Chocolate Wars

by Deborah Cadbury

  Bertie was also beginning to glimpse victory. In April 1918, he had been promoted to captain in the new Royal Air Force and was put in charge of a squadron at Great Yarmouth that was responsible for patrolling for U-boats and Zeppelins. He wrote to his father on August 6, 1918: “You will have heard . . . that my lucky star has again been in the ascendant, and that another Zeppelin has gone to destruction, sent there by a perfectly peaceful live-and-let-live citizen, who has no lust for blood or fearful war spirit in his veins. It all happened very quickly and very terribly.”

  Bertie was at a concert with his fiancée when he was summoned to the RAF station at Yarmouth. He heard three Zeppelins had been sighted fifty miles to the northeast. Knowing full well that there was only one machine left with the necessary speed and climb, he wrote, “I roared down to the station in an ever-ready Ford, seized a scarf, goggles and helmet, tore off my streamline coat, and semi-clothed, with a disreputable jacket under my arm, sprinted as hard as ever Nature would let me, and took a running jump into the pilot’s seat. I beat my most strenuous competitor by one-fifth of a second.”

  As soon as he left the air field, Bertie saw the Zeppelins and maneuvered into a position where his gunner, Bob Leckie, could target one. The explosive bullets ripped a massive hole in the airship, flames ran along its length, and it plunged in a great fireball into the sea. “The action was very short,” he wrote. “She lighted after a few rounds and went hurtling down to destruction from a great height.” He and Leckie gave chase and managed to start a fire in a second airship, but it was extinguished and the Zeppelins moved away at high speed.

  Their luck had run out. Bertie’s engine stopped. Leckie’s gun jammed. “Our sting had gone. . . . I think that half hour, driving through 12,000 feet of cloud in inky blackness on a machine that I had been told could not land at night, even if I ever made land again, was the most terrible I have ever experienced.” When he did successfully land, “in a machine which I thought certain to crash and catch fire,” to his horror, he found that his bombs had failed to release and he had “two 1001b bombs on board; also my live saving belt had been eaten through by acid from an accumulator.”

  Afterwards they learned that the airship they destroyed was an L70, the best in the German fleet. They had brought down Peter Strasser, the chief of the German Airship Service, Fuhrer der Luftschiffe. After this raid, there were no further Zeppelin attacks.

  As the guns of the Great War finally fell silent in November 1918, belief in European civilized supremacy had been thrown into question. Thirty countries had battled in a conflagration that was fought on five continents. The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires had been destroyed; Germany and Russia had been defeated. The Versailles Peace Treaty brought 13 million more people into the British Empire and added 1.8 million square miles. But the price was terribly high. More than three-quarters of a million British fighting men had died. At Bournville, of the 2,000 men who left to join the forces, 218 never came back. In a solemn ceremony, a memorial tablet was raised in their honor.

  Those who did come home to Bournville returned to a different commercial landscape. In the final weeks of the Great War, the Cadburys’ once great rival, Fry, had partnered with them in a new holding company called the British Cocoa and Chocolate Company. The Fry family, believing that both firms were of equal value, was shocked when the valuations were completed. Cadbury’s assets were worth three times more than Fry’s. Consequently, although both firms were subsidiaries in the British Cocoa and Chocolate Company, Cadbury held the controlling interest. Shares were issued in relation to the valuations of the two companies. Chairmanship of the whole enterprise fell to Barrow Cadbury. Keen to “do the right thing” by the Frys, he valued their shares generously. The great Bristol chocolate house was now effectively a subsidiary run from Bournville. It was the first in a series of mergers and takeovers that would transform the British chocolate industry over the next century as the pace of globalization quickened.

  It soon became abundantly clear that far from being the dynamic rival the Cadburys had envisaged, Fry was something of a white elephant. Twenty-six-year-old Bertie, honored with a Distinguished Flying Cross for his war record as a fighter pilot, was eager to take on the challenge of the Bristol firm. He returned from the war to find there was no room for him at Bournville. Instead he took an offer from Fry at £300 a year, but when he turned up at Union Street in Bristol for his first day in May 1919, the state of the firm shocked him.

