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Chapter 3

The Root of All Evil

Richard and George Cadbury shared a vision of social justice and reform: a new world, in which the poor and needy would be lifted from the ‘ruin of deprivation’. For generations, the Cadburys had been members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, a spiritual movement started by George Fox in the seventeenth century. In a curious irony, the very religion that inspired Quakers to act charitably towards the poor also produced a set of codes and practices that enabled a few thousand close-knit families like the Cadburys to generate astounding material rewards at the start of the industrial age.

Richard and George had been brought up on stories of George Fox, and many of the values, aspirations and disciplines that shaped their lives stemmed from his teachings. Born in 1624, the son of a weaver from Drayton-in-the-Clay (now known as Fenny Drayton) in Leicestershire, Fox grew up with a passionate interest in religion at a time when the country had seen years of religious turmoil; he went to ‘many a priest looking for comfort, but found no comfort from them’. He was appalled at the inhumanity carried out in the name of religion: people imprisoned or even executed for their faith. Disregarding the danger following the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, he left home the following year in some torment, and set out on foot for London. At the age of just nineteen, Fox embarked on his own personal quest for greater understanding.

During these years of travel, ‘when my hopes . . . in all men were gone’, he had an epiphany. The key to religion was not to be found in the sermons of preachers, but in an individual’s inner experience. Inspired, he began to preach, urging people simply to listen to their own consciences. Because ‘God dwelleth in the hearts of obedient people,’ he reasoned, it followed that an individual could find ‘the spirit of Christ within’ to guide them, instead of taking orders from others.

George Fox, the founder of the Quaker movement.

Fox blazed a trail across England, preaching against the rituals and outward forms of religion, even the standard forms of prayer and the sacraments. All these he regarded as trivial accessories; irrelevant, possibly even hindering a union with God. These outward symbols of truth, he reasoned, obscured or distorted the real truth, which could be found within each one of us. He spoke out against the corruption within the Church, arguing for social justice and a more honest and immediate form of Christianity. These views put him in direct opposition to the political and religious authorities. If an individual was listening to the voice of God within himself, it followed that priests and religious leaders were needless intermediaries.

Fox was perceived as dangerous, and his preaching blasphemous to established Churches. Even the similarly-minded Puritans objected to him. They too adhered to a rigorous moral code, high standards of self-discipline and a disdain for worldly pursuits, but Fox’s emphasis on the direct relationship between a believer and God went far beyond what most Puritans deemed acceptable. In emphasising the importance of an individual’s experience, Fox appeared contemptuous of the authorities, and mocked their petty regulations. For example, he would not swear on oath. If there was only one absolute truth, he reasoned, what was the point of a double standard, differentiating between ‘truth’ and ‘truth on oath’?

The authorities were exasperated that he declined to pay even lip-service to the class structure, and went so far as to claim that all men and women are equal. To give tangible form to his thoroughly modern message, Fox addressed everyone as ‘thou’, not the more respectful ‘you’ that others used to acknowledge the upper classes. He rejected any outward signs of status or authority. Regardless of wealth, a person should dress simply, with restraint and without extravagance. As for the doffing of hats to indicate respect for those of higher rank, in his Journal he made his position completely clear: a Quaker kept his hat on.

In 1649 Fox crossed one magistrate too many, and was thrown into jail in Nottingham, ‘a pitiful stinking place, where the wind brought in all the stench of the house’. The following year he was jailed for blasphemy in Derby, where a Justice is believed to have been the first to use the term ‘Quaker’, to mock Fox and his followers. He scoffed at the idea expressed in their meetings that they should remain silent until moved to speak, ‘trembling at the word of God’. Despite its origins as a term of abuse, the name ‘Quaker’ soon became widespread.

