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Chapter 4

They Did Not Show Us Any Mercy

No amount of prayers or hymns could solve one problem: the Cadbury brothers faced stiff competition. The other English cocoa manufacturers ‘showed no mercy’, claimed George, although they spoke with a friendly face and a reasonable voice. From the cramped offices of the Cadburys’ modest factory, their rivals looked unassailable. They sailed expertly on the great seas of commerce, making it look easy, inviting, like an adventure.

In London, the Taylor brothers claimed to be one of the largest cocoa and mustard manufacturers in Britain. They were making very similar products to the Cadbury brothers from their huge cocoa, chicory and mustard manufactory on a large site between Brick Lane and Wentworth Street in Spitalfields. A picture of their works proudly depicted on their sales brochure showed a vast complex of factory buildings with smoking chimneys, and horses and carriages gaily travelling to and fro. Their sales list boasted more than fifty different types of drinking cocoas, including all the familiar lines of Victorian England. Established in 1817, they had gained considerable expertise in cocoa preparation, and claimed their technical knowhow guaranteed the removal of any noxious, greasy oiliness from their delicious products. The firm was huge and, surrounded by the ever-growing London population, continued to grow seemingly unstoppably.

The Taylors were not the Cadbury brothers’ only competition in the capital. There was also Messrs Dunn and Hewett of Pentonville, who sold an enterprising range of cocoas that included Vanilla Shilling Chocolate sold ‘unwrapped’, various types of Chocolate Sticks in tin foil, and a curious Patent Lentilised Chocolate sold in ‘half pound canisters’. The early chocolate drinks made with powdered lentils, tapioca, dried peas or sago to mop up the cocoa fats were possibly not for connoisseurs, but these thick, rich cocoa-soups did satisfy the untried tastebuds of many a Londoner. And for the really hard-up, Dunn and Hewett promoted a slightly fatty ‘Plain Chocolate Sold in Drab Paper’.

In addition to London there were regional centres of chocolate production, notably at York, where the apprentice George Cadbury had himself witnessed the daring and confidence of Henry Rowntree on his entry into the world of the chocolatier. Within two years of starting at Tuke & Co., Henry was in a position to buy out the company’s entire cocoa division.

Henry could see that the Tuke premises, situated in the narrow, winding Castlegate in the heart of the old city of York, were too cramped for the expansion he planned. In buccaneer spirit he bought for £1,000 what he called a ‘wonderful new machine’ for grinding beans. Included in the sale was a motley collection of collapsing buildings at Tanners Moat near the centre of York, which he optimistically described as his chocolate factory: an ancient ironworks, an alehouse, and several cottages in various stages of disrepair, all of them practically falling into the putrid-smelling River Ouse. Henry explored the ruinous site with enthusiasm, smelling only chocolate as he glimpsed the river’s black and treacherous water.

The Rowntree factory at Tanners Moat in York in 1901.

The company’s leading brand had been Tuke’s Superior Rock Cocoa, which Henry duly relabelled as Rowntree’s Prize Medal Rock Cocoa after it won a prize at a local fair. To promote his wares, Henry extolled the virtues of his Rowntree’s Rock Cocoa compared to rival brands. He evidently had a sense of humour and his use of a quotation from Deuteronomy was no doubt appreciated by those listeners who knew their Bible: ‘For their Rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges.’ As Henry embarked on transforming the Tanners Moat works into a modern factory that could churn out his Rock Cocoa to sell across England, George Cadbury knew that this rival had the determination to succeed.

There were other firms in York poised to benefit from the arrival of the railway. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the twelve trains a day leaving London were delivering 275,000 visitors to York in a year. Joseph Terry and his brothers, who had inherited their father’s confectionery business in 1854, took advantage of this new opportunity. Starting back in 1767, their forebears had sold boiled sweets and candied peel to the rich from their enticing sweet shop not far from Rowntree’s grocer’s shop. Opening the shop door ushered the customer into a magical Hansel and Gretel world of sugared strawberries, raspberries, lemons and oranges.

