Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (20 page)

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 service 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.”

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

The Frenchman Claude Gaget toiled over boiling cauldrons of fruit in the quest for the perfect fruit pastille. Joseph and his younger brother, Henry, dedicated precious resources to finding just the right formula. Anxious words were exchanged as early efforts were spurned. But by 1881, they believed they had cracked it: Gaget’s recipe was luxuriously chewy and fruity. Advertising was unnecessary, Joseph insisted: Here was an honest product that he planned to sell at a fair price. How could it not be a huge success?

But the first launch of Crystallized Gum Pastilles in 1881 did not bring about an immediate change in the Rowntrees’ fortune. Although demand rose steadily, the costs kept pace. The Rowntree brothers had to order more boiling pots to support production, and over two years, the number of staff at the ramshackle factory at Tanner’s Moat doubled, reaching two hundred. If they dared to entertain thoughts that they were, at long last, turning the corner, they were sadly mistaken.

The year 1883 was a difficult one for the Rowntree family. In May, Henry died of complications from appendicitis. He and Joseph had operated the business together for fifteen years, and Henry’s cheerful presence had always balanced Joseph’s seriousness. Now Joseph was alone with his worries at the helm of a business that had grown but continued to struggle.

When Henry Rowntree died, he was in debt to the family firm. His widow and three children needed some kind of modest support, and there was still an outstanding £10,000 owing in overdrafts and mortgages on the factory. Although sales jumped in the 1880s after the launch of the pastilles, Joseph fought to control costs. By 1883, the neat columns of red figures in his account ledger told an unbelievable story. Sales reached a record £55,547, but the company still lost £329. Worse, Joseph knew that the business was unstable. Sales for his cocoa, which he knew was no match for Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence and Dutch pure cocoa, could plummet at any time. Despite years of unforgiving hard work, the future was insecure.

Joseph Rowntree had good reason to fear that his cocoa business could vanish altogether if he failed to develop a pure cocoa of his own. His first effort, which he called Elect Cocoa, debuted without advertising in 1880. It was not a success and was soon removed from sale. Fry had also launched a pure cocoa that failed. In 1883, however, Fry relaunched their pure cocoa, and this time they made sure to get their message across. Fry’s Pure Concentrated Cocoa won the backing of the
Lancet
and other medical journals and was soon selling well. Joseph Rowntree, watching from York, could see that the market for pure cocoa was getting more crowded by the day and he had nothing to contribute.

In 1885 Joseph Rowntree embarked on a tour of Europe in an urgent quest to understand the Dutch process. Rising sales from his pastilles enabled him to invest in a Van Houten press, but it was still not clear how to create a superior pure cocoa. In May, Joseph arrived in Cologne, Germany, to visit Stollwerck Brothers to buy new equipment. Soon after, he was in Amsterdam, where things looked more hopeful. He met a Dutchman, Cornelius Hollander, who assured him that he had a process that could match the quality of Van Houten’s cocoas. The Dutchman was convincing and persuasive. Joseph could not resist the promised gem of knowledge that could turn his company around. Deciding to take a risk, he agreed to pay Hollander £5 a week for six years, and Hollander promised “to communicate the secret of the Van Houten manufacture of cocoa and make cocoa powder for the Rowntrees.”

Five pounds per week was a handsome payment, and Joseph Rowntree did not want the rest of his staff to know how much he was paying Hollander. So when Hollander arrived in York and insisted on working in absolute secrecy, Rowntree heartily agreed. At Hollander’s insistence, his research room in North Street was carefully padlocked when he left each night.

Weeks turned to months as Joseph Rowntree was obliged to watch and wait. His slippery Dutchman failed to deliver: no satisfactory recipe for pure cocoa emerged from Hollander’s locked room, and his behavior became increasingly strange. He guarded his workroom, overcharged for materials, burned his mixtures, and exhausted everyone who dealt with him with endless haggling.

Joseph Rowntree’s patience ran dry. An indignant Hollander found himself locked out of his workroom one day. Rowntree’s staff had broken in and and finally uncovered his secret. Hollander knew next to nothing. Worse, with the help of the police, Rowntree’s staff entered Hollander’s house and removed numerous objects that had been stolen or copied from them, including “boiling glasses, drawings of hydraulic presses, drawings of the grinding mill, cocoa breaking machinery, a cocoa roasting machine,” and more.