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.

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.