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Chapter 5

Absolutely Pure and Therefore Best

George Cadbury was considering one final reckless gamble. It would consume every last penny of his inheritance, but as long as he did not fall into debt or the great disgrace of bankruptcy, he felt it was a risk that had to be taken.

The more he learned about the Dutch manufacturer Coenraad van Houten, the more intrigued George became. Dixon Hadaway told him that van Houten’s refined, de-fatted cocoa was now so popular it was on sale in regional centres like Leeds and Liverpool, as well as London. Gradually George began to realise that this was the model he should follow. Refined cocoa surely held the key to the future.

George discovered that the secret of van Houten’s success lay with an invention he had developed with his father, Casparus, more than thirty years earlier. The van Houtens knew that established methods of boiling and skimming the bean resulted in an indigestible cocoa consisting of over 50 per cent cocoa butter. After experimenting with various designs of mechanical grinders and presses, they eventually perfected a hydraulic press that reduced the cocoa fat to less than 30 per cent. This meant that the often unappealing extras that had formerly been used to mop up the fat were no longer required. The result was a purer, smoother drink that tasted more like chocolate and less like potato flour.

The Dutch process remained secret, and no one in England, not even Fry, had discovered a way to manufacture a purer cocoa. George pondered this possible opportunity. Could this be the way to get ahead of their English rivals? Would the Dutch be prepared to sell the brothers their machine? If they had it, could they turn the factory around by using the cocoa butter produced by the refining process to create fancy chocolates like the French? Suddenly George could see a business future that made sense. Instead of using the bean to create one type of product, a fatty and adulterated cocoa, he could create two different products – pure cocoa and eating chocolate – using the most appropriate bit of the bean for each. A whole new set of possibilities opened up – if he could get only hold of van Houten’s machine.

‘I went off to Holland without knowing a word of Dutch,’ said George, and ‘saw the manufacturer with whom I had to talk entirely by signs and the dictionary’. George, plainly dressed, earnest, frustrated by the language barrier and absolutely sure that the odd-looking machine would save the Cadbury factory, was desperate to charm and persuade van Houten, and take home the prize.

Despite the difficulties in communication, van Houten succumbed, and a Dutch de-fatting machine was sold to the English Quaker gentleman. The records do not reveal the price that was agreed, but it is likely that it accounted for much of George’s remaining funds of around £1,000. He made arrangements to ship the monstrous machine back to Bridge Street. It arrived by canal, and the sturdy cast-iron apparatus, a full ten feet high, was then laboriously transported to the chocolate works. Worse, it was very greedy: its giant hopper had to be fed with a large amount of beans. The brothers had to find a way to shift their new drinking cocoa in volume, and fast.

Van Houten’s cocoa press.

Their preparations were hit by a double tragedy in the family. In January 1866 their younger brother, twenty-two-year-old Edward, died unexpectedly after a short illness. When their older brother, thirty-two-year-old John, wrote home in May from Brisbane to express his grief at the loss, Maria was alarmed to see that his writing appeared unsteady, and the letter was unsigned. Doctors in Australia diagnosed him as suffering from ‘colonial fever’, a form of typhus. News of his death on 28 May followed almost immediately.

George Cadbury in 1866, when the business was close to failure.

Richard Cadbury with his son Barrow in 1866.

The unexpected loss of two brothers in such quick succession made Richard and George feel their responsibilities even more keenly than before. The survival of the family business, and any hopes of future prosperity, depended on this last throw of the dice.

In the coming months, they streamlined production of the new drink. By the autumn, Richard was ready to start designing the artwork for the packaging. At last, in the weeks before Christmas 1866, Cocoa Essence was launched.

It soon became apparent that there was a problem. Unlike the cocoa of their competitors, which went further because of the addition of cheap ingredients such as starch and flour, the pure Cocoa Essence was by far the most expensive cocoa drink on the market. The launch faltered. Customers were scarce. The strain on the brothers was beginning to exact a toll. ‘It was an extremely hard struggle,’ George admitted. ‘We had ourselves to induce shopkeepers to stock our cocoa and induce the public to ask for it.’ It looked as though the gamble had failed.

To the Frys, watching from Bristol, the Cadbury brothers’ move hinted at desperation. Under the management of Francis Fry, the company’s sales reached a staggering £102,747 in 1867. He continued to invest, expanding the premises in Union Street, and following the contract with the navy, Fry’s workforce rose to two hundred.

