‘Capability’ Brown, the Quiet Revolutionary of Eighteenth Century English Landscape Gardening

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Biographical, Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Leisure activities, Natural Environment, Regional History


I first happened upon the name of ‘Capability’ Brown several years ago when I was researching the Kirkbride buildings complex in Sydney✼. I guess it was the jokey sounding name that first got my interest. I found his name historically associated with the popularising of Ha-Ha Walls (another hard-to-take-serious concept when you first encounter it without context) which is an architectural feature of Kirkbride. Brown acquired his nickname from his habit of telling clients that their land had capability for improvement [‘Highclere Castle: The real-life Downton Abbey’, (Steve McKenna), SMH, 17-Apr-2016, www.traveller.com.au].

Highclere ⇓


Capability (Christian name Lancelot) Brown’s career as a landscape gardener and designer in the 18th century was a wildly successful one. Lofty accolades cast in his direction describe him as “England’s greatest gardener” and “the Shakespeare of Gardening”. He rose from humble origins to become master gardener to George III at Hampton Court Palace, receiving over 250 commissions in his lifetime and designing in excess of 170 parks (the majority of which survive) [‘Capability Brown’, Wikipedia, http:/:en.m.wikipedia.org]. His vast oeuvre stretches over 30 counties in England and Wales, greater London and even one garden project in Germany. As artistic creators of grand physical structures go, the fecund Brown was the landscaping and gardening equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright of his day – minus the ego!

LCB

And like that prolific and seminal 20th century American architect he was very well remunerated for his efforts. From the 1760s Brown was earning £6,000 per annum (equivalent to £806,000 in 2018 money!) and £500 for a single commission [ibid.].

Classical v Romantic

As Brown was starting to learn the trade in the late 1730s, there was a fundamental change going on with landscape gardens England. The formally patterned garden with its strict geometrical order and adherence to the classical style (the embodiment of the Palladian ideal) was giving way to a new, more informal type of garden landscape✥…romantic, irregular, not conforming to order, the appearance of a natural landform [Bassin, Joan. “The English Landscape Garden in the Eighteenth Century: The Cultural Importance of an English Institution.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1979, pp. 15–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4048315].

William Kent ⇓

The new style

In the forefront of this movement towards the natural and informal was William Kent (Brown’s mentor), Charles Bridgeman and others, as well as prominent literary figures of the day like Alexander Pope. What Kent et al started, Capability Brown would go on to elevate to a higher plane.

Typical features of the Brown garden

(see also “Ha-Ha Wall” in end-note) Brown honed his landscaping style while working under Kent at Stowe (Bucks). Trademark features: smooth, undulating grass running straight to the house; the grand sweeping drive (eg, Ashridge Estate, Berrington Hall, Wimpole Estate); the woodland belt (eg, Basildon Park, Dinefwr, Ickworth); clumps and scatterings of trees (eg, Petworth Park, Stowe, Croome); the picturesque stone bridge (eg, Prior Park, Wallington, Stowe): and serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers (eg, Hatfield Forest, Stowe, Wimpole Estate); decorative garden buildings (monuments, temples, rotundas and follies◙) (eg, Clandon Park, Petworth Park, Stowe, Wallington); cedars of Lebanon🌲 (eg, Croome, Charlecote Park) [National Trust (#1) , www.nationaltrust.org.uk; ‘Brown’, Wiki, op.cit.]

Era of the picturesque

The picturesque was a 18th century movement in art and architecture which was a reaction to Neo–classicism with its fixation on order, proportion and exactitude. In Georgian England the picturesque influenced landscape designers like Brown (and his successor Humphry Repton) who sought to replicate the romanticised country scenes of Italian paintings in their garden projects. The features in Brown’s ‘natural’✪ garden landscapes – long vistas to lakes, bridges, lawns, ruins, groves of trees and Ha-Ha walls – were a case of real life imitating (sublime) art [‘Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphrey Repton and the Picturesque’, (Janice Mills Fine Artist), (Jan-Dec 2016), http://janicemillsfineartist.wordpress.com]◇.

Social purpose

The new informal gardens in 18th century England, as typified in Brown’s landscapes, were created to underscore the growing affluence of the landowning class…showing England through their properties as they wished it to be seen, “a wealthy, educated and fertile centre of the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment”. Thus Brown’s beautiful, idyllic estate gardens were intended to resemble a romantic painted scene through the “use of local natural elements and English architecture” [ibid.].

Dinefwr Castle (Carmarthenshire) – in this Welsh estate LCB was engaged as a visiting consultant, making recommendations to the landowners

(Photo: National Trust) ⇓

Multitasker extraordinaire

Capability Brown was able to complete a vast sum of landscape projects in this career. On average, at any one time he had six projects going simultaneously, this testifies to Brown being able to work fast…an accomplished horseback rider, he could ride from site to site, survey it and knock up a rough design, all within a couple of hours. Of course even with his exceptional capacity he could only spread himself so far, when he couldn’t personally oversee projects, he would delegate to his hand-picked team of foremen, assistant surveyors and landscapers to be “hands-on” on-site and ensure that his designs were implemented properly [‘Our great ‘Capability’ Brown landscapes’, National Trust, (#2), www.nationaltrust.org.uk; ‘Brown’, Wiki, op.cit.].

Brown’s success as a landscape architect owed a lot to different factors…one of his virtues was his ability to choose assistants for his projects – he had a knack of picking the right people to work with, such as William Donn, John Hobcroft and Nathaniel Richmond. Brown also kept himself informed of the latest technologies. His awareness of hydraulic devices led him to utilise steam pumps employed in mining for the water features of his landscapes [Shields, Steffie. “’Mr Brown Engineer’: Lancelot Brown’s Early Work at Grimsthorpe Castle and Stowe.” Garden History, vol. 34, no. 2, 2006, pp. 174–191. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25472339].

