The idea of social welfare and reform was still in its infancy. Apart from the dreaded workhouses, there was little means of support. It was survive or die. Victorians managed to turn a blind eye to the full horror of poverty on their doorstep, until writers like Charles
Dickens forced them to look. Driven by his own experiences as a child in a blacking factory, he reinforced the message that poverty causes misery through stories such as the parish child, Oliver Twist: “the humble, half-starved drudge, to be cuffed and buffeted through the world, despised by all and pitied by none.” Dickens believed passionately that “the reform of habitations of the people must precede all other reforms, and that without it all other reforms must fail.”
In a Cadbury photo album from the period, after pages of neatly displayed sepia pictures of family members, there are images of influential thinkers of the day, doubtless used as a talking point for visitors. Included in these photos, besides Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Thomas Carlyle, is the author and artist John Ruskin. At a time when many believed that it was an individual’s own fault if he were poor and that the poor were in some way to blame for their circumstances, Ruskin was one of the first to question the role of the economy in perpetuating the deprivations of the poor. In a series of powerful essays,
Unto This Last
, which appeared in the
Cornhill
magazine in 1860, Ruskin was so critical of capitalist economics that the magazine was forced to stop publication.
Ruskin argued for an ethical approach to economic transactions and pointed out that with wealth comes a moral obligation. A profit, he wrote, is legitimate only if it can be achieved without harming the greater good of society. His beliefs that every laborer should have a wage on which he can live, that all children are entitled to an education, and that land should be used to benefit everyone and not just the wealthy were considered subversive and outlandish.
Ruskin’s political and economic thinking coincided with George and Richard’s Quaker sensibilities. Their unshakeable faith meant that all issues shrank to nothing compared with the choice between “living for things of the spirit, or for things that perish.” The idea of material success for its own sake was abhorrent. They were determined to use their growing business in a way that was compatible with “enlarging the riches of human experience.”
Full of idealism, George and Richard began to discuss ways in which they might actually do something practical to test out factory reform. Did a factory have to be located in a slum? How could they
raise men’s ideals and help them improve their lot? How could they assist women and children break the cycle of poverty? In the late 1870s, the brothers began to nurture an idea. They could move the factory outside of Birmingham and create “a factory in a garden,” where there was space, where the air was pure, and the sky hung a new shade of blue every day as though the world were born anew. It would be a model factory with “perfect friendliness among all.” Through nature, through a garden city, they would lead their workers to the “celestial city.” They would build this New Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.
Critics scoffed at the idea of altruism applied to a commercial enterprise. It was a “wild adventure” that highlighted the “rashness and folly” of the Cadbury brothers and would “end in disaster.” Factories belonged in towns, and the very idea that fresh air could be relevant to a business venture revealed that the brothers were “no more than fanatics.” The Cadburys’ stated wish that they wanted staff to find work “less irksome by environing them with pleasant and wholesome sights, sounds and conditions” was derided. Whoever heard of “pleasant and wholesome sights” making money? Surely these men of God would soon be bankrupt.
The brothers did not listen to their critics. Each Sunday on their day off, Richard and George walked along the railway lines out from Birmingham, looking for the perfect new site. They knew these roads of iron were essential to their new venture. In barely a generation, more than 10,000 miles of track had crisscrossed the country, the roaring steam engines shrinking space. By the spring of 1878, they found what they were after, about four miles southwest of Birmingham, nestled between the villages of Stirchley, Kings Norton, and Selly Oak. An unspoiled fifteen-acre meadow set in the heart of a rural landscape.
From Stirchley Street Station, they approached the land down a quiet country lane, Oak Lane (now Bournville Lane). From this muddy track, they found the fields for sale bordered on the east by the Worcester and Birmingham Canal and a branch of the newly opened Midland Railway. To the north, flowing through a buttercup meadow, was a trout stream, which gave the site its name, Bournbrook. As
George and Richard viewed this country idyll in the full blossoming of spring, their ideas began to take tangible form. Ignoring their detractors, the brothers deemed the situation “unequalled.” Their factory, they said, would be “replete with every adjunct requisite for carrying out a growing business.” Here in this rural haven they would build a factory on the part of the land nearest to the station; it would be a factory that considered the needs of the workforce, rather than merely exploiting them.
