When his family firm was in trouble, due to his father’s declining health after his mother’s death from tuberculosis in 1855, he moved back to Birmingham without having completed his apprenticeship.

When Cadbury Brothers was incorporated as a limited company on 16 June 1899, George and Richard owned 100% of the ordinary shares in their business.

Although it was not the success that they had hoped for, they worked long hours and lived a very frugal lifestyle to keep the firm from insolvency with help from the £4000 that had been left to them by their mother.

It saved the company and enabled it to grow into a large and successful enterprise with a reputation for quality products and for treating its employees well.

The brothers cared for their employees; they both believed in workers’s social rights and hence they installed canteens and sport grounds.

Nineteen years after Richard died, George opened a works committee for each gender which discussed proposals for improving the firm.

In 1901, disgusted by the imperialistic policy of the Unionist Government dominated by Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, and opposed to the Boer War, George Cadbury bought the Daily News (afterward the News Chronicle) and used the paper to campaign for old age pensions and against the war and sweatshop labour.

[1] In 1907, George Cadbury bought Selly Manor, an old Tudor house menaced by destruction in the surroundings of Birmingham.

They had six children together: Laurence John, George Norman, Elsie Dorothea, Egbert, Marion Janet, and Ursula.

[12] George Cadbury has a miniature locomotive named after him, originally owned by the husband of his daughter Elsie Dorothea, Geoffrey Hoyland.