I had intended to combine scrubbing an outside wall today, if the weather permitted, with writing an update about Babylon 5, but instead it will be about chocolate sweets and candy. The reason is a radio programme about the Fry’s Cadbury Schweppes factory at Keynsham, pronounced Cane-sham where workers have been made redundant twice in three years, first by Cadbury’s and now by Kraft
Because of World War II rationing which did not end until I had become a teenager and family poverty, it was only as a young man that I was able to enjoy as much chocolate as I wished and in those days I was very slim and active so consuming chocolate products did not have the effect it would have to day, although sometimes the craving becomes too strong I still indulge the experience of letting the bite into a chocolate bar or individual chocolate sweet, dissolve in the mouth, and then enjoy the nut, raisin or other centre, the toffee or caramel. The restrictions of childhood does mean that I have a mouth full of my own teeth, apart from the crown inserted earlier in the week.
I am yet to work out an order of enjoyment which I will work on as I write, so my first list includes Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bars, Buttons, and the Crunchie Bars and the Curley Whirly, the Roses chocolate box with the long departed Montelimar, plus the Milk Tray Box (also Jelly Babies), Fry’s Cream bar and Turkish Delight; Foxes Just Brazils and (Glacier Mints and Fruits) Payne’s Poppets; Mars for the Mars Bar and Maltesers, the Milky Way and Bounty bars, the Galaxy chocolates, Minstrals and Revels, the Twix and the Snickers which used to be Marathon; Rowntree’s for the Yorkie bar, the After Eight Mint, the Aero, the Kit Kat, the Rollo and Smarties, Coffee crisp and the Lion Bar (also the Fruit and Wine Gums, the Pastilles, Jelly Tots, the Polo), Terry’s Chocolate Orange, Neapolitans and Old Gold. There are chocolate covered pea nuts and raisins and chocolate toffees. Other confectioneries includes the Nougat Bar and Liquorice sticks and whirls and the Pontefract Cake, and the Marshmallows, Lemon Sherbets. Having completed this list and the preliminary writing I remembered the Rolo and who can forget the Rolo and my favourite selection as a teenager, the Dairy Box and my present Favourite of Favourites which I shall name and drool over later.
Having undertaken the research over a day I have two problems. All the British companies, including the great Quaker trinity of Fry, Cadbury and Rowntree which came to dominate Somerton Keynsham, Birmingham and York, together with other firms such as Terry, Payne’s, Mackintosh and Fox have been munched and gobbled up by each other and then by international corporations, closing factories, making large numbers redundant, and transferring production to mainland Europe, France, Germany and especially Poland, with Nestle first and now Kraft dominating alongside the private family firm, still, of Mars. My exploration has revealed the nature of contemporary capitalism and the general decline of British manufacturing but also the startling information that much of the present world’s cocoa production comes from West Africa using child labour in slave conditions.
There are many things which happen in my day which do not provoke the need to produce a piece of writing open to anyone who wishes to read. I have an overall writing plan related to my main project work and I have some 200 boxes of papers, programmes, receipts and other others to work through, to make into sets and write commentaries where appropriate and when I have the time. However I constantly move away from the programme because of some unplanned event and on Wednesday when I went to the bathroom to prepare for a visit to the dentist to have the crown fitted and switched on the radio, my attention became concentrated on the BBC Radio Four programme about the history and demise of the J B Fry and Son chocolate Factory near Bristol in the West Country of England, near Bristol. After the dentist visit I returned to writing about Babylon 5, intending to make a piece about chocolate the nine hundredth completed work for MySpace and the one thousand nine hundred since commencing the Blogs some five years ago, but then the power of chocolate took hold and I devoted the greater part of yesterday to the subject, although a good couple of hours, in two spells was spent scrubbing an outside wall, clearing damaged plaster and working out how to repair and redecorate while continuing to garage the car overnight,
I first confirmed a statement in the programme that it was a member of he Fry family who used a process for making soap bars to make chocolate bars anywhere in the world at their Bristol factory although fellow Quakers, the Cadbury‘s followed two years later. I listened to the radio programme again, learning it is the first of three and I shall make a point of listening to the other two in the future.
I then looked up the history of chocolate using Wikipedia where it is said that the word entered the English language from Spain and central America with is roots debated but with the origins of the cocoa bean brought first back to Europe by Christopher Columbus and then introduced to Europeans as a drink by Spanish Friars. The indigenous Americans made the drink with vanilla, chile pepper and achiote and the Europeans got rid of the pepper, the vanilla and achiote replacing with milk and sugar and other additives to first create the chocolate drink we know today.
Just as we have had gin and ale houses, milk and coffee drinking bars, the first chocolate drinking house is known to have opened in London in 1657. It was not until 170 years later that solid chocolate was developed first in Turin and then in Switzerland, but credit for the first chocolate bar as we have come to know it goes to Joseph Fry in1847 and then the Cadbury brothers in1849.
A Swiss candle maker is credited with creating the first milk chocolates in 1857 with the help of a neighbour, the then baby food manufacturer Nestle and Rodolphe Lindt invented the process which ensured that the liquid is evenly blended.