On June 18, 1878, the Cadbury brothers bought the land at an auction. William Higgins, a crème tablet worker at Bridge Street, could remember the day he heard the “the incredible news” that they were moving to the country. “Hope sprang up in the hearts of everyone,” he declared. Both brothers now had young families who were equally thrilled at the prospect. George eagerly brought his wife, Mary, and their young sons to the site in the works’ horse-drawn van. Six-year-old Edward took boyish glee in the great quantities of mud and the mountainous piles of bricks. Family visits to the construction site made such an impression that years later he could still picture his father riding on horseback along the country lanes, their temporary rooms at a nearby farm, and his newborn brother, George Junior, who slept through the fun in his pram.
Richard’s sons, Barrow and William, would later remember being taken to bare fields near Stirchley and instructed to “dig holes with our spades so that the subsoil could be inspected.” Eleven-year-old William, who was far more excited to find a stream full of trout, proudly recalled that he broke the first ground for the beginning of the factory. Sixteen-year-old Barrow, who was studying mechanical drawing in Manchester, was keen to show that he could help his Uncle George with preliminary sketches for the designs: the roasting room, grinding mills, saw mills, engine rooms, the packing room, and chocolate room leading to the railway. As for grandfather John Cadbury, now in his eighties and looking not a little formidable in a black top hat and dark cloak, with Victorian-style mutton-chop whiskers completely white, he made his way slowly around the site with his walking stick. It was satisfying to see his two sons embarking on such a promising venture and his grandchildren playing in the fields.
George and Richard were determined not to allow costs to escalate and sink them into debt. They hired and managed their own building teams supported by a young local architect, George Gadd. A nearby Quaker firm, the Tangyes Brothers in Smethwick, offered practical help in the form of their foreman bricklayer. The Tangyes Brothers were also on hand to help with the engineering design. But no one could help with the weather. The first brick was laid in January 1879, and building started in earnest in March. But constant, drenching rain reduced the clay site to a dangerous quagmire of mud. “The horses that were moving the soil were half buried in clay,” recorded the
Bournville Works
magazine. “Two or three of them broke their legs struggling to get out of it.” The word went out that the brothers had come unstuck already. They would never finish on time. George, outfitted in special long boots, would not be stopped by the rain. He supervised the works at first light and returned at nightfall after spending a full day at Bridge Street.
William Higgins was just one member of the Bridge Street staff who regularly trudged the four miles to watch the progress, whatever the weather. “So eager were the Bridge Street hands to get out here and our journeys so frequent,” he said, “that we could almost tell how many bricks were laid weekly.” It took 2 million bricks before the new “fairyland factory,” as Richard’s son Barrow called it, was close to completion. In just six months the brothers were able to close parts of the Bridge Street factory. They gave the female staff members a seven-week holiday while they transferred machinery by canal to the heart of the Bournbrook estate. Perhaps with a shrewd eye to future marketing, some bright spark suggested changing the name of the new site at the last minute from Bournbrook to Bournville, lending it a French flavor when French chocolate was so highly admired.
By September, Richard escorted the first party of female staff to see the completed works. According to his daughter Helen, he bought train tickets from the center of Birmingham to Stirchley Street Station, “like a father of a family taking his children out for an excursion.” As they drew near the station, everyone was “in a state of happy flutter and excitement,” as Richard eagerly pointed out landmarks. The party stepped down from the train, momentarily halted by the
enveloping silence of the country before taking their first glimpse of what their new life would be like.
