Chocolate Wars

by Deborah Cadbury

  Should anyone fall ill, a doctor was hired in 1902 for the staff. The medical department expanded over time to include four nurses and a dentist, who were available to all employees free of charge. Free vitamin supplements were provided for those lacking stamina, and a convalescent home in the Herefordshire countryside was built for staff in need of a rest. These amenities may seem quaintly paternalistic by modern standards, but at a time when employees could be subjected to unhealthy or even dangerous working environments, it is small wonder that workers were queuing up to join Bournville. By the turn of the twentieth century, George Cadbury took a further step and asked his son Edward and nephew Barrow to look into creating a pension scheme.

  There were the spiritual needs of his community to consider as well. George believed it was not possible to grow morally or spiritually in a slum. Only in the open spaces of the country was it possible for a man to come into touch with nature, “and thus know more of nature’s God.” At Bournville, apart from the Friends Meeting House, a site was found for an Anglican church, a village hall, and vicarage. George welcomed meetings of different faiths. He was a friend of William Booth, a Methodist, who had founded the Salvation Army in 1865, and he valued Booth’s message of a “practical religion” encouraging members to work in the slums. George believed all churches should unite to tackle issues such as helping the poor and created a central library so ministers and preachers could share works from different faiths.

  George and Elsie’s efforts to help the underprivileged began to show tangible results. In 1919 studies were carried out that compared children ages six to twelve who had been brought up in the poor Floodgate Street area of Birmingham with children of the same ages who grew up in Bournville. The children in Bournville grew on average two to three inches taller and were eight pounds heavier than their counterparts from the poorer districts of Birmingham. Infant mortality in Birmingham was 101 per 1,000 births, twice as high as the rate in Bournville.

  Above all George wanted to use Bournville to improve the lives of children from Birmingham’s slums. This may well have been due to the enduring influence of his mother, Candia, who in her temperance visits to the poor districts in Birmingham was concerned for the innocent young victims caught in the cycle of deprivation. George revisited those same dirt-encrusted, teeming inner cities, where a dozen families might occupy one house, and practical as ever, wanted to give the children space. In his ideal world, no child would be brought up where a rose could not grow. He arranged to buy sites from the Birmingham City Council and turned them into playgrounds, hoping that other wealthy families in Birmingham would follow suit. Ideally, he argued, there should be a playground every four hundred yards, so that children throughout the city had daily access to spaces where they could play and grow more healthy.

  To improve children’s health, George and Elsie created The Beeches in Bournville. This large house and grounds were used as an invalid home in the winter, but in the spring, the Beeches was turned into a summer camp where children could enjoy a two-week holiday from the industrial slums. Under the jurisdiction of the endlessly capable Mr. and Mrs. Cole, thirty stayed at a time. They could eat as much as they wanted, sleep in clean beds, and roam the garden and surrounding fields all day. According to contemporary reports, the children enjoyed their stay so much it was not unusual for them to be “unaccountably missing” on departure day. Eventually they were found hiding under beds or in cupboards when it was time to go. Ever keen to document the benefits so other benefactors would follow suit, children were weighed on arrival and departure and found to be two to three pounds heavier after their visit.

  No doubt inspired by his father’s campaign to help the chimney sweep boys, some of whom were badly maimed, George Cadbury had another scheme in mind for children who were unable to play. He knew that many of the cripples on the streets were the luckless “victim of cruel circumstances or ignorant chance,” and especially tragic were those harmed by “the carelessness of their own drunken parents.” George bought a grand house known as Woodlands, which was set on six acres of parkland just across the road from the manor house. It was adapted to cater to the special needs of crippled children.

  George Cadbury enjoyed making the rounds of these charities. He liked to visit the Barn when a party was in progress. According to his biographer, Alfred Gardiner, he also visited the handicapped children at Woodlands each week, a “large box of chocolates tucked under his arm.” Invariably his entrance was greeted “by loud shouts of the children.” After chatting with the children downstairs who were recovering their mobility, he would go upstairs to see the children with more seriously injuries whose chances in life were limited. He visited every child handing out gifts, and he hired a surgeon to investigate if anything more could be done for them.

  George Cadbury’s religious convictions shaped his world. It unified every aspect of his life and gave purpose and energy to his philanthropy.

  Walking around Bournville, George could see the results of his endeavor: houses and public buildings where there had once been muddy fields. The improbable dream that he and his brother shared had been turned into solid bricks and mortar, into something powerful for good. And it was all from chocolate. Chocolate, or rather the humble cocoa bean, had created a little Eden. He hoped the success of his charities and trusts would inspire others. “Example is better than precept,” he said. “If you can show that your life is happier by giving” than by hoarding, “you will do more good than by preaching about it.” So it was with great pleasure that he was approached in 1900 by Joseph Rowntree when he too wanted to create a model village.