In 1867, George and Richard made one last effort, exploiting something that other Quaker rivals spurned on principle: advertising. Plain Quakers like the Rowntrees in York believed that a business should be built on the quality and value of its goods. Nothing else should be needed if the product itself was honest. Advertising one’s goods was like advertising oneself: abhorrent to a man of God. To Joseph Rowntree, proudly established as ‘Master Grocer’ in his shop in York, advertising seemed slightly shabby and unworthy, elevating promotion above the quality of the product. Even though he could see that his younger brother Henry’s cocoa works at Tanners Moat was not taking off as hoped, he did not consider advertising to be the answer. He dismissed it as mere ‘puffery’; he even objected to fancy packaging, and was content to alert his customers to any new product with a restrained and dignified letter. His deeply religious sensibility was offended by the idea of extravagant claims or exaggeration of any kind.

The Frys too had Quaker sensibilities when it came to excessive promotion. With the confidence that comes with over 150 years as a successful family business, Francis Fry saw little need for change. ‘Our early advertisements had a certain coy primness about them,’ conceded Fry’s management in the company’s 1928 Bicentennial Issue. The ‘venerable announcements’ of their original drink in the eighteenth century, Churchman’s Chocolate, consisted of long-winded essays trying to explain why this product was unique and how to obtain it – by Penny Post or from ‘the hands of errand boys’. This had progressed by the early nineteenth century to little homilies that advised the public how to prepare the drink and why it was good for them. But the language remained old-fashioned, describing the firm as an ‘apothecary’. ‘We were full of innocent pride in that period,’ wrote the management. Certainly these notices had nothing in them that would stop readers in their tracks. No gorgeous girl of forthright demeanour with glossy lips and an unmistakeable message in her eye as she drank her cocoa: just a message, hardly readable in small typeface, telling of Churchman’s Chocolate.

To the Cadbury brothers it seemed that advertising could do more. Another company, Pears, was taking advertising to new levels at this time. In 1862 Thomas Barratt, often described as the father of modern advertising, had married into the Pears family, and saw a way of turning a little-known quality product, Pears soap, into a household name by replacing the traditional understatement with a simple, attention-grabbing message. He began by enlisting the help of eminent medical men such as Sir Erasmus Wilson, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, and members of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. At a time when some soap products actually contained harmful ingredients such as arsenic, the medical men were happy to endorse Pears because it was ‘without any of the objectionable qualities of the old soaps’. Barratt created posters and packaging adorned with eye-catching images of healthy children and beautiful women, with the brand name featuring boldly. For the consumer the message was immediate and simple: use this soap and you will be beautiful.

To the Frys, the modern style of poster, with its pithy message, was not unlike ‘a sudden assault’ on the eyes. ‘You get the great news at once,’ declared Fry company literature. ‘You feel that something has struck you and you have, of course, been struck, not by somebody’s fist or stick, but by an idea.’ For many Quaker firms this ‘assault’ on the unsuspecting customer raised ethical concerns, but desperation drove the Cadbury brothers to a different view.

George and Richard knew they had to change the public perception of their pure new drink. Shrugging off their Quaker scruples, they took a gamble and committed to a further investment. Like the Pears team, they asked their salesmen to visit doctors in London with samples of their new product. To the delight of the brothers, this won the support of the obliging medical press. ‘Cocoa treated thus will, we expect, prove to be one of the most nutritious, digestible and restorative of drinks,’ enthused the British Medical Journal. Noting the brothers’ claim that their product was three times the strength of ordinary cocoas and free from ‘excess fatty matter’, the Lancet concurred: ‘Essence of Cocoa is just what it is declared to be by Messrs Cadbury brothers.’

The Cadburys’ timing was excellent, because during the 1860s the purity of manufactured foods was a growing concern for the public. There was very little regulation of the food market, and even staples like bread could be contaminated. The public had first been warned in 1820, when the chemist Frederick Accum published A Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons, which argued that processed food could be dangerous. By the 1850s, Dr Arthur Hassall had written a series of reports in the Lancet exposing some of the commonly used additives in cocoa production: brick dust, red lead and iron compounds to add colour; animals fats or starches such as corn, tapioca or potato flour to add bulk. By 1860, in response to public pressure, the government introduced the first regulations to prevent the adulteration of food.