With the arrival of the railways, Joseph Terry was soon selling to customers in more than seventy-five towns across the Midlands and the north of England. To meet the rising demand, he moved his manufacturing in 1862 to a larger site beside the River Ouse, just outside York’s city walls, to which the twice-weekly steam packet brought deliveries of exotic fruits and cocoa. In the 1860s Terry was looking closely at how to diversify his range by making more use of cocoa in chocolate-covered nuts and sweets.

But the Cadburys – and the other cocoa manufacturers – faced their stiffest competition from a giant Quaker concern in Bristol: Fry and Sons. The Frys ran the largest cocoa works in the world, so large it was fast shaping the city of Bristol. Their factory was the size of a small town, their sprawling works easily accommodating all the varied processes of production. This was cocoa-making for England. The Cadburys’ little plant could not compete.

Rather than being daunted by the size of the Fry enterprise, George Cadbury was intrigued. ‘I never looked at the small people or the people who had failed,’ he declared. ‘I wanted to know how men succeeded, and it was their methods I examined, and if I thought them good, applied.’ Through the Quaker network he was able to approach the Frys in Bristol, and found one partner, Francis James Fry, who was prepared to take him under his wing. Francis Fry and George Cadbury formed a loose alliance of English cocoa-makers which met, for convenience, in the London offices of the Taylor brothers.

‘I suppose we had some energy,’ George recalled years later, ‘for Francis James Fry elected to go round with me to see the Cocoa and Chocolate Manufacturers.’ George was surprised by this, remarking, ‘I was a young man in a small business compared to his.’ A year older than George, Francis James was the fourth generation of his family to run the firm. With Fry’s sales approaching a colossal £100,000 a year, he must have felt secure in the knowledge that the young Cadbury brothers were no threat.

George Cadbury had everything to learn about the development of a family firm from his Fry counterpart – and he did. The Bristol firm, he noted, from its earliest years, had had an outstanding reputation for innovation.

The story of the house of Fry opens in Bristol at a time when the city had more in common with the Tudor period than the modern world. Born in 1728 into a Wiltshire Quaker family, Francis James Fry’s great-grandfather, Joseph Fry, who had trained as an apothecary, came to Bristol as a young man seeking an opportunity.

At the time, Bristol was the West Country hub for trade, and as a port was second only to London. On the quayside the harbour opened onto a forest of rigging and sails from a multitude of ships arriving from and departing for the New World. The port was packed with sailors, slaves and merchants, the air heavy with the scent of rum and tar, and marvels from the New World such as sugar and cocoa that were unloaded into wagons and warehouses. In the eighteenth century the Flying Coach, drawn by relays of six to eight horses, made it possible to reach London in two days.

Joseph Fry, a sober figure in his plain Quaker clothes, took a tiny shop in Small Street and began his apothecary business in 1753, at a time when it was still customary for such businesses to keep jars of leeches in the window. As a sideline to his pills and potions he sold cocoa, which he promoted as a health drink, and a highly nutritious alternative to alcohol. Fry’s chocolate drink became popular in fashionable nearby Bath, where smart coffee houses were soon selling it to the aristocracy.

In just eight years, Joseph Fry was in a position to take over the leading cocoa manufacturer in the area, Walter Churchman. While Fry’s cocoa drink consisted of the oily cocoa flakes and powder in suspension in liquid, Churchman’s was clearly superior. Its secret rested on a patent he had taken out in 1729 for ‘an invention and new method for the better making of chocolate by an engine’. This was a water-powered machine that enabled him to create a much finer cocoa powder than anyone else. Once Fry had secured the recipe, his Churchman’s Chocolate became very popular.