Fox was imprisoned several times, but the Quaker movement continued to gain momentum. It is estimated that during the reign of Charles II, 198 Quakers were transported overseas as slaves, 338 died from injuries received defending their faith, and 13,562 were imprisoned. Among them were some of Richard and George’s fore-bears, including one Richard Tapper Cadbury, a wool comber who was held in Southgate prison in Exeter in 1683 and again in February 1684.

By the end of Fox’s life in 1691 there were 100,000 Quakers, and the movement had spread to America, parts of Europe and even the West Indies. Fox had established a system of regular meetings for Friends to discuss issues and formalise business: the regional Monthly Meeting, the county Quarterly Meeting and a national Yearly Meeting. Key decisions made at these meetings were written down, and these records became known as the Advices. By 1738 they had been collated by clerks, transcribed in elegant longhand, and bound in a green manuscript volume, Christian and Brotherly Advices, which was made available to Friends’ Meetings across the country. This set out codes of personal conduct for Friends, under such headings as ‘Love’, ‘Covetousness’ and ‘Discipline’. A section on ‘Plainness’, for example, encouraged Quakers to cultivate ‘plainness of speech, behaviour and apparel’. A Friend’s clothing should be dark and unadorned; even collars should be removed from jackets, as they were deemed too decorative.

The strict rules of the Quakers dictated that anyone who married outside the society had to leave. Consequently, Quaker families tended to intermarry, resulting in a close-knit community across Britain of several thousand families. Generations of Quakers had come through years of persecution and suffering with a sense of solidarity, and these bonds were also forged by friendship, marriage, apprenticeships and business. As the Industrial Revolution was gathering speed, this solidarity and self-reliance generated a new spirit of enterprise. At a time when there was no such thing as a national newspaper, the Quakers meeting regularly in different regions across Britain enjoyed a unique forum in which to exchange ideas.

In 1709 Abraham Darby, a Quaker from Shropshire, pioneered a method of smelting high-grade iron using coke rather than charcoal. His son, Abraham Darby II, improved the process, replacing the traditional horse pumps with steam engines to recycle water, and refining techniques for making quality wrought iron. The Darbys manufactured the world’s first iron bridge, iron railway tracks and wheels at their foundry at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire. Their roaring furnaces drew visitors from miles around to observe the striking spectacle of flame, smoke and machine. The younger Darby’s daughter wrote in 1753 that the noise of ‘the stupendous bellows’ was ‘awful to hear’.

Such advances fuelled the development of the iron industry, which drove the wheels of the Industrial Revolution. In Sheffield, the Quaker inventor Benjamin Huntsman developed a purer and stronger form of cast steel. The Lloyds, a Welsh Quaker family, moved to Birmingham to create a factory for making iron rods and nails. In Bristol, a Quaker cooperative launched the Bristol Brass Foundry. By the early eighteenth century Quakers ran approximately two-thirds of all British ironworks.

Railways accelerated the pace of change, and a Quaker was responsible for the world’s first passenger train. In 1814 a meeting with the engineer George Stephenson inspired Edward Pease, a Quaker businessman, to build the Stockton and Darlington Railway, and on 27 September 1825 the first steam-hauled passenger train travelled twelve miles to Stockton on what became known as the ‘Quaker Line’. Numerous Quakers were involved in financing and directing railway companies. Even the railway ticket and stamping machine was devised by a Quaker, Thomas Edmonson, as was the timetable itself, Bradshaw’s Railway Times, devised by George Bradshaw.

There seemed no limit to the number of new ideas from Quaker businessmen. Chinaware, originally imported by the East India Company, sparked developments in pottery and porcelain. In Plymouth, William Cookworthy introduced a new way to make fine china using Cornish china clay. In Staffordshire, Josiah Wedgwood launched his pottery business. Enduring shoe businesses were founded by Quakers: K shoes in Kendall by John Somervell, and James Clark in Street in Somerset established the firm that still bears his name. The Reckitts started their business in household goods, while the Crosfields were soap and chemical manufacturers whose company evolved into Lever Brothers. The roll call of Quaker entrepreneurs resounds through the centuries, with names like Bryant and May, who designed a safer form of matches; Huntley and Palmer, who started a biscuit business in Reading; and Allen and Hanbury, who developed pharmaceuticals.