Yet still the practice continued. In one government investigation more than half the cocoa samples tested were found to be contaminated with red ochre from brick dust. Consumer guides appeared, telling customers how to test their cocoa and warning that a slimy texture and a cheesy or rancid taste indicated the presence of animal fat. If the cocoa thickened in hot water or milk this was evidence that starches had been added, something you could confirm if your comfort drink turned blue in the presence of iodine. Most worrying of all was the continued use of contaminants, including poisons such as red lead, which were injurious to human health but which enhanced the product’s colour or texture. It was small wonder then that the Grocer hurried to follow the lead of the medical press and sang the praises of the Cadbury brothers’ pure new product: ‘There will be thousands of shop keepers who will be glad of an opportunity to retail cocoa guaranteed to contain nothing but the natural constituents of the bean.’

With this support, in 1867 the Cadburys planned the largest advertising campaign they had ever undertaken. There was no longer a question mark over advertising. They would use it with confidence, and really make the Cadbury name stand out. For the first time, they were effectively rebranding the whole image of cocoa. Their Cocoa Essence was honest, and they intended to shout it from the rooftops. Richard Cadbury came up with a slogan that capitalised on the strengths of their new product: ‘Absolutely Pure, Therefore Best’. They took out full-page advertisements in newspapers and put posters in shop fronts and even on London omnibuses. Soon the Cadbury name, synonymous with the purity of the company’s product, was everywhere. It was unavoidable, rippling around the capital like a refrain from a song. Given half a chance, the Cadbury brothers would have covered the dome of St Paul’s, protested one writer. But at the chocolate works, everyone caught the mood of excitement.

By the autumn of 1868, with the campaign gaining momentum, the staff at Bridge Street grew to almost fifty. David Jones, a former railway goods porter who had longed to be a traveller, vividly recalled his first day: ‘George put a sample in my hand and told me to go wherever I wanted for a week, the only stipulation being that I should not trespass on the grounds of another traveller.’ He chose north Wales, but soon had reason to regret his decision. No one had tasted anything like Cocoa Essence before. ‘I gave hundreds of shop keepers a taste,’ he remembered, ‘only to watch their faces lose their customary shape as though they had taken vinegar or wood worm.’ But Jones would not give up. He managed to secure thirty-five orders, and was gratified when the Cadbury brothers were ‘highly pleased’. Many years later another traveller, John Penberthy, would also remember the thrill of winning orders: ‘The delight of travelling in those ancient days, working towns not previously visited by a Cadbury traveller, surpassed in my opinion . . . the discoveries of Shackleton, Peary or Dr Cook!’

Horse-drawn omnibuses carried the Cadbury brothers’ first poster campaign.

While pressing on with the launch of Cocoa Essence, the Cadbury brothers also followed Fry’s lead with experimental types of eating chocolate. Their father, John Cadbury, had tested out a French eating chocolate before, but now that they had a large volume of creamy cocoa butter as a by-product of their pure cocoa drink they could dramatically increase the manufacture of eating chocolate. Rather than mimic Fry’s rough chocolate bar, Richard and George wanted something altogether more luxurious. They found that when the excess cocoa butter was mixed with sugar and then cocoa liquor was folded back into the mix, it produced a superior dark chocolate bar. Then they went one step further. They wanted to launch a new concept that they hoped would bring the exotic products of the French chocolatier to the popular market. Richard called it the Fancy Box.

Had the Cadbury brothers not been in charge of a chocolate factory that was still faltering slightly, the lavish contents of the Fancy Box would undoubtedly have violated their principles. It represented the most un-Quakerly immoderation and extravagance. Generations of Quakers before them had maintained a beady-eyed vigilance in the pursuit of ‘truth and plainness’. The senses on no account were to be indulged; the path to God demanded a numbing restraint and self-denial. But Richard and George, the apparently devout Quakers, had come up with the ultimate in wanton and idle pleasure. For each Fancy Box was a sensual delight.

The lid opened to release the richest of scents, the chocolate fumes inviting the recipient with overwhelming urgency to trifle among the luxurious contents as a whiff of almond marzipan, a hint of orange, rich chocolate truffle, strawberries from a June garden encrusted with thick chocolate beguiled the very air, all begging to be crushed between tongue and palate. Each one had a French-sounding name, adding yet more forbidden naughtiness: Chocolat du Mexique, Chocolat des Délices aux Fruits, and more.