While coffee production continues in Central and Southern America, two thirds of world’s cocoa is produced in West Africa with half of this in the Ivory Coast.
The problem is that the Cocoa Bean is a traded good on the futures market with prices fluctuating from £500 to £3000 a ton and with 90% of trade pure speculative buying and selling and ten percent the actual cocoa bean used for manufacturing chocolate products. The consequence is that the actual growers are adolescents in conditions Europeans and North Americans must regard as slavery.. This aspect requires further attention and will govern my future approach to chocolate eating.
It was 50 years from when the Fry’s started making chocolate to selling the first chocolate bar on a factory produced scale. The chocolate Cream Bar was first made in 1867. It is sometime since I purchased a bar of that dark chocolate with peppermint cream and one of my problems in writing and wanting to establish some order of personal delight is the urge to engage in a shopping spree and tasting. It will be resisted but will require a great effort
In 1873 the Fry firm created the Easter Egg and in 1914 Turkish Delight which I have continued to enjoy in the form of wafer thins, chocolate covered, similar to the after dinner mint. Some 220 products were placed on the market by the company.
It was in 1919 that the great merger took place with fellow Quaker Cadbury’s and a giant factory was created on a Greenfield site at Somerdale, Keynsham. Keynsham is a name familiar to Radio Luxembourg listeners of my generation because of the Horace Batchelor Infra Draw betting system advertised on the station and where the name Keynsham was spelt out letter by letter, because the proper pronunciation is Cane-sham!
Somerdale factory had its own railway station with long twelve coach trains bringing in the factory staff from North Somerset towns and villages, over 5000 in its hey day, becoming the home of the Cadbury Fruit and Nut Bar. While I have always enjoyed the Cadbury‘s milk and plain chocolate bars and the all Hazel nut bar, it is the Fruit and Almond Nut which remains my favourite with the chocolate melting in the mouth leaving the fruit and nuts to be enjoyed separately. The programme revealed that when one interviewee went for a job, the Personnel Manager asked if he had a church character, a reference from the pastor or priest of his church. He was not asked for a school reference. Others speak of being in heaven working with chocolate in a family friendly atmosphere. However post World War 2 the factory shrunk in size to 1500 as modern production methods were created and by 2007 then Cadbury’s announced the closure of the factory the workforce was only 500. 400 were involved in the Kraft closure this year with production moving to Poland.
My interest in the Fry family was first created in the early 1960’s and had nothing to do with chocolate, as in 1962 I was asked to write an essay on the influence of voluntary bodies on Penal reform by the then Reader of Criminology at Nuffield College. The occasion remains vivid in my memory because my effort was hopeless compared to that of my tutorial partner, who admittedly already had a first class degree and was rightly praised for his well researched summary of involvements and conclusions. While for many people the experience of presenting work alongside someone of the highest academic standards could have been demoralising, it helped create my understanding and personal striving for the need to establish as much fact as possible before attempting any analysis and reaching of conclusions. This has created problems when placed in a position to make a decision affecting others without any let alone all the relevant information.
Elizabeth Fry made her name as a penal reformer before the chocolate bar was invented. She was the major driving force to make prison conditions more humane and since 2002 her portrait is on the back of the British £5 note. She grew up with responsibility taking charge for her father of the younger children when her mother died when she was twelve years old. Miss Elizabeth Gurney was part of the Barclay family. At the age of 18 years she was deeply moved by the preaching of a visiting Quaker and as a consequence commenced to take an interest in the welfare of the sick and the poor, and she started a Sunday School to teach children to read. She met Joseph Fry who was a tea merchant banker and a Quaker when she was 20 years old and she bore him 11 children between 1801 and 1822 with one daughter writing a history of the Parishes of East and West Ham published in 1888. Her husband was the third son of the original chocolate maker.
Invited to visit Newgate she was shocked at the conditions of the women prisoners and their children, and would not just visit but stayed nights with them inviting her well connected friends to join her. She subsequently founded a prison school and for the reformation of the women prisoners and her British Ladies Society is generally agreed as constituting the first nationwide women’s organisation in Britain. She was the first woman to present evidence to Parliament. She took up a campaign to abolish capital punishment, established a night shelter for the homeless in London and instituted the Brighton District Visiting Society after a visit to the resort. She also set up a training school for nurses which inspired Florence Nightingale to take a team of her trainees to the help soldiers wounded in the Crimean war. She was by any standards are remarkable person.
The amalgamation between Fry’s and Cadbury not only made business sense in post World 1 UK but created a giant factory organisation of the highest order and a model of social responsibility and treatment of employees. The Cadbury family had not only created the village of Bournville, which has to be viewed alongside that of Port Sunlight in the Wirral, the other great factory based community founded by the Lever brothers, but pursued a programme of worker’s rights and amenities with staff canteens and sports grounds, including a fishing lake and outdoor swimming pool, followed by an indoor pool and boating lake, works committees, and education facilities as well as savings and pension plans. They then extended their philanthropic interests setting up the Birmingham Civic Society in 1918, donating a country Park and a Hospital. The family had the foresight to create Trusts and foundations independent of the commercial chocolate making company. Bournville Village Trust was formed in 1900 and is now responsible for 7800 homes on 1000 acres with 100 acres of parks and open spaces. The famous Bournville Plain chocolate is now made in France.
