Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (19 page)

Milton united with Henry Hershey, but they had no money to rent a mill or invest in expensive equipment. Their only asset was their broad experience. Henry had travelled widely and flirted with everything from painting to gold prospecting. His son’s experience was much more focused. Milton’s mother had enrolled him at the age of fifteen as an apprentice in an ice-cream parlor in his hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For four years, he learned how to
transform large boiling pots of sugar and water into colorful temptations: lollipops, boiled candies, fruit drops, and a myriad of others. Six years of running his own business in Philadelphia had honed his skills; he had confidence in making all types of candy. Most recently he had taken a job at a sweetshop in Denver, where he refined his knowledge of caramels. Instead of adding paraffin to achieve the desired texture, his Denver employer had hit on a better recipe. “I put in fresh milk,” he said. “They stay fresh for months and the milk makes them chewy too.” Milton was impressed and took note of each step of the process.

The summer of 1882 found twenty-four-year-old Milton working in the stifling heat with his father on the shores of Lake Michigan. Chicago was a town hurrying towards the future; a population of five hundred people fifty years earlier had exploded to half a million. Meatpackers and livestock owners, railroad and factory workers—a lawless maelstrom hungry for nourishment and all potential candy eaters. The world, it seemed, was coming to Chicago. Here a sharp-eyed entrepreneur could glimpse the new America. A network of railroads was turning the city into a key junction between east and west as well as north and south, with steamboats sailing the Great Lakes to connect by canal to the Mississippi River. From their rented premises in State Street, the Hersheys were hungry for success. With Henry’s imagination and Milton’s experience, they planned to make caramels and cough drops.

Milton at last found there was just one drawback. It did not take him long to see what his mother had known all along. Henry was no team player or business partner. He was never there when he was needed and could be relied on for nothing. Before long, they decided to go their separate ways. For Milton Hershey, the lure of wealth and fortune remained maddeningly out of reach.

In the autumn of 1882, Hershey returned east to his mother and aunt in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He told them he wanted to start again. This time he would take on the largest growth market of all: New York. And he wanted to do it properly. As his mother had tried to teach him, slow, incremental steps were needed to grow a business. He knew that now.

He paced Manhattan’s grid of streets researching the competition. America’s largest city had everything. The immigrants poured in from New York harbor, forming a ceaseless tide of humanity with hope on their faces and dust in their eyes. This was where the elusive dream started: on grimy streets, where wagons and horses mingled with dirt-poor Irish immigrants, New England Yankees, Germans and Scots from Pennsylvania, people from far and wide. The possibilities greeted you everywhere, blazoned across the billboards, and in advertisements and shop windows in a bewildering array of goods. There were new skyscrapers all of ten storeys high as well as run-down tenements, laundry strung between buildings soaking up the dirt. It was a wanting world looking hard for fulfilment.

In the fashionable districts of downtown Manhattan, Milton found there was stiff competition. Countless sweetshops in town already offered every kind of delight that could be whipped up from boiled sugar and water. Even novel forms of eating chocolate were on sale, such as chocolate drops, sticks, and bonbons. Undaunted, Hershey relied on his expertise in candy making to give him an advantage over his rivals. He leased a shop on Sixth Avenue between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets near the elevated railway and began laboring seven days a week in the kitchen basement. It was his second candy business, and this time it prospered. Feeling optimistic, he moved to larger premises on Forty-second Street, only to find he had made a critical mistake. He had accidentally overstayed at the original shop by a few days, and consequently the landlord sued him for a year’s rent.

Faced with having to pay two rents, his mother and Aunt Mattie came to his aid once again. Always willing to provide free labor, they wrapped and packed, determined to win through. Yet just when it seemed that Milton Hershey might finally turn the corner, his father turned up.

Once again, the dashing Henry Hershey, full of seductive ideas and an unreasonable amount of self-confidence, urged his son to seize the moment. Winter was coming, flu was predicted, and New Yorkers would need cough drops. Despite all the puritan homilies and all the hard work, Milton found himself unable to resist a gamble.
He borrowed $10,000 to purchase the necessary equipment. Once again, the son’s success and the mother’s peace of mind were hostage to the errant father’s dream.

In 1882, the year that Hershey embarked on his venture in New York, in Birmingham, England, Richard Cadbury’s oldest son, nineteen-year-old Barrow, was due to start full-time work at Bournville. His Uncle George suggested that he should first take a tour of the New World to investigate the chocolate market in North America. “It was one of Uncle George’s generous and thoughtful propositions,” Barrow wrote in his diary. He was to travel with William Tallis, the works foreman, and young Barrow appreciated his companionship and business insights. Richard Cadbury took them to Liverpool and saw them off on the beautiful steam-propelled White Star liner SS
Republic.
The ship had four masts, with full sails rigged on each one. “I remember this,” says Barrow, because it was a stormy crossing and “in a strong gale one of the top sails burst with a loud explosion.”

As part of their North American trip, William Tallis and Barrow Cadbury visited Canada. In chilly Montreal, where an ice railway had been laid two kilometers across the vast Saint Laurence River, they went to see the company’s Canadian agent, Edward Lusher. Montreal was in pole position to benefit from a network of railways, lakes, and canals that were forging paths through great swathes of virgin territory. Travelling west, cities like Toronto were already within reach, and the Canadian Pacific Railway was inching its iron feet towards the vast snowy peaks of the Rockies. Going east, rail and shipping routes made connections to the booming Atlantic coastal towns of Canada and America. Wherever they ventured in this mighty landscape, they saw, cheekily stacked in shop windows, the bright yellow tins of Fry’s Breakfast Cocoa
.

