Another Cadbury brochure published to explain the business of chocolate manufacturing to the general public, based on the notion that the public appetite for geography and economics was as great as the appetite for chocolate. A hundred years have passed since Frank Newbould was commissioned to provide the illustrations - a perfect choice given his expertise in transport and industrial process. Newbould’s cover combines road, rail and maritime traffic into a single composition, enhanced by an elevated viewpoint. Designed to impress with the unstoppable energy of commerce, Newbould has omitted any distracting details to focus on the triumph of mechanisation. There’s a map to show us the global presence of Cadbury, drawing in raw materials from every continent via a network of commercial shipping - what we would now call the mysteries of the supply chain. Export cargoes were nailed into wooden packing cases requiring enormous supplies of raw timber from Russia and Scandinavia, moved by rail to Bourneville to be machined in the company saw mills. Cocoa beans, sugar and hazel nuts were stuffed into sacks, that in turn were lashed into nets to be craned on and off mixed cargo ships. Newbould shows an early stage in the travels of the cocoa bean where local labour loads heavy sacks into small boats that rendezvous out at sea with cargo liners too large to enter the port. A fair weather vision of breezy skies and surf in which hard labour looks effortless.
Equally idyllic is Newbould’s bucolic vision of a canal-side milk processing factory built in a restrained vernacular, barges and narrow-boats serenely chugging by. In a double page illustration across the centre pages, Newbould’s attention turns to the Bourneville factory in an aerial view that attempts to balance the vastness of raw industrial power with the sense of the factory cosily enveloped by the splendour of a verdant English countryside in high summer. To finish, Newbould observes the end of the process when the boxed finished products are loaded on to trains by sack truck and trolley. The facility has all the features of a conventional station minus the passengers. Once again we are invited to admire the scale and complexity of operations thanks to Newbould’s control of colour to create a perfect sense of clarity. Cadbury invested heavily in a wide output of promotional publishing from collectors’ cards and albums to factory guides and brochures like this. Newbould was re-employed in 1927 and dispatched to Trinidad where he made a varied portfolio of location images that featured in Bourneville 1927, Cocoa Story. It can be seen in my post from August 2010.
