The inaugural issue of Bournville Works Magazine appeared in November 1902. Distributed to all factory staff, this monthly publication was designed to connect and engage Cadbury’s rapidly growing number of employees with the firm’s ethos, offer up-to-date information about the recreational activities and opportunities that were on offer to them, and create a record of life at the factory. The first copy opened with an editorial devoted to the ‘binding force’ that represented the firm and created and sustained the factory’s community, a force identified as the ‘Bournville Spirit’ – ‘for lack of a better word’. At the heart of this force was a guiding ethos of ‘fellowship’ and ‘mutual service’ shared by management and the firm’s rapidly increasing number of factory production and office workers (1). The year 1902 signalled Cadbury’s first attempt to define and share this spirit, the energy at the centre of the growing firm, with staff, but the focus on people and community that it foregrounded can be traced back to the very early days of the family business, when John Cadbury moved his small-scale cocoa production operation to a shop and small factory in Bridge Street, Birmingham, in 1847. Quaker morning meetings were a regular part of the expanded staff’s working day at this new site, and these religious gatherings continued after the firm’s move out of the city, with weekly meetings including readings and hymns taking place at Bournville up until the First World War. Early twentieth-century shifts in the business operation, coupled with the rapid expansion of the factory site and workforce, required a set of new community-building strategies, and while Quaker business principles remained embedded in the firm’s priorities and policies, during the first decades of the 1900s, the overt presence of the Cadburys’ faith became less immediately visible to employees during the working day.
As an experiment in industrial community building, the Bournville Spirit was to prove a useful innovation that endured throughout the period covered by this book and formed the nucleus from which the firm’s support of theatre emerged. Created to drive employee engagement and activity, it represented an intangible, skilfully crafted essence of industrial betterment through which the firm sought to mould, nourish, and sustain their factory community and secure a robust position in an increasingly competitive and complex global market. At the opening of the twentieth century, Cadbury’s was entering new territory with its recreational and welfare provision. As a 1931 souvenir retrospective issue of the works magazine noted, this was a moment at which Cadbury’s established ‘the beginnings of the application of the new principle which underlie the building of a large-scale modern business’. ‘Those principles were not found readymade’, the article continued ‘for it was a little before the day when the science of business administration might be learned from a handbook!’ (49). That lack of a better word for the Bournville Spirit can be explained, at least in part, by the absence of precedents for what the firm desired to achieve: this was a point at which Quaker business strategies and values intersected with the firm’s more secularly framed engagements with the worlds of academia, social reform, politics, policymaking, and the press. This dynamic moment was modelled, captured, and responded to through factory recreation – an area of provision and participation that morphed and adapted as the twentieth century progressed. Simultaneously Bournville’s Spirit served as criteria by which recreational activities were assessed, supported, and valued, with theatre and performance at the factory estate modelling and showcasing its core values. In this chapter, I contextualise Cadbury’s within the industrial communities and experiments that preceded and coexisted with its Birmingham factory estate and explore the organisational structures through which the Bournville Spirit was created and sustained at the firm’s headquarters.
Industrial communities sit at the heart of Britain’s manufacturing history, peppering its story from the Industrial Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century, and sitting at the core of the nostalgic image of an industrial golden age. Their carefully crafted sites and organisational structures marked a new era of industrial life, production, and people management that foregrounded cultural – as well as sporting – activities. Cadbury’s Bournville was by no means the first of such experiments, although it was to be one of the last. As the ground was broken at the firm’s new greenfield site, a set of other earlier and concurrent industrial communities offered available, useful case studies. There were regular opportunities for industry’s leaders to share and reflect on their approaches to workers, work, and play in spaces offered by their professional and personal networks, publications, and conferences that focused on areas of industry and industrial life. For Quaker industrialists, these networks were larger and richer, as their faith-driven focus increased the amount of social reform–directed activity in the proportionally large number of businesses they led. From the housing, recreational provision, and educational activities offered by the shoemakers (and fellow Quaker industrialists), Clarks to their relatively small staff numbers in the Somerset village of Street, to the extensive residential areas constructed by William Lever at Port Sunlight, Chivers Jam at Histon near Cambridge, Metropolitan Vickers at Trafford Park near Manchester, and Vickerstown built by Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering, on Walney Island opposite Barrow, activities at other factory estates are key to understanding what happened at Bournville.
There is a temptation to group these places, categorising them as multiple outcomes of the same social and industrial drivers and reflecting their centrality to the nostalgic vision of British manufacturing’s golden age. Straightforward comparisons can be drawn between their geographies, architecture, urban planning, industrial management, and their founders’ political, nonconformist religious, and financial practices with relative ease. Yet, each example of these carefully planned environments was distinct and distinctive. Jacqueline Yallop records over 400 purpose-built industrial communities in Britain, making a strong case for each as a materialised ‘personal fantasy’ (2015: x). Cautioning against falsely homogenising such places into one overarching blueprint, John Minnery stresses the range and complexity of motivations that lay behind their creation, from ‘utopian idealism to religious fervour to business acumen to paternalism and to mixtures of all four’ (Reference Minnery2012: 309). Across the following pages, I look closely at five other key examples of industrial communities that span a century of experiment and development and the network of industrialists behind them. New Lanark, Saltaire, Bromborough Pool, New Earswick, and Port Sunlight were innovatory environments in their times, the scenes of creative, educational, cultural, and theatrical activities, but each was different. Together they materialise the emergence and development of ‘patterns of labour’ and the ‘jobs-for-life’ economy that Helen Nicholson has identified as critical to amateur theatre’ (Holdsworth et al, Reference Holdsworth, Milling and Nicholson2018: 170). Like Bournville, some remain familiar names, thriving and surviving as heritage attractions. Others amongst them are not so widely known today. Considered together these spaces offer a backdrop against which synergies and differences with Cadbury’s Bournville factory community and its theatre can be considered and better understood.
Healthy Fun: New Lanark, Saltaire, and Bromborough Pool
About 104 years before Cadbury Brothers relocated their factory to Bournville, the planning and construction of a new industrial mill community began on a greenfield site just under thirty miles south-east of Glasgow. The build was financed by the son of a Glasgow shopkeeper, weaving apprentice, trader in yarn, nonconformist preacher, banker, entrepreneur, and philanthropist David Dale (1739–1806) and the industrial inventor Richard Arkwright (1732–1792) to support and develop their new business. New Lanark’s status today as an UNESCO World Heritage Site affirms the innovatory social-industrial model the site represented. Nonetheless – and this is a narrative shared by the developments covered in this chapter – a main impetus behind the creation of New Lanark was pragmatic; a response, as John Minnery notes, to the remoteness of the site and the subsequent challenges of getting the workforce to work (311). Richard Arkwright was an experienced pair of hands when the construction of New Lanark began in 1785, bringing his recent knowledge of setting up a mill with connected worker housing at Cromford, Derbyshire, in 1771 (now also a World Heritage site). Dale and Arkwright’s business partnership was not long-lasting; it was dissolved after just a year, with Dale continuing to manage the business and site alone, using its worker housing, amenities, and the better standard of living conditions they offered, as successful incentives to attract the large number of workers the firm required.
Public displays and performances of New Lanark life were an early feature of the industrial site, serving as a means to entertain, create community, and define and exhibit identities of both place and people. The New Year holiday of 1797 was celebrated with a parade through the village, in which 420 ‘young folk’ processed through its streets dressed in matching uniforms provided by their employer (Caledonian Mercury, 1 December 1797: 3). Two years later, about 2,000 workers were employed at Dale’s New Lanark factory, prompting a need for further provision of residential and community space that was guided by the new leadership of Dale’s son-in-law Robert Owen (1739–1806) (Historic Scotland). While housing conditions in the village were superior to those experienced by factory workers more generally, Owen was unimpressed by the behaviour of New Lanark’a needs workers and villagers. He took immediate, social reform-targeted action, putting in place a suite of regulations and behaviour management schemes that governed their work, home, and social lives – a process that Richard Foulkes (and others) have labelled as a ‘practical experiment in paternalistic socialism’ (1997: 99). Personal and domestic cleanliness was prioritised, with villagers invited to lectures on orderliness and tidiness, and fines were imposed for drunkenness. In return, the size of the accommodation offered to workers was increased, the cooperative village stores improved, and whisky kept on sale. With the New Lanark community and its governance re-established, new employees at the firm were carefully sought and vetted: an advertisement for staff in the Aberdeen Press and Journal on 29 April 1807 sought ‘cleanly, industrious and well-behaved families’ with three or more children of ten years and over who were native to the Scottish Highlands or Lowlands and who could ‘procure properly authenticated testimonials of their good character’ (2). Together Dale and Owen created a space in which reduced rent, good quality housing, and an increasing amount of recreational provision encouraged workers to travel to the out-of-town mill location, improved the firm’s staff retention rate, and secured sufficient interest in jobs at the mill for the owners to be able to selectively recruit (Bell and Bell, cited in Minnery: 311). New Lanark’s new community generated much public interest. Dale and Owen’s site became a tourist attraction, with ‘some 15,000 visitors’ flocking to the village while Owen was in charge, attracted ‘not … by an ideal community, but an efficient enterprise’ (Bell and Bell, cited in Minnery: 311).