Of all the cities on Barrow’s tour, New York was the greatest wonder. Here Barrow Cadbury could see what Hershey had patiently researched. Sugar candy was everywhere; chocolate was not. No one in America had tapped the full potential of the little black bean. If Barrow passed Milton Hershey’s dreary kitchen on Sixth Avenue, there was nothing yet to intimate a great confectionery rival in the making.

America, land of opportunities, lay in wait; a vast map studded with possibilities. Hershey saw it. He believed his God-given country was rich in potential, and he would prove it one day. But the saintly Barrow Cadbury, his horizons bounded by temperance movements and pacifist societies, picked his way through the brash American landscape, failing to spot the right opening.

I
n the 1880s, it was the mysterious continent of Africa that held Europeans in thrall. Unmapped, unknown, a vast continent of possibilities could be glimpsed from forays inland from coastal settlements. The land with the largest desert on earth also had an immeasurable tropical rain forest along the Congo, wide open savannahs burning in a shimmering haze, and vibrant towns dotted along its eastern coast set against the enticing blue of the Indian Ocean. It was all the more vivid seen through the eyes of the great adventurers of the 1860s and 1870s, such as Dr. David Livingstone.

The British already controlled land along the coast of West Africa, including Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast. Now the empire builders of Britain saw a grand extension of Victoria’s realm in a great swathe of land across the continent from the Cape of Good Hope in the south to Cairo in the north. But they faced new rivals. Recently formed European states wanted to compete with Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal to seize their own colonies and build their military and industrial might. Germany, formed in 1871, claimed land in southwest Africa. Belgium, created in 1831, eyed the great Congo Basin. Italy, founded in 1861, was maneuvering for Abyssinia. The scramble for Africa was so intense that just thirty years later, only Liberia and Abyssinia would be independent of the Europeans.

The expansion of European empires in the late nineteenth century was mirrored by changes in trade—and chocolate was no exception.

The exotic cacao tree that once thrived only in South and Central America reached the shores of Africa. Portuguese colonialists were the first to take the hardier variety,
Forestero
, from Brazil in 1824 to plant on the island of Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea. Spaced about three feet apart under the shade of banana or plantain trees, the cocoa trees flourished in the hot, humid climate to form a thick canopy. Cocoa eventually became the island’s leading export, and
Forestero
spread to the neighboring island of Principe and made its way along the coast across the colonies of Portuguese Africa.

In Europe the price of beans began to fall. Ever greater quantities were shipped from Africa and South America to satisfy the rapacious demand of the West. Delicious concoctions, once available only to the wealthy, were reaching an expanding industrial workforce through Dutch firms, such as Van Houten, Peter, and Lindt in Switzerland, in addition to the French and British manufacturers. Imports of the cocoa bean rose fast. In Britain, demand soared from just over 1,000 tons a year in 1850 to almost 5,000 tons by 1880. And Britain’s chocolate dynasties followed the trail of the colonial empire builders as immense global horizons opened up.

George and Richard’s new factory at Bournville was well placed to benefit spectacularly from the boom in global infrastructure. The British passion for railways would lead to continents conquered as tracks of iron and steel hurried to reach profitable new markets. The railway at Bournville became double track and was part of the main-line into Birmingham, linking their chocolate works to all British ports. New waterways joined the canal route at Bournville, connecting it to both the Liverpool docks and the Bristol Channel, where ever larger steamships sailed around the world. By 1880, Britain was linked to her colonies by almost 100,000 miles of cable spun under the world’s oceans. Telegraph messages could be relayed across the world overnight. Cadbury—like Fry—had firmly established its national reach and began to explore international links to the furthest reaches of the British Empire.

The Cadbury brothers’ exploration of Africa began with a single traveller, Harry Gear. Gear had been pioneering sales in New York but in 1886 set sail for Cape Town. He soon wrote back asking for
help, which arrived in due course in the form of a clerk from Scotland, R. B. Brown, who answered the call to adventure. Brown’s ambition was considerable, and he requested the whole of southern Africa as his “patch.” He must have been a singular sight on his pony, traversing wide tracts of land, his stock of cocoa and chocolate wares like nothing recognizable in Africa, constantly fingered in a meltingly hot sun. Blazing a trail through thousands of miles of bush, he went where no confectionery salesman had ever been seen before, forging a route from the cape to Northern Rhodesia, Portuguese East Africa to Southwest Africa, and encompassing Madagascar on the way.

The Frys also sent travellers to the South African coast. Their literature shows they found the dangers of travel in Africa “immense” and were stunned by the sheer scale of the unexplored interiors. Nonetheless, “the Dark Continent,” they wrote, was beginning to open up “to the enlightening influences of trade.” Their best markets were in the towns that sprung up around the South African diamond and gold mines. Fry found that the boys working in the heat of the gold mines more than 9,000 feet underground would start to shiver with cold once they climbed above ground. And Fry had a remedy for those chills: cocoa. Demand rose, and they established branches of the company in Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Meanwhile Cadbury’s overseas travellers were also making headway in Australia. Their first Australian traveller, Thomas Edwards, informed the Richard and George that there was so much interest in their products that he required assistance. He was joined by William Cooper, a personal friend of George Cadbury. Their goal was wildly ambitious. The two travellers took a map and divided the continent between them. Edwards would promote Cadbury’s goods in South and West Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand from his Melbourne office, while Cooper tackled Sydney, New South Wales, and Queensland.