Joseph Fry was inventive, and seized his chances to develop his business. By 1764 he had agents promoting his products in no fewer than fifty-three towns, and was in a position to open a warehouse in London. In 1777 he moved his cocoa manufactory to larger premises in the fashionable Union Street, then on the banks of the River Frome, and used water power to drive the cocoa-grinding mills. His business interests were many and varied, and under his concerned gaze and industrial ‘green fingers’ everything he touched flourished. He owned a share in the Bristol China Works, created a type foundry in London, was a partner in a large soap- and candle-making business in Bristol, and bought a share of a chemical works in Battersea. This was some feat for a businessman before the age of railways, telegraphs and telephones, and with little means of communication beyond the Flying Coach and the Penny Post.

In 1795 Joseph’s son, Joseph Storrs Fry, inherited the cocoa business and continued to develop the Union Street works. Since the water flow from the River Frome was not reliable, he took the remarkable step of installing one of James Watt’s first steam engines. To the astonishment of the workers, this clanking, hissing mechanical marvel transformed cocoa production, and was soon regarded as ‘one of the wonders of the World’. According to Fry’s records, the steam power from this engine was diverted ‘by means of a vertical shaft carried up through the factory’ to the third floor, where it turned Britain’s first ‘mechanically driven machine for grinding Cocoa Nibs’. News of the novel idea of using a Watt steam engine for food manufacture prompted comments from across the country. ‘We are credibly informed’, marvelled the Bury and Norwich Post on 6 June 1798, that ‘Mr Fry of Bristol has one of these Engines – improved by an ingenious Millwright of the city – for the sole purpose of manufacturing Cocoa. It is astonishing to what variety of manufactures this useful machine has been applied!’

Apart from installing a steam engine to grind the cocoa beans, Joseph Storrs Fry received a patent from George III to build a new kind of machine to roast them, which he installed in the factory next door. Doubtless he was gratified to find The Times full of praise on 8 August 1801 for the ‘excellent articles produced from his celebrated manufactory’. By the time George Cadbury’s father was opening his tea and chocolate shop in Birmingham in 1824, the Frys were using nearly 40 per cent of the cocoa imported into Britain, and their annual sales had risen to £12,000.

Fry’s grinding machines.

In 1835 the business passed to the third generation of Frys. Brothers Joseph II, Francis and Richard continued to develop the site on Union Street, and pioneered new brands. They launched Pearl Cocoa, which countered the heavy oiliness of the cocoa drinks of the time with the addition of arrowroot, which absorbed the oils. Since Pearl Cocoa also contained less costly ingredients like molasses and sugar, it could be cheaply priced to attract poorer households, and became a huge seller. Homeopathic Cocoa took advantage of the burgeoning interest in health. For the upmarket consumer the Fry brothers introduced a finely ground Soluble Cocoa which was slightly less gritty. All these products could be sold for a fraction of what it cost to manufacture them a hundred years earlier, when a pound of their grandfather’s best cocoas cost over seven shillings, almost as much as the average farm worker received for his weekly wage. These new variations cost around one shilling per pound, while the Frys’ workers were paid ten shillings per week.

The Fry family was noted not only for its innovation, but also for the austerity of its Quaker founders. One worker from the mid-nineteenth century recalled ‘primitive and paternalistic’ conditions: ‘The quiet of Union Street was even more marked between 9.00 to 9.20 when all employees attended a morning meeting. It was not uncommon to see passers stop to listen admiringly to the peaceful strains of a hymn sung by our girls and workmen as a prelude to the working day.’

As Richard and George Cadbury were struggling to establish their firm in Birmingham during the 1860s, according to Fry’s Works Magazine, ‘so great had become the expansion of our trade’ that the factory was inadequate to deal with the ‘orders pouring into the House from every quarter’. At a time when the Cadbury brothers were just beginning to recruit travellers to support Dixon Hadaway, Fry’s travellers reached across England. George learned that a single Fry traveller with a flair for sales managed to secure ninety-five accounts in just four towns: Cheltenham, Stroud, Worcester and Gloucester. Gloucester alone bought £10,000 of Fry’s goods. In the age of the steamship, the Frys also benefited from the Bristol docks that linked the company to Britain’s burgeoning Empire and an ever-expanding horizon. To cap it all, they took advantage of Bristol being a leading naval base and won a contract to supply the British Navy – almost doubling their orders overnight. For the military, cocoa was valuable because it was easy to transport in tins, and was warm and filling for the troops.

