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Knowing there was little room for his youngest son, Joseph arranged for Henry Isaac to train with family friend’s the Tukes. Henry Isaac by all accounts was a passionate man, he was able to inspire his workers and generated great loyalty, however he was involved in teaching at the adult school, an influential supporter of the Temperance movement and also ran a local newspaper trying to push a more liberal platform in local politics.
Their letters in the CWM offer a fascinating insight into how they experienced life out in the empire, and how they interpreted their experiences for friends back home. In reassessing the history of the York Rowntree factory and its workers, we need to be aware of how, even in this provincial 'city of antiquity', the people of the modern British empire made their presence felt.By February 1912, Rowntree workers were encouraged to imagine themselves at the centre of an industry with a global, rather than merely imperial, jurisdiction: “If the sun never sets on the British empire, we may with even greater justice claim that it never sets on Rowntree’s employees”. Rather than focusing on the intricacies of agricultural methods, however, these accounts offered York readers some insight, from the perspective of white male officials, into the tropical landscapes and socio-cultural contexts of cocoa farming: "I must carry you up into the hills before the sun goes down, and the mosquito comes out of its lair, hungry for your blood, singing its shrill ping-ping music" ( CWM, May 1902). Every sharing bag contains a mixture of five fantastic flavours: blackcurrant, lemon, strawberry, lime, and orange. Rowntree’s however were cautious and quite conservative especially when it came to taking risks or promoting their products. BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed are published by Immediate Media Company Limited under licence from BBC Studios Distribution.
Alice Tabuteau left Rowntree to move to the Transkei with her husband, who held a senior position on the railways. Along with his brother, Joseph, and French confectioner August Claude Gaget, they developed the delicious taste of Rowntree’s ® in 1881. The entire collection, including the jaws of a shark and the body of a baby alligator, was placed on display in the visitors' rooms of the factory dining block. The 'girls' certainly seem to have made an impression on the Nigerian chief: "The Alake spoke of his interest in seeing the various processes the cocoa underwent after leaving Nigeria, and the number of people, mostly girls, engaged in the work, and the cheerful manner in which the work was done".
In February 1904, she described how: “The whites are mostly horrid, but I love the blacks; they are splendid in many ways, especially, as up here, they are not allowed to be served with drink, and therefore are not so demoralised as the Cape blacks”. While more unscrupulous tradesmen would put cheaper, not so nice ingredients into their products the public trusted the Quakers, they stood for honesty and could be believed to only sell quality items. Although grateful, Mr Rowntree immediately establishes intellectual and racial distance from his non-white rescuers. Two such letters took pride of place on the front pages of the January and February editions in 1904. Connections between coloniser and colonised, manufacturer and farmer, were being made, explored, and tested.
One woman, Mrs Alice Tabuteau, featured frequently in the Cocoa Works Magazine in the early 20th century, with news from her new home in South Africa.With visits from West African officials to England, the safety of geographical distance collapsed and York workers came into direct contact with colonial representatives of the cocoa industry. Rowntree were lagging far behind in 1880’s when a French man – Claude Gaget brought to them a fabulous recipe for a fruit pastille that would take the country by storm, transform the Rowntree fortune and enable rapid expansion with the development of a new factory site at Haxby Road. Whether he relayed quite such a positive story back to the Nigerian people is impossible to ascertain.
In January 1904, she wrote of her disappointment upon seeing the local railway station: “a mere shanty compared to our lovely York station”. The steam powered press enabled the extraction of cocoa butter from the cocoa mass, leaving a fuller flavoured cocoa powder that could mix more effectively to make a drink without the need for grating and further processing.
One AV Iredale, arriving in Accra on the Gold Coast on a mission to monitor cocoa production, was transfixed by the "ten lusty Kroo boys like beautiful bronze statues" who rowed his boat. He insists on a photograph of the king, "against his wish", which is reprinted in the April edition of the CWM. Through stories and images in the CWM, displays of 'exotic' objects and the presence of colonial subjects – not to mention the daily arrival of essential ingredients from the colonies – the empire literally 'came home' to York.
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