Episode 61. The Quakers and their Chocolate

SYNOPSIS

Fry’s, Cadbury’s and Rowntree’s remain well-known brand names in the world of cocoa and confectionery. What is less well remembered is the unusual commercial approach and temperance motivation that inspired the burgeoning of these 19c chocolate manufacturers: a perspective which was inseparable from the Quaker sensibility of their founders.

By the Victorian period the Quakers had come far in social acceptance from their emergence in the 1650s in an England turned upside down by the English Civil War as the most successful of several radical religious sects. Enduring imprisonment and mob violence, then political persecution, the Quakers were thought by the 1680s to make up over one per cent of the English population.

The episode explores the mystical beliefs and radical equality espoused by the Quakers, and how the combination of a bias towards commerce and an exclusion from the Universities and Parliament drove them to industrial innovation and success in banking and capital formation, when the most eminent Quaker families intermarried and created business dynasties. It also examines the Quaker concern for their employees through welfare policies in the workplace and the creation of model villages for their workers.

GUESTS

Professor Ben Pink Dandelion is a practicing Quaker and expert historian of their sociology. He worked at the Centre for Quaker Studies at the University of Sunderland in the 1990s before commencing work at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, near Birmingham in a building that had been the former home of George Cadbury. Since 2008 he has been Professor in Quaker Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Simon’s interview with Ben Pink Dandelion was recorded online on 18 February 2025.