Central to Robert Owen’s ambitions and environmentally determinist social improvement plans for the New Lanark community was the development of a dedicated recreational venue for its residents – a proposal that prompted dissent from his financial backers. Owen sought to create a ‘New Institute’ – a refit of an unused village space to be used ‘exclusively for school classes, church, lectures, concerts and general recreation’, an early iteration of the mechanics institutes that would begin to flourish around the 1820s. Committed to the importance of education for all and convinced of the potential benefits such a building would bring for workers and for the business’s profit margins, Owen drew up plans for the institute and sent them off to his business partners in 1809. Their response was one of alarm at the costs involved, and they refused to fund the social venture, prompting Owen to buy them out and seek other investors. The issue rumbled on, and history repeated itself as Owen’s new partners also refused to support his plans for increased and innovative education and leisure provision at New Lanark. In 1813, Owen resigned as Managing Director and headed back to London to seek support for the model of working life and recreation he was proposing. The mill, its lands, and the village were put up for sale at the end of the same year. The sale publicity offers some detail of Owen’s recreational scheme and its fit within plans for the village. The listing includes a lengthy description of a currently unused building, 145 × 40 feet in size, that was ‘planned’ to serve as a public kitchen, eating and exercise room, lecture room, and church for New Lanark’s current population of 2,200, and that could be ‘fitted up’ to fulfil this multi-use function for ‘a sum not exceeding’ 2,500 pounds (Manchester Mercury, 5 October 1813: 1). The online currency converter and purchasing power index created by the National Archives in London calculates 2,500 pounds to represent just over 100,000 pounds in 2017 (the latest year that conversions are offered for), or the equivalent of 16,666 days of pay for skilled labourers. Owen’s was a significant proposed investment. In the same advertisement, we can see the beginning of an understanding and language of onsite recreational and educational provision as sources of industrial and economic benefits. It states: ‘this arrangement [of the currently unused space], may be formed so as to create permanent and substantial benefits to the inhabitants of the village and the proprietors of the mills’. Owen returned from London with new backers from amongst the Quaker community and bought the mill. The planned building – named the ‘Institute for the Formation of Character’ – opened on New Years’ Day 1816, followed by the School for Children in 1817. Chapel-like in its exterior design, the institute’s spaces were predominantly dedicated to educational provision, including pioneering classes for preschool and infant school-age children, but the main room was used for concerts and dancing lessons, with galleries for seating, with the around 600 children who lived in the community ‘instructed in singing and dancing’ (McLintock and Strong, Reference Mclintock and Strong1877: 497; Siméon, Reference Siméon2017: 53). At New Lanark, performance and creativity – although not drama at this point – were recognised as elements in the formation of character, marking the beginning of an association that was shared at all the industrial experiments considered in this chapter.
Echoing the early parade of young workers through New Lanark, day-to-day village life became an important part of the spectacle and performance offered to visitors. Drawing on Robert Owen’s own record that nearly 20,000 visitors came to New Lanark between 1815 and 1825, William Wilson concluded that ‘the schoolroom became a theatre, the pupils performers, and Robert Owen the publicity agent for the show’ (Reference Wilson1984: 101). Cornelia Lambert notes that ‘as many as two hundred children at a time performed in a ninety-by-forty-foot room specially designed with galleries for spectators. Many if not most of the twenty thousand visitors who came to New Lanark in the period from 1815 to 1825 were shown a performance by the children of dancing, singing, and military drill’ (2011: 419). This presence of a public gaze, the dynamic of spectatorship it created, and the focus on social life, recreation, and education through the image of industrial workers, in and out of work, as a site of performance position New Lanark as an innovatory, incipient example of a new performance phenomenon. Schooling in the village was ‘child centred’, ‘kind’, and designed to ‘instil self-confidence’: public performances of its presence and outcomes can be read as social and political statements, as well as community celebrations (Davidson, Reference Davidson2010: 235). As Lambert has persuasively argued, schoolchildren’s performances at Owen’s village ‘exposed middle-class English travellers to “regenerated” paupers whose bodies and movements defied the expectations of those whose ideas about pauper children had been defined by less gracious experiences. What education could do, Owen demonstrated, was create a unified social body made of “living machines” which could act rationally and perform culturally significant activities on a national stage’ (420). The industrial worker’s body becomes a kinetic, ideological motif in this reading, choreographed and governed by movement and rhythm and watched by influential external, as well as internal, audiences.
While recreational dance and music were available to villagers throughout the nineteenth century, there is little discernible history of theatre until the turn of the twentieth century, putting this early model community on a similar timeline of theatrical activity as much later developments. What is significant about the New Lanark model is that Robert Owen’s innovative centring of recreation, albeit a model that seems, with hindsight, heavily governed and framed by industrial paternalism, was received as groundbreaking, prompting tension, disagreement, and funding challenges (it is of note, and of interest to later histories of Bournville, that it was Quaker financial backers who came forward to support the scheme). Later narratives celebrated the way that New Lanark’s community ‘prospered both materially and morally’, but the entwined model of work, education, and leisure these reports responded to had evolved and grown with industrial communities (Mclintock and Strong: 497). Jacqueline Yallop argues that New Lanark was a blueprint for development and that most well-known examples of model villages grew out of ‘Owen’s influential approach’, as ‘confident, if ultimately paradoxical, expressions of socialism and community, of utilitarian approaches and capitalist politics’ (32). Owen’s influence is clear, but the increasing presence of Quakerism, New Liberalism, Non-Conformism, Freemasonry, and academic and policymaking debate in later industrial village developments were to become equally influential forces in their creation, management, and differences. New Lanark offers an important early model: as newer industrial communities emerged, the dynamics between governance and recreation, and thus theatre, shifted.
Moving 175 miles south and travelling forward nearly 7 decades in time to the mid-nineteenth century, we reach the outskirts of Shipley in West Yorkshire and the mill and industrial village built by industrialist and investor Sir Titus Salt (1803–1876). Following a similar model to New Lanark, the industrial village of Saltaire was established in 1854 to house the community of around 400 workers needed to resource the new, out-of-town manufacturing site, who were currently transported to work by trains out of Bradford station. Saltaire also holds UNESCO World Heritage Site status, cementing the site’s significance to Britain’s first industrial revolution. Salt’s residential industrial community grew rapidly. By 1871 census records reveal that Saltaire was home to 4,389 residents, who were living in 775 houses and the village’s alms houses (Holroyd, Reference Holroyd1873: 81). Villagers’ needs were met by girls’ and boys’ schools, churches, a covered swimming pool, chapels, washhouses, recreation grounds, an infirmary, and a large public park (81–82). Free time was also provided for and structured. Recreational societies established in the village by 1873, when Abraham Holroyd wrote his early history of Saltaire, included horticultural and cricket clubs, a brass band, a string and reed band, and a glee and madrigal society (87). The most relevant of Salt’s provision for my interests in this book was the large village club and institute building, which were opened in 1871. Salt had been impressed by the educational activities and programming delivered by mechanics institutes around the country but was also alerted to the model’s constraints, particularly the ‘limited extent of means of social intercourse and healthy relaxation’ they offered (Balgarnie, Reference Balgarnie1877: 230). He became increasingly convinced that his workforce needed a similar space to fill their social lives, but one that offered greater ‘healthy relaxation’ and ‘innocent and intelligent recreation’ (Salt cited in Holroyd, Reference Holroyd1873: 51). The outcome of this conviction was the Saltaire Institute (now known as the Victoria Hall), a multipurpose building that contained a range of social, educational, and performance spaces, some designed to serve multiple needs, with others purpose built for specific recreational activities. Its grand façade, with central parapeted tower, led the way to a reading room. A separate library sat alongside a scientific laboratory, chess and draughts rooms, a smoking room, a billiard room, a bagatelle room, a school of art that was affiliated with South Kensington, classrooms, a curator’s house, a gymnasium, and a rifle drill room (Towle, Reference Towle1872: 831). Two lecture theatres were also housed within the hall, one of which had a capacity of at least 800, and a platform stage that was thirty-five feet wide by seventeen feet deep and that also served as a performance space. A useful comparison is offered by the Leeds Theatre Royal, opened in 1878 with a stage width of twenty-five feet and stage depth of fifty-five feet. While it is clear that anything staged at the Victoria Hall would not offer the same depth of spectacle that spectators would be accustomed to in a large commercial theatre, this was nonetheless a large performance area that was used for theatrical production.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, recreation in industrial communities slowly shifted to increasingly self-governed models, but Saltaire’s Institute remained a top-down, governed space during the 1870s, reflecting the intentions behind the build that were set out in a pamphlet distributed during the hall’s construction period in May 1870 in which Salt stated that the building was designed for ‘lectures, concerts, and other events of an approved description’ (cited in Holroyd, Reference Holroyd1873: 58). The venue was managed by a committee, which included Salt family members, and any activities that took place in the building required their endorsement. Membership fees were kept low to allow as many as possible to attend and benefit from authorised recreational activities. Theatre was an early feature of these events, with organised, staged drama becoming a part of Saltaire’s social life within the first decade of the Institute’s history. In March 1878, the Shipley and Saltaire Elocution and Dramatic Society staged three performances of Charles Wells’s dramatic poem, Joseph and His Brethren at the venue. Sell-out audiences were recorded, and a re-staging took place in May. Records make it clear that this event exceeded a reading, the costumes worn by the cast of thirty were praised, as was the ‘placing’ of the groups of performers throughout the twenty-four scenes (Shipley Times and Express, 30 March 1878: 4). This was a theatrical production. Its success was followed by an advertisement for an elocution tutor to lead the group’s future activities (Yorkshire Post, 8 August 1878: 2). The society’s name framed its activity as primarily elocution based, closely aligning their dramatic performances with the intelligent, relaxing recreation Salt sought to deliver through the Institute, but Joseph and his Brethren, and other productions, strongly suggest that fully produced, stage spectacles that far exceeded elocutionary benefits, were welcomed and encouraged at Saltaire by the late 1870s. Following the successful staging of Wells’s dramatic poem, the autumn of 1878 saw the installation of a new proscenium, act drop, and scenery at the Victoria Hall, funded by the Salts at a significant cost of 230 pounds (Shipley Times and Express, 24 May 1879: 4). Economic investment in theatre was combined with social and moral approval, symbolised by the Salt family’s attendance at dramatic society events: following the well-received production of Tom Robertson’s cup-and-saucer comedy Society by a ‘large and fashionable audience’ a year later, Titus Salt presided over the presentation of an engraved gold watch to Ernest Schutt (1847–1916), yarn merchant, and the society’s stage manager (Leeds Mercury, 15 April 1879: 8; Shipley Times and Express, 24 May 1879: 4). Following the short ceremony, fellow group member, Arthur B. Catty (1854–1920) took to the platform to deliver a speech that made the case for ‘the stage as an educational force which should be cultivated’ in order to ‘raise the moral and social condition of the people under its influence’ (Shipley Times and Express, 24 May 1879: 4). As an assistant headteacher of the Salt Boys School, Catty’s words carried significant weight in this community and – coupled with Salt’s active role in the ceremony – affirmed staged drama as a valued activity and part of the ‘rational relaxation’ the venue had been designed to deliver (Salt, cited in Holroyd, Reference Holroyd1873: 53). Saltaire’s Institute was celebrated as ‘a rare tribute to learning and letters, designed to afford recreative instruction to the operatives after their day’s work; of interest to the story of theatre in industrial communities is the positioning of staged performance as a recognised part of this approved, governed activity by the end of the 1870s (Towle, Reference Towle1872: 831).
