‘For George Cadbury his whole life was an adventure in philanthropy. That is clear from the breadth of his interests.’ Photo: George Cadbury (centre) with his wife and grandchildren.
‘Benevolence was not some kind of adjunct to ordinary life.’
Did George Cadbury’s philanthropy achieve what he hoped? Paul Vallely shares some findings from his much-anticipated new book
Before Quakerism, business and benevolence were largely seen as parallel, compartmentalised activities. Other philanthropists had spent the first part of their life making money, and the second part working out the most productive ways to give it away. With Friends, that changed: business and philanthropy worked hand in hand. This was perhaps the most profound shift in thinking on philanthropy in the nineteenth century. Quaker ways of doing business did not influence their philanthropy; instead, their philanthropy changed the way their businesses operated.
The law banned Quakers from universities and the professions, so they set up in business instead. Under the 1661 Corporation Act, Friends were also barred from civic and professional life in cities established under a charter. So the largest city in England that did not operate under a charter of incorporation – Birmingham – became a centre for Quaker entrepreneurial activity. It was there that the Cadbury Brothers built the famous chocolate business.
Among the Quaker industrialists of the second half of the nineteenth century the figure of George Cadbury stands out. As a teenager George was sent as an apprentice to work in the grocery business of another Quaker, Joseph Rowntree at York – Friends’ outsider status bonded them in a network of mutual support, business linkages, capital flows and marriages. In 1856 George returned to join his father’s cocoa factory in Birmingham, but the business began to fail when the death of George’s mother sent his father’s health into decline. In 1861, at the age of just 21, George and his brother Richard, who was a few years older, took control of the business, with the younger brother taking the lead. His willingness to innovate – which distinguished George from many of his competitors – led him to introduce a new cocoa press, and a far superior product to those of his rivals. The firm was appointed cocoa manufacturers to the royal family. Soon they were processing a third of all imported cocoa.
It was more than a sense of religious duty which made George Cadbury focus on the need to improve life for his workers. Just two years after he took over Cadbury Brothers he began volunteering as a teacher with the Adult School Movement – and continued to teach in its Severn Street School until the age of seventy-two when he was still bicycling into the city at 6am on Sunday mornings to take a Bible class. This brought Cadbury into first-hand contact with not just members of the respectable artisan class, but also with individuals whose lives were anything but respectable – vagrants, ex-convicts and drunkards. Sometimes Cadbury visited members of his adult class in their small overcrowded homes, which opened his eyes to the seamier side of working-class living. He later wrote: ‘It was largely through my experience among the back streets of Birmingham [that] I have been brought to the conclusion that it is impossible to raise a nation, morally, physically, and spiritually, in such surroundings, and that the only effective way is to bring men out of the cities into the country and to give to every man his garden where he can come into touch with nature.’ His critics later accused George Cadbury of paternalism. But it is unarguable that his concern brought many benefits to his employees. Although he did not pay wages above the market rate Cadbury did offer savings clubs, evening sewing classes, clothing clubs, dental treatment and one sickness scheme to provide wages for staff who fell ill and another for regularising employment in a seasonal trade. He also reduced the length of the working day and working week and introduced half-day and bank holidays. All this, says David Owen in English Philanthropy 1660-1960, made him ‘almost unique in the British industrial world’.
George Cadbury’s contact with the Birmingham workers he met through the Adult School Movement had convinced him, according to Cadbury’s main architect William Alexander Harvey, that ‘the greatest drawback to their moral and physical progress was the lack of any healthful occupation for their leisure’. When the Bournville community was built, one-tenth of the total area was devoted to parks and other open spaces. It had wide roads shaded with trees. The houses were built in a variety of designs, creating a multiplicity of different and distinct homes rather than rows of identical worker’s cottages. It had a village green and a cricket ground, schools and shops, almshouses for the elderly and infirm, and a home for children with disabilities, places of worship and adult education facilities. The Cadbury paternalism was undisguised. Each new resident was supplied with a copy of George’s ‘Suggested Rules of Health’, which offered advice on everything from sanitation to diet and clothing. The rules advocated, among other things: vegetarianism; avoiding intoxicating liquors, tobacco, pork, aerated drinks and drugs; the correct way to brew tea; single beds for married couples; cold and warm baths; outdoor exercise, particularly walking and gardening; good ventilation; sleeping eight hours in twenty-four; early rising; and the avoidance of tight clothing. The way of life advocated by George Cadbury was based upon his own, which espoused simplicity and thrift as acts of family worship. In the final statement of the rules, George Cadbury’s evangelical Quakerism is most prominent when recommending that ‘In a truly happy home Father and Mother will conduct family worship at least once a day when the Bible should be read and a hymn sung.’
Many Cadbury employees were members of the Religious Society of Friends, but the entire workforce, including non-Quakers, were expected to participate each day in acts of worship, which involved reading aloud from religious texts, silent prayer and even singing in the factory’s breakfast break. The practice, according to Adrian Bailey and John Bryson, was ‘an attempt to instil within the workforce a sense of unity, vocation, duty and diligence, alongside the more obvious opportunity of experiencing the presence of God’. It was another clear instance of what David Owen calls the Cadburys’ ‘fusion of philanthropy and higher self-interest’. It is some measure of the attitude of the workforce towards Cadbury paternalism that when, in 1870, the brothers decided to discontinue the readings the workforce petitioned them to change their mind.