From the Cadbury brothers’ loss-making warehouse in Birmingham, the Frys must have appeared invincible. George knew he had a great deal to learn, and travelling with Francis James Fry gave him the chance to find out more about their latest pioneering inventions.

In 1847 the Fry brothers had introduced a novelty into the Victorian market. They had experimented with mixing their cocoa powder with its by-product, the excess cocoa fat. Whether by accident or design, they hit upon a way of blending the two ingredients with sugar to make a rich creamy paste. This concoction was then pressed into a mould and left to set. The result was the first solid chocolate bar in Britain. It was a breakthrough: a way of mass-producing a chocolate product that could be eaten instead of being consumed as a drink. This made chocolate portable, and turned it into a totally new kind of snack that could be carried on a railway journey or taken to work. They called it Chocolat Délicieux à Manger.

Fry’s new product held no excitement for those with a really sweet tooth. It was bitter, coarse and heavy, and probably only of interest to the dedicated few who also possessed a strong jaw. Initially sales were slow. Undeterred, the Fry brothers had glimpsed a sweeter, more solid future. They set to work on more recipes for chocolate confectionery that could be produced in bulk. Secretly they experimented with a new kind of white minty cream. This was made by boiling sugar in an open pan, whipping it to an opaque creamy consistency and adding mint flavourings to give it a fresh taste. After the minty cream had cooled and been cut into sticks, these were dipped in luxurious dark chocolate. By 1853, Fry’s frock-coated travellers were opening their sample cases to reveal a brand new product: Fry’s delectable chocolate-coated Cream Sticks. Shopkeepers were amazed when they tasted the first chocolate confectionery produced on a factory scale; it was rich and Christmassy, a real treat. Better still, mass production meant that the price was significantly lower than that of hand-made confections.

The recipe proved to be a success, and within a few years the Cream Sticks were reformulated as a new type of chocolate bar. The chocolate for these ‘morsels of delight’, as they were called in Fry’s literature, was formed into a thin, light paste. The mint cream was set in hundreds of tiny moulds and taken to covering rooms, where ‘scores of young damsels’ with chocolate trays coated the batches. In 1866 the first wagonloads of Fry’s Chocolate Cream found their way to the grocers and sweet shops of Victorian Britain. Preliminary sales of Fry’s minty chocolate sensation may have been modest, but there was growing interest – and not just from British customers.

French chocolatiers, who had long had a reputation for exquisite hand-made confections, were also exploring ways to produce them in bulk. Just outside Paris at his chocolate works on the River Marne in Noisiel, Émile Menier hit upon a process not dissimilar to Fry’s. He had inherited his business from his father, a chemist, who had originally used cocoa sweetened with sugar as a coating for his pills. Émile Menier developed the cocoa side of his father’s business, and by the mid-nineteenth century he had created a method for pressing dark chocolate into a mould. Eye-catchingly wrapped in chrome-yellow paper, it was the first solid chocolate bar manufactured in France, and it proved so successful that Menier’s output quadrupled in ten years, reaching almost 2,500 tons in the mid-1860s, a quarter of the country’s total output. Émile was able to invest more funds in his factory. Originally powered by a humble watermill, it was now equipped with shining new steam turbines, creating such a splendid spectacle that the locals called it ‘the cathedral’. Much of Menier’s chocolate was exported, and like many European manufacturers, he had his eye on the large populations of Britain’s industrial towns. Soon he was in a position to open a factory in Southwark Street in London.