It is ironic that George and Richard dreamed up these chocolate indulgences at a point when their own lives had become most Spartan. ‘At that time I was spending about 25 pounds a year for travelling, clothes, charities and everything else,’ George wrote. ‘My brother had married, and at the end of five years he only had 150 pounds. If I had married, there would have been no Bournville today, it was just the money I saved by living so sparely that carried us over the crisis.’ It is arguable that the brothers’ unremitting self-denial fuelled their appreciation of sensual extravagance.

In the pursuit of plainness, Quakers spurned most artistic endeavour as a worldly distraction that could divert them from the inner calm that led to God. As a result George and Richard’s father never allowed a piano in the house, and had given up learning his treasured flute. Any form of aesthetic enjoyment, such as theatre or reading novels, was discouraged; only texts of a suitably thoughtful tone such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress or Foxe’s Book of Martyrs were acceptable. As for painting, this was considered a superfluous indulgence that could lead a Quaker astray with a false appreciation of something ‘worthless and base’. But now Richard overturned these rigid rules. Revelling in exuberant splashes of colour, he began a series of paintings himself to be pasted on the covers of the Fancy Box.

Richard had travelled to Switzerland and made sketches of the Alpine scenery. Now these drawings, along with images of the seaside and even his own children, formed the basis of his designs, which were chosen to appeal to Victorian sentimentality. His own young daughter Jessie loved to pose with her favourite kitten. ‘Among the pictorial novelties introduced to the trade this season, few if any excel the illustration on Messrs Cadbury’s four ounce box of chocolate crèmes,’ enthused the Birmingham Gazette on 8 January 1869. ‘It is chaste yet simple, and consists of a blue eyed maiden some six summers old, neatly dressed in a muslin frock, trimmed with lace, nursing a cat.’ To strike a real note of luxury, Richard decided that some of the Fancy Boxes should be covered in velvet, lined with silk, and include a mirror. In every way, Cadbury’s chocolate was to stand for quality. The reviewer writing for the Chemist and Druggist magazine of 15 December 1870 was certainly won over. ‘Divine,’ he declared. ‘The most exquisite chocolate ever to come under our notice.’

It was one thing to dream up recipes for the Fancy Box, but quite another to mass-produce them. ‘When I think how we were cramped up in small rooms at Bridge Street,’ recalled Bertha Fackrell of the Top Cream room, ‘the wonder is to me now that we turned out the work as well as we did.’ A lack of space was the least of their problems. ‘Oh the job we had to cool the work!’ Bertha continued. Although there were small cupboards with ventilators around the room, all too often when staff from the box room came to collect the crèmes and chocolate balls they were still too warm. ‘I remember once we girls put our work on the window sill to cool when someone accidentally knocked the whole lot down into the yard below.’

Sales of the Fancy Boxes increased, and gradually more staff were hired. One new worker, the crème beater T.J. O’Brien, was amazed to find the owners grafting with the workers. ‘During these trying times I never knew men to work harder than our masters who indeed were more like fathers to us,’ he wrote. ‘Sometimes they were working in the manufactory, then packing in the warehouse, then again all over the country getting orders.’ O’Brien’s work beating the crèmes was heavy, and ‘often Mr George and Mr Richard would come and give me a help’.

But for all their hard work, reward was not to come easily to the Cadbury brothers. For Richard, busy pouring all his energy into the factory, the enjoyment of success, so longed for, so hard won, was wiped away. His adored wife Elizabeth died at Christmastime in 1868, ten days after giving birth to their fourth child. Suddenly his achievements seemed as nothing. The very centre of his family was gone.

At thirty-three, Richard was left with four very young children. Barrow was the oldest at six, followed by Jessie, who was three, one-year-old William and the new baby, named after Richard. ‘He was everything to our baby lives,’ said Jessie of her father. ‘I can well remember riding on his shoulders and going to him with all our troubles.’ However pressed Richard was at work she recalled, ‘He was so much to us always.’ The loss of his wife, in a Quaker household, required ‘humble submission to God’s will’. The children learned fortitude from their father. For Jessie, the certainty of her father’s love made her feel ‘it was worth braving anything’.

Perhaps because Richard grew much closer to his children after their mother’s death, during the spring of 1869 he found the time to set up a crèche for poor or abandoned children and infants in the neighbourhood, renting a house for the purpose and enlisting the help of a friend, the motherly and highly competent Emma Wilson. Mrs Wilson had been widowed seven years earlier, and had managed to earn an income and raise seven children on her own. She became indispensable, not only in the nursery but also by helping out with Richard’s children at their home in Wheeley’s Road.

