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Chapter 2

Food of the Gods

Richard and George soon found themselves running down their inheritance fast just to keep afloat. The first year was worrying. By the end of 1861 Richard’s share of the loss was recorded at £226, and George registered a similar figure. More capital from their inheritance would be needed. Richard, who had the added responsibilities of married life, could not help imagining the next year’s losses. Perhaps they were not businessmen. Was this the beginning of a slow and inevitable decline to bankruptcy?

The brothers tried to calculate how long their capital would last. In the absence of any other source of funds, they had to make further cutbacks. Even basic pleasures such as drinking tea and reading the morning paper were now sacrificed. Each day started at six in the morning and did not end until late in the evening, with a supper of bread and butter eaten at the factory. ‘This stern martyrdom of the senses,’ observed one of George’s colleagues years later, ‘drove all the energy of his nature into certain swift, deep channels’, creating an extraordinary ‘concentration of purpose’. Any small diversion or treat was dismissed as a ‘snare’ that might absorb precious funds.

While George focused on purchasing, policy and development, Richard tackled sales. The infrequent appearances of their traveller, Dixon Hadaway, in the office made a vivid impression on the staff. ‘It was a red letter day,’ said one office worker. ‘It was real fun to listen to his broad Scotch, as we could only understand a sentence here and there.’ Hadaway loved his old tweed coat, which he had worn since the Crimean War, ‘and I can still remember him extolling the beauties of the cloth and its wearing qualities’.

Dixon Hadaway, the Cadbury brothers’ first traveller, whose territory extended from Rugby to northern Scotland.

Richard joined Hadaway on some of his travels, and frequently took out the pony and trap to drum up business. He also hired some additional full-time travellers. Samuel Gordon was to target Liverpool and Manchester, while John Clark, recommended by a Quaker cousin, was hired to take on the whole of England south of Birmingham. Richard sent him first to London, but in a matter of weeks Clark found business there so bad he begged to be transferred back to Birmingham, as he feared he was wasting both his and the firm’s time. A letter survives from Richard, urging him not to give up on London and its suburbs:

We do particularly wish this well worked, as we believe it will ultimately repay both us and thyself to do so, and thou may depend if thou dost thoroughly work it, we will see nothing is lost to thee whether with or without success . . . It is important for us both to pull together for we have so much to do to conquer reserve and prejudice, and thou may be assured we will do our part in this in the way of improvements in style and quality of our goods.

To cover more ground, George too began to travel, taking on Wales, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. Letters from Richard’s young wife Elizabeth show that his journeys away from home became more frequent. ‘We have come nearly to the end of another day and think of thee as that much nearer returning,’ she wrote to him in Glasgow in July 1862, a year after their marriage. ‘We shall all be happy together if thou hast had a prosperous time.’ In his enthusiasm to increase turnover, Richard himself would go into the warehouse to package the orders, ‘not only in the early days when hands were few, but even in his later years’.

During 1862, since both brothers were often away, they hired more office staff. One young worker who showed great promise was William Tallis. Orphaned as a child, he had had very little education, but impressed everyone with his ability and enthusiasm. They also employed their first clerk, George Truman, who recalls ‘working, as did Mr George, till eight or nine every night, Saturdays included’. George Truman evidently also tried his hand at selling to the shops in Birmingham. A novice salesman, he generously offered samples for customers to try. These proved so popular that he soon ran out, and returned to the factory ‘in great distress’ because ‘one customer had eaten half his samples!’ He was reassured when ‘Mr George said he could have as many samples as he wanted and he went out the next day quite happy.’

To address the problem of the product being eaten before it left the factory, a system known as ‘pledge money’ was put into effect. Each day a penny was awarded to any worker who had managed not to succumb to temptation. Every three months the pledge money was paid out: one particularly abstemious employee remembers he accumulated so much that he was able to buy a pair of boots. Workers were also rewarded for punctuality. For those who arrived promptly at 6 a.m. there was a breakfast of hot coffee or milk, bread and buns.

Unaccountably, the brothers found there was a lack of public enthusiasm for Iceland Moss, in which they had invested their early hopes. They continued to develop new lines of higher quality, introducing a superior Breakfast Cocoa, as shown in their detailed sales brochure of 1862. This was followed a year later by Pearl Cocoa, then by Chocolat du Mexique, a spiced vanilla-flavoured cake chocolate. They improved existing brands such as Queen’s Own Chocolate, Crystal Palace Chocolate, Dietetic Cocoa, Trinidad Rock Cocoa and Churchman’s Cocoa – a sustaining beverage for invalids. ‘So numerous are the sorts,’ reported the Grocer magazine of these different types of cocoa drink, ‘the purchaser is much puzzled in his choice.’ So puzzled in fact that no single one of Cadbury’s products seemed to excite the palate of the Midlands’ growing population.