They picked their way down the muddy country lane. Bournville was one storey high to avoid having to carry goods upstairs, Richard explained, and the property stretched over three acres. He and George had personally supervised the layout of the land around the factory. The coach house, stables, and smithy were already complete. Beyond the works, a large field was set aside for men’s cricket and football. There was a garden for the women, complete with swings and seats and plans for shady pathways and “other contrivances for outdoor enjoyment.” To the west, work was underway to build sixteen semidetached cottages for key members of the staff. The plots allocated for each one were spacious, with front and back gardens large enough for their owners to grow vegetables. Behind the houses, an orchard was being planted with 150 apple, plum, pear, and cherry trees. In the further fields, where the River Bourn widened naturally into a pool, the brothers had plans to create an open-air swimming bath for the men.
Stepping inside, the new chocolate works were unlike anything the women had seen before. Gone were the cramped conditions of Bridge Street, with its awkward passageways, dark corners, and steamed-up windows. The factory in the field was a revelation: a temple to space and light and order. There would be no more heavy lifting and carrying; it seemed invisible hands did half the work. A series of tramways were laid throughout to move goods effortlessly from room to room. It was lit mainly from skylights in the roof, although there were no windows in the southern wall to prevent the room from becoming too warm in the summer. With mounting excitement, the staff explored a series of airy, large rooms, the sound of their footsteps echoing in the cavernous space.
The roasting room was already in operation: a modern marvel where nine large cylinders driven by steam power rotated the beans over a coke fire. In the spacious milling room, a wonderfully scented creamy chocolate liquid emerged from heated granite millstones lining one side of the room. The packing room had “a most ingenious American appliance,” which could weigh and fill 20,000 packets
of Cocoa Essence a day. The box-making department, also mechanical, cut board into the required shape and glued the various parts together: Two machines could make 12,000 packets daily. The chocolate-making department turned out delectable little chocolate treats that proceeded in an orderly fashion on long conveyer belts to their appropriate box carrying a picture of a girl and her kitten.
Finally the wide-eyed staff entered what was called “the general girls room.” Cathedral-like in its proportions, this vast auditorium of 240 square feet of pure white space was dedicated to packing the Fancy Boxes. Here the young ladies would be faced with nothing more tedious than guiding the scrumptious chocolate mouthfuls into their preselected boxes. Beyond the Fancy Box room were kitchens with the latest equipment designed to provide meals for the staff in minutes. Yet more thoughtfulness came in the form of warm changing rooms, should the weather prove inclement.
Richard and George had separate offices, their wood-panelled rooms joined by a private corridor. They planted a rose garden outside their offices, and beyond the gardens, the views opened onto a rural horizon. They were certain that they had made the right decision in building Bournville. Fired with renewed enthusiasm, they began promoting staff. After just five years, William Tallis, taken in as an orphan, was appointed works foreman, and his office was right next to Richard and George’s. Although Tallis had almost no education, “he had natural abilities,” observed one member of staff, “which enabled him to rise from the ranks and take the responsible position.” The versatile Tallis could turn his hand to anything; one minute tackling an engineering problem, the next driving the works pair-horse van with goods to the station. He even delighted the owners’ sons “by instructing us how to fish for the trout in Bournbrook stream,” recalled Edward. Other members of staff who received promotions included seventeen-year-old Edward Thackray, who had been in the firm for just three years. Once promoted, Thackray learned from George how to purchase cocoa in the London auctions.
But for all the enthusiasm surrounding their country retreat, nature could be unkind to the new residents. The early autumn brought a plague of wasps despite concerted efforts to destroy all of their nests
in the district. This was followed by a winter so bitterly cold and wet that it tested everyone’s resolve and uncovered unwelcome anomalies in the factory’s heating system; some areas were too hot while others were icy cold. One employee recalled his surprise to see “Mr Richard or Mr George go down on their knees crawling under the tables to see if the water pipes were hot enough.” The brothers’ fatherly interest, he added, “made a great impression on us.” On wet days, George used to check with the forewomen in each department to make sure that all girls in their charge had changed into dry shoes. There was, however, an unexpected benefit from the icy weather. The two pools in the neighboring estate of Bournbrook Hall froze over completely. The Martin family who owned them permitted the Cadbury brothers and their staff to skate there. “Skating is associated in the minds of many with the first year here,” recalled one worker.