The brothers were the official providers of chocolate and cocoa to Queen Victoria. The family supplied troops with books and chocolate throughout the first World War
Cadbury’s are known for their Dairy Milk chocolate bars and sold all over the world including the USA where it is made by the Hershey Company. My Impression is that all went well until it became an International company as Cadbury Schweppes. The company was fined £1 million in 2007 due to its products from its Herefordshire Factory being at risk of infection with Salmonella and £30 million was spent on decontaminating the factory. Later that year there was a further recall because a printing mistake at the Keynsham factory resulted in the omission of the nut allergy labels from one of series of Bars.
There was also public outcries when attempts were made to replace the cocoa butter with vegetable oils such as palm oil. I suspect the motivation for the change was cost and to by-pass the instability of the cocoa futures market. I would like to think that there was concern about child slave labour. However under pressure the company reverted to the use of cocoa butter as in he USA it would not have been possible to brand the product as chocolate. There have been further problems at the increasingly widespread manufacturing practice of reducing the size of content while keeping the same price.
Cadbury’s have been responsible for several imaginative advertising campaigns with the glass and a half of milk in every half pound and being a Fruit and Nutcase. There has also been the James Bond type Milk Tray Man. The firm has also tried various rebranding campaigns with less success. For several years production has been in France, Poland and Ireland as well as the UK. In the UK in addition to Milk, Whole nut and Fruit and Nut bars we have become familiar with chocolate caramel and Turkish delight bars and Crunchie Bits as well as Button and Giant Buttons.
The Milk Tray selection was introduced in 1915, called trays because the chocolates sold loose were packed in trays for delivery to the merchants and in 1916 the half pound purple box and then in 1924 the one pound weight box quickly became the best seller in the UK with over 8 million boxes currently in the UK alone. There are two other Cadbury chocolate products which I have enjoyed. The first is the gold and red packaged Crunchie bar with a thin layer of chocolate covering a chunky honeycombed sugar centre. The bar size has varied over the years. The other product is the Curley Wurly comprising two entwined strips of chocolate covered soft caramel. Yum Yum.
It will be interesting to see what Kraft will do with the Cadbury brands and its UK factory at Bournville where the number of employees has already been reduced by three quarters. As mentioned the Keynsham has been lost to Poland and Kraft are reported to want to make a profit by selling the large land holding for housing development. Kraft are an international giant known in the UK more for Cheese products such as Cracker Barrel, Parmesan, Philadelphia and Dairylea, but also for Biscuits, Pretzels Crisps and Crackers, and for Pickles, Salad dressings and Barbecue Sauce, for Cafe Hag and Maxell House coffee, and Pizzas and Jell-0, Macaroni and peanuts and Starbucks. In addition to making Toblerone they have already taken over Terry‘s Chocolate Orange and Chocolates and closed the York factory.
They do not only but companies but they also sell them with Birds Custard, Birds Eye, Del Monte, Shredded Wheat, and Vegemite catching my attention among a list of forty, plus ten brands which have been discontinued altogether.
The Terry Family established their business in 1823 and with Rowntree had made York in a chocolate capital city. Fortunately it remains a walled city on a river with its Minster and quaint shopping area to make it a tourist favourite and a nightmare to drive and out. In fairness to Kraft, Forte, Colgate-Palmolive United Biscuits and Phillip Morris had all bought and then sold the factory since the end of the second world war. The factory is presently owned by a company who want to continue some form of chocolate business. The first application for planning permission was declined by the local the Council. Because of its location next the York Race Course there has been much interest proposing the site for clearance and development. In 2005 the local Member of Parliament explained that sugar cost 10% more in the UK than the rest of Europe and was three times higher in Europe than in the USA. I have enjoyed Terry’s chocolate bars but never been a Chocolate orange fan.
Overshadowing Terry’s in York was the third Quaker chocolate dynasty of Joseph Rowntree and now owned by Nestle. Production commenced in the city centre factory in 1862, relocating to a site north of the city in 1906 and joining with Mackintosh, the toffee manufacturer in 1969. Mackintosh had taken of the Norwich based Caley Chocolate company from Uniliver in 1932 and they started production for the Quality Street brand in 1936, for Rolo 1938, Carmac 1959 and Toffee Crisp 1963. I love the Rolo pronounced Roll-Oh especially as it is currently made at Fawden on Tyneside, I also have enjoyed the Rolo Ice cream. I am not sure who originally made the chocolate covered peanut and raisin but I can eat bags of both at the same sitting. Another long time favourite is the After Eight Mints where the factory is in Castleford West Yorkshire and in Germany
Large tins of the Quality Street mixture still appear at Christmas Time and are rivals of Cadbury Roses and Celebrations. I bought the large tins one year for the staff of the residential home where my mother was resident as she approached her 100th birthday and of course kept one tin of reach for myself! My favourite Quality Streets include the purple one, the brazil nut with caramel in purple wrapper, now a hazelnut. The Hazel nut Cracknell in the red wrapper, is also no more, as it the Hazel nut Eclair . I like the Chocolate Noisette Pate in a green triangle and the Toffee Penny as well as the Coconut Eclair. In the Cadbury Roses I loved the no longer produced Montelimar, the Praline Moment, the Coffee cream, the Turkish Delight and the Bournville tiny slab of dark, all discontinued although the Bournville can be found in Heroes. I like the Hazel Whirl and Hazel in caramel I have also eaten my share of Rollo’s in the past and was unaware of their background and manufacture in Norwich along with Yorkie and the Easter Egg until Nestle closed the plant in 1994 after a 100 years of operation and with the loss of 900 jobs.