Throughout the 1880s, fully staged theatrical productions and shorter plays became regular fare at Saltaire’s social events, including Spenser Theyre-Smith’s (1834–1911) fashionable, one-act comedietta Cut off with a Shilling that was performed at the fashionable Victoria Hall conversazione in 1882 (Saltaire Journal, 1:2, 2009). Spectacle remained an important feature: costumes, in particular, were an area where much of the production budget was spent; leading to routine praise in local newspaper reviews. On at least one occasion, costumes were sourced from major London-based designers, with the opening production of autumn 1881’s season – Tom Robertson’s The Ladies’ Battle – dressed by well-known London-based costumier Messrs Simmons. The visual spectacle this offered was well received, while the play was judged to be ‘tolerably well represented’, it was ‘beautifully dressed’ (Leeds Times, 12 November 1881: 5). By the mid-1880s, Saltaire had a minstrel troupe, alongside its ongoing elocution and dramatic society, and continued to attract fashionable, regional audiences and reviewers to productions staged at the hall. School plays were a feature of village life, visiting companies were booked to appear at the Victoria Hall, including one of D’Oyly Carte’s touring companies with a production of Iolanthe in July 1884, and Saltaire’s resident performers were used to entertain guests at company functions with dramatic sketches and recitations. Theatrical activity continued, and increased, during the early decades of the twentieth century, with charity performances by local dramatic, operatic, and school groups, and the existence of a standalone dramatic society – with no reference to the art of elocution in their name – by 1925 (Drama: The Quarterly Theatre Review, 1925: 192).
In 1877, an extended essay on ‘The English Workingman’s Home’ published in Scribner’s Monthly magazine argued that if Saltaire had been founded on business objectives, it was an undeniable success. ‘In the opinion of a member of the firm, as given to the writer, Saltaire has paid abundant interest’, the author recorded, for ‘it has attracted to the works a superior class of workers and has kept them there for years’ (356). Like New Lanark, Saltaire was identified as a site of paternalistic socialism in which recreation – and theatre and performance – were harnessed as instrumental parts of wider cultural strategies aimed at local, and national social reform. By the 1870s, such places brought acknowledged recruitment, retention, and behaviour-management benefits, as the Scribner’s article makes clear. In the case of Saltaire, the same decade also brought opportunities for theatrical entertainment, as either a participant or a spectator. The story of theatre’s presence in industrial communities was to develop in later builds, including those that remain well known today and less well-known creations, including Bromborough Pool in North West England.
In the same year the ground was broken at Saltaire, the Wirral landscape on the North-West coast of Britain saw the raising of a model village built to house workers employed at Price’s Patent Candle Works new factory. William Price (1772–1860) and his two sons George (1822–1902) and James (1818–1890) had expanded their candle-making operation based in Vauxhall, London, creating a production site that offered easier and cheaper import and export potential and a greater amount of space to purpose build and expand. The result was Bromborough Pool. Described as a ‘pretty landing place for the Mersey steamer’ with a stately home, parkland and a ‘charming flowery dell’ near the mill, Bromborough offered the same backdrop of natural beauty that characterised New Lanark and Saltaire (Sharpe, Reference Sharpe1855: 67). Indeed, William Price had been born in Lanarkshire, and John Nelson Tarn identified an affinity between the Price’s management and that of Robert Owen, suggesting that while the Prices were ‘neither so idealistic or so radical’, ‘they appeared to share many of [Owen’s] fundamental convictions’ (Tarn, Reference Tarn1965: 331). Driven by their deep evangelical Christian faith, and the acceptance of their responsibility for staff welfare, moral instruction, and quality of life it prompted, the Prices were committed to providing for their employees.
For the most part, Bromborough Pool adhered to the organisation of earlier planned industrial village communities, offering good quality housing, gardens, allotments, works schools, and sports facilities. A resident chaplain was also employed to offer daily services in the factory and tend to the villager-employees’ spiritual needs. There was precedent within the firm for some of this provision, the Wirral site drew on and extended the Vauxhall factory’s educational activities at night and day schools, countryside excursions and Mutual Improvement Society (Tarn, Reference Tarn1965: 331; Brack, Reference Brack1980: 165). Dedicated to education and recreation, mutual improvement societies offered diversion that the South London Chronicle’s report of an entertainment at Price’s Vauxhall factory society labelled ‘healthy fun’ (9 November 1878: 7). Christopher Radcliffe has noted their democratic nature and connection with radical groups – including the Owenites, concluding that such societies ‘were of the people not for the people’ (1997: 141). In each of the three villages considered to this point, recreation was entwined with capitalism, social reform, and radical politics. Bromborough Pool’s entertainment history begins with the village’s history: a branch of the Belmont Mutual Improvement Society (named after the Vauxhall factory) was established during the village’s first year and used as the village school and library, for reading and writing lessons, musical concerts, magic lantern talks, penny readings, and lectures (Tarn, Reference Tarn1965: 332–334; Brack, Reference Brack1980: 168). Gillian Darley identifies the society and its ‘instruction and intellectual recreation’ as the centre of village life from 1854 onwards, and as the major innovation of the Wrights’ industrial community (Reference Darley2007: 65). When the new school was built in the 1890s, a village hall was provided by repurposing the original school building into a multi-use community space with a stage. By this time, the village consisted of 142 houses and was home to a population of 728. Dramatic classes were in place by 1901, run by the village Reverend, Edward Trevitt (1857–1915), under the aegis of the Mutual Improvement Society. Trevitt’s classes led to staged performances in the village hall; these were practical lessons, not dramatic reading sessions (Birkenhead News, 4 January 1902: 7). By the following year, the village’s dramatic society were performing at other local venues, drawing attention to the Bromborough Pool community and its cultural recreation (Birkenhead News, 12 February 1902: 2). Building plans from November 1899 and theatrical licences dating from 1903 and 1910 further reveal that public dramatic performances were regularly staged in the village hall from at least the early twentieth century, offering some competition for Port Sunlight’s Dramatic Society who were performing just a short distance away (Wirral Archive Services, ZP/38/11/1-4; Unilever Archives, GB1752.PRU/412/1/7-8).
In his 1965 article on the planning of Bromborough Pool, John Tarn noted the village’s relative absence from scholarship on model villages and made a case for its location as the first of the garden villages that was grounded in the focus on green and open spaces that characterised its planning (332). The occlusion of Bromborough Pool can be traced back to at least the turn of the twentieth century. In his 1909 guidebook, A Perambulation through the Hundred of Wirral, Harold Young had encouraged tourists to take a ‘detour’ to the ‘not greatly visited’ Bromborough Pool, describing it as a ‘well worthwhile’ excursion (40). Ewart Gladstone Culpin’s Reference Culpin1913 The Garden City Movement Up-To-Date makes no reference to the village, while Port Sunlight receives an extensive entry (41). Throughout history Price’s works and housing have been consistently eclipsed by their more renowned neighbour, Port Sunlight, creating an absence that impedes histories of theatre and recreation in British industrial communities.
New Lanark, Saltaire, and Bromborough Pool supply three key examples of purpose-built industrial communities sited outside of polluted urban spaces. Together they originated visual and verbal images of a pastoral industrial world and practical, working case studies that were available to later developers, including Lever Bros at Port Sunlight, Rowntree’s of York at New Earswick, and Cadbury’s at Bournville. Recreational provision was at the core of all three, but as the German economist Gerhart Schulze-Gaevernitz noted in Reference Schulze-Gaevernitz1900, in some cases it came at a cost: writing of Saltaire he argued that while ‘externally’ the village ‘is a most magnificent example of care for the workman’, this first impression means that its ‘drawbacks are not such as to be observed by the hasty observer’. However, he continued, ‘inquiries amongst its inhabitants will show that their wellbeing is purchased at the price of liberty’ (58). The recreation inhabitants (and employees) could access under paternalistic industrialism were governed and managed to varying degrees. As was daily life. In the three examples introduced above, a clear, two-phase pattern is evident. First came the organisation of recreational sports, education, and music, followed by a second phase that focused on the provision of wider cultural or creative recreational activities, including drama. The reasons behind this were, in part, practical. Sports pitches were relatively quick and cheap to lay out, education was an increasingly recognised need with growing legal requirements. Across the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, and across places and under different leaderships this pattern began to shift, as did the presence of theatre. Stable models of fully governed, controlled recreation were modified as the new century saw key drivers change from ‘paternalism’ to ‘pragmatism’ (Chance, Reference Chance2017: 16). Two final case study communities – Port Sunlight and New Earswick – form the subject of the next section, modelling these changes. With their roots in the final years of the eighteen hundreds, these two spaces marked a step-change in recreational provision and tell different stories of residential provision, employee welfare, and dramatic activity. Social reform action, the acceleration of industrial production and global markets, and growth of sociological and urban planning studies and literature brought renewed energy to the industrial communities of the fin de siècle, entwining manufacturing, beauty, and leisure in images that were a far cry from the smog bound, pollution filled imagery of city-based production. Amidst these shifting discourses around theatre, education, recreation, and people management, theatrical activity increased, with performance supporting and harnessing these new dynamics, feeding into, shaping, and changing them, and playing a part in the gradual process that transmuted solid, delivered models of rational recreation into more interlocutory sets of exchanges between employer and employee, worker, and player.
Port Sunlight
Just over three and a half decades after the creation of Bromborough Pool, work began on Port Sunlight’s factory and village spaces, less than five-minute’s walk away. Today Port Sunlight remains the home of Unilever’s headquarters and the site of two separate archives – one covering the factory and the other the village. Like Saltaire and New Lanark, the village continues to attract significant tourist numbers; visitors keen to explore its history, streets, and art gallery, following in the steps of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sightseers, academics, and professionals drawn by its architecture and Lever’s innovative approach to work, wellbeing, and play. In 1909, the factory magazine Progress reported 53,471 visitors up to the end of November (January 1910: 96). Five years later, The Music Herald devoted an article to the village’s musical activities, noting that the village had attracted 50,000 village visitors in the past year (1 March 1914: 72). Like other industrial villages, Port Sunlight had internal and external, professional, and residential audiences. Railway posters and guidebooks make its status as a visitor attraction – a destination – clear. The reach of Port Sunlight is further signalled by the Gaiety Theatre’s 1912 production of The Sunshine Girl by Paul Rubens (1876–1917) and Cecil Raleigh (1856–1914); a musical comedy telling the story of Port Sunshine’s soap-works owner who disguises himself as a factory employee (in characteristically convoluted burlesque style) and falls in love with the eponymous heroine, played by star actress and Gaiety Girl Phyllis Dare (1890–1974). Reflecting the acceleration of new advertising cultures and global brand marketing, Port Sunlight was a household word and a romanticised location by the early decades of the twentieth century.
