Southam & Long Itchington

[Noel]

More strangely is the cement at that time was about $10aud a bag where for half that now is the same price.

Labour costs have gone up, fuel costs for the kilns have gone up, transport costs have gone up...

[david_g]

if you're interested there is some rather nice sack action in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE2a8VrrSwU

It shows the transport of cocoa from Avonmouth (loaded off ship into a coaster) to Cadbury''s at Bournville. Out into the Severn and in at Sharpness, up the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal to Gloucester docks, picking up a narrowboat on the way; unloading overside into a narrowboat (you can see why containerisation caught on); narrowboat up the river to Worcester with shots of motor narrowboats and the tug with a train of horseboats behind, towing off the timberheads which were fitted for this purpose to these boats; up the canal to Bournville - nice to see that when they stopped for tea they were drinking out of china cups and saucers - and unloading at Bournville.

There are some brief shots of trains too, a double headed express on the Midland seen from the five mile and steam from one of the Cadbury's locos, unfortunately the loco is behind the fence. Worth a look and it will only waste 13 minutes of your life

[Alan Turner]

if you're interested there is some rather nice sack action in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE2a8VrrSwU

It shows the transport of cocoa from Avonmouth (loaded off ship into a coaster) to Cadbury''s at Bournville. Out into the Severn and in at Sharpness, up the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal to Gloucester docks, picking up a narrowboat on the way; unloading overside into a narrowboat (you can see why containerisation caught on); narrowboat up the river to Worcester with shots of motor narrowboats and the tug with a train of horseboats behind, towing off the timberheads which were fitted for this purpose to these boats; up the canal to Bournville - nice to see that when they stopped for tea they were drinking out of china cups and saucers - and unloading at Bournville.

There are some brief shots of trains too, a double headed express on the Midland seen from the five mile and steam from one of the Cadbury's locos, unfortunately the loco is behind the fence. Worth a look and it will only waste 13 minutes of your life

How was this more efficient/cost effective than trans-shipping to rail at Bristol?

China cup? - they were proud people, they wouldn't want to be seen drinking from anything else on camera.

regards

Alan

[Noel]

How was this more efficient/cost effective than trans-shipping to rail at Bristol?

Efficient possibly not, but it has to be assumed to be cost effective or Cadbury wouldn't have done it that way. I have recently read an academic paper on the coal trade to south-west England in 1938, which showed that there was a great disparity in costs per ton between coastal shipping and railways for medium to long distance traffic from and to areas served by a near-by port, in favour of shipping. Once the cargo is discharged from the ship, there are costs for the coaster to Gloucester, trans-shipping to the narrow boat and for the trip to Bournville, but these costs relate to hundreds of tons, potentially, on the coaster, and 30+ tons on each narrow boat, so the overall total presumably amounted to a rate per ton lower than the railway charge per ton/mile. The railway might be a bit quicker, but with suitable organisation by the customer, this is probably not relevant for bulk cargos.

Clearly, the further from a suitable port the supplier and/or the customer were, the more the higher costs of land transport influenced the overall costs, with a crossover point at which transport costs to or from the port became too high, but bulk cargos for canal-side industries were the types of traffic which the canals hung onto for longest against railway competition, implying that, if there was no requirement for speed, canals continued to be potentially more economic where land transport costs were absent or negligable, particularly where the necessary infrastructure had been built before the railways became a serious competitor.

[Will L]

if you're interested there is some rather nice sack action in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE2a8VrrSwU

It shows the transport of cocoa from Avonmouth (loaded off ship into a coaster) to Cadbury''s at Bournville. Out into the Severn and in at Sharpness, up the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal to Gloucester docks, picking up a narrowboat on the way; unloading overside into a narrowboat (you can see why containerisation caught on); narrowboat up the river to Worcester with shots of motor narrowboats and the tug with a train of horseboats behind, towing off the timberheads which were fitted for this purpose to these boats; up the canal to Bournville - nice to see that when they stopped for tea they were drinking out of china cups and saucers - and unloading at Bournville.

There are some brief shots of trains too, a double headed express on the Midland seen from the five mile and steam from one of the Cadbury's locos, unfortunately the loco is behind the fence. Worth a look and it will only waste 13 minutes of your life

You do have to wonder just how many barges were needed to carry a whole ship full of cocoa up to Bournville, bearing in mind they all had to go up the 30 locks at Tardebigge on the way. I still find it a surprising they still going by water.