Joseph Rowntree lived for 89 years and made his family business into one of the most important in the UK. Aged 14 he visited Ireland with his father and witnessed the impact of the potato famine. This changed his perspective on life and his company was one of the first to provided an occupational pension. He married again after the death of first wife a cousin Emma Seebohm and they had six children one of whom became Lord Seebohm Rowntree who chaired the report into the organisation and training of the personal social services in 1960’s. I once had the bedroom next to him and his wife at the Randolph Oxford. Discovering this only when we had to leave our rooms in he middle of the night because of a fire alarm. His father created a foundation to research the causes of social problems such as poverty, poor housing and other forms of social exclusion. The Housing Trust also provides care homes for the elderly and disabled. There is a charitable trust working for Quaker ideals including international peace and justice. The Reform Trust supports progressive politics and supports the Liberal Party. Rowntree donated half his personal fortune to provide the Trusts with their ongoing income. A school was built in 1942, a parkland created as a memorial to those members of the company who died in the first World War.
When I stay at the central Croydon Travel Lodge the building is over overlooked by the Nestle Tower a fact which the busy Railway station proudly announces that Croydon has become the home of the company in the UK It is also the home of the Home Office immigration services. All those confectionary jobs handed to Poland and for a time the Polish population appeared to have emigrated here!
Now for the Nestle Rowntree Mackintosh products. There was a year back, not so long ago when I spent some £50 on Kit Kat trying to put in a successful bid for an item several times the value of the purchases. I failed but eat a lot of Kit Kat!. The wafer finger bar was first produced in 1935. The name is believed to be taken from a political club in the eighteen century. It is also the name of the Christopher Isherwood Club in Berlin made more famous by the musical Cabaret. There are now over 100 variations of the traditional bar in various flavours and shapes. I do like the chunky single bar but Cucumber flavour, Caramel and salt, Pumpkin, Pepper, Soy Sauce, and apple vinegar as favoured in Japan, I think not.
Another established favourite is the Smarties chocolate beans, created in 1939 and re-branded as just Smarties in 1977. Those made at York are now made in Germany while the largest production unit is in Canada. Until 2006 chemical dies were used to create the colourings but these have been removed because of concerns on children’s health. I believe those with an orange chocolate or coffee flavour are no longer made. In the USA M and Ms are the equivalent. The cylindrical cardboard tube with a coloured plastic cap is the British standard although they also appears in boxes and other packaging as will as in chocolate bars, eggs and ice cream.
The Coffee Crisp was first made in Canada in 1938 although he main ingredients are wafers and a chocolate coating with coffee flavouring. There is a small amount of actual coffee. I have also enjoyed the Lion Bar which is a chocolate coated bar of wafer, caramel and crisps cereal. This is late comer from 1977.
What has become the most famous is the Yorkie bar, a chunky bar aimed at men and at one time it was branded as not for girls. In 2006 a for girls version was produced wrapped in pink. Although not a chocolate, Rowntree’s Wine Gums and Fruit Pastille were much loved in my teens and since. I still use the Nestle Rowntree Polo Mint to this day and I am sucking one now.
I grew up in Wallington and a couple of miles away at Waddon on the road to Croydon was the Payne’s Poppets factory and where one of my cousins, a former Prisoner of War and his wife worked for a time. Payne’s was taken over by Fox’s Confection famous for its Glacier Mints and fruits and also Just Brazils. In 1969 the Leicester based company was acquired by Mackintoshes before they merged with Rowntree. When Nestle bought Rowntree Mackintosh they sold the brand and site to Northern Foods and in turn they sold the company to Big Bear Ltd in 2003. It is surprising that no one ahs brought the Chocolate Merry Go Round selection.
The one company which has not been a part of part of the British Quaker Trinity is the Mars Corporation formed in 1911 in Washington State in the USA and about which I gained some knowledge during an International Management Course attended in the mid 1980’s where one of the same seminar group was a research Director with one of its subsidiaries. That I got to know some information was remarkable given the general secrecy of this private owned company run by three aging brothers at that time. One died in 1999 and family has moved into fourth generation control since the retirement of the remaining two, with the development of non family day to day management with over a dozen manufacturing sites throughout the USA. There is a British Branch based at Slough. Mars is responsible for some of the great chocolate treats in my life, The Mars Bar, of course but also Maltesers, Bounty, Galaxy, Milky Way, Minstrels and Revels, Twix and Snickers which used to be Marathon, which brings me nicely to my tops of the pops selection box by the widest margin possible Celebrations because it includes mini versions of Mars, Bounty, Snickers, Twix, Topic, Maltesers, Galaxy caramels and Milk Way. I could eat a boxful now. I must find out where they get their cocoa butter. The Mars Group remains the International standard bearer for effective management.