Work began on William Hesketh Lever’s (1851–1925) new Port Sunlight factory headquarters for his soap bar production business in the autumn of 1887. Having outgrown its existing location, Lever had invested in fifty-six acres of swampy land in a ‘rural district’ near Bebington, on the Wirral. Twenty-four acres was assigned to production, the remaining thirty-two allocated to fulfil Lever’s plans for an industrial village, with housing restricted to factory workers and their families. Rapid expansion over the next fifteen years resulted in a 230-acre industrial site by 1902, of which just over 60 per cent was devoted to housing and religious, educational, and recreational buildings (The British Architect, 4 April 1902: 247). Port Sunlight’s housing design was diverse. Lever played out his own architectural aspirations on the Wirral site, commissioning domestic and community buildings from a range of designers that were quickly recognised for their entwined beauty and functionality – a reflection of the Arts and Crafts ethos that also shaped Cadbury’s Bournville, and one that led author Thomas Davison to conclude that the ‘combination of the practical and the artistic has been achieved [at Port Sunlight] with outstanding success’ (Reference Davison1916: viii). Alongside its architecture, recreational provision became an early defining feature of the site, with the scale of the cultural and sporting pastimes on offer regularly featuring in external and internal reports. In November 1900, the Lever Bros company magazine Progress noted that while ‘it may not be generally known’, it is ‘nevertheless fact, that in Port Sunlight there are more societies and clubs for social work and mutual benefit etc, than in any other “village” in the world’ (593). Bow Bells listed these in 1896, identifying their existence as a response to ‘relieving the tedium of existence spent in monotonous mechanical work’ that ‘has evidently been especially studied by the paternal government of the Sunlight community’ (27 November: 545). Activities included science and art classes, literary and debating societies, chess, cricket, billiards, football, gymnastics, quoits, cycling and bowling clubs, a band (with instruments and uniforms supplied by the company), minstrel troupe, choral society, dramatic society, dancing school and a musical comedy/light opera group.
Recreational activity was organised and delivered by the village council in a series of community spaces created by the firm that included several publicly licensed entertainment venues with permanent stages. George Benoit-Levy, founder of the French Garden City movement, lauded the number of buildings that offered flexible space for ‘public festivities’ in his 1904 account of his visit to Port Sunlight; a report so positive it was subsequently translated and published in Progress for the factory readership (October 1904: 18). As this suggests, the village offered flexible community spaces that served multiple purposes, enabled recreational activities for villagers and staff, offered occasional space for company events, and were deliberately showcased by Lever Bros. Writing for The British Architect in 1902, Lever identified ‘the first public building at Port Sunlight [as] the Gladstone Hall, opened in November 1891’; a ‘simple, unpretentious’ space, ‘admirably adapted for the purpose for which it was designed’ (4 April: 247). Simple, unpretentious, flexible, and very well-used: on weekday lunchtimes, the Gladstone Hall served as a dining room for factory workers, while in the evenings recreational activities took over. Dramatic society rehearsals were on Monday evening, the minstrel troupe on Tuesdays. The choir had a regular booking on Wednesdays, with Thursday evenings left free for weekly entertainments by outside companies or performers, programmed and administered by the village council. On Fridays, the chemistry class took place in the hall and, at the end of the week, it was the turn of the Sunday service, a weekly occasion that was more akin to a public lecture than a religious event. A second community venue, Hulme Hall, opened in 1901, with a proscenium stage and theatrical licence. The village schools were also equipped for dramatic performances. Theatrical activity was a factor in the planning of community buildings at Port Sunlight, and present from the earliest stages of the village's recreational activity.
Port Sunlight’s Dramatic Society arrived early in the site’s recreational activities; established in 1894, eighteen years before the formation of Cadbury’s equivalent group at Bournville. From 1895, all societies were governed by the newly formed Port Sunlight Village Council, and most adopted a subscription model to cover their day-to-day costs. In the case of the dramatic society, budgets were supplemented by larger one-off production expenses – including the hiring of lights or of playscripts – being met by the council, and by default by the firm, who funded the council. The first years of their activity saw the society stage regular performances at the Gladstone Hall, perform at other local charity events, and attract billings and reviews from the local press and national publications, including The Sketch (13 May 1896: 101). The backbone of their early repertoire was made up of musical comedies and operettas, particularly those of Gilbert and Sullivan, with the dramatic and choral societies regularly working closely together to stage productions. 1897 saw The Sketch report on the group’s work again, in a commentary that praised the quality of theatrical production in the village. Quality – of production, performances, and elocution – was repeatedly stressed as an important part of the society’s outputs, evoking the idea of the professional amateur, an amateur performer who sought to equal the performance of a professional performer within a production context that was high quality. Port Sunlight’s dramatic society appear to have met this threshold, at least in the view of newspaper reviewers. Echoing The Sketch’s praise of the quality of their performances that had appeared six years previously, The Birkenhead News’s review of a 1903 production concluded that, ‘if all local amateur dramatic societies were of the merit of Port Sunlight’s, there would not be so much justifiable complaint about amateurism’ (19 December 1903: 6). Press reviews made Port Sunlight’s theatre and performance visible to external local and national audiences, widely advertising Lever’s community and its recreation.
Taking into account the acclaim that the society’s productions appear to have received, it is interesting to discover that other records indicate that while drama appeared to be thriving in Port Sunlight’s early years, the society struggled during the 1890s, nearly folding on two separate occasions due to a ‘lack of enthusiasm’ (Boumphrey and Hunter, Reference Boumphrey and Hunter2002: 10; 12). Two separate occasions that align with The Sketch’s positive attention. There are several possible reasons for this. Without wishing to verge on conjecture, the first may have been connected to local competition. The dramatic society did not hold the monopoly on Port Sunlight’s entertainment. In addition to visiting companies appearing in the village, other village entertainment groups existed, and were popular enough to perform outside of Port Sunlight’s spaces, in Bootle, at local Liberal clubs, and at charity appearances at workhouses and hospitals. The most popular of these groups was the minstrel troupe. Appearing in blackface, the use of burnt cork or theatrical make up to change skin colour that was common practice in music hall song and comedy from the 1840s and played a significant role in Britain’s racist ideologies and visual iconographies on stage and in print culture, ‘The Sunlight Darkies’ had fifty members by 1895, including a band of eight musicians (Pickering, Reference Pickering2008). The group was managed by eight elected members, was well resourced, with ‘all the outfit, music, instruments […] necessary for modern high-class minstrelsy’, and had administrators charged with booking appearances and managing their fees (Progress, February 1895: 2). In this village-originated racist grotesquery intersections between theatrical production in the industrial village, local urban centres, and national entertainment trends are revealed. Children’s performances were also staged outside of the dramatic society’s activity. Other groups and activities continued as the twentieth century turned. The year 1910 saw the opening of the social club hall and the connected formation of the Shakespearean Reading Circle. ‘Privately formed’ to read the trial scene from The Merchant of Venice at the end of a lecture by Reverend T. H. Martin, the group went on to offer a production of the play in the new social club in May. On this occasion, the quality acting of the dramatic society was not met: ‘the golden mean between acting too much and not acting enough is hard to find, even by professionals. Everyone agreed that our beginners were diligently on its tracks’ recorded the works magazine (Progress, April 1910: 91).
The dramatic society’s 1890s struggles appear to have passed by the early twentieth century, and 1903’s production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s (1855–1934) farce The Magistrate (1885) offers a useful example of the function and operation of staff-performed theatre at this point. The first performance was at the Gladstone Hall in mid-February, with the reviewer from The Birkenhead News recording it was well attended and well received, and that any profits would be donated to the Village Nurse Fund (14 February 1903: 5). During the following week the play was re-staged at the Joyville Theatre, Thornton Hough – a private space in the Lever home that will be discussed later in this section – in front of an invited audience of Lower Bebington District Council members (Birkenhead News, 21 February 1903: 7). Mid-December saw a second revival feature as part of a fundraising event for The Hot Pot Fund – which offered Christmas dinner to thousands – at Birkenhead Town Hall (Birkenhead News, 12 December 1903: 4). Through The Magistrate we can begin to understand the multiple functions of theatre at Port Sunlight, and its increasing connections with publicity, wider community, charity, recreation, and education. Theatre was part of Port Sunlight’s meaning and place-making. Stage backdrops used in the Gladstone and Hulme halls featured images of the village streets that hung at the rear of the platforms during some of their entertainments, and other uses. In this way, Port Sunlight’s stages were imprinted as Port Sunlight spaces. The outside was brought inside and acted as an outer frame for theatre, entertainment, and recreation.
In 1903, Lever opened the most ambitious of his public space-building projects at Port Sunlight – an open-air theatre with a capacity of around 2500 (George, Reference George1907: 110). The inaugural performance featured the dramatic and musical societies and attracted national and international press coverage, much of which was accompanied by illustrations or photographs. Located in the Dell, an area of land now known for its famous vista of the village’s bridge, the Auditorium was the site of a wide range of events including roller-skating competitions, boxing matches, dances, the village flower show, film screenings, and cycling events. Theatre infused many of them: 1917’s horticulture show, offers a strong example, as an event that featured not only plants, but also a public appearance from the actress Olga Nethersole (1866–1917) and a speech from the dramatist Hall Caine (1853–1931) in a complex occasion fusing patriotism, war work, industrialism, and performance. It also served as a key public site for William Hesketh Lever’s playing out of his own interwoven professional, social, and political public identity, offering space for large workforce meetings and when – after five failed attempts – Lever was returned as Liberal MP for the Wirral in 1906, a bunting-covered venue to house his victory celebrations (Observer, 26 January 1906: 7). Lever’s auditorium was identified and celebrated as the first open-air theatre in Britain and a pioneering new experiment in employee wellbeing and recreation. ‘The intellectual wellbeing of the adults [at Port Sunlight] has not been forgotten’, reported Walter George in his 1907 study Engines of Social Progress, ‘the most interesting attempt in that direction is the Auditorium’, which offers’ unlimited possibilities of intellectual development’ (120). Aligning intellectual development with the Auditorium’s entertainments is a strong indicator of the extent to which performance’s role as approved recreation had expanded by this point, for theatre came to be at the heart of the venue’s ‘unlimited possibilities’.
