LITMIR.BIZ

      The Rowntree factory at Tanners Moat in York in 1901.

      The company’s leading brand had been Tuke’s Superior Rock Cocoa, which Henry duly relabelled as Rowntree’s Prize Medal Rock Cocoa after it won a prize at a local fair. To promote his wares, Henry extolled the virtues of his Rowntree’s Rock Cocoa compared to rival brands. He evidently had a sense of humour and his use of a quotation from Deuteronomy was no doubt appreciated by those listeners who knew their Bible: ‘For their Rock is not as our Rock, even our enemies themselves being judges.’ As Henry embarked on transforming the Tanners Moat works into a modern factory that could churn out his Rock Cocoa to sell across England, George Cadbury knew that this rival had the determination to succeed.

      There were other firms in York poised to benefit from the arrival of the railway. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the twelve trains a day leaving London were delivering 275,000 visitors to York in a year. Joseph Terry and his brothers, who had inherited their father’s confectionery business in 1854, took advantage of this new opportunity. Starting back in 1767, their forebears had sold boiled sweets and candied peel to the rich from their enticing sweet shop not far from Rowntree’s grocer’s shop. Opening the shop door ushered the customer into a magical Hansel and Gretel world of sugared strawberries, raspberries, lemons and oranges.

      With the arrival of the railways, Joseph Terry was soon selling to customers in more than seventy-five towns across the Midlands and the north of England. To meet the rising demand, he moved his manufacturing in 1862 to a larger site beside the River Ouse, just outside York’s city walls, to which the twice-weekly steam packet brought deliveries of exotic fruits and cocoa. In the 1860s Terry was looking closely at how to diversify his range by making more use of cocoa in chocolate-covered nuts and sweets.

      But the Cadburys – and the other cocoa manufacturers – faced their stiffest competition from a giant Quaker concern in Bristol: Fry and Sons. The Frys ran the largest cocoa works in the world, so large it was fast shaping the city of Bristol. Their factory was the size of a small town, their sprawling works easily accommodating all the varied processes of production. This was cocoa-making for England. The Cadburys’ little plant could not compete.

      Rather than being daunted by the size of the Fry enterprise, George Cadbury was intrigued. ‘I never looked at the small people or the people who had failed,’ he declared. ‘I wanted to know how men succeeded, and it was their methods I examined, and if I thought them good, applied.’ Through the Quaker network he was able to approach the Frys in Bristol, and found one partner, Francis James Fry, who was prepared to take him under his wing. Francis Fry and George Cadbury formed a loose alliance of English cocoa-makers which met, for convenience, in the London offices of the Taylor brothers.

      ‘I suppose we had some energy,’ George recalled years later, ‘for Francis James Fry elected to go round with me to see the Cocoa and Chocolate Manufacturers.’ George was surprised by this, remarking, ‘I was a young man in a small business compared to his.’ A year older than George, Francis James was the fourth generation of his family to run the firm. With Fry’s sales approaching a colossal £100,000 a year, he must have felt secure in the knowledge that the young Cadbury brothers were no threat.

      George Cadbury had everything to learn about the development of a family firm from his Fry counterpart – and he did. The Bristol firm, he noted, from its earliest years, had had an outstanding reputation for innovation.