[Noel]

You do have to wonder just how many barges were needed to carry a whole ship full of cocoa up to Bournville

The harvest period for cacao is apparently quite prolonged, and not necessarily the same in every country which grows it. It may be a matter of multiple smaller consignments rather than a whole shipload at one go. It is also possible to source from more than one country; what Cadbury's practice was at the time I have no idea.

[Alan Turner]

You do have to wonder just how many barges were needed to carry a whole ship full of cocoa up to Bournville

The harvest period for cacao is apparently quite prolonged, and not necessarily the same in every country which grows it. It may be a matter of multiple smaller consignments rather than a whole shipload at one go. It is also possible to source from more than one country; what Cadbury's practice was at the time I have no idea.

My understanding is that the majority of it came from Ghana (Gold Coast as it was then - see the bag labels. Or more correctly Gold Coast and Northern Territories).

Cadbury is still big in Ghana and supports farmers through a programme called Cocoa Life (originally Cadbury Cocoa Partnership).

regards

Alan

[Will L]

You do have to wonder just how many barges were needed to carry a whole ship full of cocoa up to Bournville

The harvest period for cacao is apparently quite prolonged, and not necessarily the same in every country which grows it. It may be a matter of multiple smaller consignments rather than a whole shipload at one go. It is also possible to source from more than one country; what Cadbury's practice was at the time I have no idea.

You missed the operative element Noel, the fact that the rout contains the Tardebigge flight (the countries longest flight of lock). This is hard enough when all you have is single tour boat, a wife and three pre-teenage children. Apparently we were spotted as we entered the flight and after about 20 locks a passing lock keeper mentioned that they had wondered how we would get on but we were doing fine.

[Noel]

You missed the operative element Noel, the fact that the rout contains the Tardebigge flight (the countries longest flight of lock).

No, I understood the point, Will. I haven't been up or down that flight, but I have worked a boat through locks, and watched boats on the Caen Hill flight. I simply don't see it as relevant. All traffic on that line had to work up and down those locks, which takes time (and effort), but working boatmen would have been used to that, and, so far as I understand canal legislation, locks didn't normally affect freight rates directly [although I am aware of one penurious canal which had charges for passing a lock]. As I suggested earlier, time probably wasn't a primary consideration, and the carrying costs, whatever they were, were presumably acceptable to Cadbury or they would have found an alternative.

The discussion made me curious about Cadbury involvement with inland waterways, and a search turned up http://www.workingboats.com/cadbury.htm, so it was a long-standing practice. The business of the S&CCC passed to the BTC in 1948, and FMC in 1949, but there is a reference on the site to Cadbury using another carrier in 1959. There are only seven motors in the list [which may be incomplete, at least before 1911], so even allowing for possible outside help at busy times, it doesn't look, I think, as though they expected to carry even a full coaster cargo, unless there was temporary storage at Gloucester; too many uncertainties to be sure.

[Hardwicke]

You do have to wonder just how many barges were needed to carry a whole ship full of cocoa up to Bournville

The harvest period for cacao is apparently quite prolonged, and not necessarily the same in every country which grows it. It may be a matter of multiple smaller consignments rather than a whole shipload at one go. It is also possible to source from more than one country; what Cadbury's practice was at the time I have no idea.

I have a friend who makes chocolate from raw beans in Nottingham. I'll ask her what the harvest season is. A lot of hers come from Central America I believe.

[david_g]

I've retrieved my copy of "Working Life on Severn & Canal" by Hugh Conway-Jones (Alan Sutton,1990) to see if it sheds any light on the Cadbury traffic. The book is a compilation of conversations with former working boatmen rather than a history of the economics and logistics of the cargo movements but there are several passages relating to this traffic. I should have a copy of Alan Faulkners short book "Severn & Canal and Cadburys" (Robert Wilson, 1981) somewhere but between various house & boat moves it seems to have disappeared.