Despite the Auditorium’s range of uses, it had been particularly well equipped for theatre, with a raised stage, good lighting and sightlines, a sunken orchestra pit, a green room, prop and scene stores, and dressing rooms for actors and actresses. Alongside home-produced theatre, appearances from a range of touring companies and performers were booked. The first of these was the Avenue Pierrot Company (including ventriloquists and comedians) who were programmed to appear twice a week for a short season in 1903. Frank Benson’s (Francis, 1858–1939) touring company appeared later in the same year, with a charity performance of The Merchant of Venice, staged under the patronage of local aristocracy and civic dignitaries. Benson’s company was known for al fresco Shakespeare; nationally touring outdoor performances staged in gardens and parks. The production was a perfect fit with the company’s ambitions for the auditorium and reflected that centrality of the outside, the countryside, to Port Sunlight’s wider imagery. The auditorium’s scene store was stocked with backdrops representing village streets that were used for home-produced events and by travelling companies (George: 112). Most of those that feature in surviving images appear to have been representations of Port Sunlight village, landscapes with meaning that also hung at Gladstone Hall (where images of Gladstone’s properties were interchanged with those of the village), and at Hulme hall. When these drops were hung, the stage action was framed at least in part as local, no matter what the play, no matter what the performance. Place and play fused creativity, crafting, storytelling, and performance with Port Sunlight’s village and factory, workers, and residents. In 1937, the outdoor theatre at Port Sunlight was demolished. All that remains today are earthworks that offer an outline of the site. Yet the green space – with its views of factory and village – offers important traces of theatre’s history at Port Sunlight and clues to the way its imagery and activity shaped and underpinned Lever’s industrial project.
The Manor Mummers
The Lever family’s home was Thornton Manor, three miles from Port Sunlight in the village of Thornton Hough. It was at home that the Lever family amateur dramatic company ‘The Manor Mummers’ rehearsed and performed from 1904 to 1914, with a brief reappearance in 1921. Aside from ‘a few exceptions’ the ‘small, but efficient band of actors’ was made up of Lever family members, with (William) Hulme Lever – W. H. Lever’s eldest son, and incoming chairman of the company – at the helm (Liverpool Echo, 18 January 1921: 5; Whitby Gazette, 2 April 1909: 6). Hulme’s published memories of his father make it clear that he supported his dramatic interests, choosing the name of the company, and financing the creation of the ‘Joyville Theatre’ in the manor house’s ballroom (Lever, Reference Lever1927: 272). While occasional performances took place at social events for local estate owners and society personalities, the most familiar Manor Mummers’ performances were the Christmas entertainments they produced for factory and village audiences. From 1904, Port Sunlight’s staff and villagers were transported by carriage to Thornton Manor for an evening of entertainment that was repeated on successive days to allow all to attend. A programme for 1904’s play, Charles Dicken’s A Cricket on the Hearth, makes it clear that these were fully staged productions, with a focus on theatrical spectacle – individuals responsible for wigs, scenery, stage management, costume, dressing, and electric lighting are listed (Port Sunlight Village Archive). The entertainment marked a clear step up from that offered in the previous year, when a scene from The School for Scandal starring the village vicar Samuel Gamble-Walker (1866–1936) in the role of Sir Peter Teazle was the main feature. This second example of a ‘growing sympathy between Church and Stage’ in industrial village communities – following Reverend Edward Trevitt’s running of neighbouring Bromborough Pool’s Dramatic and Elocution two years earlier – tracks the history of theatre as an increasingly approved activity (Progress, February 1903: 51). Watching a performance in an employer’s home, with members of the employer’s family and the village vicar amongst the cast, affirmed the recreational value of theatre, and cemented its status.
Alongside these Christmas events, the Manor Mummers gave regular performances at Port Sunlight’s Gladstone Hall, a space where village and factory life intersected. Manor Mummers’ performances appear to have been popular. In January 1913, the group staged a third performance of John Davidson’s tragic farce Smith, for ‘residents’ and ‘workpeople’ who had been ‘unable to gain admission’ to the previous two (Birkenhead News, 25 January 1913: 11). Some audience members are likely to have attended out of a sense of duty, but accounts indicate that these entertainments sought to create a sense of fun. Short farces and comedies were standard fare: Smith followed Mr Hopkinson, a farce by Richard Claude Carton (1853–1928), staged in 1912. The focus on spectacle clear from records of Thornton Manor productions is also present in reviews of these Gladstone Hall productions: Mr Hopkinson was praised for its ‘admirably arranged’ ‘big open stage’ and scene stagings that would ‘do credit to a professional stage craftsman’ (Birkenhead News, 6 January 1912: 5). Hulme Lever remained influential and active in Port Sunlight’s theatre throughout the period covered in this book, as president of Birkenhead Dramatic Society in the early nineteen twenties, and creator of plays for early nineteen thirties productions at the Gladstone Hall, including Cinderella (1931), and Dick Whittington (1932). The second of these is particularly interesting, as he co-wrote the piece with Sophie Somers (1891–1950), an advertising department manager at the firm who lived in Port Sunlight village, had previous plays produced professionally under her pseudonym George Hewitt, and was to co-author with Lever again (Progress, January 1921: 23; Crewe Chronicle, 16 January 1932: 2). Over the first three and a half decades of the twentieth century, a considerable number of Port Sunlight’s staff watched senior managers at the firm play. Theatre was entangled with the village and factory communities, and the firm’s innovative models of employee communications and relations.
While the Manor Mummers’ performances were deliberately not educational, other strands of Port Sunlight’s theatrical activity were designed to focus on drama’s educational potential. Port Sunlight’s Staff Training College – a day continuation school for younger employees founded in 1918 – staged regular dramatic productions during the 1920s, with a strong focus on William Shakespeare’s plays. Various venues and sites were used for these events. At Port Sunlight the Lyceum, the village’s early school buildings, which had been used as a military hospital during the First World War before being repurposed for the college, offered an indoor stage and grounds used for outdoor plays. Thornton Manor also welcomed the college’s performers. In 1922, a production of Persephone was staged at an entertainment hosted by William Lever, featuring a cast of around fifty factory employees currently in college education and produced by their teachers (The Sphere, 26 August 1922: 36). That this occasion attracted the attention of fashionable journal The Sphere, which featured both a report and a photograph, is testament to the reach of industrial theatre on the Wirral. Further educational dimensions to theatre at Port Sunlight are clear in a wartime series of open lectures programmed for the Lyceum in 1916–1917, including ‘Dramatic Recitals’ by elocutionist John Duxbury (1871–1953), a well-known figure on touring national and international lecture circuits who had started his career as a paid scripture reciter and remained well known for his recitation performances of Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson (1911 census), ‘The Theatre in these Days’ delivered by Annie Horniman (1860–1937), manager of the Gaiety Theatre repertory company in Manchester, and ‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet, from a Woman’s Point of View’ by Morden Grey (Mary King Griffen, 1871–1931), actress, well-known touring lecturer and Professor of Elocution at Royal Manchester College of Music (Progress, January 1917: 15; April 1917: 62). All three were trained entertainers with public identities and strong affiliations with local educational and cultural landscapes that offered endorsed authoritative identities and presence. Well suited to the wartime moment, the lectures presented theatre as a valued cultural, and wider social, activity in Lever’s village.
Theatrical culture was embedded in Lever’s industrial project at Port Sunlight. Accounts convey his skills as a performer and crafted, honed public persona. His professional and political speeches regularly included citations from William Shakespeare’s plays, with his investment in a replica of Shakespeare’s birthplace – built in the village on Poets’ Corner and housing four worker cottages (now demolished) – further cementing his self-alignment with theatre and performance. Unsurprisingly perhaps this filtered through to his crafted community. Performance permeated village life. Thousands of factory workers, their families and guests were entertained by or participated in school plays, fancy dress parades, Punch and Judy shows, conjurors, dramatic society performances, and the Lever family’s amateur company over the first fifty years of the site’s development. National entertainment trends were staged in spaces where backdrops of the village’s streets framed the performance space, and where theatrical activity was presented as part of wider recreation and wellbeing agendas. A model for this thinking about performance and recreation can be discovered in an 1899 speech Lever delivered at a Girls’ Institute Conversazione that had included songs, recitations, and a cinematograph entertainment screening views of Port Sunlight, accompanied by music. Rising at the end of the programme, Lever celebrated the work of the Institute, identifying participation in such activities as a key part of ‘direct self preservation’ and drawing clear connections between wellbeing, engaging with social and cultural activities, and the spaces that enabled them (Progress, November 1899: 90–91). There are multiple synergies between Port Sunlight and Bournville. Both industrial communities were crafted through purpose-built spaces that prioritised recreational and leisure provision, both attracted attention from academic, social, and political audiences – evidenced by literature and regular site visits from town planning and social reform groups, including the International Housing Conference in 1907 and 1910’s Royal Institute of British Architects Town Planning Conference. Railway posters and guide books positioned Bournville and Port Sunlight as destinations and they also shared a theatricality that sat at the core of their operations and advertising. There is, however, one more influential model it is important to consider in the history of theatre at Cadbury’s, and for this final part of the story we move to another cocoa and chocolate factory.
Rowntree’s of New Earswick
In November 1911, the cocoa and chocolate producers H. I. Rowntree and Company hired Brynhild Lucy Benson (1888–1974) as a gymnastics instructor based in the factory’s social department (Parratt, Reference Parratt2001). With responsibility for girls’ employment, welfare, and recreation, the firm’s Social Department was firmly established, well financed, and supplied with its own administration, staff, offices, and letterhead by this point (BI/BSR93/VII/Memorandum/2 June 1917). Employing Miss Benson as part of the team was presented as a coup. Having the daughter of leading Shakespearean actor-manager Frank R. Benson (who had performed at Port Sunlight’s auditorium seven years earlier) and direct descendent of Quaker philanthropist, merchant, and civic leader William Rathbone (1819–1902) on the payroll was welcomed as an assertion of the firm’s cultural, educational, and recreational provision (C.W.M., March 1911: 1184). A position that was further cemented by a visit from her celebrity father to the factory boys’ school during the following year (C.W.M., April 1912, 1289). On her arrival at Rowntree’s Brynhild Benson quickly involved herself in the theatre being produced by the factory’s dramatic society, prompting both praise and what appears to have been a degree of jealousy from her new audiences. Her performance as Minnie Gilifillian in August Wing Pinero’s Sweet Lavender (1893) received strong praise from the factory works magazine. The role, the reviewer noted, ‘demands a degree of abandon rarely found in an amateur’, but Miss Benson ‘revelled in the part’. That this revelling also brought disquiet and criticism from others is clear, for ‘we have heard it murmured that the part was overdone [and] at times too much attention was drawn away from the other actors’. Such complaints were met with scant patience. ‘If that was so’, the reviewer concluded, ‘then other actors should have infused their parts with a relatively greater intensity’ (C.W.M. March 1912: 1251–2). By 1912, theatre was entangled in Rowntree’s social and cultural politics, as well as factoring in its business strategies and governance structures. While Port Sunlight’s extensive recreational provision might appear to offer the closest comparison to Cadbury’s Bournville factory activity, the York-based industrial community founded by fellow Quaker, friend, and chocolate and cocoa manufacturer Joseph Rowntree (1837–1925) offers an equally significant model.
