altruism of Cadbury

Capitalism with a soft centre: How the Victorian Cadbury family put today's fat cats to shame | Mail Online

Britain was in effect put up for sale when the Big Bang under Margaret Thatcher revolutionised the City in October 1986.

Thereafter, the City was deregulated and restrictions on movements of capital both into and out of Britain were swept away.

This meant it was possible for anyone with credit to move in and take over any British company.

Asset-stripping — whereby British companies were bought, then split up and sold off in parts — was the inevitable consequence.

That, along with the arrival of hard-nosed shareholders who demanded ever better returns on capital.

But we all know that such an attitude to money-making — and especially to money made by manufacturing — is horribly short-sighted.

The name of Cadbury in Birmingham means something much more than chocolate eggs or steaming mugs of chocolate-drink before we go to bed.

It means, in effect, a whole community, generations of men women and children.

The Cadbury family are Quakers.

From small beginnings, John and Benjamin Cadbury began to sell tea, coffee and cocoa from a shop in the middle of Birmingham, during the reign of George IV.

With the growth in population in Victorian England, the vast growth of teetotalism and cocoa-drinking, and a very timely reduction in the import taxes on cocoa, the Cadburys became prodigiously rich.

What did they do? If they had been following the wisdom of today’s financial whizkids, they would presumably have gone off round the world finding other chocolate-businesses to take over.
John Cadbury

Founding father: John Cadbury

If it profited them, they would ‘asset strip’ — that is, sack the workforce, split up the company — and their shareholders would presumably cheer them to the rafters.

But the Cadbury brothers did something very different.

In 1893, George Cadbury — one of the four sons of the founder of the firm — used his own money to build a model village which would ‘alleviate the evils of modern, more cramped living conditions’.

The Cadbury family built more than 300 houses and set them in a pleasant estate which was a world away from the awful slums where so many Birmingham workers were in those days compelled to live.

The Cadburys were guided by a sense of civic duty. But this was not simply to appear virtuous. It was realistic.

A prosperous, fair community is a happy community.

In such a place, where local manufacturing wealth has been used to finance schools, hospitals, adequate housing and local facilities such as libraries, swimming-pools and museums, there is inevitably less crime.

The Cadbury’s ‘model village’ at Bournville was not unique.

Think of William Hesketh Lever — later Lord Leverhulme — who built Port Sunlight in Cheshire with the huge fortune he had amassed from Sunlight soap.

It is an amazing place — with over 800 beautiful Arts and Craft houses, a cottage hospital, schools, an open-air swimming-pool, allotments, a church and a temperance hotel.

Of course it is easy to smile at the paternalism of all this.

But the altruism of Leverhulme or the Cadbury family are in sad contrast to the antisocial attitude of modern business magnates, who think only of profit and the shareholder.