Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers (27 page)

Seebohm pored over the data. Page after page of case notes revealed a vivid snapshot of poverty in York, each distilling the bare facts of a heartrending family struggle, but how could he use the information to analyze the problem more systematically?

After consulting with nutrition experts on the minimum requirements for a basic diet, Seebohm Rowntree set a poverty line for a family of five at 21s and 8d—roughly £75 per week today—acknowledging that this allowed for a diet “less generous . . . than that supplied to able bodied paupers in workhouses.” He defined “primary poverty” as those below this poverty line. No matter how carefully they spent their wages, this group did not earn enough to cover the minimum basic needs of life, which he described as “the maintenance of merely physical efficiency.” Incredibly, 7,230 people (almost 10 percent of York’s population) fell into primary poverty, meaning they could not earn enough to feed themselves adequately.

Seebohm’s analysis showed a low wage was the biggest single cause of primary poverty. Half the men in this category had jobs, but they worked for such a pittance that they could not meet their families’ basic needs. Apart from appallingly low wages, the other key causes of primary poverty were the size of the family and the death or illness of the wage earner.

The next group Seebohm analyzed was the 13,072 people suffering from what he called “secondary poverty”—roughly 18 percent of the population. To the investigators, this group appeared just as poverty-stricken as the first group, despite the fact that its members earned enough money to meet their basic needs. However, they failed to do so because they were spending some of their income on nonessentials, “either useful or wasteful,” such as drink. For those in secondary poverty, he considered a number of factors were contributing to their poverty, such as inadequate housing or overcrowding. Taking the two groups together, Seebohm showed that 27 percent—half the working population of York—were in either primary or secondary poverty.

Seebohm Rowntree was “much surprised” that his findings coincided with Charles Booth’s research. Booth had estimated that 30 percent of Londoners lived in poverty. If the findings in London and York could be extrapolated to other towns, reasoned Seebohm, “We are faced with the startling probability that from 25-30% of the town populations of the UK are living in poverty,” a result that he thought prompted “great searchings of the heart.” Surely, “No civilisation can be sound or stable which has at its base this mass of stunted human life?” For him it was unacceptable that “multitudes of men and women are doomed by inevitable law to a struggle for survival so severe as to cripple or destroy the higher parts of their nature.” Seebohm’s research was published in 1901 as
Poverty: A Study of Town Life
. One person who read it was Winston Churchill, a Tory MP at the time. Rowntree’s study “has fairly made my hair stand on end,” he said.

Joseph Rowntree was keen to do what he could to alleviate the situation his son had revealed in York. By 1900 he was in a position to do this; in the five years since moving to Haxby Road, his business had doubled in size with sales approaching £500,000. After discussions with George Cadbury, Joseph purchased 150 acres of land three miles outside of York and hired an architect to design a village on parallel lines to Bournville. He envisaged a similarly idyllic community, a utopia of cottage gardens resplendent with produce and pale children running freely through the woods, taking on the color of health. He wanted his village to be affordable for the poorest slum dwellers of York, many of whom were supporting a family on less
than £1 a week. When the lowest weekly rents of 5 shillings proved to be beyond their means, Rowntree commissioned simpler cottages to be built without bathrooms or hot water for £135 each and let for 4 shillings per week.

It took time for his experiment to come to fruition, but gradually, with the addition of the Folk Hall, schools, and playing fields, the pretty garden village of New Earswick took shape. In 1904, sixty-eight-year-old Joseph Rowntree, like George Cadbury, handed over the estate to the nonprofit Joseph Rowntree Village Trust. To complement the work of the Village Trust, he also created the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and the Social Services Trust. These had the remit to investigate social and religious issues and explore problems of “importance to the well-being of the community.” He committed one-half of his total wealth to these three trusts.

Discussions between the two friendly rivals brought Joseph Rowntree and George Cadbury together on another issue of keen, shared interest. Joseph Rowntree’s older son, John Wilhelm, was beginning to question the Quaker movement and challenge its restrictive practices. He felt that the Quaker movement was stagnating, and the decline in numbers and outdated codes of practice were leading to a withering of the Society. It was in danger of becoming little more than “a hereditary social club!” Where was the spark? What was its mission? John Wilhelm organized a series of meetings to discuss ideas and called for the creation of a permanent college that would develop Quaker thinking. George Cadbury offered his former home at Woodbrooke on the outskirts of Bournville for the Quaker college, the only one in Europe. He and Elsie wanted Woodbrooke College to become a retreat where the spirit might be recharged; they funded scholarships for students from around the world. They hoped the college would contribute to the evolution of the Quaker faith and bring a new understanding reborn from centuries encrusted with obedience to outdated ideas.

Meanwhile, Joseph Rowntree was not the only entrepreneur in England inspired to copy Bournville. Early in the twentieth century, Sir James Reckitt, a Quaker and a successful businessman in household goods, developed a similar garden village in east Hull. Ebenezer
Howard’s ideals began to take shape as he founded his first garden city in Letchworth in Hertfordshire, followed years later by Welwyn Garden City. Another friend of George Cadbury, Dame Henrietta Barnett, created the Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London.

