In Brief: Beyond Chocolate: Adrian Cadbury, Life, Loss, and Leadership

Reviewed by Thomas Hamm

June 1, 2025

By Patrick Donovan. Unicorn, 2024. 320 pages. $35.95/hardcover; $37.50/eBook.

Most Friends today know about the Quaker roots of the famous Cadbury confectionery company, which just last year celebrated its bicentennial. In 1824, English Quaker and businessman John Cadbury opened a tea, coffee, and chocolate shop in Birmingham. John’s sons George and Richard took over in 1861 and made it the biggest chocolate-manufacturing business in the British Isles. Adrian Cadbury (1929–2015), the subject of this thoughtful biography, was a grandson of George Cadbury.

Adrian joined Cadbury in 1958 at the age of 29, promoted from a trainee to personnel director. Noteworthy is that he never intended to join the family business, but the sudden death of his beloved elder brother, Julian, who had been on track to join made him reconsider. In 1965, Adrian was appointed chairman, a position he retained for the next 24 years until his retirement.

He was technically a Friend all his life but seldom attended meeting. His curriculum vitae—Eton, Cambridge, the Coldstream Guards, director of the Bank of England and IBM, a knighthood in 1977—doubtless leaves many Friends uncomfortable. So why does a biography of this Friend-by-inheritance deserve attention?

Adrian Cadbury’s life is instructive because it shows the ways in which certain Quaker values endured over generations. Even when he headed the multinational corporation Cadbury Schweppes, “he never required a bevy of assistants or other trappings of corporate power.” Decision making “where personal ambitions and egos were sacrificed for the common good, ‘goes back to [our] Quaker background and the principles we had growing up.’” His work required corporate socializing, but contemporaries could never remember seeing him the worse for consuming alcohol. In the “Greed is good” 1980s, he focused on questions of business ethics. For him, a business was not just about return on investment but also “the role it plays in its communities at home and abroad and the degree of leadership it has shown in the field of social responsibility.”

Patrick Donovan admires Adrian Cadbury. The admiration is justified. Even if Cadbury was not a committed Friend, Friends can learn from this life.

Thomas Hamm is emeritus professor of history at Earlham College and a member of West Richmond (Ind.) Meeting.