  He was greeted by the legacy of failed investment by Joseph Storrs Fry II. “Partially manufactured goods were transported by horse drawn box vans through narrow congested streets,” he wrote home, “between 24 different factories.” The doors from the many buildings opened directly out onto the street, making it impossible to track who came and went; goods disappeared without trace. With a pub on every street, the calm discipline that characterized Bournville was lacking. Equally curious for Bertie, “It was impossible to shake the then directors out of their complacency and their false sense of security.” For a reason best known to the director of confectionery and the director of chocolate-making, the two men were “hardly on speaking terms.” Since they both required large teams of almost identical staff, the inefficiencies multiplied, as did the confusion. Worse still, reported an amazed Bertie: “Fry’s never had much regard for quality, but during the War they abandoned any pretence of maintaining it and they opened up their refiners and let them rip.” The inevitable result was that they had a “terrible reputation” and were producing “unpleasant” chocolate. Could anyone be surprised they were failing, he thought, “with a divided and hopelessly inefficient and out of date factory, a sales force split in two, and a reputation for poor quality?”

  As for the Swiss rival that had prompted the move in the first place, as George Sr. had forecast, they had nothing to fear. Nestlé’s bold growth strategy came with a high price. They had continued their aggressive spending, acquiring twenty-two more factories in Australia and America in 1920 alone. They had eighty factories worldwide when the postwar downturn kicked in. The combination of plummeting government orders, stunning levels of debt, a crisis in foreign exchange, a rise in costs of raw materials, and panic selling of Nestlé shares in 1921 brought the company to a crisis point. In 1921, for the first time in the company’s history, Nestlé announced a substantial deficit of 1 million Swiss francs.

  Ever practical, when George Sr. and Elsie learned there were children starving in Austria after the war, they made arrangements to bring fifteen of them to stay in Bournville village. Quaker friends organized “cocoa rooms” to feed orphaned children in Vienna. George became known as “the chocolate uncle” on account of the numerous boxes of chocolates that he sent to the children.

  Gradually George reduced his duties, and when he appeared in public it was invariably with Elsie at his side. King George V and Queen Mary came to visit Bournville in 1919 and toured the almshouses built by Richard Cadbury. Although still tall, spare, his head held high, George Sr. had a certain fragility; he moved with the careful, measured pace of a man who knows his days too are measured. His eyes “gleamed with visionary light” as though fixed on the New Jerusalem that had inspired him.

  George may have found that the evil of war was utterly incomprehensible—far removed from his understanding of God—but ultimately nothing could destroy his faith. He heard only one voice and focused on the vision that drove him: a liberal vision of toleration, unity, and a world at peace. On January 18, 1922, he and Elizabeth visited the latest developments of the Selly Oak Colleges, which he had helped to found. Woodbrooke and other Selly Oak Colleges aimed to advance spiritual and theological understanding, and George felt it was urgent to do all he could to bring religions together and encourage churches to work side by side. He and Elsie were touring a new church within the Selly Oak system when he was taken ill. His doctors advised rest.

  Even at eighty-three, George was not a man who would readily succumb to doctor’s orders. Conf
ined to the upper floor of the manor house, he could hear the familiar sounds of staff moving around the house, the whirring of the electric lift between floors, and outside on the terrace, the water cascading on the stone fountain. Peaceful hours passed in his study, commenting on the minutes from Bournville or meeting with visitors, happily engaged in discussing causes about which he was still passionate. His voice was weak and frail, reported a friend, Lady Frances Balfour, who saw him that summer, but his indomitable spirit never left him as he talked enthusiastically of his “vision of what cities should be.”

  Even when defeated by the exertion of visitors, from a balcony at the front of the house, he could look over the little empire he had created, still unspoiled. He always maintained that the view from his garden window was a universe in miniature. To see that perfect landscape was enough; even if he travelled beyond the western star, he could not be more enchanted. Across the lake and the herbaceous gardens, in a blaze of early autumn color, he loved to watch the children playing in the fields beyond. That year he and Elsie invited a record number of children for the holidays.