Sometimes Richard’s children accompanied him to his office. Barrow had a vivid memory of going to Bridge Street with his father, and delighting in watching boxes being unloaded from the colonies. ‘One day a large boa constrictor emerged and was chased by two men who held it down with sugar and cocoa bags,’ he recalled. ‘It was a revelation that the boa constrictor could bend its body with such force whatever the strain.’ When the frightened boy fled to the Cocoa Essence sieving room, he was soon discovered, ‘and given a lecture on the impropriety of being there’. Hygiene was all-important; no leniency was given even when hiding from a boa constrictor.

Although the Cadbury brothers’ financial position had improved, they could not yet feel secure. None of their capital remained. Their livelihood and their future depended on the public buying their confections, charmed by an image of a blonde, blue-eyed girl holding a kitten and smiling sweetly from the lid of a chocolate box.

Richard’s illustration of his daughter Jessie and her kitten.

In York, the Rowntrees, with a quality grocer’s shop in the centre of town and a big chocolate factory by the river, appeared to be enjoying enviable success. But Joseph Rowntree, successful purveyor of superior foods, was worried. The problem lay with his brother Henry, and the chocolate factory at Tanners Moat, which looked more like a medieval castle with its forbidding high walls and blackened windows. It was becoming apparent that Henry had optimistically overreached himself by investing in the rambling complex on the River Ouse. By 1869, after a seven-year battle, his cocoa was still struggling to find a market, and the firm’s future looked uncertain. The prospect of failure was very real.

The lesson of years of stern homilies about honouring debt, plain dealing and trustworthiness began to preoccupy Joseph. He knew perfectly well from the family’s much-thumbed copy of the Rules of Discipline that good Quakers should keep ‘a watchful eye over all their members and those heading for commercial trouble should be warned and if required, helped in their difficulties’. Joseph knew that Henry was in trouble, running his business in a most eccentric manner, with equally eccentric accounting methods. Their father had died shortly after setting Henry up in the cocoa business, and as his older brother, Joseph felt keenly aware of his duty. Much though he delighted in his role as ‘Master Grocer’, he could not allow himself the easy path of putting self-interest first when his brother was in need of help.

At thirty-three, Joseph Rowntree had already won a reputation as a man who took his Quaker responsibilities seriously. Having witnessed the horror of the Irish Potato Famine, he had made the time while running his grocery shop to undertake an exhaustive study of poverty in England. Adopting a true spirit of enquiry, he had attempted to investigate not just the effects but also the causes of poverty. Researching back to the time of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, he had carefully gathered facts on pauperism, illiteracy, crime and education, leading him to uncover a complex web of connections that could trap a family in poverty. Concerned at the apparent indifference of the authorities, he wrote up his findings as a paper, British Civilisation, which he hoped to present at an Adult School Conference in Bristol in 1864. But even fellow Quakers, such as Francis Fry’s nephew Joseph Storrs Fry II, who was running the conference, feared his essay might ‘cause offence to weak brethren’, and urged him to modify its strong language. The following year Joseph Rowntree published a more measured paper, Pauperism in England and Wales, a landmark study that set out the figures and questioned the role of Church and state in perpetuating social injustice.

Joseph Rowntree in 1862.

Rowntree’s studies had given him confidence in his ability to collect data and analyse problems – skills that he reasoned could help him stabilise his brother’s business. In 1868 he took a bold step, withdrawing his inheritance from the security of the Pavement grocery shop to invest with Henry, hoping to bring order to the chaotic chocolate factory by the river, where Henry was put in charge of production. There was every reason to believe that, properly run, the factory could make headway. After all, other firms were turning a profit from cocoa.

Joseph, who had a keen eye for detail, found much to vex him as he embarked upon a painstaking examination of his brother’s accounts. Henry liked informality, and a number of most irregular practices and unbusinesslike anomalies had blossomed undisturbed in his factory. It seemed that each room, each account book or order book, each pile of receipts, harboured potentially fatal flaws. Joseph was confronted by a parrot in the workroom, and an obstinate donkey with a predilection for steam baths. The parrot distracted the workers, and the donkey failed to meet Joseph’s exacting requirements for the firm’s transport, stubbornly refusing to budge from the warmth of the steam pipes that emerged everywhere from the walls of cottages and outhouses that had been converted into factory buildings. The donkey had to go – to be replaced by a much more versatile handcart.

