George Cadbury

In 1863 the Cadbury cocoa business in Bridge Street was close to finished. Two years earlier George Cadbury, aged 22, and his brother Richard had taken over their father’s failing works with about £10,000 of their mother’s family money and a promise to each other: if the money ran out, they would close rather than borrow. The money was running out. George was planning to go to the Himalayas to grow tea. Richard thought he might become a land surveyor.

They held on. In 1864 the books showed a profit for the first time, and George later said that only his own spartan living had saved them. “If I had been married there would have been no Bournville to-day,” he wrote in July 1914 (quoted by A. G. Gardiner, 1923). “It was just the money that I saved by living so sparely that carried us over the crisis.”

A Quaker upbringing

George was born in Edgbaston on 19 September 1839, the third son of John Cadbury, a Quaker grocer who sold tea and coffee in Bull Street and had begun making cocoa in Crooked Lane, and his wife Candia, née Barrow. He trained in the Rowntree grocery business in York and joined his father’s cocoa works in 1856. When John Cadbury’s health broke after his wife’s death in 1855, the business declined, and in 1861 the sons took over.

Pure cocoa

Victorian cocoa was mostly something else. By George’s own account, the firm’s cheap cocoa was only one-fifth cocoa, padded out with potato starch, sago flour and treacle. In the 1860s he went to the Netherlands, without a word of Dutch, and bought a press of the kind used by Van Houten that squeezed out the fatty cocoa butter. In 1866 the brothers launched Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence, sold as “Absolutely pure”. When the Adulteration of Food Act of 1872 forced makers to declare what they added, the Cadburys dropped their cheap lines altogether.

Out to the fields

By the late 1870s Bridge Street was too small, and George wanted something better than a factory in a smoky street. In 1878 the brothers bought about 14½ acres at Bournbrook, four miles south of the city, beside the railway and the Worcester and Birmingham Canal. Building began in 1879, and that autumn the works moved out. They called it Bournville, after the Bourn stream, with a French ending because French chocolate was then the best.

The new works had playing fields and a garden, and sixteen houses for foremen. In 1893 George bought about 120 more acres nearby, and from 1895 he began building a model village. It was open to anyone, not only Cadbury workers, and was laid out with large gardens, trees and parks. In 1900 he handed the whole estate to the Bournville Village Trust. Its deed barred any pub without the trustees’ consent.

Generous, and in charge

Bournville workers had sports fields, swimming baths, classes, a pension fund and medical care, unusual benefits for the time. From 1866 George led a short daily service for his workpeople, with a Bible reading, a hymn and silent prayer. The firm grew from 303 employees in 1880 to 6,182 at the end of 1911.

The welfare came with rules. Men and women used separate entrances and dining rooms. Women had to leave when they married. “For a great many years married women have not been employed at the Works,” Edward Cadbury, George’s son, wrote in 1912, “as it is felt that a woman cannot give proper care to the home and children if she is spending the greater part of her time in a factory.”

Slave-grown cocoa

In 1901 the firm learned that cocoa from the Portuguese islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, which supplied about 45 per cent of its beans, was grown by Africans taken from Angola and held as forced labourers. George was chairman. The firm sent agents, lobbied Lisbon and the Foreign Office, and waited. In September 1908 the Standard newspaper accused Cadbury Brothers of hypocrisy. In March 1909 the firm stopped buying São Tomé cocoa, and that winter it sued the Standard for libel. The jury found for Cadbury, but awarded damages of one farthing, a sign that it was not impressed by eight years of delay.

Newspapers and causes

George taught at the Severn Street Adult School for half a century. He opposed the Boer War, and in 1901 he took on the Daily News to give that view a voice, banning racing tips and drink advertisements from its pages. He campaigned for old-age pensions. He died at the Manor House, Northfield, on 24 October 1922. His ashes rest in a columbarium in the Friends’ Meeting House on Bournville Green, and a bust of him looks out from an alcove on its front.