Because of World War II rationing which did not end until I had become a teenager and family poverty, it was only as a young man that I was able to enjoy as much chocolate as I wished and in those days I was very slim and active so consuming chocolate products did not have the effect it would have to day, although sometimes the craving becomes too strong I still indulge the experience of letting the bite into a chocolate bar or individual chocolate sweet, dissolve in the mouth, and then enjoy the nut, raisin or other centre, the toffee or caramel. The restrictions of childhood does mean that I have a mouth full of my own teeth, apart from the crown inserted earlier in the week.
I am yet to work out an order of enjoyment which I will work on as I write, so my first list includes Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut bars, Buttons, and the Crunchie Bars and the Curley Whirly, the Roses chocolate box with the long departed Montelimar, plus the Milk Tray Box (also Jelly Babies), Fry’s Cream bar and Turkish Delight; Foxes Just Brazils and (Glacier Mints and Fruits) Payne’s Poppets; Mars for the Mars Bar and Maltesers, the Milky Way and Bounty bars, the Galaxy chocolates, Minstrals and Revels, the Twix and the Snickers which used to be Marathon; Rowntree’s for the Yorkie bar, the After Eight Mint, the Aero, the Kit Kat, the Rollo and Smarties, Coffee crisp and the Lion Bar (also the Fruit and Wine Gums, the Pastilles, Jelly Tots, the Polo), Terry’s Chocolate Orange, Neapolitans and Old Gold. There are chocolate covered pea nuts and raisins and chocolate toffees. Other confectioneries includes the Nougat Bar and Liquorice sticks and whirls and the Pontefract Cake, and the Marshmallows, Lemon Sherbets. Having completed this list and the preliminary writing I remembered the Rolo and who can forget the Rolo and my favourite selection as a teenager, the Dairy Box and my present Favourite of Favourites which I shall name and drool over later.
Having undertaken the research over a day I have two problems. All the British companies, including the great Quaker trinity of Fry, Cadbury and Rowntree which came to dominate Somerton Keynsham, Birmingham and York, together with other firms such as Terry, Payne’s, Mackintosh and Fox have been munched and gobbled up by each other and then by international corporations, closing factories, making large numbers redundant, and transferring production to mainland Europe, France, Germany and especially Poland, with Nestle first and now Kraft dominating alongside the private family firm, still, of Mars. My exploration has revealed the nature of contemporary capitalism and the general decline of British manufacturing but also the startling information that much of the present world’s cocoa production comes from West Africa using child labour in slave conditions.
There are many things which happen in my day which do not provoke the need to produce a piece of writing open to anyone who wishes to read. I have an overall writing plan related to my main project work and I have some 200 boxes of papers, programmes, receipts and other others to work through, to make into sets and write commentaries where appropriate and when I have the time. However I constantly move away from the programme because of some unplanned event and on Wednesday when I went to the bathroom to prepare for a visit to the dentist to have the crown fitted and switched on the radio, my attention became concentrated on the BBC Radio Four programme about the history and demise of the J B Fry and Son chocolate Factory near Bristol in the West Country of England, near Bristol. After the dentist visit I returned to writing about Babylon 5, intending to make a piece about chocolate the nine hundredth completed work for MySpace and the one thousand nine hundred since commencing the Blogs some five years ago, but then the power of chocolate took hold and I devoted the greater part of yesterday to the subject, although a good couple of hours, in two spells was spent scrubbing an outside wall, clearing damaged plaster and working out how to repair and redecorate while continuing to garage the car overnight,
I first confirmed a statement in the programme that it was a member of he Fry family who used a process for making soap bars to make chocolate bars anywhere in the world at their Bristol factory although fellow Quakers, the Cadbury‘s followed two years later. I listened to the radio programme again, learning it is the first of three and I shall make a point of listening to the other two in the future.
I then looked up the history of chocolate using Wikipedia where it is said that the word entered the English language from Spain and central America with is roots debated but with the origins of the cocoa bean brought first back to Europe by Christopher Columbus and then introduced to Europeans as a drink by Spanish Friars. The indigenous Americans made the drink with vanilla, chile pepper and achiote and the Europeans got rid of the pepper, the vanilla and achiote replacing with milk and sugar and other additives to first create the chocolate drink we know today.
Just as we have had gin and ale houses, milk and coffee drinking bars, the first chocolate drinking house is known to have opened in London in 1657. It was not until 170 years later that solid chocolate was developed first in Turin and then in Switzerland, but credit for the first chocolate bar as we have come to know it goes to Joseph Fry in1847 and then the Cadbury brothers in1849.
A Swiss candle maker is credited with creating the first milk chocolates in 1857 with the help of a neighbour, the then baby food manufacturer Nestle and Rodolphe Lindt invented the process which ensured that the liquid is evenly blended.
While coffee production continues in Central and Southern America, two thirds of world’s cocoa is produced in West Africa with half of this in the Ivory Coast.
