Chocolate, according to Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food (1999) "is popularly perceived as comforting and perhaps 'addictive'; and maintains a reputation as an aphrodisiac'. The Marquis de Sade apparently liked his chocolate as "black as the devil's ass", and the Aztec emperor Montezuma is said to have drunk 50 goblets of chocolatl a day in order to maintain his exhausting routine of amorous activities. Given its association with lust, perversion and pleasure, it is perhaps ironic, therefore, that the great British chocolate manufacturing dynasties have all been Quakers. Barred from the traditional professions because of their refusal to swear an oath, Quakers were forced into commerce and industry.
Joseph Fry, born into a devout Quaker family, began making and selling chocolate around 1759. Another great Quaker, Joseph Rowntree, became a partner in his brother's cocoa business in 1869. The company JS Fry & Sons Ltd is of course long gone, and Rowntree is now owned by Nestlé. Among the British chocolate dynasties, none survived as long as Cadbury.
In 1824, John Cadbury established himself as a tea dealer at 93 Bull Street, in Birmingham. Within five years he'd bought a malthouse, set up his own factory, and was offering 16 varieties of drinking chocolate and 11 cocoas. Cadbury had a huge capacity for hard work and a genius for self-promotion. As John Bradley points out in his history of the business, Cadbury's Purple Reign: The Story Behind Chocolate's Best-Loved Brand (2008), as soon as Cadbury was awarded a royal warrant in 1854 – the first cocoa manufacturer to be so honoured – he rushed out a new line, which he called Queen's Own Chocolate.
Even Cadbury struggled to compete against the longer-established Fry's, and after the death of his wife, and in failing health, in 1861 he handed the business over to two of his sons, Richard and George. They took on the burden, and it is they who take the credit for what Cadbury became. George was a visionary. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, his aim was to create a business which would "reflect his religious ideals, his belief in thrift and hard work, worthy products, fair dealing and good employment conditions". All of these aims he met, and exceeded. He established the Bournville model village in 1895, where Cadbury workers were housed. He worked tirelessly for the cause of adult education. And he campaigned for better working conditions for all.
George's eldest son, Laurence, became managing director of Cadbury in 1919, expanding the business through improvements in productivity and innovations in manufacturing. The 20th century was the great era of cheap Cadbury chocolate: the Dairy Milk bar, first introduced in 1905; the Flake (1920); the Crunchie (1929); the Curly Wurly (1971); and the mighty Double Decker (1976). Cadbury dynastic succession was assured when Laurence's son Dominic became chief executive in 1983. Among the many other Cadburys, Peter Cadbury became a successful businessman in his own right, and his son, Joel Cadbury, continues the family tradition as an entrepreneur and philanthropist.
On February 2 2010, alas, Cadbury became part of Kraft Foods. Felicity Loudon, a great-great-granddaughter of John Cadbury, has described the sale of the business to Kraft as "the worst-handled takeover of all time" and has announced her plans to revive the Cadbury tradition and launch a rival chocolate company. Another scion, Deborah Cadbury, is to due to publish her book Chocolate Wars, a history of Europe's chocolate manufacturers, later this year.