  In the other direction towards Birmingham, beyond the trams of Bristol Road, lay the rapidly expanding model village at Bournville, now with more than 1,000 houses and almost 2,000 acres of land, all thriving and at peace.

  George Sr. was well enough to visit Bournville in October, but any hopes that he would see another Christmas were short-lived. On October 20, he slipped into unconsciousness. There was a brief rally the next day, when he and Elsie, joined by their belief in the eternity of the spirit and soon to be separated by the great divide opening up between life and death, seized their chance for one more brief reunion and farewell.

  On October 24, 1922, Elsie entered in her diary: “Go early to see my darling. Breathing difficult all day. . . . Just as the Bournville bell signalled the end of the day, one sigh, and he too went home after work. Such triumph and joy. Much desolation.” She told her friends, “It was the going home of a conqueror.”

  The sun rose on October 28 on a clear autumn day. Bright sunlight streamed through the leaves on Bournville Green, the trees like brilliant flowers. It was the kind of glorious fall day that George Sr. had always loved. But it was the day of his memorial service.

  Sixteen thousand people gathered silently on the village green to pay their respects. Bouquets of flowers engulfed the Rest House. Tributes poured in from around the world. There were messages from thousands of people whose lives had been touched by George Sr. in a personal way—the young Viennese woman rescued after the war, the criminal whose life was transformed by his Adult Class, the cripple who first experienced swimming at the farm.

  The Bournville choir sang hymns. The twenty-two bells of the carillon that had once enchanted George and Elsie rang out across the village. Eyes were on Elsie, her grief and loss staunchly masked behind a veil of formality as well-wishers offered their condolences. “He was very much more than a captain of industry,” declared Henry Hodgkin in his eulogy. “He was much more than a large-hearted philanthropist, he was much more than a far-seeing builder of the future, though he was all these things. Pre-eminently we think of him today as our friend . . . and we think of him even more as a man of God, whose religion was his life and whose life was his religion. . . . He was a man of wide sympathies. . . . It seemed as if none lay outside his great heart. The world was his parish. He had a universal spirit.”

  People mourned not just the loss of a pioneer but the loss of all that George Cadbury had come to symbolize: the practical mystic whose visions of utopia, of garden cities and factories, whose love of nature and the simple things in life, whose overpowering faith and desire to do good informed every aspect of the enterprise he created. Above all, said Hodgkin, “He was a man who loved. The inspiration of his life was love. . . . Can any epitaph be more worthy than this—‘He loved greatly’?”

  Perhaps George Cadbury would have marvelled at the fuss. He believed he was merely doing his job and fortunate to be in such a position. His faith had always pointed the way—even when faced with the meaningless horror of the Great War. His conviction that your own soul “lived or perished according to its use of the gift of life” had guided him from the outset and never wavered. Neither he nor Richard, innocents at business when they took over the factory from their father, had any conception of the embarrassment of riches that following this course would provide. But business for them had always been just a means to an end. As Quakers, they knew the rewards were for their fellow men and for the glory of God.

  Soon afterwards a similar scene played out in York when George Sr.’s friend and rival, Joseph Rowntree, died at the age of eighty-nine. Right to the end, according to his private papers, he was puzzling over the question of poverty and whether, through rigorous scientific inquiry, poverty could become a thing of the past. In York, as in Bournville, people mourned not just the passing of the man, but everything he symbolized that had brought such unexpected good to the world of business on such a scale.

  For although the Quaker pioneers had died, they left behind enterprises in York and Bournville that were larger than the individuals themselves. People spoke of the “spirit” of the Quaker chocolate firms as though a mantle had gently enveloped each one, granting them a life and character of their own. Each seemed charged with the mysterious purpose of the men who created them, as though even the bricks and mortar were bent towards some stoic Quaker quest. What hope was there that their iconic creations would live on in the changed landscape of the post-war world? Would the dedicated altruism and idealism falter now that the leading lights were gone?