Dissenting voices – ‘Culpability’ Brown

Despite the popularity Brown attracted for his landscape work, the Northumberland garden designer had his detractors… both from contemporaries and from critics after his time. Typical among these was Uvedale Price who criticised Brown for sweeping away all of the older trees and formal garden features in wholesale fashion (destroying the aesthetic of the classical of earlier landscapes). Similarly, architect William Chambers thought the “new manner of gardens” (code for Brown’s work) as little improvement on “common fields and vulgar nature” [‘Brown’, Wiki, op.cit.]. Certainly for these critics, the subject of their censure may have better been labelled ‘Culpability’ Brown!

Some of the invective aimed on Brown’s direction however would have derived from a more base source. Class snobbery would have been a motive for some given Brown’s modest origins – the language often used was a giveaway, detractors like architect Reginald Blomfield disparaged him as “a peasant slave from the melon ground” and having once been (allegedly) a “kitchen gardener” [Shields, loc.cit.]. Some of the opprobrium also was no doubt born out of sheer jealousy at Brown’s immense fame and financial success.

In 2016 a collection of Royal Mail stamps were issued to mark the tercentenary of LCB’s birth ⇓

A “single shaping hand”

For the many true believers though, no praise for the man known as ‘Capability’ seems high enough…one observer noted of his Highclere Castle (Hants) gardens: the location has been a designed landscape for over 1,200 years, yet Brown’s stamp is so much on the place. The remarkable result of one person imposing “his vision with sufficient force for it to have endured indefinitely” [Phipp, loc.cit.].

So successful was Capability Brown in popularising the informal garden, and so imitated was he, that he played a revolutionary role in changing the face and character of English gardens forever. In creating naturalistic landscapes he ‘copied’ nature so skilfully that “his work is often mistaken for natural landscapes” [‘How to spot a Capability Brown landscape’, [National Trust, (#1), loc.cit.].

The English Ha-Ha ⇓

End-note: The Ha-Ha: “Invisible boundaries”

The Ha-Ha Wall (AKA the sunken wall) was a defining features of a typical Capability Brown landscape garden. The Ha-Ha (French in origin) was devised to keep grazing animals out of the more formal areas of a garden, doing away with the need for a fence while creating the illusion of openness. Brown et al used it to provide unbroken vista views – from the house and garden to the parkland or countryside beyond (eg, Petworth Park, Charlecote Park, Stowe) [‘Garden Features: What are Ha-Has?’, The English Garden, 29-Oct-2014, www.theenglishgarden.co.uk].

PostScript: The test of time Remarkable also are the number of country gardens sculpted by Brown that have remained intact (or at least partly so). Around 150 survive – including Alnwick Castle (Northumberland), Blenheim Palace (Oxfds), Basildon Park (Berks), Croome Park (Worcs), Stowe House and Stoke Park (Bucks), Berrington Hall (Hertfds), Milton Abbey and Abbas (Dorset), Clandon Park (Surrey), Charlecote Park (Warws), Chatsworth House (Derbys), Petworth Park (Sussex), Warwick Castle (Warws), Wimpole Estate (Cambs), Wallington (East Yorks), Hatfield Forrest (Essex), Harewood House (West Yorks), Ashridge Estate (Hertfds), Appuldurcombe House (Isle of Wight), Ickworth (Suffolk), Belvoir Castle (Leics), Dinefwr Castle (Wales), Kew Gardens (Lond) and of course Highclere, these days more famous for the location of the TV series “Downton Abbey”.⇑ Brown’s penchant for lakes & bridges (Photo: National Trust)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

✼ ‘Callan Park: The Kirkbride Experiment, a Microcosm of “Good Intentions” ‘, December 2015 blog

✥ this trend had a paradoxical component to it…as the born-to-rule gentry were opting for country homes which were smaller, the gardens were becoming larger [Bassin, loc.cit.] – which of course suited landscape gardeners like Brown given to broad canvasses

◙ follies are decorative, usually non-functional, buildings that enhance the planned landscape, Brown used mock Roman villas, Medieval ruins, etc

🌲 evergreen conifers

✪ Brown’s gardens were of course not natural in any organically occurring sense, but carefully and meticulously contrived to both look natural and to convey “a sense of informality” [‘Capability Brown’, Britain Express, www.britainexpress.com

◇ Brown’s vistas contained no clear delineation between house, parkland and natural environment giving the landscapes a seamless appearance [Mills, op.cit.]

Yemen 1970-1994: A Roller-Coaster of Coups, Sporadic Conflicts, Rapprochements, Civil Wars and Uneasy Unions

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Comparative politics, Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, Political geography, Regional History

A tale of two republics

After the uprisings and civil wars of the 1960s, Yemen in 1970 was delicately poised between a Saudi Arabian-backed North, the Yemen Arab Republic, and the South, the Soviet Union and Chinese Communist-backed People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. The South Yemeni PDRY regime, bolstered by large injections of Soviet cash and aid, was taking on an increasingly Marxist complexion…close ties were forged with other left-wing states and organisations – PRC, Castro’s Cuba, East Germany, the PLO (PDRY was the “only avowedly Marxist nation in the Middle East” at this time) [‘South Yemen’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

With the formation and consolidation of power by the Yemeni Socialist Party, South Yemen’s polity moved to a one-party state. The YSP embarked on a nationalisation program which restricted agricultural privatisation to a minimum✽. The economy was restructured along centralised planning lines. An ambitious land reform program was launched, creating 60 collective farms and 50 state forms. Limits were placed on home ownership and the holding of rental properties [ibid.; Halliday, Fred. “Catastrophe in South Yemen: A Preliminary Assessment.” MERIP Middle East Report, no. 139, 1986, pp. 37–39. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3012044].


Some progressive pluralism
Despite the overall conservative and politically unsophisticated nature of Yemeni society, the regime did not shy away from modernising and progressive reforms. A secular legal code was introduced, replacing Sharia Law, education was also secularised. Reforms addressed at making the position of women in society more equal, were especially bold – polygamy was banned as was child marriage and arranged marriages [‘Sth Yemen’, (Wiki), loc.cit.].