Banking too was built on Quaker virtue. At a time of little financial regulation, according to the writer Daniel Defoe the activities of many eighteenth-century financiers were ‘founded in Fraud, born of Deceit, nourished by Trick, Cheat, Wheedle, Forgeries, Falsehood’ (not totally dissimilar to some twenty-first-century banks, some might argue). The Quaker traders stood out as being quite different. Customers learned to rely on typical Quaker attributes: skilled bookkeeping, integrity and honesty served up by sober Bible-reading men in plain dark clothes. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, local Quaker businesses began providing a counter in their offices that offered banking services. By the early nineteenth century this practice had blossomed into seventy-four Quaker banks, one for almost every large city in Britain: James Barclay formed Barclays Bank in London, Henry Gurney established Gurney’s Bank in Norwich, Edward Pease formed the Pease Bank in Darlington, Lloyd’s Bank was started in Birmingham, Backhouse’s Bank grew across the north, Birkbeck flourished in Yorkshire, the Foxes set up in Falmouth, the Sparkes in Exeter, and many more. By the time Richard and George Cadbury were born, Quaker banks, founded on a unique and trusted set of values, formed a solid network across the country.

Underpinning all this, the core Quaker beliefs and traditions, and the independence of spirit that went with them, flourished. As its members’ banks and businesses grew, the Society of Friends continued to exchange views in meetings across the country. The stoic independence, self-discipline and questioning rebelliousness fashioned over a century was now channelled into the spirit of enterprise that fuelled the furnaces and mills of the Industrial Revolution.

But there was something else unique that guided Quakers in business from the earliest days of the movement. The original Christian and Brotherly Advices of 1738 included a section on ‘Trading’. This highlighted situations that a Friend might encounter in business, and how to deal with them. It marks the foundation of business ethics built on truth, honesty and justice: values that would form the basis of Quaker capitalism.

Central to the advice was that a Quaker must always honour his word:

• That none launch forth into trading and worldly business beyond what they can manage honourably and with reputation among the Sons of Men, so that they may keep their word with all Men; that their yea may prove their yea indeed, and their nay, may be nay indeed; for whatever is otherwise cometh of the Evil One . . . and brings Dishonour to the Truth of God.

Quakers entering into business were encouraged to keep written accounts, since accurate and thorough bookkeeping helped avoid errors of judgement.

• It is advised that all Friends that are entering into Trade and have not stock sufficient of their own to answer the Trade they aim at be very cautious of running themselves into Debt without advising with some of their Ancient and Experienced Friends among whom they live.

Above all, Quaker elders, many of whom were in trade themselves, were keen to prevent any ‘Great Reproach and Scandal’ that might damage the reputation of the Society:

• It is advised . . . that all Friends concerned be very careful not to contract Extravagant Debts to the endangering and wronging of others and their families, which some have done to the Grieving Hearts of the upright, nor to break promises, contracts and agreements in the Buying and Selling or in any other lawful Affairs, to the injuring themselves and others, occasioning Strife and Contention and Reproach to Truth and Friends.

The local Monthly Meetings across the country were not only a forum for exchanging ideas: Quakers were urged to ‘have a Watchful Eye over all their Members’. If they found anyone ‘Deficient in Discharging their Contracts and just Debts’, they were charged with ‘launching an Inspection into their Circumstances’. Should the transgressor fail to heed honest advice, ‘Friends justifiably may and ought to testify against such offenders.’ Accordingly, Friends collaborated in their local communities to help one another achieve high standards of integrity in trade.

