From The Guardian
“The past is a foreign country,” wrote LP Hartley; “they do things differently there.” Indeed they do, as we’ve seen with the kerfuffle over the ownership of Cadbury. Today, Brummies descend on the capital to protest against the sale of the company to the American food giant, Kraft. It is the last rage against the dying of the light for an industry – and indeed, a way of life.
I grew up a mile or two from the Cadbury Bournville factory. In the 1960s, Cadbury loomed large over our young lives. It seemed to employ half the grown-ups I knew. It gave my mother her first job upon leaving school at 14. Many of my aunts and uncles worked there. They swam in the subsidised pool and played football and cricket on the professionally-kept grounds. I saw my first football match there, trials for the England schoolboy team. And for us kids, it was chocolate heaven. I can still recall the excitement of being taken to the shop on the grounds where damaged chocolate was sold at a discount price – so cheap, my mother would come away with armfuls.
Of course, the link with the Cadburys has weakened steadily since 1962 when the company was floated on the stock market. But that’s hardly the point. It has remained a focal point of the community to the present day. Even now it still hosts a Mayflower festival and carol singing around a giant Christmas tree. And to my parents, Bournville represented a dream. They wanted to move from our council flat to real village – a village just a short bus ride from the city centre. A place where my sister and I could grow up in safety and freedom, a place without pubs, without crime, without the dirt of an industrial city.
Now it seems set to follow HP Sauce, Rover, Dunlop and all the other famous names of Birmingham into the dustbin of history. Does this matter? New companies and industries spring up all the time. Birmingham has reinvented itself as a thriving cultural hub, with an internationally renowned symphony orchestra, with theatres and restaurants to rank with the best, with a new canal development that has restored the waterways to their rightful place as the focal point of the city.
But I’d say it does matter if Cadbury sells out. Cadbury and other iconic employers – such as Rover, where my dad was on the assembly line for 17 years – were more than just companies. They were synonymous with the city, with a sense of shared civic pride, with a sense of place. If we didn’t know how the mining villages felt in the 1980s, we do now. A way of life is now gone, probably forever.
Lord Mandelson recently admitted the government had been too lax in allowing foreign ownership of leading British companies. Did he not realise that from day one? That will be for history to judge. As British ownership of Cadbury fades into memory, we will look at that foreign country, the past, and wonder why we gave away so much, and what we got in return.