  In York, Joseph Rowntree, like George Cadbury, found it liberating to delegate part of the business to the younger generation. He had an all-consuming interest in tackling the problems of poverty, a passion shared by his son, Seebohm. Both Joseph and Seebohm had been much moved by a powerful series of books called Life and Labour of the People in London, which were written by Charles Booth in the 1890s. Booth popularized the idea of a “poverty line”—a minimum weekly sum that was needed to keep a man and his family at a basic level to maintain health. His study highlighted the levels of squalor and degradation that London’s poor endured, and he argued that the state had the means to help them. Seebohm was interested in applying a dispassionate scientific analysis to try to understand the causes of poverty. Despite his duties at the chocolate works, he found time to embark on a groundbreaking study.

  Seebohm chose York as a representative provincial town and set out to gather data on 11,560 families on 388 streets—two-thirds of the town’s inhabitants, including, he said, “the whole of the working class population of the city.” He and his investigators undertook sensitive inquiries house to house, questioning people on their rent, income, number of occupants, number of rooms, access to a water tap, diet, and other personal information.

  Seebohm pored over the data. Page after page of case notes revealed a vivid snapshot of poverty in York, each distilling the bare facts of a heartrending family struggle, but how could he use the information to analyze the problem more systematically?

  Labourer. Married. Two rooms. Four children. Chronic illness. Not worked for two years. Wife chars. Parish relief. This house shares one closet and one water tap with eight other houses. Rent 1s 7d. . . .

  Woodchopper. Married. One room. Parish relief. Wife blind. Mostly live on what they can beg. This house shares one closet and one water tap with two other houses. Rent 2s. . .

  Labourer. Married. Four rooms. Six children. Filthy to extreme. This house shares one closet with another, and one water tap with five others. Rent 3s 6d. . .

  Husband in asylum. Four rooms. Five children. Parish relief. Very sad case. Five children under thirteen. Clean and respectable but much poverty. . . . This house shares one closet with another house and one water tap with three other houses. Rent 3s 9d. . .

  Chimneysweep. Married. Two rooms. Five children under thirteen. All sleep in one room. . . . Man in tempora
ry employment earning 2s a day. . . . A bad workman . . . incapable of supporting his family decently. . .

  Polisher. Married. Four rooms. Two children. Parish relief. Wife washes . . . Man not deserving; has spent all large earnings on drink. Fellow workmen have made several collections for him. All speak badly of him. House very dirty. Rent 3s 10d. . .

  After consulting with nutrition experts on the minimum requirements for a basic diet, Seebohm Rowntree set a poverty line for a family of five at 21s and 8d—roughly £75 per week today—acknowledging that this allowed for a diet “less generous . . . than that supplied to able bodied paupers in workhouses.” He defined “primary poverty” as those below this poverty line. No matter how carefully they spent their wages, this group did not earn enough to cover the minimum basic needs of life, which he described as “the maintenance of merely physical efficiency.” Incredibly, 7,230 people (almost 10 percent of York’s population) fell into primary poverty, meaning they could not earn enough to feed themselves adequately.

  Seebohm’s analysis showed a low wage was the biggest single cause of primary poverty. Half the men in this category had jobs, but they worked for such a pittance that they could not meet their families’ basic needs. Apart from appallingly low wages, the other key causes of primary poverty were the size of the family and the death or illness of the wage earner.

  The next group Seebohm analyzed was the 13,072 people suffering from what he called “secondary poverty”—roughly 18 percent of the population. To the investigators, this group appeared just as poverty-stricken as the first group, despite the fact that its members earned enough money to meet their basic needs. However, they failed to do so because they were spending some of their income on nonessentials, “either useful or wasteful,” such as drink. For those in secondary poverty, he considered a number of factors were contributing to their poverty, such as inadequate housing or overcrowding. Taking the two groups together, Seebohm showed that 27 percent—half the working population of York—were in either primary or secondary poverty.

  Seebohm Rowntree was “much surprised” that his findings coincided with Charles Booth’s research. Booth had estimated that 30 percent of Londoners lived in poverty. If the findings in London and York could be extrapolated to other towns, reasoned Seebohm, “We are faced with the startling probability that from 25-30% of the town populations of the UK are living in poverty,” a result that he thought prompted “great searchings of the heart.” Surely, “No civilisation can be sound or stable which has at its base this mass of stunted human life?” For him it was unacceptable that “multitudes of men and women are doomed by inevitable law to a struggle for survival so severe as to cripple or destroy the higher parts of their nature.” Seebohm’s research was published in 1901 as Poverty: A Study of Town Life. One person who read it was Winston Churchill, a Tory MP at the time. Rowntree’s study “has fairly made my hair stand on end,” he said.

  Joseph Rowntree was keen to do what he could to alleviate the situation his son had revealed in York. By 1900 he was in a position to do this; in the five years since moving to Haxby Road, his business had doubled in size with sales approaching £500,000. After discussions with George Cadbury, Joseph purchased 150 acres of land three miles outside of York and hired an architect to design a village on parallel lines to Bournville. He envisaged a similarly idyllic community, a utopia of cottage gardens resplendent with produce and pale children running freely through the woods, taking on the color of health. He wanted his village to be affordable for the poorest slum dwellers of York, many of whom were supporting a family on less than £1 a week. When the lowest weekly rents of 5 shillings proved to be beyond their means, Rowntree commissioned simpler cottages to be built without bathrooms or hot water for £135 each and let for 4 shillings per week.