Richard was keen to find new ways to promote their different types of nutritious beverage. Apart from notifying the trade through the Grocer, in 1862 he designed a stall to exhibit their products at the permanent exhibition in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham in south London. The brothers also paid for a stall exhibiting their wares in the Manchester Corn Exchange. But it was not enough. An elusive ‘something’ was missing from their products, preventing them from exploiting the clearly delicious cocoa bean. Their travellers returned with disappointing orders, putting the struggling business in further jeopardy.

In battling to save the Bridge Street factory there was one issue that the brothers had failed to tackle. However inventive their new recipes, and however adventurous the palate of the British public, by turning cocoa beans into a drink, they were faithfully following centuries of tradition. Despite its long and colourful history of cultivation, by the mid-nineteenth century the dark cocoa bean was mostly consumed in a liquid form, largely unprocessed and unrefined, as it always had been. The Cadbury brothers, like everyone else, were still thinking along lines rooted in ancient history.

Like many Victorians, Richard Cadbury had a passion for foreign culture and history. With his life circumscribed by long hours of labour in provincial England, he longed to travel beyond Europe. He had been brought up on vivid tales of the exotic lands where cocoa originated, and the history of its cultivation. ‘It was one of the dreams of our childhood,’ he wrote, ‘to sail on the bosom of that mighty river whose watershed drains the greater part of the northern portion of the continent of South America, and to explore the secrets of its thousand tributaries that penetrate forests untrodden by the foot of man.’ He was particularly interested in the long and colourful history of cocoa in South America and Mexico, a history that gave intriguing glimpses as to how the bean might best be cultivated and consumed.

Richard had never actually seen a cocoa plantation, and attempted to satisfy his curiosity by collecting stories of explorers. While the traders he had met in Mincing Lane had never been short of anecdotal accounts, he could find out more by corresponding with experts at the tropical botanical gardens in Jamaica, and the Pamplemousse Botanic Gardens in Mauritius. Closer to home, knowledge of tropical species was increasing through the famous glasshouses at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The magnificent Palm House had recently been completed, and in the early 1860s work was just beginning on the Temperate House. Botanists knew cocoa by its scientific name – Theobroma cacao, or ‘Food of the Gods’ – given to the plant in 1753 by the Swedish naturalist Carl von Linnaeus.

‘This inestimable plant,’ Richard wrote, ‘is evergreen, has drooping bright green leaves . . . and bears flowers and fruit at all seasons of the year.’ It flourished only in humid tropical regions close to the equator, and was acutely sensitive even to slight changes in climate. The cocoa pod itself he described as ‘something like a vegetable marrow . . . only more elongated and pointed at the end’. In contrast to European fruit trees, the pods grow directly off the trunk and the thickest boughs, from very short stalks, rather than from finer branches. The outer rind of the pod is thick, and when ripened becomes a firm shell. Inside, embedded in a soft, pinkish-white acid pulp, are the seeds or beans – as many as thirty or forty within each pod.

Richard’s romantic idea of cocoa plantations was fed by the travel narratives that were occasionally featured in fashionable magazines like the Belgravia. One such article described a magical tropical paradise that must have seemed a million miles from Victorian Birmingham. In looking down over the plantation, ‘the vista is like a miniature forest hung with thousands of golden lamps . . . anything more lovely cannot be imagined’. Taller trees such as the coral tree, were planted around the cocoa trees to provide shade. In March, the coral trees became covered in crimson flowers, and ‘At this season, an extensive plain covered with cocoa plantations is a magnificent object. The tops of the coral tree present the appearance of being clothed in flames.’ Passing through the shady walkways of the plantation was like being ‘within the spacious aisles of some grand natural temple’.

To harvest the marrow-like cocoa pods, the plantation workers would break them open with a long knife or cutlass. The pale crimson seeds or beans were scooped out with a wooden spoon, the fleshy pulp scraped off, and the beans dried in the sun until they turned a rich almond brown. This method of preparation had remained essentially unchanged for centuries, and is richly interwoven with the history of the Americas.

Richard could not suspect how far into the past this history of cultivation extended. Recent research has revealed that three millennia have elapsed since the Olmec, the oldest civilisation in the Americas, first domesticated the wild cocoa tree. Little survives of the Olmec, who eked out an existence in the humid lowland forests and savannahs of the Mexican Gulf coast around 1500 to 400 BC, save the striking colossal heads they sculpted of their kings. Evidence that these early Mexicans consumed cocoa comes principally from studies in historical linguistics – their word ‘ka ka wa’ is thought to be the origin of ‘cacao’.