Rowntree’s new factory had opened in 1890, followed by the planning and construction of New Earswick village – a mile down the Haxby Road – between 1902 and 1904. Now absorbed into the city of York, the boundaries and shape of Rowntree’s village are less discernible than those of the previous examples I have discussed, and the site does not have a ‘heritage presence’ in the way of New Lanark, Saltaire, Port Sunlight, and Bournville. In many ways, New Earswick has disappeared, but its connections with Cadbury’s make it an important site for consideration here. New Earswick was created after Bournville, and shared George Cadbury’s objective to supply good quality housing for a wider population of workers. As Trevor Rowley notes, Joseph Rowntree was prompted by more general concerns about housing and designed the space to offer a ‘practical contribution’; a ‘balanced village community’ for his own staff and others (Culpin, Reference Culpin1913: 39; Rowley, Reference Rowley2006: 176). Its population evidences the success of his aim. By 1910, the village was home to 119 cottages, 45 of which were let to factory staff (Rowntree Society, 2016: 16). At this point, less than 40 per cent of New Earswick residents worked for the firm, and this proportion was to decrease over the next two decades. In comparison to the ‘workers’ village’ myth that has perpetuated in relation to Bournville, the function of Rowntree’s community has been more accurately told, possibly because the space is less visible, less well known, and less subject to forces of romanticism and nostalgia. It certainly does not lack the hallmarks of industrial community design, its location as an early build by Raymond Unwin (1863–1940) and Barry Parker (1867–1947) who were to become guiding figures in the development of the Garden City Movement cements its identity as a key urban planning experiment. Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871–1954), Joseph Rowntree’s son and author of the paradigm shifting, early sociological study Poverty: A Study of Town Life (Reference Rowntree1901) had met Unwin and Parker at 1901’s Garden Cities Association Conference. The New Earswick commission gave the partners an opportunity to explore their urban planning in practice – materialising an ethos largely grounded in the aesthetics and politics of William Morris’s socialist movement (Rowntree Society, 2016: 13). Of interest to this study is the way in which Rowntree’s foregrounding of innovative applications of architectural design to facilitate and better society, industry, community, and quality of life in both industrial and residential spaces created separate theatre-making histories in the factory and the village.
New Earswick village was governed through a similar model to Port Sunlight, with all village recreation delivered by a village council and its sub-committees. The year 1904 had seen the formation of the self-financing Joseph Rowntree Trust, a body charged with managing the ongoing development of the village, rentals of its cottage-style homes, and recreational activity for its residents. The trust held unequivocal power over the village community; providing ‘such facilities for the enjoyment of full and healthy lives as the Trustees shall consider desirable, and by such other means as the Trustees shall, in their uncontrolled discretion, think fit’ (Culpin: 39). Around ten per cent of the village area was dedicated to leisure by this time, and administering and resourcing villagers’ spare time was the source of a significant part of the trust’s responsibility and workload, and a key site of their financial investment (Agricultural Economist and Horticultural Review, February 1913: 31). In October 1905, the first village community space opened. New Earswick’s Assembly Rooms sounded rather grander than two houses, given, rent free, for village use, but six nights a week they offered space for newspaper reading, or playing card and board games, and dominoes. While there was no provision for theatre in this space, the rooms’ governance and self-financing, subscription model set the scene for future village drama. The Assembly Rooms were managed by a village council sub-committee whose members were responsible for cleaning, lighting, supervising, and renting out the rooms, fundraising, and all membership applications and approvals (BI/NEVCM/9 September 1904). Entertainment was on their agenda early on, with a Concert Committee formed in January 1905 to organise fundraising events throughout 1905 and 1906 (BI/NEVCM, 12 March 1906). By 1907, the Assembly Rooms was recognised as not fit for purpose, particularly – it was noted – as a space for public worship. It was replaced by the Folk Hall, a second, much improved multiuse village space, which was resourced for theatre, as well as sewing clubs, gymnastics, and village functions. Suitability for wide recreational usage had been a key design principle, with Joseph Rowntree’s Personal Secretary, New Earswick property manager, and self-defined ‘Jack of all Trades’ Gulielma Harlock (1863–1941) charged with researching similar venues (1911 Census entry, Harlock). As part of this process Harlock made contact with her equivalent at Clarks of Street, where the Quaker shoemakers had created an early example of a community hall – the Crispin Hall – in 1885. In a lengthy, four-page reply to her enquiry, the challenges, and considerations of designing, supplying, and running such industrial community venues were laid out in detail; the author envied Rowntree ‘being able to plan things afresh’, ‘for there are many things I would do differently if we had them to do over again’ (BI/NE/21/2a). There was a growing body of experience and expertise amidst this industrialist network that far exceeded well-known industrial leaders, and spanned female and male employees.
Considerable investment was made in the Folk Hall. New Earswick Estate Annual Statistics, 1905–1917 records that the construction of the building and provision of recreational equipment cost 3888 pounds. A useful comparative figure is provided by the cost of fourteen cottages built in the same year the hall opened, at 5061 (BI/NE21/1). One clear difference between the Clark’s model Harlock had researched and the final Folk Hall design could be found in its theatrical set-up. At Clark’s ‘theatricals are not allowed’, at New Earswick’s new venue they were planned for, provided for, and showcased to journalists (BI/NE21/2a). Press accounts drew attention to the stage in the main hall, equipped with curtain, trap, and dressing room (Sheffield Evening Telegraph, 28 March 1907: 4). The resulting design is reminiscent of Gladstone Hall at Port Sunlight. ‘Dramatic Entertainments’ feature as a regular item in New Earswick Village Council Minutes from 1910, records that offer insight into the day-to-day concerns and logistics of village life and provide an interesting social history of both quotidian existence and exceptional events. Records of meetings from the early twentieth century identify theatre as one of a range of recreational activities offered to ensure villagers’ ‘enjoyment of full and healthy lives’. As with the fellow Quaker-driven business operation at Cadbury’s, there is no sense captured in writing that theatre prompted greater anxiety than gardening or cricket: the minutes heading column from a March 1911 meeting reads ‘Lawn Mower’, followed directly by ‘Fairy Play’ (BI/NEVCM/March 20 1911). Theatre was as an accepted part of regular village life as the upkeep of communal lawns; indeed it is safe to say that during the first two decades of the twentieth century, billiards and the cricket team prompted far greater discussion, consternation, and disagreement than the village’s dramatic activity.
The first references to theatre in the council minutes position it as part of the social and educational sub-committee remit, clearly locating the ‘two short dramatic pieces in preparation under the direction of Mrs Sorensen’ within the village’s wider recreational management (BI/NEVCM/11 October 1910). Bee (Beatrice Drew, nee Arundel, 1872–1968) and Carl (Wilfred, 1872–1948) Sorensen lived at White Rose Farm (now The Garth), the farm that supplied milk for the Cocoa Works. Their daughter, Beatrice Anne, born in 1913 (–1937), married Julian Rowntree, one of Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s four sons. The Sorensens were prominent figures in village life and York’s Quaker community. They were comfortably off. The 1911 census entry sees them both in their late thirties, two years into their marriage, with a domestic servant and two dairy maids. Carl Sorensen was also Chair of New Earswick Village Council at the same time Bee was staging theatre at the Folk Hall. Theatre was at the core of the lives of senior village representatives. Bee Sorensen’s production of two short pieces was followed by a children’s fairy play over the Christmas period of 1910 (BI/NEVCM/19 December 1910). These must have been well received, as from 1912 a dramatic sub-committee was put in place, comprised of seven members, four women and three men, including the village vicar, to manage Folk Hall theatrical productions (BI/NEVCM/8 November 1912; 5 June 1914). A series of performances followed, each making a financial contribution to the Folk Hall’s running costs, with the balance sheet and accounts of the 1912/1913 season recording net income of four pounds and sixteen shillings (JRF/4/1/9/8/8/5; BI/NEVCM/15 December 1913). Unlike other recreational pursuits, village theatre was not a subsidised activity, it was a net contributor to the community’s finances.
Following a failed attempt to form a village dramatic society in the autumn of 1912, in the summer of 1914, New Earswick’s village council were presented with a letter signed by over thirty residents re-petitioning for a theatrical group to be formed (BI/NEVCM/8 December 1912; 20 July 1914). It is clear that recreational management in industrial communities favoured a bureaucracy-heavy approach, with the nature of this request suggesting a desire for greater, more representative control over the community’s theatre by the community. To some extent, this was achieved through the trust agreeing and suspending the council sub-group, but it would be naïve to assume that theatre was any less monitored and governed in this new model (BI/NEVCM/20 July 1914). Recreational provision was a space for practical applications of Joseph Rowntree’s primary intentions, articulated in his 1904 Founder’s Memorandum that, ‘I should regret if there were anything in the organisation of these village communities that should interfere with the growth of the right spirit of citizenship […] I do not want to establish communities bearing the stamp of charity but rather of rightly ordered and self-governing communities – self-governing, that is, within the broad limits laid down by the Trust. (BI/NEVCM, 5 September 1904; BI/RFAM/JR/8/1/1). Connections with the factory community are also clear in this phase of village drama. Irene Mockett (1895–1979) was secretary to the dramatic society and a manager at Rowntree’s in a role that appears to have been equivalent of a Cadbury’s Forewoman (1939 register; Borthwick 1922–1930 records). By the late 1920s, theatre in the village flourished, with the dramatic society producing seasons of work and running a fortnight summer school at the Folk Hall, with actor, pageant director, male impersonator, and playwright Gwen Lally (1882–1963) as lead tutor, offering classes in elocution, prop-making, costume, play-design, and casting (Yorkshire Post, 10 August 1927: 12).