For those who failed to comply, there were further words of guidance. Despite the Advices’ exhortation to Friends to aspire to ‘Truthfulness and Perseverance in Godliness and Honesty’, ‘to our Great Grief we find there are fresh instances of Great Shortness in coming up in the Practice Thereof, particularly by some injuriously defrauding their Creditors of their Debts’. This had led to ‘Grievous Complaints’. The Advices urged further discipline to deal with those ‘Evil Persons’ who proved ‘base and unworthy’. Firstly, the rule which prohibited Friends from suing one another could be waived. Secondly, Monthly Meetings had the power to investigate cases and ‘speedily set righteous Judgment upon the head of the Transgressor’.

Discipline could be severe for any members who were unable to meet the ethical standards required, or who acted imprudently in business. With the astonishing success of Quaker businesses and banks during the Industrial Revolution, protecting the good name of the Society became more important. Those who repeatedly failed to demonstrate the high ethical conduct required of a Quaker tradesman could be ‘disowned’ by the Society. This was seen as a harsh punishment, with the offender excluded from the local Quaker community and recognised publicly as a thief or a cheat.

Effectively as early as 1738, Quakers had a set of specific guidelines for business, which endeavoured to apply the teachings of Christ to the workplace. Straight dealing, fair play and honesty would form the basis of Quaker capitalism, and for those who fell short, there were rules of discipline. These guidelines were supplied to clerks at the Monthly and Quarterly Meetings, and were refined and formally updated every generation. They provide a snapshot of changing ethical concerns as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum. For example, when the trading guidelines were updated in 1783 in the Book of Extracts, Friends were warned against a ‘most pernicious practice’ which could lead to ‘utter ruin’: the use of paper credit. This was considered ‘highly unbecoming’, falling far short of ‘that uprightness that ought to appear in every member of our religious society’. The 1783 Extracts warned unequivocally that this practice was ‘absolutely inconsistent with the truth’.

The 1738 Advices and 1783 Extracts were updated once again in 1833 into the more formal Rules of Discipline. By this time, material prosperity presented another issue to exercise the minds of Quaker elders. Was it right for a religious person cultivating plainness and simplicity to accumulate wealth? ‘We do not condemn industry, which we believe to be not only praiseworthy but indispensable,’ noted the Rules of Discipline, but ‘the love of money is said in Scripture to be “the root of all Evil”’. The guidelines urged ‘Dear Friends who are favoured with outward prosperity, when riches increase not to set your hearts upon them.’ The work ethic was entirely acceptable, but accumulating riches for oneself was not.

In 1861, as Richard and George Cadbury embarked on their business life, Quaker guidelines were updated once again, in Doctrine, Practice and Discipline. By now the section on trade had become a sophisticated set of rules, under the heading ‘Advice in Relation to the Affairs of Life’. These covered a wide range of issues: honesty and truthfulness, plain dealing, fair trading, debt, seeking advice from fellow Friends, inappropriate speculation, discipline, and much more. With an increased number of Quakers experiencing worldly success, there was even a section for the children of rich Quakers, to ensure that they were not corrupted but fixed ‘their hopes of happiness on that which is substantial and eternal’. The love of money was ‘a snare, which is apt to increase imperceptibly . . . and gradually withdraw the heart from God’.

Richard and George Cadbury’s entire worldview was shaped by Quaker values. They moulded their early childhood experiences, their learning as apprentices, their social and marriage opportunities, their choice of career, and their all-encompassing view of the wider purpose of their chocolate business.

From the earliest years they had seen their father endeavour to apply Quaker ideals in the community. According to George’s biographer Alfred Gardiner, John Cadbury was deeply concerned about society’s ‘savage indifference to the child’. This was before Charles Dickens made the Victorian public finally take notice of the plight of the ‘Parish Boy’ and the ‘little workus’, in his description of child criminals in Oliver Twist in 1837. In the 1820s, when John was developing his shop on Bull Street, it was not uncommon for children to be carted off from the workhouses ‘like slaves to the cotton mills of Lancashire or to the mines’, to be used there as if they were disposable. John was horrified by the misery and degradation of children trapped in a life of slavery.

