Cadbury Works Locomotive ‘Number One’

Description:Coal and Chocolate in Bournville

This locomotive provides evidence of the coal-powered reality behind Bournville’s ‘chocolate box’ image, cultivated over many years by the Cadbury Company. Now owned by Birmingham Museum Service and preserved at Birmingham Railway Museum, ‘Number One’ is an Avonside 0-4-0T tank engine purchased by Cadbury in 1925 to replace an earlier locomotive bearing that prized fleet number.^{<small>1</small>} It has been preserved since retirement in 1963.^{<small>2</small>}

From its creation in 1879, Bournville has been portrayed as a wholesome place to work (and later to live), the source of ‘pure’ chocolate products and desirable housing for working people. The French sounding name ‘Bournville’ was chosen because of Gallic associations with high-quality food products.^{<small>3</small>} Whilst Cadbury made much of Bournville’s clean environment and Bournville Village Trust promoted quintessential rural features in a suburban setting, the reality was more prosaic and rooted in Victorian industrial developments. Bournville was immediately adjacent to the pre-existing industrial village of Stirchley, the canal and the railway.^{<small>4</small>} This was a major factor in encouraging Cadbury to join James and Son (later part of GKN) in developing a large scale industrial concentration focused on Stirchley (<a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1848">see 'Stirchley's Railway Infrastructure'</a>).

From the outset, Bournville was developed around the latest industrial thinking on productivity and logistics. An internal railway system opened in 1884 to handle the vast quantities of raw materials required and to ensure the rapid distribution of finished products to markets. Coal was as important to Cadbury as cocoa, sugar and milk, as all processes were ultimately steam powered, using boilers and electric generating equipment. Itself steam powered, the Works railway encircled the entire complex and linked canal wharves and freight sidings with company sidings serving all production sites. The railway was constructed to the national gauge to permit wagons to pass directly from the main line to the factory system without the need for costly transhipment.^{<small>5</small>} This internal railway was as highly developed as any in ports, collieries and steelworks, yet Cadbury’s public image deliberately sought to minimise the scale and nature of its industrial complex. Locomotives were painted red with company script to match Cadbury’s tins of drinking chocolate. Official views of Bournville focused on crisp facades overlooking lawns and sports fields, as seen from Linden Road rather than the more workaday views from the canal where warehouses, sidings and boiler chimneys proliferated. Where such <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1842">chimneys</a> did appear in advertising, no smoke was depicted. This sensitivity to coal-powered pollution in food production is further revealed by the conversion, beginning during the early 1950s, of Cadbury's locomotives to burn coke, which produced less visible pollution than coal.^{<small>7</small>} This process continued with the introduction in 1958 of diesel locomotives; steam being completely supplanted by 1963 and all internal rail services finally being replaced by road haulage in 1976. Ironically, in recent years a better understanding of the impact of lorry route miles on atmospheric pollution and general congestion has been gained, but the loss of Bournville’s internal rail system makes it unlikely that it will be re-introduced to reduce such effects.



<font color="#666633"><small>¹ Details of this and all Cadbury works traction and rolling stock are provided in M. Hitches, Bournville, Steam & Chocolate (1992, third reprint 2005)
² Donated by Cadbury to Dowty Railway Preservation Society at Ashchurch, it moved to the Gloucestershire & Warwickshire Railway at Toddington in 1983, then to Birmingham Railway Museum [BRM] in 1988. See Hitches, p.17. The locomotive was purchased from BRM by Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery in 1993 and is now on loan to the BRM Trust so that it can be displayed in an appropriate setting.
³ Hitches
⁴ The Worcester Canal reached Stirchley and King’s Norton in 1795/6, whilst the Birmingham & West Suburban Railway was completed in 1876.
⁵ The standard gauge is four feet eight and a half inches, whereas many industrial railways operated at narrower gauges and required transhipment of goods onto differently sized wagons, an additional cost and delay which Cadbury avoided on their system.
⁶ Hitches, p.17</small></font>