The Rowntree Society

Learning Resources

Biography of Joseph Rowntree (1836-1925)

Here you will find a short biography of Joseph Rowntree which tells you who he was and what he did.

He was a cocoa and chocolate manufacturer, born in York in 1836. The family was Quaker and his father was a successful grocer. He attended Bootham School and was apprenticed to his father from the age of sixteen. When his father died, Rowntree managed the family business with his elder brother.

In 1869, Joseph became his brother’s partner in a cocoa, chocolate, and chicory firm. They divided responsibilities between them: Henry Isaac oversaw manufacturing, while Joseph supervised sales and bookkeeping. Joseph was serious minded and attentive, carefully costing each line and restoring the soundness of their business, but he had joined a fairly weak business needing a lot of work. His new firm remained small, making losses in 1873 and 1876, and only from 1875 did Joseph Rowntree describe himself as a ‘cocoa manufacturer’.

In 1881 the firm achieved its first breakthrough, when it began the first manufacture of fruit pastilles in Britain. Rowntree introduced a pure cocoa essence, Elect, in 1887. He was committed to the highest product quality, motivated in part by a Quaker duty to fair trading and the making of goods that would benefit people.

As his business continued to expand, Rowntree purchased 33 acres of land on Haxby Road, outside York, on which to build a new factory, the Cocoa Works, and he followed his success in pastilles with the manufacture of fruit gums in 1893. The business benefited from the growth in demand for cocoa and confectionery products during the 1890s and the factory grew. Sales grew from £114,429 in 1890 to £463,199 by 1900 and £1,219,352 by 1910; the workforce, which numbered 200 in 1883, expanded to 894 by 1894 and 4000 by 1906. By this time, Rowntree was Britain's eightieth largest manufacturing employer. By 1900 Joseph Rowntree led one of Britain's most famous companies.

Rowntree’s, influenced by Joseph’s Quaker beliefs, was well known for caring for its workers and charitable work. He viewed his business as a God-given trust, responsible to its employees and community as well as to its owners and shareholders. As the company grew, he appointed people to care for the workers. Good employment conditions were both good business and sound ethics: Rowntree benefited from contented, healthy workers. Giving them charitable help was always was balanced by the maintenance of factory discipline and supervision of issues such as gambling and employees’ sexual morality. Today such concern with people’s private lives would be considered intrusive, but it was not considered unusual at the time. A doctor's surgery was set up in 1904; a savings scheme in 1905; a girls' school in 1905; a pension scheme in 1906; a boys' school in 1907; and a sick benefit scheme in 1910. In response to the growth of trade unionism at the Cocoa Works during the First World War, works councils were introduced in 1919. Rowntree was a mild tempered man, courteous, retiring, cautious, and hardworking. He inspired loyalty and a clear focus on the company’s aims within the Cocoa Works. His management style was consultative, and he was willing to delegate, but his presence was always authoritative.

Rowntree believed that his business was responsible to its community, and throughout his life he fulfilled his God-given duty to society through his interest in social and political reform. In 1857 he founded the York Adult School, and followed his father on to the management committee of the Bootham and Mount schools; he also gave lifelong service to The Retreat, a mental hospital. He helped to found York's city library, he was an alderman of York from 1868 to 1874 and he held the chairmanship of the York Liberal Association. Rowntree had an abiding interest in education, and was himself well read in history, biography, travel, and natural history. In 1911, despite his reluctance to accept civic honours, he became a freeman of the city. Rowntree was an active campaigner for a number of issues. In 1899, with Arthur Sherwell, he co-authored The Temperance Problem and Social Reform, which, with five other books in the next twenty years, argued the case for public control of the alcohol trade. Rowntree believed in House of Lords reform, and, true to his pacifist Quaker values, he supported the League of Nations after the First World War.

When Joseph Rowntree retired as chairman in 1923 at the age of eighty-seven, his business had a turnover of over £3m and a workforce of over 7000. As the dominant personality in his company since its beginning, Rowntree was one of the Victorian and Edwardian period's most successful businessmen. He died at his home, Clifton Lodge, York, in 1925. Over two thousand people, who were unable to attend a private memorial at the Friends' meeting-house in York, gathered to remember him at the Cocoa Works, and he was buried at the Quaker burial-ground, Heslington Road, York.

Rowntree is still well known today because in 1904 he used half of his wealth to create three trusts. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust was set up to support social research, adult education, and the Society of Friends. The Joseph Rowntree Social Trust concentrated on social and political activities that were outside the strict definition of charitable work, and the Joseph Rowntree Village Trust was given responsibility for building respectable but affordable working-class housing. By the time Rowntree died, the model village of New Earswick contained about 400 homes and was served by a range of community and educational facilities.

Adapted from: Robert Fitzgerald, ‘Rowntree, Joseph (1836–1925)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004