The Quaker way

Mixing money and morals proves a winning combination for centuries

By Jim Boulden

SHROPSHIRE, England (CNNfn) -- The world's first cast-iron bridge is a monument to the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Completed in 1779, the bridge was the brainchild of Abraham Darby III, a Quaker.

Quakers, as business people, have had a long history of acting fairly, responsibly and very successfully in business.

By the time the iron bridge was built across the Severn River in Shropshire, England, Quakerism was already 128 years old. Briton George Fox founded the Society of Friends, the official name of the Quakers, which began as a small group of devout dissenters in 1652.

Early converts, like the iron-making Darby family, endured legal and social barriers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Quakers were barred from professions such as law and medicine. And they would not join the military or the clergy.

So many Quakers concentrated on industry and money, where they made an early ethical mark.

James Walvin, author of "The Quakers: Money and Morals," says, "The great Quaker companies - the banks, the chocolate manufacturers, the confectionery people - genuinely believed that what they were producing was a good product which they sold at a fair price and employing people on terms that were equitable and decent toward the labor force."

A lasting tribute to the Quaker ethic is the list of viable companies started by followers in the 18th and 19th centuries. The Barclay brothers and the Lloyds family loaned money to fellow Quakers, while the Fry, Rowntree and Cadbury families tapped into the British love for chocolate.

Why were the Quakers successful in areas like banking and trade? "It was because they were trusted," says former Cadbury Schweppes chairman Adrian Cadbury.

"They were the first shopkeepers to put the price on their goods at which they intended to sell it. This was regarded as extremely unfair commercial practice by our competitors," laughs Cadbury.

Few of the Quaker-founded companies have any Quaker connections today. But many claim the positive ideals endure with those businesses. Quakers espouse putting the person at the forefront of any activity, even in business. It's a belief that says the bottom line must be more than money.

In Bournville, a suburb of Birmingham in the heart of industrial England, a cluster of housing, shops and schools was built by George Cadbury in 1900, right next to his factory. Many industrialists built factory towns, but Bournville was different. Cadbury let non-employees buy homes and he made sure there were accommodations for all walks of life.

"What George Cadbury was trying to do was to create an inclusive society, to improve the quality of life," says James Wilson, chief executive of the Bournville Village Trust. "His aim was to, in the word of the original trust deed in 1900, ... 'ameliorate the condition of the working-class and laboring population.'"

Today the Bournville Village Trust is planning to build similar communities in other parts of Britain.

The legacy of another chocolate-making Quaker, Joseph Rowntree, is used to fund studies on how to treat people and workers.

"Businesses are really recognizing, more and more, their responsibilities on a wider basis to their workers, to the communities in which they work, and that does take that right back to Joseph Rowntree," says Steven Burkeman, trust secretary of The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

There are only a handful of companies still run by practicing Quakers, like Scott Bader, a specialty chemicals firm with 650 employees worldwide. The father of president Godric Bader put the company in the hands of the employees in 1951.

"We attract people who have realized ... that the job and the possibility to actually create something of social worth, of social consequence, is equally as important as having a good living," says Godric Bader.

Adrian Cadbury believes these ideals are having a big impact today.

"In the past, company reports would never have said anything about the environment, or indeed about human rights, which now have become an issue," he says. "Companies are responding to that because these are now external pressures. The Quakers came to them from an internal view, that this was the right thing to do. I think that is the difference, but I think the outcome is perhaps they are moving closer together."