External aid to PDRY 1968-1986
Soviet Union $US270m
PRC (China) $US133m
(Halliday)

The Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) came into being with the ‘Compromise of 1970’…the republican government included some royalists in senior posts but the deposed imam was not allowed to return to North Yemen. In contrast to the leftist PDRY, YAR maintained friendly relations with the West (eg, trade deals with the US and the German Bundesrepublik (West Germany). The new republic embarked on tentative political and economic reforms [‘Yemen – the age of imperialism’, Encyclopaedia Britannia, https://www.britannica.com/]. The YAR civilian government lasted only until 1974 when the military dissolved it and ruled in partnership with some tribal elements.

From 1972, a regular cycle of war/peace/war

A unified Yemeni state had long been an abstract idea in the deliberations of Yemeni politicians, but relations between the two adjoining republics became strained in 1972 when conflict between the North and South Yemens erupted over a border disputation. Fighting between the North (backed by Saudi Arabia) and the South (backed by the USSR) was only brief. In October a peace was concluded with the Cairo Agreement where it was agreed that both sides would work towards an eventual unification [‘CIA Study on Yemeni Unification’, www.scribd.com].

Political marginalisation and economic disenfranchisement within North Yemen

Under the Saudi-backed Ali Abdullah Saleh, who took over the presidency in 1978, certain elements of society became more favoured – centring round a small mostly northern tribal group (of Zaydi ‘fivers’, a Shi’a sect with it’s base in the northwest highlands) who benefitted from a tax rate of half that imposed on the more numerous lowlands tribes [‘Yemen the 60-Year War’, Gerald M Feierstein, Middle East Institute, (Policy Papers, 2019-2), www.mei.com].

▼ President AA Saleh

(Source: www.aljazeera.com)

The 1979 war: “Groundhog Day”

In 1979 this conflict/pause/conflict pattern repeated itself…PDRY funded ‘red’ rebels fighting the northern government in Sana’a provoking YAR into a military response against the South. The spiral into open warfare was triggered by acts of assassination – both the YAR president (al-Ghashmi) and the PDRY president (Rubai Ali) were killed in separate incidents. Outright war followed with South Yemeni on the cusp of inflicting a decisive defeat on North Yemen when the Arab League intervened with a mediation. At the ensuing Kuwait Summit relations between the two states were again patched up, with a now increasingly familiar sounding outcome – unification was once again back on the agenda [‘Yemenite War of 1979’, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/].

YSP shifts from a hardline position

From the late 1960s to 1980 PDRY was led by Abdul Fattah Ismail who followed a dogmatic Marxist line and actively interfered in regional politics. In 1980 Ismail resigned the leadership and left Yemen to seek medical treatment in Moscow. Taking his place was Ali Nasir Muhammad, a more pragmatic Arab socialist who pursued a less interventionist approach than Ismail in relation to North Yemen, Oman, etc.

1986, factional showdown within the YSP

South Yemen’s peace was broken again in 1986. The South Yemenite Civil War was (at least partly) internecine in nature, spiralling out of an ideological power play between two factions of the ruling Yemeni Socialist Party❂, exacerbated by tribal tensions. The war lasted only eleven days but the fallout was truly catastrophic – somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 Yemenis died, with 60,000 refugees, the southern capital Aden was sacked. Ismail returned and launched a coup to try to regain the presidency, but was killed in a factional shootout. Nasir Muhammad himself was ousted from power…with both rivals out of the picture a new figure, Ali Salem al-Beidh, emerged as the main power-broker in the YSP and the South [FP Halliday, Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen, 1967-1987, (2002)].

Salem al-Beidh ▲ South Yemen leader

Forging a fragile union

Up to the late 1980s efforts at unification by both states had been at best half-hearted. After 1986 however al-Beidh made a more concerted effort to reconcile with North Yemen than previously. Aden liberalised the authoritarian strain prevailing in the PDRY…releasing prisoners, allowing political parties (in addition to YSP) to form⎋ [‘Sth Yemen’, (Wiki), loc.cit.].

Economic straits

There were compelling economic reasons for the Beidh regime to reach out to the North at this time…the arid conditions of the country exascerbated by a parlous lack of water made self-sufficiency in food impossible. Accordingly there was an over-reliance on the state’s fishing exports [Halliday, loc.cit.]. Compounding this, between 1986 and 1989 the Soviet Union, itself feeling the pinch, halved its aid to the South Yemeni regime exposing the weakness of it’s economy [Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1994, (Special Report), ‘North and South Yemen: Lead-up to the Break-up’, Robert Hurd and Greg Noakes, www.mrmea.org].

By the beginning of 1990 North Yemeni president Saleh and his southern counterpart al-Beidh had reached agreement on a unified Yemen. Political power was intended to be shared evenly. Thus Saleh was made president of the new republic with al-Beidh vice-president and another South Yemeni politician appointed as prime minister [ibid.].

Conundrums of power-sharing

Sharing power under the new alliance was always going to be a problematic consideration. Al-Beidh and YSP going into the union would have had an expectation of an equal standing in the government. The reality was that a balance between North and South was unrealistic given the demographics – the North contained some 80% of the republic’s total population. This came home to roost for the South in the 1993 multiparty elections – al-Beidh’s YSP won only 54 seats in parliament out of a total of 301. Saleh’s General People’s Congress won the outright majority, with a new, third force, the northern Islamist-tribal alliance Al-Islah , garnering 62 seats,
pushing the YSP into third place.
Descent into conflict and violence

With this power imbalance now starkly visible to all, relations between North and South deteriorated rapidly – especially after the South Yemenis gave support to southern rebels in the North region who were trying to secede from Yemen. In 1994 open fighting erupted and the numerically stronger armed forces of the North invaded the South with the intention of capturing the capital Aden✥.

