Description:Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery’s collections include artwork associated with Cadbury during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The earliest images are a group of watercolours produced in 1897, depicting cocoa estates in Trinidad by the artist Jeanne Borde. In 1897, Cadbury acquired two estates in La Mered and Maracas Valley in Trinidad.<small><sup>1</sup></small> William Cadbury visited in the same year and brought back a number of <a href="http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1989">photographs</a> of the estate and its labourers.<small><sup>2</sup></small> Although Cadbury owned a cocoa estate, they continued to acquire cocoa from other plantations (some of which were in West Africa).
Little information is available regarding the watercolours’ artist, Jeanne Borde, other than a reference to her being French-Creole.<small><sup>3</sup></small> However, it is possible that she was the wife of an estate planter, as the majority of the estates in Trinidad were owned by French-Creole families.<small><sup>4</sup></small> In 1903 her watercolour of <a href="East" target="_blank">http://www.search.suburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=2082">East Indian Labourers</a> was used on the cover of Brandon Head’s book, The Food of Gods.<small><sup>5</sup></small> There are many common themes between Borde’s views of Cadbury’s Trinidad estates and visual representations of the Bournville Works. For example, Borde’s watercolours only depicted female labourers engaged in cocoa harvesting, which was akin to the abundance of imagery depicting Bournville’s female staff at work in the Cadbury factory. Also, the majority of the women in that Borde painting wear simple white garments, which again echoes the white uniforms of women employees at Bournville. The image appears to illustrate a number of stages in cocoa bean harvesting, the three figures in the foreground can be seen cutting open cocoa pods and scooping out the beans and pulp into baskets, which can then be seen being carried away on the head of the worker to a central collection area at the rear of the image. Borde’s work also depicted a group of male and female labourers sitting in a circle playing music and dancing.
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> Ortinola Great House, Brief History of Early Trinidad, http://ortinola.com/history.htm
<sup>2</sup> These photographs are held by Birmingham Archives & Heritage [MS 466]
<sup>3</sup> Brandon Head, The Food of Gods: A Popular Account of Cocoa, (1903), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16035/16035-h/16035-h.htm
<sup>4</sup> Head
<sup>5</sup> Watercolour depicting East Indian Labourers, by Jeanne Borde, 1897 [BM&AG: 1980P50]