In the gruelling summer of 1900, thousands of British and colonial troops received a bizarre luxury directly from the home front: a half-pound tin of chocolate commissioned by Queen Victoria herself. Behind the gesture lay a corporate crisis that forced the great Quaker chocolate families — Cadbury, Rowntree, and Fry — to choose between conscience and duty. They fulfilled the order at cost, refusing to profit from a war they opposed on principle.
This episode follows that tin from the boardrooms of Birmingham and Bristol to the rocky slopes of the Tugela Heights, where the 1st Battalion Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers made a stand that history has largely forgotten. And it ends with something stranger than fiction — a soldier whose life was saved by a half-pound of dark chocolate and a Mauser bullet that had nowhere left to go.
The full text article with original archival images is here:
The Queen’s Chocolate:
In the weeks after Black Week — after Colenso, Magersfontein, and Stormberg had shaken the British Empire to its foundations — Queen Victoria reached for the most powerful weapon in her personal arsenal.