Saleh’s march on Aden was held up by southern resistance and its superior air power to that of the northern forces. In May the southern leaders seceded and al-Beidh declared the formation of the People’s Republic of Yemen (which did not find international support). By July the North had captured Aden which promptly triggered the disintegration of resistance by the South, driving al-Beidh and other leaders into exile [ibid.]. Reunification was forcibly established with Saleh in charge of the state

▼ General People’s Congress (emblem)

Appendix: Other factors contributing to the failure of unification

The chances of the 1990 unification lasting was always at best a long shot. Decades of mutual suspicion and ill-feeling between the two Yemens amounted to considerable baggage to carry into a bold experiment in unification. Some of the stakeholders found themselves pitched against each other in pursuit of their own (sectional) interests, eg, northern elites v southern elites. This also was the case at the leadership level. Both Saleh and al-Beidh came to power and maintained it through ruthless actions (treachery, deceit) and the personal animosity between the two didn’t make for constructive cooperation for the good of the new state.

From al-Beidh’s viewpoint, the economic circumstances making unification an attractive option had altered over time. North Yemen’s economy took a hit after their revenue source from overseas remittances was shut down✫, and the potential oil productivity in the southern Yemen region led al-Beidh to envisage South Yemen becoming an “oil statelet” along the lines of the Gulf states [ibid.].

Contrasting and unharmonious societies

Another element contributing to the rupturing of the union was the seeming incompatibility of the two Yemens – socially and ideologically. North Yemeni society was conservative and tribal, resistant to modernising tendencies. The society of the South had a diametrically opposite dynamic, secular, socialist, and an economy driven by central planning. Among the more liberal, progressive elements of South Yemen, there was a fear that the conservatives in the North might roll back some of the progressive gains in DRPY society, such as those made by women (their representation in the judiciary for example was under threat) [ibid.].

External players in the region

Following the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, interference in Yemen by the Islamic Republic heightened tensions with Saudi Arabia as the two powers manoeuvred for influence in the region. The gravitation of the North towards Saudi Arabia and the South towards Iran was an underlying factor destabilising the united Yemen state [‘Yemen and the Saudi-Iranian Cold War’, (Peter Salisbury), Chatham House, (Research Paper, Feb 2015), www.chathamhouse.org].

Oman (source: www.geology.com)

Footnote: Proximity to an unstable Yemen

It is interesting to briefly consider the situation of the Sultanate of Oman 🇴🇲 on the eastern flank of Yemen. Oman’s history in modern times has not escaped turmoil and instability itself. In 1964 Oman’s unity was confronted by the threat of separatism in Dhofar Province. The separatists, aided by leftist South Yemen et al waged guerrilla war against the sultanate for over ten years before being defeated in 1975. Over the last several decades Muscat under Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Said, appreciative of its delicate geo-strategic position vis-a-vís radical states (close to both Iran and Iraq) has pursued a steadfast policy of non-interference – in the spiralling out of control conflict in Yemen. Oman has been particularly careful to do what it can to maintain stability on the country’s western flank [‘Oman’s Balancing Act in the Yemen Conflict’, (Roby Barrett), Middle East Institute, 17-Jun-2015, www.mei.edu].

(Source: Nafida Mohamed)

<~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
✽less than permitted in the USSR at the same period (Halliday)

❂ one faction led by Ismail pursued a doctrinal hard-left strategy, while the other under Nasir Muhammad took a more pragmatic socialist approach

⎋ in this spirit of reconciliation Aden and Sana’a agreed to demilitarise the border, allowing free passage and to conduct joint commercial ventures to tap the oil discovered in Marib Governorate in the mid Eighties (which also unfortunately created opportunities for corruption) [Feierstein, op.cit.]

✥ what accelerated this descent into war was the failure of the two republics’ military forces to integrate in 1990

✫ Saleh’s injudicious backing of Salem Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait earned the displeasure of Saudi Arabia and retaliatory action (an estimated 1M Yemeni workers employed in the Saudi Arabian oil fields were sent home). The returning migrant workers were a double blow to the economy and the Saleh-led regime, swelling the ranks of the unemployed [Colton, Nora Ann. “Yemen: A Collapsed Economy.” Middle East Journal, vol. 64, no. 3, 2010, pp. 410–426. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40783107.]

Empires Built of Chocolate: The Quaker Dynasties of English Chocolatiers

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Commerce & Business, Memorabilia, Popular Culture, Regional History, Retailing history, Social History

First World problem – Cadbury’s or Nestlé’s?
For children of the Fifties and Sixties growing up in the West, the preference of chocolate usually came down to a shelf choice between Cadbury and Nestlé. My recollection is that my own juvenile palate tended towards Nestlé, but only partly due to taste…yes I did have an oral appreciation of Nestlé’s slim, pocket-size milk chocolate bars but Nestlé was also great for youthful card collectors. Each bar contained a different colour card that you could paste into your Nestlé Car Club book or Sky Club book or into their “Conquest of Space” series book. A glance at the enduring popularity of Cadbury’s chocolate is confirmation that the British confectioner did not miss my preference for their Swiss rival.

(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)

As a child I was very aware that Cadbury’s had a chocolate factory in Tasmania (known as “the factory in the garden”)…the idyllic image of rustic Claremont was imprinted in my head courtesy of innumerable Cadbury TV ads (as a visual treat great scenery plus chocolate is always hard to top!) What I wasn’t aware of as a young chocolate consumer was that that Cadbury’s (nay, almost all of the English pioneering chocolate manufacturing industry!) was a Quaker company. Cadbury’s kicked off from a small shop in Birmingham, England, in 1824, but before Cadbury’s there was Fry’s Chocolates which opened its first shop in Bristol in 1761, and after it Rowntree’s (established 1862, in York✲). All of these chocolatiers were founded by English Quakers and the companies business ethos imbued with the Quaker philosophy.