Soon there was a stream of visitors to Bournville from overseas. A Frenchman, George Benoit-Levy, returned home to create a garden village at Dourges in northern France. In Germany, Margarethe Krupp, who inherited a fortune from her husband’s large armaments firm, gave a million marks to build a big estate at Margarethenhohe in Essen on condition that the architects studied Bournville before drafting their plans.

Word of Bournville’s success reached across the Atlantic and to India, China, and even Australia. “Bournville,” declared the
Melbourne Age
, “is as important to England as a Dreadnought.”

W
hile George Cadbury Sr. was happily absorbed in creating his model community at Bournville, he could not ignore the wider issues in society. The deepening crisis of the Boer War provoked him to action.

In the early autumn of 1900, a rector’s daughter from Cornwall, Emily Hobhouse, heard rumors of a new and horrific practice being used by British commanders against the Boers. As a member of the South African Conciliation Committee, she learned of inhumane conditions in a “concentration camp” in the region—so named after the policy of “concentrating” Boer women and children in one location, allegedly for their own protection. The British had fought their way into Boer territory by the summer of 1900. Faced with guerrilla tactics, British commanders applied a scorched earth policy, razing 30,000 Boer homes in the Transvaal region to the ground. Hobhouse heard of hundreds of Boer women, children, and prisoners trapped in a concentration camp in Port Elizabeth on the South African coast. She set sail to help them and to investigate the situation.

Her research revealed that there was not one but thirty-four concentration camps. Worse, it was a mockery to call these “refugee
camps.” Conditions were so barbaric they were more like death camps. In one camp alone, fifty children died each day, and a third of the inmates perished over one month. There was no provision for adequate food, clean water, or sanitation. Disease was rampant, famine was rife, and many inmates were emaciated. The camp system was “whole sale cruelty,” Emily wrote. “To keep these camps going is murder to the children.” She denounced the so-called humanitarian system run by British commanders as “hollow and rotten to the core.”

Back in Britain, however, the press was speaking in an almost united voice in favor of war and failed to reveal its full horror. When Emily Hobhouse returned to England and tried to explain what she saw, “The press abused me,” she said. She was branded “a rebel and a liar and an enemy of the people” and dismissed as “hysterical and even worse.”

In England, Lloyd George had not given up on his efforts to find a Liberal backer for the
Daily News
. George Cadbury, shocked by developments in the war, the corruption of the mine owners, and the recent revelations of concentration camps, began to see how owning a national newspaper could have a value. It seemed a matter of duty to use his wealth to influence public opinion. “This war seems the most diabolical that was ever waged,” he told Labour MP John Burns. “Just now it seems to me that speculators, trust mongers, and owners of enormous wealth are the great curse of this world and the cause of most of its poverty!”

In 1901, he agreed to Lloyd George’s proposal and put up £20,000 to join a partnership to purchase the
Daily News
. By any standards, this was a colossal sum—enough to build more than eighty new houses at Bournville. But in sharing ownership of a national paper, he hoped to expose other social ills, such as inhumane factory conditions. He would have a national voice that could promote the Quaker ideal of pacifism and to speak for the inarticulate and the unfortunate.

But opposing the war was no light matter. Advertisers responded swiftly by removing their business from the
Daily News
, and losses soared. By the end of 1901, his business partner wanted out. George Cadbury faced a tough choice. He could sell his share and run the
risk that the paper would be bought by those in favor of war. Or he could put up another £20,000 to buy the paper outright. Despite the rising losses, George Cadbury chose the latter.

As sole proprietor, he appointed an editor who shared his views: Alfred George Gardiner, who would later write Cadbury’s biography. Under Gardiner’s editorship, the
Daily News
drew attention to the scandal of tens of thousands of Chinese coolies laboring in South African mines in subhuman conditions. With provocative headlines such as “Yellow Slavery,” the paper condemned the Tory government for condoning slavery and supporting wealthy British interests.

Gardiner and his team also highlighted the urgent need for labor reforms at home. The
Daily News
was tireless in its exposure of inhumane labor conditions in Britain. The paper funded an exhibition in London that revealed the appalling exploitation of those working in sweated labor. They found women making shirts in their homes for less than a penny an hour, repairing sacks for two shillings a week, and chain-making for six shillings a week, often working more than twelve hours a day. George Cadbury became president of the newly formed Anti-Sweating League and was supported by the indefatigable efforts of his oldest son, Edward. Edward wrote two books summarizing the findings:
Sweating
, which highlighted the need for a minimum working wage, was published in 1907; and
Women’s Work and Wages
followed in 1908. The
Daily News
also campaigned for unemployment benefits and old age pensions. Edward and his father helped to create the National Old Age Pensions League to champion the cause of state support for the elderly. It appeared that the dream of creating a chocolate factory to promote social reform and justice was finally coming to fruition.