The problem is that the Cocoa Bean is a traded good on the futures market with prices fluctuating from £500 to £3000 a ton and with 90% of trade pure speculative buying and selling and ten percent the actual cocoa bean used for manufacturing chocolate products. The consequence is that the actual growers are adolescents in conditions Europeans and North Americans must regard as slavery.. This aspect requires further attention and will govern my future approach to chocolate eating.
It was 50 years from when the Fry’s started making chocolate to selling the first chocolate bar on a factory produced scale. The chocolate Cream Bar was first made in 1867. It is sometime since I purchased a bar of that dark chocolate with peppermint cream and one of my problems in writing and wanting to establish some order of personal delight is the urge to engage in a shopping spree and tasting. It will be resisted but will require a great effort
In 1873 the Fry firm created the Easter Egg and in 1914 Turkish Delight which I have continued to enjoy in the form of wafer thins, chocolate covered, similar to the after dinner mint. Some 220 products were placed on the market by the company.
It was in 1919 that the great merger took place with fellow Quaker Cadbury’s and a giant factory was created on a Greenfield site at Somerdale, Keynsham. Keynsham is a name familiar to Radio Luxembourg listeners of my generation because of the Horace Batchelor Infra Draw betting system advertised on the station and where the name Keynsham was spelt out letter by letter, because the proper pronunciation is Cane-sham!
Somerdale factory had its own railway station with long twelve coach trains bringing in the factory staff from North Somerset towns and villages, over 5000 in its hey day, becoming the home of the Cadbury Fruit and Nut Bar. While I have always enjoyed the Cadbury‘s milk and plain chocolate bars and the all Hazel nut bar, it is the Fruit and Almond Nut which remains my favourite with the chocolate melting in the mouth leaving the fruit and nuts to be enjoyed separately. The programme revealed that when one interviewee went for a job, the Personnel Manager asked if he had a church character, a reference from the pastor or priest of his church. He was not asked for a school reference. Others speak of being in heaven working with chocolate in a family friendly atmosphere. However post World War 2 the factory shrunk in size to 1500 as modern production methods were created and by 2007 then Cadbury’s announced the closure of the factory the workforce was only 500. 400 were involved in the Kraft closure this year with production moving to Poland.
My interest in the Fry family was first created in the early 1960’s and had nothing to do with chocolate, as in 1962 I was asked to write an essay on the influence of voluntary bodies on Penal reform by the then Reader of Criminology at Nuffield College. The occasion remains vivid in my memory because my effort was hopeless compared to that of my tutorial partner, who admittedly already had a first class degree and was rightly praised for his well researched summary of involvements and conclusions. While for many people the experience of presenting work alongside someone of the highest academic standards could have been demoralising, it helped create my understanding and personal striving for the need to establish as much fact as possible before attempting any analysis and reaching of conclusions. This has created problems when placed in a position to make a decision affecting others without any let alone all the relevant information.
Elizabeth Fry made her name as a penal reformer before the chocolate bar was invented. She was the major driving force to make prison conditions more humane and since 2002 her portrait is on the back of the British £5 note. She grew up with responsibility taking charge for her father of the younger children when her mother died when she was twelve years old. Miss Elizabeth Gurney was part of the Barclay family. At the age of 18 years she was deeply moved by the preaching of a visiting Quaker and as a consequence commenced to take an interest in the welfare of the sick and the poor, and she started a Sunday School to teach children to read. She met Joseph Fry who was a tea merchant banker and a Quaker when she was 20 years old and she bore him 11 children between 1801 and 1822 with one daughter writing a history of the Parishes of East and West Ham published in 1888. Her husband was the third son of the original chocolate maker.
Invited to visit Newgate she was shocked at the conditions of the women prisoners and their children, and would not just visit but stayed nights with them inviting her well connected friends to join her. She subsequently founded a prison school and for the reformation of the women prisoners and her British Ladies Society is generally agreed as constituting the first nationwide women’s organisation in Britain. She was the first woman to present evidence to Parliament. She took up a campaign to abolish capital punishment, established a night shelter for the homeless in London and instituted the Brighton District Visiting Society after a visit to the resort. She also set up a training school for nurses which inspired Florence Nightingale to take a team of her trainees to the help soldiers wounded in the Crimean war. She was by any standards are remarkable person.
The amalgamation between Fry’s and Cadbury not only made business sense in post World 1 UK but created a giant factory organisation of the highest order and a model of social responsibility and treatment of employees. The Cadbury family had not only created the village of Bournville, which has to be viewed alongside that of Port Sunlight in the Wirral, the other great factory based community founded by the Lever brothers, but pursued a programme of worker’s rights and amenities with staff canteens and sports grounds, including a fishing lake and outdoor swimming pool, followed by an indoor pool and boating lake, works committees, and education facilities as well as savings and pension plans. They then extended their philanthropic interests setting up the Birmingham Civic Society in 1918, donating a country Park and a Hospital. The family had the foresight to create Trusts and foundations independent of the commercial chocolate making company. Bournville Village Trust was formed in 1900 and is now responsible for 7800 homes on 1000 acres with 100 acres of parks and open spaces. The famous Bournville Plain chocolate is now made in France.