(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)

In business by circumstance and conviction British Quakers in the 19th century not only cornered the chocolate market, they excelled in business in a multiplicity of fields, ranging from banking (Barclays, Lloyds) to biscuit manufacturing (Huntley and Palmers, Carrs) to footwear (Clarks’ Shoes) to match manufacturing (Bryant and May) [‘How did Quakers conquer the British sweet shop?’, (Peter Jackson), BBC News Magazine, 20-Jan-2010, www.bbc.com].

The circumstance that Quakers found themselves in guided their decision to embrace the world of business. As a Christian non-conformist group in a sea of English Anglicanism, adherents of the Quaker faith in the 1800s were subjected to the systematic discrimination befalling religious outsiders – exclusion from the universities (until the 1870s) meant the leading professions of medicine and law was barred to them. Naturally enough, this barrier to the industrious, go-ahead Quaker person, turned them towards business and commerce [ibid.].

The senior Cadbury ⤋


 Kings of the chocolate business ❇
The Quaker philosophy incorporates a commitment to social reform and the pursuit of justice and equality. This ethos informed their business practices, Cadbury’s and other Quaker firms established a reputation for being honest and reliable. This gave them a competitive advantage over their non-Quaker competitors. The perceived ethical nature of Quaker confectionery firms was rewarded with customer loyalty. John Cadbury and his successors were among the first to set a firm (and fair) price – this was a clear departure from the hitherto customary retail practice of point-of-sale price bartering [ibid.]✥.

Cocoa the health drink
Founder Cadbury started off mainly selling cocoa drinks (solid chocolate came later)…this was borne out of 19th century social concerns – a Quaker (by definition teetotal) response to the “perceived misery and deprivation caused by alcohol” in British society (Helen Rowlands, Quaker historian)⍓. The Cadburys marketed cocoa as a cheap available drink, one that was healthy (the process involved boiling thus removing the impurities lurking in the dubious public water supplies of the day)[ibid.]☯.

Democratising cocoa and drinking chocolate Cocoa and drinking chocolate had been around in England since the 1650s but before Cadbury’s came along it had been a luxury beverage for the elite. John Cadbury’s improvements to the product gave it more varieties and made it a more palatable drink, and after the Gladstone government reduced taxes on imported cocoa beans in the mid 1850s, the cost of cocoa became within the reach of the greater majority of Britons. Cadbury’s introduction of unadulterated “cocoa essence” in the 1870s coincided with a government crackdown on the widespread adulteration of food in the UK. The upshot was free ‘plugs’ for the purer Cadbury product and a boost in fortunes for the Quaker business [‘The Story of Cadbury. Early Days – A One Man Business’, www.cadbury.com.au].


Even ‘Lancet’ was lavish in it’s praise of Cadbury’s Cocoa ⤋(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)

Worker welfare and satisfaction a priority The Cadbury brothers (Richard and George, sons of the founder) placed an uncommon degree of emphasis on the fitness and health of their workforce (again philosophically driven by their faith). After moving their factory to a greenfields site south of Birmingham to cope with the business’ growth, George built the Bourneville village in the vicinity – this was a model village community for Cadbury’s workers – replete with schools, leisure facilities (including a lido) and parks, canteen, a carillon and its Friends meeting house. Cadbury’s employed doctors and dentists for the benefit of Bourneville employees and was among the first to pioneer pension schemes for their workforce [Jackson, loc.cit.]. The village included attractive “Arts and Crafts” style cottages in picturesque surrounds, but no pubs were permitted on the Bourneville estate⍟.The Bourneville factory ⤊

Chocolate you can eat! Cadbury Dairy Milk Richard and George’s acquisition of a new cocoa press reduced the cocoa butter content, further improving the taste of the Cadbury cocoa drink. The press also helped Cadbury’s make a breakthrough with eating chocolate in the 1890s…learning from the Swiss prototype (Nestlé), it started to create milk chocolate bars to rival those on the Continent. In 1905 Cadbury’s introduced Dairy Milk Chocolate which would go on to become it’s and the UK’s top selling chocolate bar (60% UK market share in 1936). DCM, together with Bourneville Cocoa, have established themselves as Cadbury’s two stand-out, iconic products in the history of the company [‘The Story of Cadbury’, loc.cit.; Deborah Cadbury, The Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World’s Greatest Chocolate Makers, (2010)].

(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)

Following success came expansion – in 1918 Cadbury’s opened a new factory in Tasmania (the first outside the UK). In 1910 Cadbury’s finally overtook J.S.Fry & Sons in chocolate and cocoa sales…Fry’s got the block of solid chocolate right before Cadbury’s but the legendary “glass and a half” merchants surged ahead in the end. [ibid.]. So much so that Cadbury’s acquired its biggest domestic rival in 1919 (giving it Fry’s top lines, ‘Chocolate Cream’ and ‘Turkish Delight’). In 1967 Cadbury’s added the Australian chocolate manufacturer MacRobertson (‘Freddo’, ‘Snack’)✴

