Chocolate Girls

Travel Guide

Let’s go back in time and see what life was like in Birmingham, at one of its most iconic factories to really see inside it. Annie takes you there and immerses all of your senses at a time where war took over and life was very different to life today.

Chocolate making is central to the setting – the three women work at one of the most famous factories in the world (for chocolate lovers today) and the history of the factory, the fact it was run by Quakers whose vision was to set up a community of workers, with housing and education part of that dream. The workers were well looked after and there was even a cocoa van which sustained people during the worst of the bombings and rations. for Ruby, the job is more than a job:

Even after all this time at Cadbury’s she still couldn’t resist eating chocolate”

As well as the iconic chocolate factory, this is a story of Birmingham and its people and how they faced up and coped with the dangerous everyday. The fear of the unknown both for those away in the war and those left behind – the struggle for women who found themselves pregnant, embroiled in affairs with married men, forced adoption and situations which war brought upon them. The rations, the emotional state of the men returning and a country brought to its knees after such hardship and the picture is  a dark and bleak one. Evoked like with much, in the local Brummie dialect:

“Got a face on yer like a wet week in Bognor”

However this book takes you on a great journey back in time, right into Birmingham’s heart and soul. From the ww2 to the 1950s, this is Birmingham with the chocolate factory at its heart and the communities of wartime and post war time Britain