Cadbury’s represents the heyday of British industrialism and remains a familiar global brand. Guided by Quaker Capitalism, employees at Cadbury’s Bournville factory took part in recreational and educational activities. In the first decades of the twentieth century sports, leisure, and entertainment were part of day-to-day Cadbury’s life. Creativity flourished. Amidst this culture of Work and Play, an astonishing amount of factory theatre was staged involving tens of thousands of Cadbury’s employees. Home-grown Bournville casts and audiences were supplemented by performers, civic leaders, playwrights, academics, town planners, and celebrities, interweaving Birmingham’s famous Quaker industrialists with the city’s theatre culture, visual artists, wider, national entertainment cultures, and ground-breaking approaches to mental and physical health and education. Theatre in the Chocolate Factory uncovers stories of Bournville’s theatre and the employees who made it, exploring industrial performance and positioning theatre and creativity at the heart of Cadbury’s operation.

Fresh air and green spaces were key to the development of Cadbury’s company image, and to the marketing of their cocoa and chocolate products. The creation of Bournville’s industrial pastoral landscape – widely marketed as the Factory in the Garden – was grounded in the firm’s recreational activities and theatrical performances. Outdoor performance was a key ingredient in this imagery, and a significant amount of theatrical activity was staged on the factory’s recreation grounds, including masques, Shakespeare and Robin Hood plays and Ancient Greek tragedies. Focusing on Cadbury’s summer works party performances, Chapter 3 considers performances that attracted audiences of between 5000 and 6000, who were offered rich, lengthy entertainment programmes that lasted up to eight hours, and brought together fairground side-shows, burlesques, sports, tableaux vivants, dances, song, brass bands, appearances from well-known professional performers, plays, maypole dancing, and aquatic spectacles.

Cadbury’s represents the heyday of British industrialism and remains a familiar global brand. Guided by Quaker Capitalism, employees at Cadbury’s Bournville factory took part in recreational and educational activities. In the first decades of the twentieth century sports, leisure, and entertainment were part of day-to-day Cadbury’s life. Creativity flourished. Amidst this culture of Work and Play, an astonishing amount of factory theatre was staged involving tens of thousands of Cadbury’s employees. Home-grown Bournville casts and audiences were supplemented by performers, civic leaders, playwrights, academics, town planners, and celebrities, interweaving Birmingham’s famous Quaker industrialists with the city’s theatre culture, visual artists, wider, national entertainment cultures, and ground-breaking approaches to mental and physical health and education. Theatre in the Chocolate Factory uncovers stories of Bournville’s theatre and the employees who made it, exploring industrial performance and positioning theatre and creativity at the heart of Cadbury’s operation.

In many ways, the entire Cadbury’s enterprise was rooted in a commitment to the ongoing education and development of all staff. Education programmes created and sponsored by the firm sought to do more than secure accrual of knowledge, and that recreational activities that foregrounded learning new skills were understood to be as important as the content of more formal educational curricula. Both were viewed as self-development opportunities. As 1926’s Work and Play asserted, ‘the worker acquires in himself sharpened faculty and fuller capacities derived from his experience [in participating] in those activities, and a larger knowledge of men and affairs’. Chapter 6 details the range of educational opportunities on offer to employees, alongside those that the firm supported that were not exclusively for their own staff – including the Day Continuation Schools and Fircroft and Woodbrooke Colleges, and considers the use of drama as an innovative pedagogic tool at Bournville and performances staged for, and as, learning.

In the first chapter, I open with an exploration of the Bournville Spirit, an energy created in house that manifested Cadbury’s core values and ambitions as both employer and manufacturer, and move on to trace synergies and differences between the firm’s factory site and other earlier and contemporaneous industrial communities, with a specific focus on the sites’ leisure provision and wider cultural offers. Brief considerations of earlier models – including New Lanark, Saltaire, and Bromborough Pool – are followed by more detailed explorations of Lever Brothers Wirral-based Port Sunlight factory, and Cadbury’s fellow cocoa and confectionery manufacturer and Quaker business operation, Rowntree’s, in York. Through these comparative industrial communities, the chapter acknowledges the wider contexts and industrial networks Bournville was located within and presents a case for the distinctiveness of Cadbury’s enterprise.

In Chapter 2, we move inside the Bournville factory. As Cadbury’s staff numbers grew over the first three decades of the twentieth century, several indoor performance spaces were created across the estate to accommodate the increasing number of entertainments created and staged in-house. These spaces varied enormously, from purpose-built parts of major factory expansions and developments, to found spaces that were temporarily re-appropriated for performance. Framed by a range of performance case studies, the chapter identifies the complexity of Cadbury’s indoor performance and explores the entwined recreational, promotional, and business functions theatrical activity served at the firm’s Bournville headquarters.

From 1908 to 1914, each summer party included a large-scale outdoor play, and these productions are considered in Chapter 4. Performed by casts of between 80 and 150 employees, between 1911 and 1914 these plays were written and produced by local theatrical personality John Drinkwater (1882–1937). Alongside other parties, charity occasions, and wartime entertainments that took place in the grounds, these performances demanded huge investments of time and money. What is clear is that they also offered a return, and these two chapters explores how outdoor theatrical events worked for and at Bournville and the ways in which they told stories about Cadbury’s and the Cadbury’s factory to in-house and external audiences.

Having explored the extensive amount of high-profile, large-scale theatrical activity at Bournville that took place before the factory’s first dramatic society was established in 1912, Chapter 5’s focus is the emergence of this group, its key players, and the connections between the society, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and the city’s wider cultural networks. Cadbury’s first recreational theatrical society proved a useful resource for the firm, and its repertoire, personnel, wartime activity, and programmed appearances at Bournville functions are explored alongside the challenges faced by leaders and members.