He was occasionally seen at Bournville with his stick, noting his sons’ progress with pleasure, while his life remained a living testament to plain Quakerism and its insistence on the “life of the spirit.”

  In York, Joseph Rowntree was not vexed by the problem of reconciling personal wealth with Quaker ideals. His business was still struggling.