Family Fry and partners
The Fry chocolate business was another dynastic Anglo-Quaker confectioner. The original Joseph Fry started the company in the mid Georgian period in Britain, taking on a partner, John Vaughan. Upon Fry’s death his widow Anna Fry took over the family business and the firm name changed to Anna Fry & Son. Joseph Storrs Fry succeeded her and partnered with a Dr Hunt. Storrs Fry patented a method of grinding cocoa beans using a Watt steam engine. The company then devolved to his sons, Joseph, Francis and Richard, as joint partners. Under the next generation of Frys (Joseph Storrs Fry II), the business reached its commercial pinnacle before it got absorbed into the vast Cadbury empire [‘J.S.Fry & Sons’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Shadowing Cadbury’s, the rise of Rowntree’s Rowntree’s, Cadbury’s other domestic rival in the sweets trade, was the creation of Henry Rowntree. Like Cadbury’s Rowntree applied Quaker principles to his business and always insisted on the best quality ingredients [‘Rowntree’s’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Joseph Rowntree, Henry’s brother, joined as partner in 1869, and being a staunch advocate of social reform, steered some of the firm’s profits towards his Quaker philanthropy. The company’s first big success was with ‘Fruit Pastilles’ and ‘Fruit Gums’ which allowed it to follow Cadbury’s earlier move in purchasing a Van Houten press. This enabled Rowntree’s to produce chocolate sans cocoa butter, so as to compete with Cadbury’s successful ‘Cocoa Essence’ [Robert Fitzgerald, Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution, 1862-1969, (2007)].Rowntree’s, as their rival Cadbury’s did, created a dynasty of chocolatiers, merchants, philanthropists and social reformers – succeeding sons and brothers kept the family name at the helm of the company (Joseph Rowntree Jr, Henry Issac Rowntree, John Stephenson Rowntree).

Rowntree’s later created the consumer favourites ‘Kit Kat’, ‘Aero’ and ‘Smarties’, and went on its own expansion journey, merging with the Halifax “Toffee King” Mackintosh in 1969 (which added ‘Quality Street’ and ‘Rolo’ to its product inventory). Rowntree’s (rebranded Rowntree Mackintosh Confectionery) then acquired Australian chocolate manufacturer Hoadley’s (1972) which gave RMC Hoadley’s ‘Violet Crumble’ bar.

Rowntree’s introduced the ‘Yorkie’ bar in the Seventies which put a serious dent in Cadbury Dairy Milk’s market share and contributed to Rowntree’s reaching fourth spot in the world chocolate manufacturers’ ladder by the Eighties▣. This was Rowntree’s apogee however as it’s underperforming shares saw it fall victim to a successful takeover from the Swiss giant Nestlé in 1988 [‘Rowntree’s’, op.cit.].

Nestlé’s Yorkie and a dubious sales pitch – the “Nestlé Goliath” was clearly tone deaf to the value of being inclusive when they designed this, a chocolate bar which discriminates on the grounds of gender? ⤋

A British institution undone
Cadbury’s, despite its continuing success, in 2010 suffered the same fate as Rowntree – swallowed up by another Goliath of the food business, US’ Kraft Foods (operating now as Mondelēz International). The loss of Cadbury’s, a household name in British manufacturing for 186 years, was highly controversial, causing an outcry in the UK. What was especially galling to many patriotic Brits was that Kraft had to borrow £7bn to seal the acquisition deal, and the banker brokering the financial transaction was itself British – the Royal Bank of Scotland [Deborah Cadbury, op.cit].


FN: Pseudo-Quakers
The runaway commercial success of Quaker food and confectionery companies did inevitably lead to imitation. A US food manufacturer in the 1870s introduced “Quaker Oats” to the cereal market…on the packets and in product advertising are images of a man dressed in Quaker garb, despite the US company having NO connexion with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) whatsoever♉. The company states that it chose the “Quaker Man” as its figurehead “because the Quaker faith projected the values of honesty, integrity, purity and strength”, [‘Quaker Oats website’, (FAQ 2009), www.quakeroats.com] (an early example of retail “identity theft’ to try to cash in commercially on the high regard Quaker businessmen were held in).

تتتتتﭢ ت ﭢ تتتتت

PostScript: Third World cocoa beans and the Quaker chocolatiers – an uncomfortable association
In the late 19th century the Cadbury brothers and other British chocolate-makers started exporting a large proportion of their cocoa beans from the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe (Portuguese West Africa)…by the turn of the century this amounted to 55% of Cadbury’s total supply of beans. Although Portugal had abolished slavery in its colonies, the rigid labour contract system which replaced left the African labourers working the plantations in a de facto slave status. This uncomfortable connexion of an ethical Quaker business to neo-slavery prompted one of the managing grandsons, William Cadbury, to commission an investigation of worker conditions in São Tomé and Príncipe in the 1900s. Cadbury eventually found an alternative source of cocoa beans (the Gold Coast) and organised a boycott of the two Portuguese plantations, but not before he had to fend off a spate of newspaper attacks on Cadbury’s alleging that it profited from the labour of slaves [‘William Cadbury, Chocolate, and Slavery in Portuguese West Africa’, (Lindsey Flewelling), 11-May-2016, https://britishandirishhistory.wordpress.com/2016/05/11/william-cadbury-chocolate-and-slavery-in-portuguese-west-africa/].

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(photo courtesy of www.historyworld.co.uk)

✲ the non-Quaker exception to this was Terry’s (established 1767, York, UK), famous for “Terry’s Chocolate Orange” and now owned by Kraft Foods

❇ the Quaker chocolatiers’ success was remarkably out of proportion to their numbers…with Quakers just one in fourteen out of a total UK population of 21M in 1851, they comprised >0.1% of the population [Jackson, loc.cit.]

✥ descendant and family historian Deborah Cadbury states that the Cadbury founder practiced a brand of “Quaker capitalism” that valued hard work and “wealth creation for the benefit of the workers, the local community, and society at large” [Cadbury, op.cit.]

⍓ John Cadbury had a long connexion with the Temperance Society

☯ later with the move into making chocolate bars, what gave the Quaker confectionery businesses an added edge over rival manufacturers was their preparedness to invest in new, state-of-the-art machinery [Jackson, loc.cit.]

⍟ the Cadbury village inspired the American non-Quaker Milton Hershey (a Pennsylvanian Mennonite in fact) to create his own ‘utopian’ village for his chocolate factory workers [Cadbury, op.cit.]