When the Maya became the dominant culture of Mexico from around AD 250 they extended the cultivation of cocoa across the plains of Guatemala and beyond. In Mayan culture, the rich enjoyed a foaming, hot, spicy cocoa drink. The poor took their cocoa with maize as a starchy, porridge-like cold soup that provided easily prepared high-energy food. It could be laced with chilli pepper, giving a distinct afterburn, or enhanced with milder flavourings such as vanilla.

Mayan art reveals that cocoa was highly prized. Archaeologists have found images decorating Mayan pottery of a ‘Cacao God’ seated on his throne adorned with cocoa pods. There is evidence suggesting that Mayan aristocrats were buried with lavish supplies for the afterlife, including ornate painted jars containing cocoa and cocoa flavourings. The earliest image of the preparation of a chocolate drink appears on a Mayan vase from around the eighth century AD, which also depicts a human sacrifice. Two masked figures are beheading their victim, while a woman calmly pours a cocoa drink from one jar to another in order to enhance the much-favoured frothy foam.

‘European knowledge of cocoa as an article of diet,’ Richard wrote in his survey, ‘dates from the discovery of the Western World by Christopher Columbus.’ On 15 August 1502, during Columbus’s fourth trip to the New World, he reached the island of Guanaja, near the Honduran mainland. His men captured two large canoes and found they were Mayan trading ships, laden with cotton, clothing and maize. According to Columbus’s son Ferdinand, there were a great many strange-looking ‘almonds’ on board. ‘They held these almonds at great price,’ he observed. ‘When any of these almonds fell, they all rushed to pick it up, as if an eye had fallen.’ The Europeans could not understand why these little brown pellets should be so valued.

The mystery was solved by the Spanish conquistadors, who arrived in Mexico in 1519. Travelling into the Valley of Mexico, they reached the heart of what was then the Aztec civilisation. It was soon apparent to them that the cocoa bean had special value in Aztec society, since it was used as coinage, and people in the provinces paid tributes to their Emperor, Montezuma, with large baskets of cocoa beans. The Emperor kept a vast store in the royal coffers in the capital city of Tenochtitlan of no fewer than 40,000 such loads: almost a billion cocoa beans. According to one Spanish chronicler, ‘a tolerably good slave’ was worth around one hundred beans, a rabbit cost ten beans, and a prostitute could be procured for as few as eight.

It is now known that the Aztecs, like the Mayans, used their favourite drink in a number of religious rituals, including human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that their most powerful gods required appeasement, and prisoners of war had to be sacrificed each day to sustain the universe. In one macabre ritual, the heart of a slave was required to be cut out while he was still alive. The slave was selected for his physical perfection, since until the time of his sacrifice, he represented the Aztec gods on earth and was treated with reverence. According to the Spanish Dominican friar Diego de Duran, who wrote The History of the Indies of New Spain in 1581, as the ritual approached its climax, and the fate of the victim was made known, the slave was required to offer himself for death with heroic courage and joy. Should his bravery falter, he could be ‘bewitched’ by a special little cocktail to see him through, prepared from chocolate and mixed with the blood of earlier victims and other ingredients that rendered him nearly unconscious.

Some time in the sixteenth century the cocoa bean found its way to Europe, where it was introduced into the Spanish royal household. The Spanish court initially consumed cocoa the South American way, as a drink in a small bowl, and then gradually replaced the maize, or corn, and chillies with sugar, or sometimes vanilla or cinnamon. In time elaborate chocolate pots were developed in which the heavy liquid was skimmed and allowed to settle before pouring, but essentially the Spanish ground the beans in the same way as the inhabitants of the Americas, crushing them between stones, or grinding them with stone and mortar. The result was a coarse powder.

Richard Cadbury found one written account of cocoa preparation in Madrid in 1664 in which one hundred cocoa beans, toasted and ground to a powder, were mixed with a similar weight of sugar, twelve ground vanilla pods, two grains of chilli pepper, aniseed, six white roses, cinnamon, two dozen almonds and hazelnuts and a little achiote powder to lend a red hue. The resulting paste was used to make a cake or block of cocoa which could be ground to form a drink. But whether mixed with maize or corn to absorb the fatty cocoa oils the Mexican way, or blended with sugar, the cocoa oils made the drink heavy and coarse, and cocoa continued to receive a mixed reception in Spain. Josephus Acosta, a Spanish writer at the turn of the seventeenth century, considered the chocolate drink much overrated, ‘foolishly and without reason, for it is loathsome . . . having a skum or frothe that is very unpleasant to taste’.