  On November 18, 1923, the front page of the New York Times carried a startling revelation about America’s chocolate millionaire. Mindful of Kitty’s wishes and inspired by the philanthropy of Quakers and others, the cigar-smoking, gambling candyman had discreetly given away his massive fortune. “I decided to make the orphan boys of the United States my heirs,” Milton Hershey told the Times reporter, James Young. Hershey had turned his company stock, worth $60 million, into a trust to benefit the orphan boys of the Hershey Industrial School. “He picked out the boys who never get a chance and decided to give them one,” wrote Young. “The biggest chance they’ve ever had in the history of the world.” The reporter found Hershey to be a practical man of few words; nonetheless, Hershey managed to convey his message.

  “Our boys are our finest possession,” he said to Young. “They are the future itself, growing up before our eyes.”

  “Suppose you had had two or three sons?” Young asked. “Would you still have felt the business should go to the orphan boys?”

  “Well, my wife and I decided that we ought to do this,” he replied. “She . . . did not live to see the plan completed. It was hers and mine.” He hesitated. “Too much money is an evil influence. Money spoils more men than it makes. . . . Yes, I think even if I’d had those sons you mention I still would have wanted the poor boys to get the business. . . . Because they are all our boys, you know, after all, whether we happen to be their dads or not.”

  PART IV

  CHAPTER 16

  This Company Isn’t Big Enough for Both of Us

  CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 1920s

  The Roaring Twenties—brash, hedonistic, jazzy—exorcised some of the horrors of the Great War. There was new hope, new ideas, and lovely new toys for all those shimmying, Charleston-stepping moderns, high-heeling it into the golden twenties, where you could live in a modern house and fill it with objects of wonder that banished drudgery with the touch of a button. Many households owned a car, a radio, sometimes a refrigerator, and even a toaster. This new world of consumerism and easy credit seemed a world apart from the frugality and self-restraint of the Quakers. Only a few years had passed since the death of George Cadbury, but the chocolate companies were about to be thrust onto a different planet: planet Mars.

  Forrest Mars was born in America in 1904 but grew up in a remote mining community in North Battleford in Saskatc
hewan, Canada. His entry into the world of confectionery happened by chance in Chicago in 1923, when he met his estranged father, Frank.

  Frank Mars had come to success late in life after struggling for years with a succession of failed candy businesses in the frontier towns of the Midwest. Chicago in the early twentieth century was the battleground that produced such winners as William Wrigley Jr., a salesman who worked the city streets, peddling his new ideas for chewing flavors: Spearmint and Juicy Fruit gum. Chicago also produced the Curtiss Candy Company, creators of the Baby Ruth and Butterfinger. Then there was George Williamson, who launched the delicious Oh Henry! candy bar—named, according to the Chicago Tribune, after a pretty company employee who went into such a flutter when her boyfriend arrived that “all the young lady could exclaim was ‘Oh, Henry!’”

  But for Frank Mars and his wife, Ethel, there was no quick breakthrough, and the hardship led to the collapse of their marriage in 1910. Frank was ordered to pay $20 a month to support six-year-old Forrest, but he often failed to make the payments. Ethel felt she had no choice but to send her son away. She worked as a sales clerk while Forrest lived with his grandparents in Canada.

  Forrest worked hard and eventually enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley. He took casual jobs to fund his education and rapidly discovered his talent for business. Pushing the boundaries as he tested his entrepreneurial skills, he soon landed in prison. His “crime” was an overzealous advertising stunt. Working as a salesman in the summer of 1923, he plastered the central street of Chicago with posters for Camel cigarettes, completely ignoring such niceties as payments and permissions—and ended up with a lot of explaining to do. The person who turned up at the Chicago prison to bail him out was none other than his estranged father, Frank Mars. Perhaps even more galling for Forrest, the father who had so carelessly abandoned him was now a success. After years of struggle, the upturn had come slowly for Frank Mars with the launch of his third candy-making company, known simply as Mar-O-Bar.