✴ a 1969 merger with soft drink giant Schweppes proved less enduring with the two partners demerging in 2008

▣ behind Mars, Hershey and Cadbury’s

♉ in recent years some brethren of the Quaker movement have objected to the way the company’s advertising depicts Quakers, ‘Quaker Oats Company’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]

The West Indies Federation: A Failed Attempt at Forging a Dominion Within the British Commonwealth (Part 2)

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Comparative politics, Inter-ethnic relations, Racial politics, Regional History

Many observers of the abject collapse of the West Indies Federation (WIF) in 1962, looking to particularise the reasons for it (and viewing it from outside Jamaica), tend to point the finger squarely at that largest of British Caribbean islands and more precisely at the role of the powerhouse politician of Jamaica, Norman Manley.

Manley as chief minister of the colony of Jamaica and founder of the Jamaican People’s National Party (PNP) at the onset of the Caribbean Federation was in a position to exert a centrally prominent role and even a guiding influence over the shaping of the new multi-island federation. Manley however chose not to put himself forward as candidate for the WIF’s prime ministership✲, or even to stand for election to the new parliament as an MP. And given that Manley was revered within Jamaica as a national hero/father figure, his non-participation in the fledgling WIF, certainly would have dissuaded other Jamaicans from embracing the cause of union [Kwame Nantambu, ‘W. I. Federation: Failure From the Start’, (art. updated 26-Oct-2014), www.tricenter.com].

⇣ Norman Washington Manley

Federalism as an essential stage to independence
Manley’s backing off from active involvement in the WIF at its formative stage was not an indication per se of his opposition to federation in the Caribbean. Manley had long advocated his support for federalism – but for him (as for others) it was a necessary stage on the road to achieving national independence for Jamaica. As he unequivocally stated in 1947: “I cannot imagine what we should be federating about if it is not to achieve the beginning of nationhood” [‘Jamaica’s Brexit: Remembering the West Indies Federation’, (Stephen Vasciannie), Jamaica Observer, 25-Jun-2016, www.jamaicaobserver.com].

Two unit ten-pins fall and the Federation splinters
Jamaica’s and Manley’s disaffection with the Federation, and with the perceived direction it was heading in, did not abate over the next two years. In 1961, under pressure from the opposition Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) Manley put the issue to a referendum of the Jamaican people. The wily JLP opposition leader Alexander Bustamante managed to persuade some of the constituents that the referendum was a choice between federalism with independence and independence for Jamaica. The vote came down 54.1% to 45.9% in favour of exiting the WIF (only just over 60% of eligible Jamaican voters cast a ballot)…Bustamante’s reward for publicly taking a consistent line against federation was his election in 1962 as the first prime minister of an independent Jamaica [ibid.].

⇡ Eric Williams, 1st PM of independent Trinidad & Tobago

Jamaica’s departure from the WIF was a crippling blow to it, but it was Trinidad and Tobago which applied the coup de grace. Trinidad’s leader, Eric Williams, responding to Jamaica’s exit with his famous aphorism “one from ten equals nought!”, followed suit, withdrawing Trinidad and Tobago from the Federation as well. Without the two most economically advanced islands the WIF was simply not viable and the Federation collapsed abruptly in January 1962.

Jamaica was the linchpin that determined the fate of the WIF but there was more behind its eventual opt-out than simply the political jockeying of rivals Manley and Bustamante for power…there were a complicated set of considerations for Jamaica in appraising it’s role in the Federation.

The ‘exceptionalism’ of Jamaica and Trinidad within the island-countries of the West Indies

In the late 1950s nearly all the West Indian islands making up the WIF were poor, beset by unemployment and woefully lacking in development. Jamaica and Trinidad however were the economic exceptions. With the advantage of comparatively larger land masses and significantly larger populations, both colonies were able to attract foreign capital and establish export markets (Jamaica with its discovery and production of bauxite, and Trinidad with its oil). Their spurts in economic growth set them apart from the other eight territorial units of the WIF. This stark disparity in resources and economic progress would work against the Federation’s efforts to unify it’s members [‘Norman Manley and the West Indies Federation’, part two (the referendum) (David Tenner) (Narkive Newsgroup Archive, 2004), www.soc.history.what-if.narkive.com]. The differing levels of development across the southern Caribbean archipelago was a handicap to the objection of integrating the parts of the Federation❂.

“Two rival conceptions”: Trinidadian centralism v Jamaican localism

Over the course of its existence two competing views of the WIF’s raison d’être took centre stage – succinctly encapsulated by one of the antagonists (Eric Williams) himself: Federation as a “weak, central government” (Jamaica) and Federation as a “strong, Central power” (Trinidad) [Vasciannie, op.cit.]. Williams and T & T also harboured fears and misgivings about the direction the WIF was heading (though Jamaica’s and Manley’s misgivings were more demonstrative). At the heart of Jamaica’s position was that no “extraordinary powers” granted the Federation should encroach on its national sovereignty. Being more wealthier than the others Jamaica was particularly concerned with the scope and application of federal taxes…Manley believed that they would inevitably rise and therefore hit Jamaica the hardest.

Jamaica’s antipathy to the WIF centralist model drew criticism from the other member-states…Albert Gomes, first chief minister of Trinidad and Tobago accused Jamaican politicians of a power-grab, manipulating the Federation, making regular demands with the purpose of supplanting “Whitehall with Kingston✥” [Nantambu, loc.cit.].

All of the eastern Caribbean islands advocated a strong role for the central authority, but T & T chief minister Williams was the WIF’s strongest voice. Seeking dominion status for the British Caribbean islands Williams in 1956 laid out the predicament for its small countries: “The units of government are getting larger and larger…federation is inescapable if the British Caribbean territories are to cease to parade themselves to the twentieth-century world as eighteenth-century anachronisms” [Vasciannie, op.cit.]. This echoed the UK’s position at the time of the 1947 Montego Bay Conference: union was the only way the “small and isolated, separate communities could achieve and maintain full self-government” [Narkine, loc.cit.].