What made George Cadbury singular as a philanthropist was his insight – way ahead of his time – that benevolence was not some kind of adjunct to ordinary life. Nor was it a way of achieving redemption for bad behaviour in commercial or political activity. Rather it was a quality which should inform the whole of the way that a good life is led. His business and philanthropic careers were so closely intertwined, as David Owen puts it, that it is ‘difficult and unprofitable to classify some of his decisions’ as one thing or another. For George Cadbury his whole life was an adventure in philanthropy. That is clear from the breadth of his interests. Few good causes – political, social or religious – made requests of him in vain, Owen observed, especially if they seemed to hold promise for the future. In addition to personal donations to religious institutions like the China Inland Mission and the London Missionary Society, he supported an agency formed to protect the natives of New Guinea from ‘the crudest sort of commercial exploitation’. At home he made substantial contributions to campaigns in support of old-age pensions and in opposition to sweated labour, demanding a minimum wage in sweatshops – which ‘marked him as something of an alien spirit among late Victorian philanthropists and proclaimed his sharp deviation from the main tradition of Victorian philanthropy’. He also, unfashionably, opposed the Boer War. Finding that the British press was overwhelmingly shrill in its enthusiasm for military action, George Cadbury, who had already acquired four Birmingham newspapers to ‘educate the public in civic affairs’, in 1901 bought a controlling interest in a national newspaper, the Daily News. He instructed it to oppose the war in South Africa and call for it to be brought to an end through arbitration. Cadbury – a convinced Liberal who believed that people of substance, like himself, had a duty ‘to encourage an enlightened public opinion and to guide the nation to upright high-principled decisions’ – set up a trust to run the newspaper with the mission ‘that it may be of service in bringing the ethical teaching of Jesus Christ to bear upon National Questions, and in promoting National Righteousness’. The paper lost money partly, perhaps, because of Cadbury’s insistence that it did not run racing tips or carry advertising for strong liquor. But he was unconcerned about the need to subsidise it.
George Cadbury gave away almost the whole of his income, keeping only what he required to maintain his fairly fugal lifestyle. He gave it away pretty much as he made it and was not concerned to leave a substantial inheritance for his large family. A strong believer in death duties and income tax, he put practically his entire income, beyond living expenses, into good works. ‘I have seriously considered how far a man is justified in giving away the heritage of his children and have come to the conclusion that my children will be all the better for being deprived of this money,’ he said on 14 December 1900, standing in front of the Meeting house on the village green, declaring that he was giving away his wealth to the Bournville Village Trust. ‘Great wealth is not to be desired, and in my experience of life it is more a curse than a blessing to the families of those who possess it. I have 10 children. Six of them are at an age to understand how my actions affect them, and they entirely approve.’
The Daily News was directed to support the Liberal Party, campaign against sweated labour, and give voice to nonconformist views. When, in 1912, he handed over the reins of the trust he had established to own the paper, he wrote a letter to the new chairman, his eldest son, Edward. In it he said: ‘I have a profound conviction that money spent on charities is of infinitely less value than money spent in trying to arouse my fellow countrymen to the necessity for measures to ameliorate the condition of the poor, forsaken and downtrodden masses.’ That could be done ‘most effectively by a great newspaper’.
Among the benevolent rich men of his day George Cadbury was, in the estimation of David Owen, ‘the most creative and daring in his giving’. Inevitably, there were those who felt he had not gone far enough. The Socialist Quaker Society, in the first decade of the twentieth century, denounced him for ‘favouring philanthropy to ease social ills rather than more radical steps’. That is unfair. Cadbury clearly saw, certainly towards the end of his life, as he put it in 1912, that money spent on charities was ‘of infinitely less value’ than money spent on political reform. As well as funding newspapers to campaign for social change, he also gave financial donations to candidates for the Liberal Party and also to some from the Independent Labour Party. He knew the price he would pay for that – which was to be attacked from both right and left. As he handed over control of the Daily News Trust, Cadbury wrote a letter to the new trustees in which he offered a warning from bitter experience: ‘If you champion the cause of the poor who cannot do anything to recompense you, you must expect savage attacks from those whose interests may be affected. I have been bitterly attacked in Society papers, also, on the other hand, by anarchists who desire a violent revolution and who know that progressive legislation will make this impossible.’ But, more significant than his politics, George Cadbury developed what Owen calls ‘seminal philanthropy’– a conscious experiment which he believed others might emulate on a scale that could bring significant social change. As he grew older Cadbury became more and more convinced of the rightness of this. At the age of 73 he concluded: ‘Much of current philanthropic effort is directed to remedying the more superficial evils. I desire [to be of service] in assisting those who are seeking to remove their underlying causes.’
George Cadbury’s approach was far more ethical than the corporate social responsibility of twenty-first-century shareholder capitalism, argues Deborah Cadbury, a non-Quaker descendant of the famous philanthropist. At the turn of the twentieth century thoughtful philanthropists were being forced to the conclusion that voluntary private charity was just not equal to the problems being thrown up by an urban and industrial society. Joseph Rowntree, in York, came to the same conclusion as Cadbury, lamenting that ‘much of our present philanthropic effort is directed to remedying more superficial manifestations of weakness or evil’. Indeed, he went further, adding that ‘the charity which takes the place of justice, creates much of the misery it relieves, but does not relieve all the misery it creates’. The hard truth was that George Cadbury, this most radical of business-oriented philanthropists, was eventually forced to the conclusion that philanthropy on its own is unable to deliver the vision of social justice which he cherished. Poverty had a social dimension which ultimately only society could address. In the end Quaker philanthropists, even one like George Cadbury who gave away virtually his entire income, could not reform British capitalism.
Paul Vallely has worked and written for many national newspapers since being commended as International Reporter of the Year for his coverage of the 1984/5 Ethiopian famine. He is also a canon of the Anglican Manchester Cathedral. Philanthropy: From Aristotle to Zuckerberg is available now from Bloomsbury.