In addition to Bournville Cadbury's also had canalside factories at Blackpole on the edge of Worcester on the Worcester & Birmingham canal, Frampton on the Gloucester and Sharpness canal and Knighton on the Shropshire Union Canal about twenty miles north west of Wolverhampton; none of these had a rail connection. The latter two factories produced chocolate crumb from cocoa mass, sugar and milk which was taken to Bournville to produce finished chocolate; the traffic from Knighton to Bournville carried on until 1962; "Chocolate Charlie" Atkins worked this traffic for the last 12 years with the Mendip, now preserved at Ellesmere Port and became a well known canal character, he was interviewed for at least one BBC documentary which sometimes pops up on Youtube. Blackpole seems to have been used for wharehousing and producing packaging.

As well as their own boats Cadburys took a major interest in Severn & Canal from 1923 onwards and George Cadbury became chairman in 1925, there followed a major expansion in the fleet of motor barges & dumb boats for use on the river, tankers for the oil trade which by 1945 reached 310,000 tons and continued to grow thereafter, and canal boats (known as longboats locally rather than the more familiar narrow boats), eight new motor boats were built by Charles Hill of Bristol in 1934-5 which were unusual in that they were wooden bottomed with welded iron sides, other canal boats being built at this time continued to be rivetted.

oak.jpg

Oak, one of the Charles Hill motors after restoration around 1990, I was towing it to Braunston for craning to road it to the National Waterways Museum in Gloucester docks. Its subsequent neglect and decline in the hands of the museum was sad to see.

There was also a push to seek new traffics, among them landing cocoa beans at Avonmouth. There is mention in "Working Life.." of the motor barges loading off ship having to wait until the dockers reached your cargo as "what you wanted was at the bottom of the ship" which suggests they weren't clearing an entire shipoad of beans. My guess would be that large consignments would be wharehoused at Avonmouth and cleared over a period either by water or by rail. The motor barges carried around 160 tons. Increased tonnages of sugar, coming in 500 ton shiploads, were also carried from Sharpness, the boatmen tell stories of pushing a tube into the sacks to let the sugar run out, the hole closing up as the tube was withdrawn.

On transit times, the Avonmouth - Gloucester leg would take a day depending on tides and bridge opening times on the G&S. After transhipment to the longboats the timings are 6 hours up the river, 9 hours Worcester - Tardebigge (remember Will that there are 58 locks from Worcester to the top of Tardebigge, once you start the only significant gap is the five mile through Dunhampstead). Leaving Gloucester in the morning they would get to Birmingham at dinner time the next day. Going down empty was even quicker, three hours to Tardebigge, six and a half hours down the canal (ie. down all the locks) and 3 and a half hours down the river so they would do Birmingham-Gloucester in a day. Horse boats weren't much slower though they would either have to wait for the tug or drop downstream backwards on the current trailing "the pig", a heavy weight dragging on the bottom of the river. If the river was in flood they could also go over straight over the weirs at Diglis & Upper Lode rather than through the river locks.

Eventually the total traffic carried for Cadburys by S&C reached 50,000 tons annually. One reason for Cadburys using canal transport was to keep railway rates low.

There was quite a number of traffic flows involved in all this:

Cocoa beans Avonmouth - Bournville & Blackpole and Blackpole-Bournville
Cocoa mass Bournville - Frampton & Knighton
Sugar Sharpness-Frampton, Bournville & Knighton
Chocolate crumb Frampton & Knighton - Bournville
Packaging Blackpole - Bournville
Timber for making packaging Sharpness - Blackpole
There are no reports of carrying finished chocolate, I imagine the boatmen would have had their share of that, the boats carrying chocolate crumb were popular with local children.

So Cadburys continued to find water transport economical intio the post-war period before all this went over to road.

Eventually we should get back to railways but it has been an interesting diversion.

[Noel]

Thank you for providing this wider view, David.

There are no reports of carrying finished chocolate, I imagine the boatmen would have had their share of that, the boats carrying chocolate crumb were popular with local children.

The grouped railways and BR had contracts to send the final products by rail https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/misc/misc_cad116.htm to local distribution centres for delivery by road. The railways provided the premises and staff for the distribution centres, and did the paperwork. They also provided contract hire motor vans in Cadbury livery to do the road part of the distribution. Canal carriers would not have been in a position to provide those services. The railways provided such distribution services for many other large companies before WW2, many of which continued well into BR days before being replaced by distribution entirely by road.