The brothers were the official providers of chocolate and cocoa to Queen Victoria. The family supplied troops with books and chocolate throughout the first World War
Cadbury’s are known for their Dairy Milk chocolate bars and sold all over the world including the USA where it is made by the Hershey Company. My Impression is that all went well until it became an International company as Cadbury Schweppes. The company was fined £1 million in 2007 due to its products from its Herefordshire Factory being at risk of infection with Salmonella and £30 million was spent on decontaminating the factory. Later that year there was a further recall because a printing mistake at the Keynsham factory resulted in the omission of the nut allergy labels from one of series of Bars.
There was also public outcries when attempts were made to replace the cocoa butter with vegetable oils such as palm oil. I suspect the motivation for the change was cost and to by-pass the instability of the cocoa futures market. I would like to think that there was concern about child slave labour. However under pressure the company reverted to the use of cocoa butter as in he USA it would not have been possible to brand the product as chocolate. There have been further problems at the increasingly widespread manufacturing practice of reducing the size of content while keeping the same price.
Cadbury’s have been responsible for several imaginative advertising campaigns with the glass and a half of milk in every half pound and being a Fruit and Nutcase. There has also been the James Bond type Milk Tray Man. The firm has also tried various rebranding campaigns with less success. For several years production has been in France, Poland and Ireland as well as the UK. In the UK in addition to Milk, Whole nut and Fruit and Nut bars we have become familiar with chocolate caramel and Turkish delight bars and Crunchie Bits as well as Button and Giant Buttons.
The Milk Tray selection was introduced in 1915, called trays because the chocolates sold loose were packed in trays for delivery to the merchants and in 1916 the half pound purple box and then in 1924 the one pound weight box quickly became the best seller in the UK with over 8 million boxes currently in the UK alone. There are two other Cadbury chocolate products which I have enjoyed. The first is the gold and red packaged Crunchie bar with a thin layer of chocolate covering a chunky honeycombed sugar centre. The bar size has varied over the years. The other product is the Curley Wurly comprising two entwined strips of chocolate covered soft caramel. Yum Yum.
It will be interesting to see what Kraft will do with the Cadbury brands and its UK factory at Bournville where the number of employees has already been reduced by three quarters. As mentioned the Keynsham has been lost to Poland and Kraft are reported to want to make a profit by selling the large land holding for housing development. Kraft are an international giant known in the UK more for Cheese products such as Cracker Barrel, Parmesan, Philadelphia and Dairylea, but also for Biscuits, Pretzels Crisps and Crackers, and for Pickles, Salad dressings and Barbecue Sauce, for Cafe Hag and Maxell House coffee, and Pizzas and Jell-0, Macaroni and peanuts and Starbucks. In addition to making Toblerone they have already taken over Terry‘s Chocolate Orange and Chocolates and closed the York factory.
They do not only but companies but they also sell them with Birds Custard, Birds Eye, Del Monte, Shredded Wheat, and Vegemite catching my attention among a list of forty, plus ten brands which have been discontinued altogether.
The Terry Family established their business in 1823 and with Rowntree had made York in a chocolate capital city. Fortunately it remains a walled city on a river with its Minster and quaint shopping area to make it a tourist favourite and a nightmare to drive and out. In fairness to Kraft, Forte, Colgate-Palmolive United Biscuits and Phillip Morris had all bought and then sold the factory since the end of the second world war. The factory is presently owned by a company who want to continue some form of chocolate business. The first application for planning permission was declined by the local the Council. Because of its location next the York Race Course there has been much interest proposing the site for clearance and development. In 2005 the local Member of Parliament explained that sugar cost 10% more in the UK than the rest of Europe and was three times higher in Europe than in the USA. I have enjoyed Terry’s chocolate bars but never been a Chocolate orange fan.
Overshadowing Terry’s in York was the third Quaker chocolate dynasty of Joseph Rowntree and now owned by Nestle. Production commenced in the city centre factory in 1862, relocating to a site north of the city in 1906 and joining with Mackintosh, the toffee manufacturer in 1969. Mackintosh had taken of the Norwich based Caley Chocolate company from Uniliver in 1932 and they started production for the Quality Street brand in 1936, for Rolo 1938, Carmac 1959 and Toffee Crisp 1963. I love the Rolo pronounced Roll-Oh especially as it is currently made at Fawden on Tyneside, I also have enjoyed the Rolo Ice cream. I am not sure who originally made the chocolate covered peanut and raisin but I can eat bags of both at the same sitting. Another long time favourite is the After Eight Mints where the factory is in Castleford West Yorkshire and in Germany
Large tins of the Quality Street mixture still appear at Christmas Time and are rivals of Cadbury Roses and Celebrations. I bought the large tins one year for the staff of the residential home where my mother was resident as she approached her 100th birthday and of course kept one tin of reach for myself! My favourite Quality Streets include the purple one, the brazil nut with caramel in purple wrapper, now a hazelnut. The Hazel nut Cracknell in the red wrapper, is also no more, as it the Hazel nut Eclair . I like the Chocolate Noisette Pate in a green triangle and the Toffee Penny as well as the Coconut Eclair. In the Cadbury Roses I loved the no longer produced Montelimar, the Praline Moment, the Coffee cream, the Turkish Delight and the Bournville tiny slab of dark, all discontinued although the Bournville can be found in Heroes. I like the Hazel Whirl and Hazel in caramel I have also eaten my share of Rollo’s in the past and was unaware of their background and manufacture in Norwich along with Yorkie and the Easter Egg until Nestle closed the plant in 1994 after a 100 years of operation and with the loss of 900 jobs.