For many years the Spanish dominated cocoa cultivation in the Americas. They introduced it to the West Indies, where on islands such as Trinidad it soon became a staple crop. At first, English pirates raiding Spanish ships did not know what the bean was for. In 1648 the English chronicler Thomas Gage observed in his New Survey of the West Indies that when the English or Dutch seized a ship loaded with cocoa beans, ‘in anger and wrath we have hurled overboard this good commodity, not regarding the worth of it’.

Gradually, however, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the cocoa bean found its way into the coffee houses of Europe. Its first recorded mention in England appears in an advertisement in the Public Advertiser on 22 June 1657: ‘At a Frenchman’s house in Queensgate Alley is an excellent West India drink called Chocolate to be sold, where you may have it ready at any time at reasonable rates.’ Word of the exotic new drink spread across England. In the 1660s, the diarist Samuel Pepys describes enjoying his drink of ‘chocolatte’ or ‘Jocolatte’ so much that he was soon ‘slabbering for another’. In 1662 Henry Stubbe, royal physician to King Charles II, published A Discourse Concerning Chocolata, in which he surveyed the ‘nature of the cacao-nut’ and extolled the health benefits of the drink. Taken with spices it could relieve coughs and colds, and strengthen the heart and stomach. For anyone ‘tyred through business’ Stubbe heartily recommended chocolate twice a day. It could even serve as an aphrodisiac. White’s famous Chocolate House opened in 1693 in St James’s, London.

Cocoa continued to gain in popularity, principally as a drink prepared in the Mexican way, but it was also added as a flavouring to meat dishes, soups and puddings. In Italy a recipe for chocolate sorbet survives from 1794 – once the mixture was prepared, ‘the vase is buried in snow layered with salt and frozen’. For the more adventurous palate, Italian recipes from the period listed cocoa as an ingredient in lasagne, or even added it to fried liver. While most European preparations were ‘rough . . . and produced poor results’, according to Richard Cadbury, ‘France developed a better system for roasting and grinding.’ The French confiseurs got straight on with the sweet course; no messing with chillies, curries or fried liver. By the nineteenth century, French confectioners were winning a reputation for their exquisite hand-crafted sweets made from chocolate: delicious mousses, chocolate cakes, crèmes and dragées and chocolate-coated nuts.

With the wheels of European commerce and consumerism driving demand, in the Americas the cultivation of the cocoa bean was gradually extended beyond Mexico and Guatemala, reaching south to the lower slopes of the Andes in Ecuador, the rolling plains of Venezuela and into the fringes of the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. In the Caribbean, cocoa plantations were established on Jamaica, St Lucia and Grenada as well as Trinidad, which became a British colony in 1802.

By the mid-nineteenth century, despite the growing interest in the cocoa bean in Europe, it remained expensive, and principally a novelty for the wealthy. ‘When we take into account the indifferent means of preparation,’ concluded Richard Cadbury, ‘we can hardly be surprised that it did not come into general favour with the public.’ As Richard and George struggled to save their business, the full potential of Theobroma cacao had yet to be revealed. The unprepossessing little bean offered only a tantalising promise of prosperity.

In the early 1860s George and Richard hardly needed to undertake the charade of stocktaking, which they did twice a year. They knew their business did not thrive. The Cadbury brothers’ wide variety of different cocoas did not excite the nation’s tastebuds. ‘We determined that we would close the business when we were unable to pay 20 shillings in the pound,’ George said, determined to honour all their financial agreements in full. He admitted the stocktaking was ‘depressing’, but nonetheless he and Richard thrived on the challenge: ‘We went back again to our work with renewed vigour and were probably happier than most successful men.’

The struggle brought the brothers closer together. Quite apart from sharing the responsibility and the burden with George, Richard proved to be a delight as a partner. He was ‘very good natured and constantly up to practical jokes and fun of various kinds’, George wrote, ‘so that one almost doubts whether immediate success in a business is a blessing’. Workers too recalled Mr George and Mr Richard with a ‘cheery smile’, although they knew ‘the Firm was in low water and losing money’, and ‘at one stage expected any day to hear that the works were to be shut’.

Despite his outward calm, as losses mounted Richard privately formed a list of everything he owned, noting the price each item would fetch if it had to be sold at auction. The birth on 27 September 1862 of his first son, Barrow – named after Richard’s mother’s family – was great cause for celebration, but Richard knew the financial security of his young family was uncertain, and the brothers fully intended to shut the business rather than risk defaulting on any money owed and accruing debt. The stocktaking at the end of the second year was particularly gloomy. By Christmas 1862, the Cadbury brothers’ losses had escalated to a further £304 each.

But for Richard and George there was another motive that went well beyond personal gain. Business was not an end in itself; it was a means to an end. As Quakers, they had a far greater goal to fulfil.