His greatest outrage was reserved for the ‘barbarous practice’ of using workhouse boys as young as five as chimney sweeps. Some chimneys were as narrow as seven inches square, and the children could only be induced to climb up inside by straw being lit beneath them, or being prodded with ‘pins’. Before they grew too big to be useful, many suffered twisted spines or damaged joints, or were maimed by falls or burns. When John was informed of a machine that could clean chimneys, he ‘had the courage to call a meeting of Master Sweeps in the Town Hall’, reported the Daily Gazette. But his demonstration of the new machine met with strong opposition, as the sweeps were convinced they got better results using boys. After years of campaigning he was delighted when legislation was eventually introduced banning the use of climbing boys.

George and Richard also saw their parents become passionately involved in another major social issue of the time: alcoholism. The consumption of gin had become widespread in the eighteenth century, when many traditional pubs and alehouses were replaced by gin shops which promised oblivion with the tantalising slogan ‘Drunk for a penny. Dead drunk for two pence. Clean straw for nothing.’ This ‘liquid fire’, in the words of London magistrate John Fielding, led to nothing less than ‘hell’. The painter and social critic William Hogarth wrote of gin causing ‘Distress even to madness and death’. Reports of children dying of neglect from their drunken parents were commonplace. There were even accounts of children being killed by their parents, their clothes sold for a pittance for more gin.

By Victorian times the gin shops had become ‘gin palaces’, whose gilded interiors and warm gaslights seduced workers pouring out of mills and mines on payday. As a member of the Board of Street Commissioners in Birmingham, John Cadbury saw at close hand the squalid reality for those beguiled by such temptations, and he and Candia became keen supporters of the Temperance Movement. In 1834, John publicly signed up to become a total abstainer, and he and Candia vigorously took on the town’s drinkers, including even the ‘Moderation Society’, which tolerated modest drinking, with a ‘Total Abstinence Plan’. His researches showed that one house in every thirty in Birmingham ‘was dedicated to the sale of intoxicating drinks’, and that of the city’s 6,593 drunkards, one in ten died each year.

John felt a strong desire to help his fellow citizens who preferred the oblivion of gin to any further struggle with life. In meetings across the town he told them that the money they saved by giving up alcohol could buy a better diet, and compared the hearty meals of roast meat and a quarter loaf that an abstainer could afford to those of a drinker on the same wage, who could bring home little more than a penny loaf. To convince his audience how little goodness there was in a gallon of ale, he lit a saucer of alcohol and watched it vanish in flames. As for the barley in a gallon of beer, he told them, it could be used to make something much more nutritious. At this point he would pass round some of Candia’s barley puddings to demonstrate the joys of repudiating drink.

Candia too became personally involved, and for many years ‘did go from house to house and court to court, circularising tracts and conversing with the people to induce them to discontinue the drinking usage and practices’. John later wrote that she saw it as her ‘duty to seek a personal interview with the landlords of public houses, spirit and beer shops’. These visits were not always appreciated: sometimes ‘she was met by rude and coarse remarks’. But often ‘much tenderness of feeling was displayed, tears flowed freely, with the expression of the desire to get out of the trade’. She almost certainly picked up the consumption that killed her from these trips, but even as her health was declining she continued her crusade, and insisted on making more than two hundred visits to publicans. Richard and George remembered her concerned interest in the children of the poor, who suffered from the consequences of having drunken parents. The Cadburys’ Total Abstinence Plan was so successful that, according to John, ‘very soon the “Moderation Society” sank into oblivion’.

John and Candia Cadbury and their family in 1847.

One tale recorded in Richard Cadbury’s Family Book concerns the old Birmingham workhouse, which was then at the corner of Lichfield Street and Steel House Lane. When John arrived there for his first meeting as an Overseer of the Poor, he was dismayed to find that the distinguished committee, in true Dickensian style, met once a month for a ‘sumptuous repast’, with members filling themselves with ‘the choicest delicacies’, washed down with brandy, before ‘attending to the shivering paupers outside’.

