Bournville works (Cadbury)

History

Out of the town

By 1878 Cadbury Brothers had outgrown its works in Bridge Street, in the centre of Birmingham. Most manufacturers in that position looked for a bigger site in an industrial district. Richard and George Cadbury went to the country. On 18 June 1878 they found the Bournbrook estate, about 14½ acres of meadow with a cottage and a trout stream, between Stirchley, Selly Oak and King’s Norton, four miles from the town. It had a railway station next door and the Worcester and Birmingham Canal, which linked it to the docks at Bristol where cocoa beans arrived.

Business friends in Birmingham thought they were mad. The brothers went ahead. They secured cheap weekly railway tickets for workers who still lived in town, and built on the part of the estate nearest the station. George drew up plans with the Birmingham architect George H. Gadd. Building began early in 1879. Bridge Street closed that summer, and in the autumn the first trainload of workers arrived at Bournville. The name came from the Bourn stream, with a French ending because French chocolate then had the highest reputation.

A factory in a garden

From the start it was meant to be different. There was a cricket and football field for the men and a playground with swings for the girls. There was an orchard, an open-air swimming pool where the Bourn widened, and sixteen semi-detached houses for foremen on the road to the south, let at five shillings a week. Inside were separate dining rooms for men and women, kitchens, heated dressing rooms and, later, separate gardens.

The same spot, then and now

1888–1913

Today

“If the country is a good place to live in, why not to work in?” George Cadbury asked, according to Cadbury’s own history.

Growing, and organising

The works grew quickly. In 1880 it employed 303 people. By 1899, when the firm became a limited company, it had trebled in size and employed more than 2,600. By the end of 1911 there were 6,182 workers, and by 1938 about 10,000. A younger generation of directors brought in laboratories, a sales department, a works committee, a medical department and education for young workers. The works became a series of ‘factories within a factory’, making almost everything it needed on site. In 1911 all workers were given paid holidays and brought into a pension scheme.

Life at the works had firm rules. Men and women used separate entrances and did not mix at work. For many years married women were not employed, because, as Edward Cadbury wrote in 1912, the firm 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”. Morning services, held daily for decades, were still held three times a week when the workforce was nearly 5,000.

Wars, mergers and new owners

In the First World War more than 2,000 Bournville men joined the forces, and some buildings became hospitals. In the Second, parts of the works made gun doors for Spitfires and other war work. Cadbury merged its business interests with Fry’s of Bristol in 1918–19, joined Schweppes in 1969, and was taken over by the American company Kraft Foods in 2009–10. Since 2012 the Cadbury brand has belonged to Mondelēz International. Cadbury World, a visitor attraction about the history of chocolate, opened on the site in 1990.

What happened here?

Cadbury Brothers moved here from Bridge Street in 1879 and built up one of Britain’s biggest food factories, with sports grounds, welfare schemes and strict rules on the separation of men and women. The model village of Bournville grew beside it from the 1890s.