New Earswick village theatre remained a site of increasing development and investment. The souvenir programme produced for the opening of a Folk Hall extension in 1935 celebrated the size of the new facility, with its capacity of over 400 spectators and ‘stage of generous size having full lighting equipment of the most up-to-date type, proper stage-curtain equipment, an orchestra well, dressing rooms on either side of the stage, and under the stage a large basement providing ample storage for scenery etc’. Again, it is clear that staging theatre had been at the core of the design. The programme goes on to note that ‘provision for dramatic performances in a hall of this size creates a difficulty and the present compromise was only decided upon after consultation with theatrical experts’ (BI/NE2/1f). As this activity continued in Rowntree’s village, dramatic recreational provision was also in place in the factory further up the Haxby Road.
Drama at the Cocoa Works
As the celebrated appointment of Brynhild Benson might suggest, the socially progressive thinking that lay behind the creation of New Earswick village also drove management and day-to-day operations at Rowntree’s factory. Like the Cadburys, the Rowntree family came from long, established Quaker heritage, and social responsibility, business ethics, and a disapproval of accumulating excess capital guided the firm’s operations. Employee welfare was a key business concern embedded in the running of the factory, not activity that ran in parallel alongside it. Staff numbers rose rapidly at the York manufactory during the fin de siècle, from less than 100 in 1880, to over 4,000 in 1910 and over 6,000 by 1920 (Haxby Road Historic Building Report). Under the leadership of Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, an eight-hour day was introduced in 1896, a full-time factory doctor employed from 1904, a pension scheme started in 1906, and a five-day working week introduced in 1919 (Rowntree Society, 2016: 17–18). The first edition of the in-house Cocoa Works Magazine appeared in 1902, with the publication serving similar community creation and people management functions to Progress and Bournville Works Magazine (which it predated by several months). The factory’s dramatic society history predates the village’s. From 1912, the theatre group identified interchangeably as the Cocoa Works Dramatic Society and the Rowntree Players, performed onsite in the factory, supported by the firm’s recreational schemes, and included in its annual report on education. By 1926 its use in the factory was the subject of national commentary, with the year’s government report on The Drama in Adult Education recording that ‘the welfare scheme of Messrs Rowntree and Co. has a dramatic section’ (117). A listing in The Amateur Dramatic Year Book and Community Theatre Handbook records that society membership was restricted to Rowntree employees, with the factory’s lecture theatre doubling as a performance space and referred to as the ‘factory theatre’ (Bishop, Reference Bishop1928: 154). As the years passed, their productions became increasingly outward facing, with a repertoire familiar from other industrial amateur repertoires (including Port Sunlight and Bournville), but distinguished by annual, large-scale Christmas pantomimes.
The 1920s marked the heyday of dramatic activity at Rowntree’s factory. In 1925, the society joined forces with York Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society, the York Everyman Theatre, and the York Settlement Community Players to revive the pageant Drake, a piece originally created by pageant master Louis Napoleon Parker (who we will meet properly in Chapter 4). Seven performances were staged in the city’s museum gardens: this was high profile showcasing of the firm’s theatre that attracted the attention of the fashionable, national press (Westminster Gazette, 14 July 1925: 4). During the following year, the factory players took part in the National Festival of Community Drama, organised by the British Drama League, making it through to the regional final at Leeds Little Theatre in December (Ridge: 165). When drama at Rowntree’s is thought-through as part of the firm’s careful brand management and recreational governance, it is clear that it was positioned as an approved activity. Factory theatre was not just tolerated, it was considered an appropriate mechanism for showcasing the company and promoting its commitment to education, recreation, and wellbeing, dynamics materialised in the building and opening of the Joseph Rowntree Hall (later known as the Joseph Rowntree Theatre) in 1935. At a cost of 12,000 pounds, the build realised the ongoing aim to provide ‘a hall which may be a fitting centre for those recreational and educational activities which make for a full and happy life’ (Rowntree Trust Website). Rowntree’s new theatre featured simple architecture, a warm colour scheme, and hidden lighting, designed to give an intimate and welcoming atmosphere to the 450 seat auditorium and to focus the audience’s attention on the stage. Equipped with up-to-date acoustics, lighting and heating systems, space for a sixteen-piece orchestra, and a magnificent, curved cyclorama, this production space was created to stage a business and its people and was used for meetings, conferences, and theatre. It became the home of the Rowntree Players productions. In three decades, across factory and village, Rowntree’s had constructed two venues bespoke designed and created for performance.
By 1935, Seebohm Rowntree’s investment in theatre exceeded the confines of the factory and village estates. In the previous year, he had co-led a group of prominent citizens who took a lease on York’s Theatre Royal to prevent its closure. Together they established a Citizens’ Theatre – a business model designed to offer performances by the ‘best touring companies available’ – and a resident repertory company; an early model of the producing and receiving house. Publicity surrounding the initiative made it clear that the leaseholders were not interested in the theatre as a profit-making opportunity, they saw their involvement and financial contributions as ‘important public service’. ‘Mr Seebohm Rowntree […] particularly feels that his employees should not be without a theatre’ recorded one newspaper article (The Observer, 19 August 1934: 11). Then and now, Rowntree’s industrial and social experiment attracted less press, popular and academic attention than either Port Sunlight or Bournville. New Earswick is absent from, or a footnote in, many studies of model villages and the later garden city movement that spend considerable time discussing Lever and the Cadburys, Port Sunlight and Bournville (see Fishman, Reference Fishman1982 and Beevers, Reference Beevers1988 for examples of this). At the York factory and village models of theatre as healthy recreation, public service, and education were carved out, models that intersected with, contributed to, and influenced the making and funding of theatre in other industrial spaces. They are an important part of these histories.
The Cadburys and Rowntrees were national colleagues and competitors, professionally and personally networked through organisations, the Society of Friends, and family connections (including marriages). Several members of the Cadbury family attended the well-known Quaker school The Mount, in York, and personal correspondence indicates social and business contact between the two prominent families at the time (BI). George Cadbury had served his apprenticeship under Joseph Rowntree senior (1801–1859), when the business was still located in central York. Multiple, often intersecting, religious, political, masonic, and professional networks connected Britain’s leading industrialists, with the industrial communities they created revealing shared motivations and experiments, distinct aims and objectives, and their parallel careers in the fields of politics, education, and sociology. The story of British industrial communities told through these five case study sites is one of shift and change, with the cultural offer to workers and residents moving from second-phase of developments to planning priorities. Tracing the story of theatrical provision in these spaces tells a story of the role of culture in British industrial history and industrial relations, reflecting W. L. George’s 1909 statement that ‘we have at last begun to look upon the worker as something more than a dividend-earning machine’ (1). In these spaces, staff work and play were sites of investment, and while governance and restrictions around culture were firmly in place, there was a gradual shift from late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century models of paternalistic industrialism towards increasingly reciprocal models rooted in an understanding that welfare, productivity, and profit were interconnected. Fuelled by the social reform agenda of New Liberalism, and progressive Quaker reform, Cadbury’s activity at Bournville can be located within this wider group of business thinkers who shared core convictions that recreational, educational, and health provision was not a philanthropic act but a fundamental part of complex, religiously informed commercial strategy (Packer, Reference Packer2003; Chance, Reference Chance2017: 16). The significance of balancing of work and play for the sake of business, the role of delivered recreation as part of that balancing, and the promotional potential of recreational activity are clear in Lever, Rowntree, and Cadbury’s business records and in the publications and events they produced for internal and external audiences. For all three, play was work, work was play, and recreation was serious business that required investment in material and human resources. The range of extant and lost performance spaces in these industrial communities capture a sense of the scale, spectacle, and significance of performance and the role of theatre in the business dynamics industrialists created and were economically dependent on. Returning to Cadbury’s Birmingham headquarters, the final section of this chapter explores how theatre was fostered, resourced, and delivered at Bournville, and its significance in the creation and promotion of the firm’s key people management construct, the Bournville Spirit.
Bournville’s Spirit: Industrial Community and Theatre at Cadbury
The ‘Bournville Spirit’ editorial in Bournville Works Magazine’s 1902 inaugural issue was co-authored by in-house journalists, and joint editors, John Henry Whitehouse (1873–1955) and Clarkson Booth (1846–1915). Whitehouse left Cadbury in 1903, having juggled three separate professional roles that signal his position at the very heart of the firm: magazine editor; boys’ club manager; and confidential clerk. That the remaining editor, Clarkson Booth, was to become central to theatre and performance at Bournville is no coincidence. Like Whitehouse, Booth held more than one role at the firm. He was also responsible for the Visitors’ Department – a site of strategic investment that was entangled with the firm’s innovative use of performance and spectacle. The significance of visitors to the factory was understood at Cadbury’s headquarters, and a large proportion of the journalists who produced accounts of Bournville had been hosted by the factory at one of their regular press days that brought reporters to the estate by train, where they were fed, greeted by senior members of staff, and taken on organised tours that focused primarily on the factory but often included areas of the village (see Graham, Reference Graham1915; The Sphere, 6 October 1906: 8, for examples). Illustrated guides to the factory containing key facts and figures about production, employees and villagers were published in-house and distributed to journalists and other visitors to ensure – as far as possible – the circulation of accurate information and a focus on areas the firm favoured. Representatives from the press were not the only professional visitors entertained in this way. During the first decades of the twentieth-century, Bournville’s factory buildings, grounds, and village were the sites of visits by key figures involved in town planning, policymaking, and health. Individual researchers, groups of delegates from academic and professional conferences that numbered into the thousands, politicians, civic leaders, and specialist groups visited the Cadbury’s estate. Meticulous planning was in place around these events, work that was also the remit of Booth’s Visitors’ Department.
