Eumundi Voice - Issue 89, 21 March 2024

The Chocolate Factory – a delicious treat

Smooth, exciting, rich and delicious. Once you have started you have to tuck in again and again until finished. Chocolate? Yes, but this also describes Mary-Lou Stephens latest novel The Chocolate Factory.

One of my favourite school excursions in the 1950s was to the Cadbury factory on the outskirts of Birmingham. The thick smell of raw chocolate hit as we drove through beautiful gardens to the entrance.

Guides in white coats and cheesecloth hats with very strong 'Brummy' accents – which we loved to mimic – bribed us with a small cup of hot chocolate. They escorted us through rooms of noisy machinery and rows of women who were forbidden to look up as they hand-folded cardboard boxes or squirted patterns on top of endless conveyor streams of chocolates.

After about 30mins, up and down stairs and long factory corridors, the overwhelming smell made some visitors nauseous. We reached fresh air back at the entrance and the strong ones accepted another chocolate or two and a booklet of Cadbury history.

Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of John Cadbury opening his shop in Birmingham, Mary-Lou’s The Chocolate Factory stirred many memories. I journeyed with Dorothy Adwell in 1921 from her successful position at Bournville across the seas to help establish Cadbury’s in Tasmania.

Mary-Lou’s in-depth research reveals the problems, frustrating delays, opposition and jealousy from newly taken-over Pascals' and Frys' employees. Women were struggling in a male-dominated world facing poverty, family expectations, mistrust of Quakers and even industrial espionage.

We meet efficient secretary Sarah, the bright but impoverished Maisie and several other female employees who knew that once married, employment ends. Romantic feelings must be hidden. Dorothy fights for her girls, the future of Cadbury, the man she loves and a powerful secret she protects.

After dabbling in bands, producing CDs and acting, Mary-Lou got a 'real job’ in commercial radio as a music director and ABC presenter including 15 years on the Sunshine Coast. Her broadcasts and interviews from the Woodford Festival became compulsory listening. Her first book Sex, Drugs and Meditation discusses how she changed her life and found a husband. In How to Stay Married, a pair with cabin luggage only adopted a light attitude to extreme locations and temperatures which reflected their marriage. The Last of the Apple Blossom still appears on best seller lists.

The Chocolate Factory is truly a labour of love. With her husband, Mary-Lou spent a year slow touring in Asia to write without distraction. “This is a book of my heart set in Tasmania where I grew up. Through it I found a genre that fascinates and inspires me – historical fiction.”

You can no longer tour the Tasmanian Cadbury factory so devour this delicious book or treat someone you love to a copy this Easter.