In 1901, a plantation came up for sale and its laborers were listed among the assets. Two hundred people were valued at £3,555, counted alongside the land, trees, and tools. This sales document was seen by William Cadbury, a third-generation member of the family that ran Cadbury Brothers, and it forced a reckoning with what the firm’s success was built on. For years, Cadbury had been the most trusted name in British chocolate.
The company’s fortune rested on a single promise printed on every tin: purity. The firm was run by Quakers, a faith that had stood at the front of the fight to abolish slavery in the British Empire. The family housed its workers in a model garden village called Bourneville, which drew admiring visitors from across the world. The reality behind the sweetness was darker.
Roughly half of all the cocoa Cadbury bought came from two small Portuguese islands in the Gulf of Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe. The people who grew the beans were brought from the interior of Angola in chains, marched to the coast, and put to work on plantations from which almost none ever returned. The men who investigated the islands recorded death rates that no free population could explain. An often-cited figure was that close to one in five of the workers died every year.
One plantation doctor estimated the rate at 12 to 14 percent annually. Even on the estates described as the best, the yearly toll ran above one in ten. The laborers were officially called contract servants, but the term was a fiction. Portugal had abolished slavery in its colonies in the 1870s, so the legal framework required a different word.
In practice, the workers were gathered by raids, debt settlements, or the aftermath of local wars. They were marched to the sea, registered before a Portuguese official as voluntary workers, and assigned contracts written in a language they could not read. A portion of their small wage was withheld in a fund said to pay for the journey home after a five-year term. In practice, the term was seldom allowed to end, and the return passage was rarely given.
Children born to the laborers on the estates were treated as belonging to the owner. Cadbury had begun buying from the islands in 1886. By 1905, the two islands together were the largest cocoa producer in the entire world. Cadbury’s purchases accounted for about one percent of everything São Tomé exported, but that one percent represented close to half of all the beans the firm bought.
The firm’s board recorded its knowledge in a minute dated April 30, 1901, acknowledging that slavery, either total or partial, existed on the cocoa estates from which it bought. What the firm did with that knowledge over the next eight years would become the center of a national scandal. William Cadbury took a measured approach. He went to Lisbon in 1903 and was told that the abuses were trivial and that a new labor decree would set things right.
In 1904, he proposed that the major chocolate houses join together to fund an independent investigator. The Quaker Joseph Burt was chosen, and he spent roughly two years on the inquiry, including about nine months learning Portuguese before he sailed. While Burt prepared his careful report, the journalist Henry Nevinson went to the region independently. Sent by an American magazine, he followed the slave path inland in Angola in 1905 and nearly died of illness on the route.
In 1906, he published his findings under the title “A Modern Slavery,” describing the bones of the dead lying along the path and concluding that except in the eyes of the law, it made no difference whether a man was called a servant or a slave. Burt’s own report, completed around 1907, reached the same conclusion. He wrote that if this was not slavery, he knew of no word in the English language that correctly described it. The report was held back for a time at the request of the Foreign Office while quiet diplomacy was attempted, then released to the British public in October 1908.
On September 26, 1908, The Standard, a London newspaper, published an editorial that accused Cadbury of hypocrisy. It asked why the firm’s tender care for its English workers in Bourneville did not extend to the Africans who grew its cocoa. The paper said the labor was not called slavery but contract labor, and that in most of its essentials it was that monstrous trade. Cadbury sued the newspaper for libel.
The trial was held in Birmingham in late 1909, with Sir Edward Carson appearing for the defense and Sir Rufus Isaacs for the firm. Carson did not try to prove the labor was free. He attacked the delay. He set out the eight years between knowledge and action and asked William Cadbury in the witness box whether he had formed any estimate of the number of slaves who had lost their lives in preparing his cocoa.
Cadbury answered: “No, no, no. ”
In the spring of 1909, before the trial began, Cadbury Brothers announced it would buy no more cocoa from São Tomé and Príncipe. The boycott held. The firm shifted its supply to the Gold Coast of West Africa, where cocoa was grown by free African smallholders on their own land.
Within a couple of years, the Gold Coast became the largest cocoa producer on Earth, and the islands began a long decline. The jury found in favor of Cadbury, deciding that the newspaper had gone beyond fair comment into libel. But when it came to damages, the jury awarded the firm one farthing, the smallest coin then made in England. The legal term for this is contemptuous damages, a jury’s way of saying that the plaintiff deserved almost nothing for the injury.
The newspaper was ordered to bear the costs of the action, which ran into many thousands of pounds. But the deeper defeat belonged to the firm that had won. For more than a century afterward, the farthing remained the lasting memory of the case. After the trial, William Cadbury published his own account of the affair in 1910, defending the years of investigation and diplomacy.
He argued that a sudden boycott would have freed no one and that the patient path had been the right one. Some of the reforms the boycott sought did eventually arrive, with roughly 14,000 laborers returned to Angola in the years that followed, though it was far too late for the tens of thousands who had already died. The plantations on the islands now stand as ruins in the forest. Bourneville still makes chocolate.
The family’s independent firm eventually merged with its old rival Fry, then with Schweppes, and later passed into foreign ownership. The deepest lesson of the affair is not that Cadbury was uniquely wicked but that it was in many ways uniquely good, and that even men of a faith that had helped end slavery went on for eight years buying what they knew because stopping was inconvenient, uncertain, and expensive. The distance between a good name and a clean conscience was measured exactly by those eight years.