To improve the texture of his chocolate and increase his production, Menier needed extra cocoa butter, the fatty part of the bean. He found a supplier in Weesp, near Amsterdam, where a cocoa-making family firm was run by Coenraad van Houten. Van Houten had managed to solve a problem that had eluded everyone else: how to mechanise the separation of the fat content from the rest of the cocoa bean, which produced cocoa butter as a by-product. As a result his cocoa was purer and more refined than anything else on the market. Exactly how he achieved this was a trade secret, but there was no secret about his sales: his agents were acquiring customers in London, Edinburgh and Dublin.

As a regular visitor to London, George Cadbury could not fail to notice the new products that were becoming available: a purer form of cocoa made by the Dutch, and eating chocolate manufactured as solid bars in bulk. In the 1860s sales of eating-chocolate in England were modest – nothing compared to the established drinking-cocoa brands. Even so, like a flag planted on new territory beating against the wind, they pointed the way to unlock the potential inside the little cocoa bean.

George recognised that the Fry family was better placed than anyone else in Britain to take on the foreign competition. Although none of their cocoas matched the quality of van Houten’s pure Dutch cocoa, Fry of Bristol was the cocoa metropolis of the world. Its four factories on Union Street, towering eight storeys high, seemed as secure as their granite and concrete exteriors. Just as this towering citadel dominated the town, so the bounty within dominated the market. The variety and sheer abundance of Fry’s chocolate temptations put them in a class of their own. The Frys were indeed a beacon, a light to follow.

The Cadbury brothers’ need to produce a popular product was becoming critical. Lacking the money to invest in the moulding machinery that was necessary to mass-produce such luxurious temptations as a chocolate bar, Richard and George struggled on producing cocoa as a drink mixed with questionable starches to absorb the fat. Their new products, Iceland Moss, Pearl Cocoa, Breakfast Cocoa and others, had failed to make an impact, and their losses continued to mount.

In response to yet another grim stocktaking, it fell to Richard to tackle the overdue accounts. ‘We made the lowest class of goods,’ George wrote later, and consequently they had some of the ‘least desirable custom’, who were not always ready or willing to settle their debts: ‘The small shopkeepers were constantly failing.’ Some went under without paying, putting Cadbury at risk of going under as well.

The public showed little appetite for cocoa mixed with lichen.

The brothers had resolved, whatever happened, not to take on any liabilities that they could not meet, or to turn to their father John for additional funds. Not unusually for the time, their only sister, Maria, now in her late twenties, had postponed any thoughts of marriage to devote herself to caring for their father. Inevitably she provided a focal point for family news. Their oldest brother John, after a brief attempt at farming in the West Country, had made the bold decision to emigrate to Australia, and had sailed from the East India Docks in London on 17 December 1863 on the ninety-day journey for Brisbane. Their younger brother Edward was embarking on a home-decorating business, and the youngest, Henry, was still at school. Maria, gentle, patient and unassuming, provided encouragement with a maternal eye.

Richard and George continued to work relentlessly, spending long days on the road selling their cocoas to reluctant grocers and returning to the warehouse to pack the orders themselves if hands were lacking. The shortage of money was proving a strain at home. Richard’s oldest son, Barrow, later recalled a family outing to Pebble Mill, ‘where there was a pretty stream’. His mother, Elizabeth, suddenly felt unwell, but his parents elected ‘to tramp all the way back again when his father would have given so much, had he been able, to take her home in a cab’.

The struggle was also taking its toll on the brothers’ relationship. Richard and George often took very different views about how to proceed. With their offices next door to each other, they were careful to keep any disagreements private, debating their options until one had convinced the other of the best way forward. To their staff they appeared united – according to Elizabeth they won the nickname ‘the Cheeryble Brothers’, after the philanthropic twins in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby.

All the brothers’ industry and virtue made no difference. At the end of four years they were facing disaster. ‘All my brother’s money had disappeared,’ George admitted. ‘I had but 1,500 left – not having married.’ There were insufficient funds left of their inheritance to develop a business that was in desperate need of capital for mechanisation. ‘I was preparing to go out to the Himalayas as a tea planter,’ said George. ‘Richard was intending to be a surveyor.’

The Cadbury business was all but dead.