Joseph Rowntree lived for 89 years and made his family business into one of the most important in the UK. Aged 14 he visited Ireland with his father and witnessed the impact of the potato famine. This changed his perspective on life and his company was one of the first to provided an occupational pension. He married again after the death of first wife a cousin Emma Seebohm and they had six children one of whom became Lord Seebohm Rowntree who chaired the report into the organisation and training of the personal social services in 1960’s. I once had the bedroom next to him and his wife at the Randolph Oxford. Discovering this only when we had to leave our rooms in he middle of the night because of a fire alarm. His father created a foundation to research the causes of social problems such as poverty, poor housing and other forms of social exclusion. The Housing Trust also provides care homes for the elderly and disabled. There is a charitable trust working for Quaker ideals including international peace and justice. The Reform Trust supports progressive politics and supports the Liberal Party. Rowntree donated half his personal fortune to provide the Trusts with their ongoing income. A school was built in 1942, a parkland created as a memorial to those members of the company who died in the first World War.
When I stay at the central Croydon Travel Lodge the building is over overlooked by the Nestle Tower a fact which the busy Railway station proudly announces that Croydon has become the home of the company in the UK It is also the home of the Home Office immigration services. All those confectionary jobs handed to Poland and for a time the Polish population appeared to have emigrated here!
Now for the Nestle Rowntree Mackintosh products. There was a year back, not so long ago when I spent some £50 on Kit Kat trying to put in a successful bid for an item several times the value of the purchases. I failed but eat a lot of Kit Kat!. The wafer finger bar was first produced in 1935. The name is believed to be taken from a political club in the eighteen century. It is also the name of the Christopher Isherwood Club in Berlin made more famous by the musical Cabaret. There are now over 100 variations of the traditional bar in various flavours and shapes. I do like the chunky single bar but Cucumber flavour, Caramel and salt, Pumpkin, Pepper, Soy Sauce, and apple vinegar as favoured in Japan, I think not.
Another established favourite is the Smarties chocolate beans, created in 1939 and re-branded as just Smarties in 1977. Those made at York are now made in Germany while the largest production unit is in Canada. Until 2006 chemical dies were used to create the colourings but these have been removed because of concerns on children’s health. I believe those with an orange chocolate or coffee flavour are no longer made. In the USA M and Ms are the equivalent. The cylindrical cardboard tube with a coloured plastic cap is the British standard although they also appears in boxes and other packaging as will as in chocolate bars, eggs and ice cream.
The Coffee Crisp was first made in Canada in 1938 although he main ingredients are wafers and a chocolate coating with coffee flavouring. There is a small amount of actual coffee. I have also enjoyed the Lion Bar which is a chocolate coated bar of wafer, caramel and crisps cereal. This is late comer from 1977.
What has become the most famous is the Yorkie bar, a chunky bar aimed at men and at one time it was branded as not for girls. In 2006 a for girls version was produced wrapped in pink. Although not a chocolate, Rowntree’s Wine Gums and Fruit Pastille were much loved in my teens and since. I still use the Nestle Rowntree Polo Mint to this day and I am sucking one now.
I grew up in Wallington and a couple of miles away at Waddon on the road to Croydon was the Payne’s Poppets factory and where one of my cousins, a former Prisoner of War and his wife worked for a time. Payne’s was taken over by Fox’s Confection famous for its Glacier Mints and fruits and also Just Brazils. In 1969 the Leicester based company was acquired by Mackintoshes before they merged with Rowntree. When Nestle bought Rowntree Mackintosh they sold the brand and site to Northern Foods and in turn they sold the company to Big Bear Ltd in 2003. It is surprising that no one ahs brought the Chocolate Merry Go Round selection.
The one company which has not been a part of part of the British Quaker Trinity is the Mars Corporation formed in 1911 in Washington State in the USA and about which I gained some knowledge during an International Management Course attended in the mid 1980’s where one of the same seminar group was a research Director with one of its subsidiaries. That I got to know some information was remarkable given the general secrecy of this private owned company run by three aging brothers at that time. One died in 1999 and family has moved into fourth generation control since the retirement of the remaining two, with the development of non family day to day management with over a dozen manufacturing sites throughout the USA. There is a British Branch based at Slough. Mars is responsible for some of the great chocolate treats in my life, The Mars Bar, of course but also Maltesers, Bounty, Galaxy, Milky Way, Minstrels and Revels, Twix and Snickers which used to be Marathon, which brings me nicely to my tops of the pops selection box by the widest margin possible Celebrations because it includes mini versions of Mars, Bounty, Snickers, Twix, Topic, Maltesers, Galaxy caramels and Milk Way. I could eat a boxful now. I must find out where they get their cocoa butter. The Mars Group remains the International standard bearer for effective management.
