Cocoa sales had begun to decline during the economic depression of the ‘Hungry Forties’, when a slump in trade, rising unemployment, bad harvests and a potato blight in England and Scotland in 1845 combined to create widespread hardship. Many small businesses struggled, but for the Cadburys the irrevocable blow came in the early 1850s, when Candia was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
These painful years left their mark on Richard and George. They witnessed the inexorable decline first of their mother then of their father, then the neglect of the factory, as though it too was afflicted with a malady for which there was no known cure. John still occasionally walked through the factory in his starched white collar and neat black ribbon tied in a bow, but the enthusiasm that had prompted him to develop the venture over a period of thirty years was gone. He paid scant attention to the piles of cocoa beans accumulating in the stock room. The hard-won accolade as cocoa manufacturer to Queen Victoria no longer excited him. A year after Candia’s death he dissolved the partnership with his brother Benjamin. Gradually his absences became more prolonged as he searched for a cure for his arthritis, and the family firm began to lose its good name.
These were the pressing concerns in young George Cadbury’s mind when in 1857, like his father and grandfather before him, he too was sent away to learn his trade as an apprentice. His sister Maria had taken his mother’s place in the home looking after the younger children. His older brother Richard was taking on more responsibility for his father’s business. George was keen to master the trade by working in a grocery shop in York run by another Quaker, Joseph Rowntree.
Once past York’s famous city walls, the seventeen-year-old George Cadbury found himself in a maze of winding old streets, with irregular gabled houses, the overhang of their upper storeys making the streets narrow and dark. At the bottom of the Shambles, the road opened onto a busy thoroughfare called Pavement. Almost directly opposite, at number 28, stood Rowntree’s shop, a handsome eighteenth-century terraced house, tall and narrow, its walls made crooked by subsidence. There was little in the colourful thoroughfare outside to hint at the austerity and long hours that awaited George inside the shop.
The strict rules of conduct that Joseph Rowntree expected his numerous apprentices to obey were clearly set out in a Memorandum:
The object of the Pavement establishment is business. The young men who enter it as journey men or apprentices are expected to contribute . . . in making it successful . . . It affords . . . a full opportunity for any painstaking, intelligent young man to obtain a good practical acquaintance with the tea and grocery trades . . . The place is not suitable for the indolent and the wayward . . .
The Memorandum specified every detail of the boys’ lives: no more than twenty minutes for a meal break, only one trip home a year, and the exact hours at which they were to return each night: in June and July they were allowed to walk outside in the evenings until ten o’clock; during all other months the curfew was earlier.
Living at the house were Joseph Rowntree’s sons, including twenty-one-year-old Joseph and nineteen-year-old Henry Isaac. Joseph was tall and dark with intense features, the natural severity of his own character complemented by years of Quakerly upbringing. His father had taken him to Ireland on a Quaker Relief Mission in 1850 during the potato famine, and the experience had left a lasting impression on him: Joseph remembered how slow starvation turned the young and comely into walking corpses. Numberless unknown dead lay in open trenches or where they had fallen by the side of the road. For the serious-minded Joseph it had been a shocking lesson in the effects of poverty. His younger brother Henry provided a contrast to Joseph’s austerity. Somehow the full Puritan weight of Quaker training did not sit quite so readily on him; he had a sense of fun, and could be relied upon to lighten the mood.
While working in Rowntree’s grocery shop, George saw at first hand how the family’s cocoa business came into existence. Joseph senior had for many years been close friends with a local businessman, Samuel Tuke, who ran a cocoa factory and shop at Castlegate, not far from the Rowntrees’ Pavement shop. The business had been in the family for three generations, but when Samuel Tuke became ill in 1857, his sons did not want to take on the cocoa factory. The elder Joseph Rowntree offered to help his friend by placing one of his own sons in the business. As Rowntree’s eldest sons were due to take a stake in his grocer’s shop, the opportunity to work for the Tukes fell to his third son, Henry Rowntree. In 1860, Henry duly set out to Castlegate to embark on his own career in cocoa.
Not long after this, George Cadbury returned to Birmingham, although he had barely completed three years as an apprentice. Perhaps he was fired up by seeing Henry Rowntree start his new venture, and was eager to begin making his own way. But it also seems likely that John was well aware of his third son’s ability and dedication, and needed his help.
To the employees at Bridge Street the two young Cadbury brothers were curiously ‘alike and unalike’. Richard was seen as ‘bright and happy with a sunny disposition’. He claimed he would be happy simply to rescue the business and turn it around to make a few hundred pounds a year. George was much more driven. In the words of his biographer, Alfred Gardiner, he had ‘more of an adventurer’s instinct . . . The channel of his mind was narrower and the current swifter.’ Despite his ambition, he could see no simple solution to the business’s problems. As the brothers deliberated during the spring of 1861 in the gloomy Bridge Street factory, the prospect seemed a dismal one. From their cramped office they could see the empty carts banked up in the yard awaiting orders. It was not immediately obvious what they could do that their father and uncle had not already tried.
The great hope, of course, was to come up with a breakthrough product. They did in fact have something in mind that their father had been working on before family difficulties drained his energy. It was a product very much of the moment, with healthful overtones, called Iceland Moss. The manufacturing process involved blending the fatty chocolate bean with an ingredient that was thought to improve health: lichen. It was then fashioned into a bar of cocoa that could be grated to form a nutritious drink. Richard had a flair for design, and could see the possibilities for launching Iceland Moss. It would be eye-catchingly displayed in bright yellow packaging with black letters that boldly proclaimed the addition of lichen, complete with the image of a reindeer to show how different it was from anything else on the market. He and George hoped to promote the health-giving properties of Iceland Moss, but would the untried combination of fluffy-textured lichen and fatty cocoa bean excite the English palate?
Apart from developing new products, the brothers also had to find new customers. Their father had only one salesman, known at the time as a ‘traveller’. His name was Dixon Hadaway, and he covered a vast swathe of the country, from Rugby in the south far up into the Scottish Highlands, visiting grocers’ shops to promote the company’s variety of cocoa wares. He took advantage of the new railway to cover the long distances between towns, but was often obliged to travel by pony and trap or even on foot. Despite the challenges of getting around, Dixon Hadaway was evidently determined to keep up appearances, and was always smartly attired with a tall top hat and dark tweed coat, although it was invariably crumpled from long hours of travelling. It seems he was appreciated by his customers, who claimed that he was so punctual that they could set their clocks by his visits. But punctuality and enthusiasm alone were not enough to win new orders. People could not be expected to buy Cadbury’s goods if they had never heard of them. George was clear: they needed more capital to fund a sales team.
To finance this, the brothers discussed how to manage the business more efficiently. Their solution was to return to their Puritanical roots: ‘work, and again work, and always more work’. George enthusiastically planned to cut all indulgence from his life: games, outings, music, every luxury would go. Every penny he earned would be ploughed back into the business. This was harder for Richard, who was planning to marry in July.
A photograph survives of Richard’s fiancée, Elizabeth Adlington, whose classic good looks are evident in spite of her serious expression and the limited scope permitted for the enhancement of feminine Quaker beauty. Her face appears unadorned, her hair parted down the middle and pulled back