  It took time for his experiment to come to fruition, but gradually, with the addition of the Folk Hall, schools, and playing fields, the pretty garden village of New Earswick took shape. In 1904, sixty-eight-year-old Joseph Rowntree, like George Cadbury, handed over the estate to the nonprofit Joseph Rowntree Village Trust. To complement the work of the Village Trust, he also created the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Social Services Trust. These had the remit to investigate social and religious issues and explore problems of “importance to the well-being of the community.” He committed one-half of his total wealth to these three trusts.

  Discussions between the two friendly rivals brought Joseph Rowntree and George Cadbury together on another issue of keen, shared interest. Joseph Rowntree’s older son, John Wilhelm, was beginning to question the Quaker movement and challenge its restrictive practices. He felt that the Quaker movement was stagnating, and the decline in numbers and outdated codes of practice were leading to a withering of the Society. It was in danger of becoming little more than “a hereditary social club!” Where was the spark? What was its mission? John Wilhelm organized a series of meetings to discuss ideas and called for the creation of a permanent college that would develop Quaker thinking. George Cadbury offered his former home at Woodbrooke on the outskirts of Bournville for the Quaker college, the only one in Europe. He and Elsie wanted Woodbrooke College to become a retreat where the spirit might be recharged; they funded scholarships for students from around the world. They hoped the college would contribute to the evolution of the Quaker faith and bring a new understanding reborn from centuries encrusted with obedience to outdated ideas.

  Meanwhile, Joseph Rowntree was not the only entrepreneur in England inspired to copy Bournville. Early in the twentieth century, Sir James Reckitt, a Quaker and a successful businessman in household goods, developed a similar garden village in east Hull. Ebenezer Howard’s ideals began to take shape as he founded his first garden city in Letchworth in Hertfordshire, followed years later by Welwyn Garden City. Another friend of George Cadbury, Dame Henrietta Barnett, created the Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London.

  Soon there was a stream of visitors to Bournville from overseas. A Frenchman, George Benoit-Levy, returned home to create a garden village at Dourges in northern France. In Germany, Margarethe Krupp, who inherited a fortune from her husband’s large armaments firm, gave a million marks to build a big estate at Margarethenhohe in Essen on condition that the architects studied Bournville before drafting their plans.

  Word of Bournville’s success reached across the Atlantic and to India, China, and even Australia. “Bournville,” declared the Melbourne Age, “is as important to England as a Dreadnought.”

  While George Cadbury Sr. was happily absorbed in creating his model community at Bournville, he could not ignore the wider issues in society. The deepening crisis of the Boer War provoked him to action.

  In the early autumn of 1900, a rector’s daughter from Cornwall, Emily Hobhouse, heard rumors of a new and horrific practice being used by British commanders against the Boers. As a member of the South African Conciliation Committee, she learned of inhumane conditions in a “concentration camp” in the region—so named after the policy of “concentrating” Boer women and children in one location, allegedly for their own protection. The British had fought their way into Boer territory by the summer of 1900. Faced with guerrilla tactics, British commanders applied a scorched earth policy, razing 30,000 Boer homes in the Transvaal region to the ground. Hobhouse heard of hundreds of Boer women, children, and prisoners trapped in a concentration camp in Port Elizabeth on the South African coast. She set sail to help them and to investigate the situation.

  Her research revealed that there was not one but thirty-four concentration camps. Worse, it was a mockery to call these “refugee camps.” Conditions were so barbaric they were more like death camps. In one camp alone, fifty children died each day, and a third of the inmates perished over one month. There was no provision for adequate food, clean water, or sanitation. Disease was rampant, famine was rife, and many inmates were emaciated. The camp system was “whole sale cruelty,” Emily wrote. “To keep these camps going is murder to the childre
n.” She denounced the so-called humanitarian system run by British commanders as “hollow and rotten to the core.”

  Back in Britain, however, the press was speaking in an almost united voice in favor of war and failed to reveal its full horror. When Emily Hobhouse returned to England and tried to explain what she saw, “The press abused me,” she said. She was branded “a rebel and a liar and an enemy of the people” and dismissed as “hysterical and even worse.”

  In England, Lloyd George had not given up on his efforts to find a Liberal backer for the Daily News. George Cadbury, shocked by developments in the war, the corruption of the mine owners, and the recent revelations of concentration camps, began to see how owning a national newspaper could have a value. It seemed a matter of duty to use his wealth to influence public opinion. “This war seems the most diabolical that was ever waged,” he told Labour MP John Burns. “Just now it seems to me that speculators, trust mongers, and owners of enormous wealth are the great curse of this world and the cause of most of its poverty!”

  In 1901, he agreed to Lloyd George’s proposal and put up £20,000 to join a partnership to purchase the Daily News. By any standards, this was a colossal sum—enough to build more than eighty new houses at Bournville. But in sharing ownership of a national paper, he hoped to expose other social ills, such as inhumane factory conditions. He would have a national voice that could promote the Quaker ideal of pacifism and to speak for the inarticulate and the unfortunate.