As for the accounts, Joseph’s detailed personal notebooks from that time are filled with long columns as he tried to get to the bottom of the debts to York Glass, York Gas, the saddler and the parcel delivery service. To resolve discrepancies in the accounts, he was obliged to resort to hearsay to work out the company’s liabilities: ‘Beaumont says he thinks Epps gave a 7% discount upon his lowest whole sale quotation.’ Henry’s staff, like Henry himself, it was clear, were a trifle hazy when it came to the details of the deals they had made. Perhaps that was not surprising, as the staff that had been pared down to the bone. Seven workers managed the key processes of grinding, roasting, rubbing and carrying sacks from the warehouse, each taking turns with heavy work. There were definitely no spare funds to squander on something that Joseph regarded as disreputable as advertising.

As a small antidote to the Mad Hatter logic of the castle, Joseph Rowntree did cast a discerning eye over the competition. Recognising Cadbury’s potential breakthrough with Cocoa Essence, he began to make discreet enquiries as to where he could purchase machinery to make a purer form of cocoa

Relaxed in the knowledge that he was at the helm of the world’s largest chocolate company, Francis Fry found he could delegate the many day-to-day problems involved in running such an establishment to others, and devote time to his numerous philanthropic and public causes. For years he had had a keen interest in the West Country railways, and during 1867 he led a campaign to unite the nineteen separate western lines. In addition, it was his great ambition to help create a national Parcel Post which could carry parcels at uniform rates throughout the whole of Britain. On top of this, he took a particular interest in the Bristol Water Works, a scheme to replace the old city wells.

But Francis Fry had another little interest that consumed a great deal of his time while he assumed the factory was running along nicely: he wanted to create a definitive history of the Bible, nothing less than ‘a systematic and historical account of the various editions of the different translators’. His profound conviction that the ‘Sacred Scriptures were of Divine origin and he was unravelling the wishes of the Lord’ necessitated extensive trips abroad retracing the footsteps of great Protestant scholars such as William Tyndale. In the early sixteenth century Tyndale was the first to translate much of the Bible into English directly from original Hebrew and Greek texts. He encountered so much opposition that he was forced to flee to Europe, where he was betrayed in 1535 and burned at the stake the following year.

Fry’s passion for William Tyndale ‘amounted almost to veneration’, wrote his son and biographer Theodore. He viewed him as one of the ‘greatest men England ever produced’, and was determined to make an exact copy of the Tyndale testament of 1525–26, the first English Bible. In 1867, the year Cocoa Essence was advertised on London omnibuses and the Cadbury name was emblazoned all over London, Francis Fry was absorbed in publishing a treatise on the Tyndale testament. Not content with this, he also tried to track down the original Bible translations of Thomas Cranmer, the sixteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury. Three years after the martyrdom of Tyndale, Henry VIII had authorised an English translation to be distributed to every church in the land, so that anyone could hear the word of God.

Little by little, Francis Fry’s real world was reduced to a shadowy decade in the sixteenth century, entwined in the internal problems of the Tudor court. His factory, the great chocolate citadel in Bristol, was a faded dream compared to his glorious quest to find the chalice, the authentic word of God. While he was so intensely preoccupied, it was hard for him to pay more than fleeting attention to the modern-ising force being pioneered by Cadbury.

At Bridge Street, Richard and George Cadbury were beginning to find their wilderness years were behind them. The first signs, reported Thomas Little in the packing room, came from a traveller in the Black Country: ‘The weight of the goods had broken the springs of his van, and he had had to run it into a customer’s cart house for repair and ride home on a horse.’ This was one of many clues that the company was turning the corner. Skilful use of technology and advertising were winning customers. And once the Cadbury brothers knew what they were doing, the ideas kept coming. Records for the Birmingham patent office show that on 3 November 1869 they sealed a patent for one of the first kinds of chocolate biscuit – ‘a new improved description of biscuit manufactured from the cocoa bean’ – and the search was on for other new forms of luxury foods.

All this was not enough for George. Seizing the initiative from his rivals, he went on the offensive to promote Cadbury’s pure new cocoa. Aware of the public’s growing sensitivity to food adulteration, he lobbied the government to take action. People should know what they were buying, he argued. Eventually he was summoned to a government committee to give evidence. In a troubling move for his competitors, he insisted that only an absolutely pure product such as Cadbury’s Cocoa Essence should be called ‘cocoa’. All preparations mixed with additional ingredients should be sold under a different name.