The sweet smell of success
George Cadbury made a fortune in the chocolate business.The success of his company stemmed from a decision in 1866 to produce cocoa powder which, unlike that produced by their competitors, was unadulterated. Cadbury’s market position was reinforced by legislation passed in 1875 which prevented manufacturers from labelling adulterated cocoa as pure cocoa.
Bourneville: the factory in a garden
In 1878 Cadbury built a model community on fourteen and a half acres of land near the little stream of Bourne, south west of Birmingham.He named it Bourneville, a name chosen to help the company compete with rival French chocolate makers.At Bourneville, Cadbury provided housing, cricket and football pitches, open air swimming pools, and a full-sized concert hall and lecture theatre.
Bourneville became known as the factory in the garden.Cadbury said that ‘no man ought to be compelled to live where a rose cannot grow.’A tenth of the estate was reserved for public open space.Public buildings, shops and schools were built round a large common.Every residence had a large garden laid out with vegetable patches, flower beds and fruit trees.The value of garden produce was estimated as equivalent to a saving of two shillings a week on the rents for householders, and Cadbury’s proud boast was that the villagers grew £58 of food per acre where before the same land had yielded only £5 per acre.
The impact on the quality of life of residents was profound: the annual death rate at Bourneville at 7.7 per thousand and infant mortality at 5.1 percent were exactly half those prevailing in Birmingham.
A Quaker culture
A Quaker, Cadbury led prayers for all employees at the beginning of each day.As fellow Quaker and chocolate manufacturer Joseph Fry said, ‘in addition to the religious benefit which may be looked for, there is a great advantage in bringing the workpeople once a day under review.It is often a means of observing their conduct and checking any tendency to impropriety.’[1]
George Cadbury and his brother Robert led frugal lives and took a personal interest in their employees, addressing them by Christian names, employing an engineer whose sole duty was to make the machinery safer, and also a resident works doctor and a dentist.
As with Titus Salt at Saltaire, corridors were arranged to keep boys and girls separate on their way to or from work, and they had separate recreation areas on either side of the main road.Cottages provided for female employees were protected by night watchmen, one of whose duties was to light fires in the afternoon so that the girls came home to a warm home in the evening.But Cadbury refused to employ married women, believing that a wife’s place was in the home.
Representation for working people
Originally Cadbury wanted owner occupiers, but several who bought on advantageous terms sold at a profit so Cadbury vested all the property in the Bourneville Village Trust.He insisted that the Trust made 5% profit, to prove that such a venture was not bound to make a loss.A democratically elected council was set up to run some aspects of the village affairs and as a consultative body.In all of this he inspired his friend, business rival, and fellow Quaker Joseph Rowntree, and the wider City Garden movement.
Cadbury had no time for those who kept their business and philanthropic interests separate.He believed that it was just as important that money should be made rightly as that it should be spent rightly.By 1919, the Cadbury’s company was the largest chocolate manufacturer in the world and had a system of elected works councils on which the 7,500 employees and the management were given equal representation.
In later life Cadbury, a radical Liberal, believed strongly in more working class representation in Parliament, and finding himself increasingly in sympathy with the Labour Party gave financial support to many Labour MPs.
He became the proprietor of the Daily News, which campaigned for improved old age pensions, state ownership of the coal mines, and more public works to reduce unemployment.The paper lost money but Cadbury wrote ‘I had a profound conviction that money spent on charities was of infinitely less value than money spent in trying to arouse my fellow countrymen to the necessity for measures to ameliorate the condition of the poor, forsaken and downtrodden masses which can be done most effectively by a great newspaper.’
Sources
Ian Campbell Bradley, Enlightened Entrepreneurs, 1987
[1] Quoted in Ian Campbell Bradley, Enlightened Entrepreneurs, 1987, p 125
