Bitter Chocolate by Carol Off

was the eve of the libel trial they hoped would shut theTories up, once and for all. The boycott, they assumed, would strengthen their case against the newspaper.
    The trial began on November 29, 1909, and it soon became as much a test of Cadbury’s ethics as defamation by the
Standard
. In his book
Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business
, Lowell Satre documents an extraordinary display of legal theatrics. It was a dramatic contest between two of the most accomplished and brilliant lawyers of the time: Edward Carson representing the
Standard
, and Rufus Isaacs representing Cadbury Brothers Limited.
    What emerged during six days of testimony and florid oratory from the two barristers was a portrait of a highly principled company brought to moral paralysis for a decade in a genuine confusion of ethics and self-interest. Yes, the company ultimately launched a boycott against São Tomé cocoa—but that couldn’t excuse ten years of dithering. William Cadbury could offer few explanations for all the procrastination, except to blame the Foreign Office. He’d been following instructions from important men at Whitehall and he thought he’d been behaving in the national interest. But in the end, the Foreign Office hung him out to dry.
    Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, when called to testify, could shed no light on any such arrangement. Much to the astonished chagrin of the Cadburys, Grey claimed he could hardly remember any meetings with the chocolate companies and could offer no explanation as to why Cadbury Brothers had failed to boycott São Tomé years earlier. The Foreign Secretary had been called as
their
star witness.
    In the end, the Cadburys had to fall back on their longstanding reputation for fairness and high moral principles over many years of business dealings. In the closing moments of the trial, it seemed that this might be enough. The judge’s instructions to the jury urged that, should they find in favour of the plaintiff—that the
Standard
had indeed libelled the chocolate-makers—theyshould award “sufficiently substantial damages.” The jury did rule in Cadbury’s favour. But the victory was bittersweet. The jurymen awarded damages of “one farthing.”

    Henry Nevinson continued to investigate and to rail against the chocolate companies in a campaign that was more advocacy than journalism. In his diary for June 3, 1910, Nevinson recorded a conversation with two cocoa traders who seemed to confirm that Cadbury Brothers had cynically avoided any boycott of the Portuguese until they were satisfied that Gold Coast plantations were ready to meet their needs for raw product. He also wrote that the Fry company seemed to have finalized a huge contract for São Tomé cocoa “the very day before the boycott was announced & continued to draw on it for many months.” During the trial, Cadbury’s principal buyer admitted under cross-examination that it would have been “difficult” and “awkward” to obtain beans from anywhere else before 1909, but it was still possible, if one wanted to pay a premium. And that was the fundamental problem: The bottom line in business was, as always, the bottom line.
    A number of contemporary scholars, including Satre, have concluded that it was a lack of alternative bean sources and not skepticism over Nevinson’s report that made the Cadburys delay action for so long. The appalling corollary is that the Quaker cocoa companies of Britain dragged their feet and dodged the issue for nine years before they finally stopped using slave cocoa.
    Despite worldwide condemnation of slavery, and laws against it, as many as eight million Africans died from overwork or were slaughtered by their masters in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Uncalculated numbers perished on the Portuguese islands while the Cadburys temporized and stalled. Even after the British companies