Bubbling over with righteous anger, John set out to expose the ‘illegality and iniquity’ of such banquets. Evidently this was met with some disfavour. In the heated debate that followed, one old gentleman who had never been known to speak on any former occasion was stirred to rise to make a brief but pithy point: ‘I spakes for the dinners!’ Needless to say, John managed to get the practice stopped.

The Birmingham workhouse.

He also served on the wonderfully-named Steam Engine Committee, which was responsible for tackling what he saw as the ‘serious evil’ of smog and smoke. As chairman in the 1840s, he gathered data on the Birmingham chimneys that were emitting the greatest volume of dense black smoke, and put pressure on their proprietors to take action. He was also chair of the Markets and Fairs Committee, which dealt with matters such as unwholesome meats and fraudulent trading. And he won funds as governor of the Birmingham General Hospital to develop its facilities. There was, according to the Daily Gazette, a widespread belief that the poor were operated on to advance medical knowledge, and John would periodically attend surgeries ‘to prevent any unnecessary cruelty to patients of the poorest class’.

Their parents’ example of patient and helpful concern for society’s less privileged members was a mantle that George and Richard accepted as an absolutely normal Quaker duty. Not only did they see it as their moral responsibility to improve the plight of those living in the industrial slums, but saving the chocolate factory also held out the promise of providing employment, thus helping the entire community. Even more fundamental, by developing and promoting cocoa as a drink that everyone could afford, they aimed to provide a nutritious alternative to alcohol.

Despite their diminishing inheritance, George and Richard persevered with their efforts to keep the company afloat. George saw the relationship with the employees as key. Sitting in the stock room at 6 a.m. over breakfast, he encouraged workers to discuss issues in their lives, and tried to help with their education, reading aloud to them and exchanging views on topics of interest or stories from the Bible. By today’s standards such actions might seem paternalistic and even intrusive, but at a time when many people could not read, they were greatly valued. Many staff members spoke of their enjoyment of these small meetings, which were ‘more like family gatherings’. One youth named Edward Thackray recalled how honoured he felt when Mr George called him into his office ‘and they knelt together in prayer over some weighty business question’.

The brothers’ interest in the workers was also practical. In spite of their losses, George and Richard pressed ahead with plans to increase wages, with a new payment structure that tripled women’s pay. A staff fire brigade was organised, which fortunately was never tested by a serious fire in the chocolate works. The brothers introduced the novel idea of a ‘Sick Club’ to help pay the wages of staff who had to take leave for illness. There was an evening sewing class once a week at the factory, during which George read to the group. The firm’s ‘bone-shaker’ bicycle – with iron-rimmed wheels and no springs – was extremely popular, and any employee could take it home if they had learned to ride it. Richard and George were among the first employers in Birmingham to introduce half days on Saturdays and bank holidays.

They even took the staff on leisure outings. According to the Daily Post of 21 June 1864, ‘On Thursday last, Messrs Cadbury brothers . . . with commendable liberality took the whole of their male employees on a delightful trip to Sutton Park. The afternoon was spent by some in playing cricket . . . and others rambling through the park enjoying the invigorating air.’ At five o’clock the whole company ‘sat down to a substantial tea which was duly appreciated’. There was cricket in the summer, and during the winter, ‘when work was a bit slack’, reported office worker George Brice, ‘the appearance of Mr George with his skates was a sure sign that we were to be the recipients of his favour in the shape of a half day’s skating’.

As his business experience grew, George was conscious that a paternal responsibility for the firm’s employees was falling gently on his shoulders, quite naturally from friendly daily contact. The welfare of the staff was woven into the brothers’ lives. The factory was not just a business, it was a world in miniature, and an opportunity to improve society. In the middle of the great big sinful city, George would create a perfect little world, a ‘model chocolate factory’.

But first he had to make a profit.