Description:This is a part of the Bournville Recreation Grounds was one a series of advertisements published by Cadbury between October and November 1910. Whereas the advertisement entitled This is a Bournville Workroom<small><sup>1</sup></small> was designed to draw the viewer’s attention to the superior nature of the design and layout of the Works, the focus of this advertisement was on Cadbury’s female workforce. Cadbury regularly depicted its female employees in advertising campaigns. Women accounted for nearly fifty-percent of the workforce during the early decades of the twentieth century and on the whole it was a relatively young workforce. The 1926 publication Bournville Work & Play stated that ‘a large proportion of women […] leave during their 20s to be married’,<small><sup>2</sup></small> making indirect reference to the company’s bar on married women employees. Many companies enforced such rules, although Cadbury regularly employed married women during periods in which the company required a significant influx of women workers, for example, during the First World War or during peak production periods such as Christmas.
‘Purity’ was an overriding theme within Cadbury’s advertising campaigns during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Advertisements featured the strap-line ‘purity […] in everything that bears the name and mark of Cadbury Bournville’ which was used to imply the superior quality of ingredients and production as well as the high standards of health, and moral welfare of Cadbury’s employees. Cadbury’s female workforce was frequently referred to as ‘girls’ due to their age and unmarried status. Advertising campaigns such as this enabled Cadbury to emphasise physical and moral ‘purity’ of its workforce.
Another aspect of the Bournville Recreation Grounds advert was the depiction of reading, emphasising Cadbury’s commitment to education. Cadbury continued to use images very similar to this and to the <a href="Bournville" target="_blank">http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1770">Bournville Workroom</a> within advertisements and promotional publications throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Press Pulls: This is a Bournville Workroom, 19 October 1910, p.13 [BA&H: MS 466/12]
<sup>2</sup> Cadbury Brothers Ltd., Bournville Work & Play: 1926 (Bournville, 1926), p.13