⇡ Kingston 🇯🇲 (1960s)

The eastern Caribbean islands’ push to make WIF more centralised kept tensions between it and Jamaica at a high point. The centralisation issue was at its most polemical on the question of the Federation’s tax provisions. PM Adams tried to run the line that federal taxing power could be applied retrospectively, much to the consternation of the Jamaicans⌖. In fact the scope of federal authority was intended to be quite limited (eg, allocating grants under the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts, assisting the University College of the West Indies)⍟. The bulk of government functions were allocated to the territorial units [Vasciannie, op.cit.].

The internal migration issue

Another revenue worry of Jamaica’s was the Federation’s call for a customs union and freedom of movement between the member islands…some of the poorer islands tended to be overpopulated (eg, Grenada, St Kitts), so Jamaica already with population pressures and wanted to avoid the possibility of it’s island becoming a “dumping ground” for other islands’ unemployed surplus – with a resultant diminution of Jamaican quality of life [Nantambu, loc.cit.]. The T& T government was similarly concerned about the danger of it’s territory’s labour market being flooded by internal migrants. Conversely, the other economically less advanced units like Barbados (with higher employment) welcomed the free movement of labour across the various units [Vasciannie, op.cit.].

Jamaica – the West Indies ‘outlier’

Another factor in Jamaica’s failure to embrace federalism in 1958 was geography. The island’s location in the west of the Caribbean put it a long distance from the other British colonies all in the east. This sense of isolation and removal from Federal power was compounded by the WIF capital being located not in Jamaica but in Trinidad.

When individual independence did come to the West Indian islands, some like the Turks and Caicos opted to remain a British overseas territorial dependency ⇣

Geography and nationalism

This “tyranny of distance” played a role in undermining WI federalism in a general way which affected more than just Jamaica. The spread-out nature of the British group of Caribbean colonies made for difficulties of inter-island communication…before Federation West Indians didn’t have much contact with peoples from other islands. Antiguans and Dominicans and St Lucians, etc, tended to identify with their own islands rather than with the Caribbean as a whole□, this bred insularity in mindsets. Home island identity was what informed their nationalistic feeling. The populations thus never arrived at a sense of ‘oneness’ about the Anglophone Caribbean◙. Consequently, the essential prerequisite for unifying the Federation, a “substantial groundswell of popular support”, failed to materialise [ibid.].

The triumph of parochialism – self-interest rules OK!

Ultimately, this inherent disunity sowed the seeds of the Federation’s dissolution. Once it was established, no one wanted to really get behind the new structure, one’s own vested interests was paramount to most island politicians. Those who held a post in unit territorial politics at the time of Federation were faced with making a choice between seeking office in the federal parliament or retaining what they had at island level – and particularly if they were a minister in their island government, this was a lot to risk losing (Manley for instance stayed put, in part at least, because he didn’t want to afford any opportunities to the JLP under Bustamante to regain the ascendency on the island and wrest control of Jamaican politics from his party) [Coore, D. (1999). THE ROLE OF THE INTERNAL DYNAMICS OF JAMAICAN POLITICS ON THE COLLAPSE OF THE FEDERATION. Social and Economic Studies, 48(4), 65-82. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/27865166 ; Nantambu, loc.cit.].

⇡ WIF crest – motto refuted: a federation without unity

This duality in Caribbean politics extended to the structures of public administration. When the policy-makers formulated the new Federation constitution, the old individual constitutions of the colonies were retained in a parallel arrangement… the new federal constitution was simply “fastened on to the various existing structures of government territorial units” [CB Bourne, ‘The Federation of the West Indies’, University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol. XIII, No 2, 1960]. Another fundamental problem for the territorial units was that, as British colonies, they held only limited legislative power under the Federation.

Shortcomings of leadership

The WIF’s central government has been described as virtually powerless and its leadership ‘timid’ [Cynthia Barrow-Giles, Introduction to Caribbean Politics ((2002)]. Infighting between island leaders (eg, Williams v Manley) was constant…the nearly four years of the Federation’s life was characterised by seemingly endless discussions of what it should be about, include, etc. (Federation premier Adams likened the task of governing to trying to build a house on shifting sand) [Hugh Wooding, ‘The Failure of the West Indies Federation’, Melbourne University Law Review, July 1966 (Vol.5), www.austlil.edu.au].


PostScript:Successor organisations to the WIF
The moribund West Indies Federation was eventually replaced initially by the Caribbean Free Trade Association (Carifta) in the Sixties which in turn was succeeded by the Caribbean Commission – known as CARICOM, founded in 1973. CARICOM was established to achieve economic integration in the region, operate a (CARICOM) single market, undertake special projects in the less developed countries, handle regional trade disputes, etc. It has 15 full and associate members including countries in Central and South America.

⇡ Grantley Adams of Barbados (Federation PM)

••➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖•➖••
✲ the vacuum left by Manley was filled by Barbados chief minister Grantley Adams who was selected the Federation’s inaugural PM…with no consensus between the Federation’s different units, the task was a Herculean one in any light, however Adams lacked the stature and clout of Manley and was largely ineffectual in heading the WIF

❂ a frequent criticism of Manley concerned the WIF’s perceived power imbalance resulting in the “85%” (Jamaica and T & T) being dominated by the “15%” (the remainder of the territorial units). Manley was unhappy with the Federal arrangements, believing that the voting powers, the parliamentary representation and the cabinet membership did not reflect Jamaica’s larger population and economic standing [Vasciannie, op.cit.]

✥ the Jamaican capital

⌖ the constitution actually prevented WIF from imposing direct taxes on members for a period of five years

⍟ expanding tertiary education in the Caribbean by opening a second campus of the University College of the West Indies at St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

□ trade between the islands had been sporadic [Nantambu, loc.cit.]

◙ only in one arena, on the sporting field, has this sense of ‘oneness’ ever shone through…the West Indies cricket team (and community), dominant in world cricket during the Seventies and Eighties, has been able to unify cohesively and successfully as a constructed ‘national’ identity

Enduring West Indian unity – the WI cricket flag