The first decade of the twentieth century saw a huge and welcomed increase in the numbers of visitors to the Bournville factory, visualised in a striking early infographic created by the firm in 1931 (Figure 2). Further detail of this growth is offered by Iola Williams’s history of Cadbury’s, where he records that Bournville’s first visitors’ book includes around 40 pages of signatures for the twenty years between 1881 and 1901, and 130 for the following six years (1931: 90). The Visitors’ Department had an immediate impact: in just the first year of existence its staff organised site tours for 4,000 people (1931: 89–90). This remit of showcasing Bournville to guests linked Booth and his team with theatre and performance, staff were trained in the art of the guided tour, and theatrical events were often included at the larger occasions they managed. Investment in the Visitors’ Department continued throughout economic downturns, the legacies of the First World War, and changes in factory production; this was a recognised and significant area of organisational activity that positions Bournville as a space that was watched, and watching was not only encouraged, but placed at the heart of the operation. Cadbury’s was a business model that hinged on audiences. A firm that deliberately staged materialisations, and embodiments of the Bournville Spirit through its workers working and playing against the backdrop of the factory site. All its theatre took place within this wider context. At the turn of the twentieth century, Bournville’s Spirit was a complex essence that blended the industrial with the pastoral, work with play, and business objectives with factory community needs. While Cadbury’s robust spiritual and ethical core continued to propel and steer business activity, this was gradually entwined with a more marketable and inclusive suite of physical and material systems and resources: a manifestation of George Cadbury Junior’s statement that ‘only those industries can be recognized as legitimate which perform some public service’ (Cadbury, Reference Cadbury1926: 3). Over the first decades of the twentieth century, regular staff gatherings were organised that sat alongside religious meetings and they often included theatre; positioning performance at the heart of the company’s community-building activities. In the Bournville Spirit Cadbury’s ethical business ethos and practical frameworks for the firm’s organisational structure and people management can be discovered and key to these were recreational provision, an emphatic focus on the importance of creativity, education, and play in day-to-day working life, and the fostering and rewarding of the mode of participation bred by and through a Bournville Spirit that was closely entwined with, and historically specific to, recreation during the early decades of Bournville.
Figure 2 ‘Our Visitors’
Managing Recreation and Theatre at Bournville
Entertainments at the Bournville factory were the end results of a complex, well-funded set of systems and organisational structures that were continually adapted and expanded to increase recreational provision. Business structures impacted the ways theatre, and other recreational and educational activities intersected, and how they were prioritised, managed, and funded. Cadbury’s theatre was facilitated by committees, and without understanding this wide industrial context we can reach only a partial history of the factory’s performance. From 1902, recreation was governed by separate Girls’ and Men’s Works Committees, supported by a set of sub-committees. These bodies were responsible for day-to-day management of employee health and welfare, professional behaviours, and disciplinary procedures, working conditions, wages, catering, and recreation (CAHS/MWCM/1902). Each was chaired by forewomen and foremen, and included representatives from the wider staff body. All members were appointed by the Cadbury Board. In 1905, the status of the two works committees was raised to management level, indicating the growing organisational importance of the areas they represented. The year 1918 saw these structures shift, in part to accommodate the outcomes of the 1917 Whitley Report, which recommended joint industrial councils as standard practice in a new era of industrial relations that was increasingly trade unionised. Women’s and Men’s Works Councils were formed, new groups that adapted and extended the earlier model and formed part of a structure of shop and group committees agreed upon through a year-long consultation period between staff and management (Rogers, Reference Rogers1931: 67). Membership of these groups was more representative. Of the sixteen members of each, eight were elected representatives from across departments. The two new councils continued to co-ordinate and recommend on matters around discipline, health, and recreation, within a new structure that positioned their activity as part of a four-layered administrative process: a Recreation and Welfare Sub Committee was formed that reported to the Women’s and Men’s Works Councils, which in turn reported and recommended to a joint Works Council that was charged with making recommendations to Cadbury’s Board, the Committee of Management; a body that retained all final decision-making power (CAHS/BWWCM/5 May 1919).
Minutes from all four of these factory councils document the extensive amount of time and resources committed to Cadbury’s recreational provision; revealing that discussions about recreation were the key content of most meetings, and detailing the rigorous systems of checks and recommendations around the budgeting and form of factory extra-work activities. Looking solely at these records, it would be feasible to conclude that Bournville’s recreational activity was delivered through a top-down model, with strict controls over access and activity. But closer reading of them, in line with other documents and minutes on other areas, indicates that that was not the case. Employee thinking about, and engagement with, recreation was allowed, indeed encouraged. Independent thought was understood to be a vital element of wellbeing and recreational activities were identified as ways to foster creative, independent ways of thinking that aligned with those at the heart of Quaker practice. Theatrical activity took place in a space between rules and creativity, governed recreation and encouraged play. This space was not stable, and I have drawn no false lines in this study to ‘tidy’ the diverse events and activities I have discovered. Instead, I have both accepted and embraced the complexity of how and where theatrical activity occurred and functioned, and positioned it as largely separate from the construct of rational recreation which has been widely discussed as a driver of nineteenth-century social reformation through leisure (see Bailey, 2006; Cunningham, Reference Cunningham2016; Holt, Reference Holt1990). Cadbury’s provision started from the same question: ‘the problem of giving the worker in industry a larger share of leisure is being succeeded by the problem of the utilisation of that leisure’, opened The Factory and Recreation published by the firm in 1925, as a follow-up to the 1924 International Labour Conference focus on how to ‘ensure profitable utilisation of leisure’ across secondary and tertiary sector employers (3). The agency that individuals and groups held against such rationalising agendas is a question that has been raised by Brad Beaven, amongst others. Beaven argues that although the mid- to late-Victorian period can be characterised as one in which ‘from the socialists to the Salvationists, a common strand of thinking materialised which believed that only through aggressive forms of rational recreation, taken to the heart of working-class communities, could the modern citizen be fostered’, working men ‘showed a remarkable propensity to manipulate the entertainment offered to coincide with their own cultural preferences’ (2005: 39–40). By the early decades of the twentieth century at Bournville less of this style of manipulation was required by the women and men who worked for the company; participation in the shaping of their recreational activity was encouraged and their own needs and preferences were factored in, albeit with limitations. Residual elements of rational recreation are identifiable at Cadbury in the early 1900s, and these will be discussed throughout this study, but in general, the experience of re-creativity at Bournville, and the distinctive set of political, industrial and religious ideas and ideals it emerged from, were a significant modification of earlier approaches and practices.
Between 1900 and 1935 Cadbury’s was home to a large, influential senior staff sub-group – drawn from Staff A, Staff B, Forewomen A, and Forewomen B – who were closely involved with Bournville’s theatrical production and included an increasing number of women. Lists published in the works magazines record that in 1904 all twenty-seven Staff A and Staff B members were men. A further ninety-two members of staff were employed as Foremen, alongside sixty-seven Forewomen (Bournville Works Magazine, February 1904: 112–113). By 1921, sixteen women employees had been appointed or promoted to Staff A and Staff B positions, and a further seventy-seven were Forewomen. Their male counterparts numbered eighty-four at Staff A and B level, and one hundred and forty-four Foremen (B.W.M., January 1921: 4–5). Reflecting the changing demands of early twentieth-century industry, and the prioritisation of visual culture, advertising, and staff education and wellbeing at the factory, many of these senior figures had been deliberately hired for their creative skill sets in the visual arts, marketing and journalism, or backgrounds in education. Others were rewarded with promotion in recognition of their strong commitment to Cadbury’s recreational values and work ethic. These senior employees were key to the day-to-day running of Cadbury’s and the creation and delivery of its ethos around health and wellbeing, and there are numerous crossovers between the lists of senior staff published annually in the works magazine and those of Bournville’s entertainment casts. Senior and mid-management roles at Cadbury’s came with high expectations. It was anticipated that senior employees would participate in the recreational activities the firm facilitated, as well as adhering to the clear regulations that were set out around professional behaviour and appearance. The printed codes of conduct issued to new senior staff delineated the day-to-day professional performance required of them and made it clear that their roles positioned them as embodiments of Cadbury’s approaches to work and play. The centrality of this group of employees to Cadbury’s performance means that representatives from it will feature regularly throughout the following chapters. Those who will make the most regular appearances are: Lottie (Charlotte) Allen (1870–1946), an accountant and forewoman who worked in the company’s finance and wages department and sat on the Girls’ Works Committee; Clarkson Booth, editor of the works magazine and a Foreman based in the Visitors’ Department, whose name was ‘well remembered by many visitors as the name of the Firm’ (B.W.M., December 1913: 397); Harry Northway Bradbear (1882–1917), an in-house artist and draughtsman based in Cadbury’s advertising department; Arthur Knapp (1881–1939), Cadbury’s leading research chemist and a well-known scientific author; Walter Pedley Hunt (1874–1957), a foreman in the engineering department; Sophia Pumphrey (1866–1923), forewoman, professional artist and long-term chair of the Girls’ Works Committee and Florence Mary Showell (1877–1961), a Birmingham Council school teacher turned factory forewoman, member of many of Bournville’s entertainment committees and long-term Chair of the company’s dramatic society.
By the mid-1920s, the first and second generations of staff appointed to senior roles at Bournville had been iconised as embodiments of the firm’s Golden Age. Amidst the fulsome programme of activities that marked the factory’s 1927 bi-centenary a series of articles – ‘In the Beginning’ – was published throughout the year in the works magazine. Much of the content was given over to staff profiles from these senior groups (including some from amongst the employees listed above), a focus that echoed the regular publication of sets of head and shoulder silhouettes of Bournville’s managers in the works magazine. In this way Staffs A and B, Forewomen and Foremen, became key players in the creation of Bournville’s image and of the community spirit that came to define it, both in-house and externally. Yet, histories of early twentieth-century Cadbury have been dominated by the family: the figures of George, Richard, George Jr (1878–1954), Edward, William (1867–1957), Louis Barrow and, to a lesser extent, Elizabeth (1858–1951) and Dorothy (1892–1987) Cadbury. Since Iola Williams’s Reference Williams1931 study relatively little attention has been paid to the influential group of female and male in-factory personalities who were positioned at the operational and reputational heart of the company at the time. Those women and men who ran the day-to-day operations and contributed heavily to commercial strategy. With no intention of belittling the Cadbury family’s labour and management – their progressive thinking and practical action is a subject that has rightly been an object of study – the examples of performance considered over the following chapters increase the narratives through which Cadbury’s history circulates, and dilute the image of Bournville as a site of paternalistic capitalism governed and delivered by a very small group of public-facing individuals, one that has to some extent obscured the carefully designed, multi-layered company management structure put in place as the firm expanded. Employees were the creators, performers, and promoters of both Cadbury’s theatre and the Bournville cocoa and chocolate business, and it is with one such powerful image of a factory employee at work and at play that Chapter 2’s exploration of theatre in the factory begins.
