Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers Read Online Free Page B

Secretary of State and got the woman’s sentence commuted to transportation.”
    As a Quaker, Richard Tapper became deeply involved in community affairs and served on the Board of Commissioners for Birmingham, a precursor to the Town Council. He also worked as an Overseer of the Poor, including during the troubled year of 1800 when the harvest failed. According to the St. James Chronicle , the price of bread on October 8 rose to nearly two shillings for one loaf. In the parish of Birmingham, the poor were in dread of starvation, “the distress in the town was great,” and there was “an alarming disorder” in the workhouse. Richard Tapper was among those who tried to ensure that there was enough food.
    Richard Tapper’s shop prospered, and his garden in the back of Bull Street was “a favourite place” for his growing family “with currants in abundance, flowers and a vine.” The accounts of Richard’s children are of particular personal interest since my own branch of the family can be traced to his oldest son, Benjamin, born in 1798. According to the Birmingham Daily Post , Benjamin had a passion for philanthropy. Among the many benevolent causes he supported were the local Infant Schools, the Bible Society, and the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Animals. But like many Quakers, according to the Post , by far “his most laborious and anxious labours” were devoted to the antislavery movement, “which more or less occupied his time and unwearied attention for upwards of thirty-five years.” Regardless of whether he possessed the same “unwearied attention” for business, it was the custom for the oldest son to inherit the father’s business, and when Benjamin turned thirty, he duly inherited his father’s successful draper’s shop on Bull Street and was happily settled for many years.
    Richard Tapper Cadbury’s second son, Joel, was able to fulfill his father’s dream of seeking his fortune in America and set sail in 1815
at the age of sixteen. The Atlantic crossing took eighty days in high winds and rough seas that washed a man overboard and prompted seasoned sailors to say they “not have seen such sea.” Joel eventually settled in Philadelphia and became a cotton goods manufacturer. He had a family of eleven children and established a large branch of Quakers on the East Coast of America.
    But Richard’s third son, John—the father of Richard and George—born in 1801 above his father’s draper’s shop, was destined to have a very different fate. According to an account handed down through the generations, John’s farsighted father, having passed on his business to his oldest son, Benjamin, asked John to investigate the new colonial market in Mincing Lane, London. He was curious about the new commodity, the cocoa bean, which was arriving from the New World.
    Today, among the gleaming black facades of Mincing Lane in the City, there is little to give away its colorful past as one of London’s thriving trading markets. But when John Cadbury visited in the 1820s, there was a teeming market where colonial brokers met to trade in different commodities from Britain’s growing empire. There were salesrooms where frenetic auctions were taking place for tea, sugar, coffee, jute, gums, waxes, vegetable oils, spices, and cocoa. Prices and details of business were written on a black board. Samples of goods from warehouses in docks along the nearby Thames were on display. They included the cocoa bean or “nib” from South America, which looked like a huge chocolate-colored almond, still dusted with the dried pulp that surrounded it in the cocoa pod and baked by a tropical sun.
    At a time when cocoa was purchased primarily to produce a novelty drink for the rich, John tried to ascertain whether there might be a future in the unpromising black bean.

    J ohn Cadbury, like his father before him, had set out as an apprentice to learn his trade at a young age. In 1816, aged fifteen and proudly