He was named York’s ‘Man of the Millennium’ – but who exactly was Joseph Rowntree? CHRIS TITLEY, York-based biographer of the chocolate tycoon, offers some answers.

WHO was Joseph Rowntree? An intensely private man who was a public figure. A politician who stuck to his principles. A highly successful entrepreneur who created jobs and prosperity – and then gave away much of his own riches to improve wider society.

Where, we may be forgiven for asking, are the Joseph Rowntrees of today?

This was the question which kept returning to me as I researched his life.

We live in an era dominated by big business, global corporations run by supremely wealthy individuals. Many of them demonstrated the same drive and acumen in growing their enterprise as Joseph did transforming the factory founded by his brother.

But few seem to share his belief that with great wealth comes great responsibility. Once he had achieved his success, Joseph Rowntree led a comfortable rather than an opulent personal life, seeing his fortune as an opportunity to change the world for the better.

Perhaps that is why the Rowntree name is still held in such high esteem in his home city in a way that few modern industrialists could hope to emulate.

So what were the forces that transformed Joseph Rowntree from shopkeeper to the York Press’s Man of the Millennium?

The first, and perhaps most overlooked, is that he was born into business.

Joseph arrived in 1836 and for the first nine years of his life lived above the grocery shop his father had founded in Pavement.

It must have been a lively place to be: 12 apprentices and five children jostling for space and attention, sharing meals, encouraged to read and discuss issues of the day, with the confusion and noise of the market outside providing a regular soundtrack.

His father, Joseph senior, worked hard to make the shop a success in the face of stiff competition. Joseph junior became an apprentice at the store aged 15, and here began his formal training in the core matters of business: stock control, customer care, pricing. He worked alongside another apprentice who learned his lessons well – George Cadbury, soon to take control of his own cocoa factory in Birmingham.

However Joseph junior was more than just a diligent businessman. He was a risk taker. It is striking how, throughout his life, Joseph was to take the bold decision. And the boldest of all was to leave behind the thriving grocery shop he had inherited from his father and instead join his younger brother Henry Isaac’s struggling cocoa factory, housed in a ramshackle collection of riverside buildings in Tanner’s Moat.

For a while, this looked like a mistake. Prices were falling, international competition was increasing and every effort Joseph made to rationalise the business wasn’t enough to turn it around.

Then another risk paid off. Frenchman Claude Gaget was a pastille maker who called on Joseph and Henry Isaac in 1879. Joseph determined to create a Rowntree’s pastille that could undercut the expensive imports from France and through trial, error and determination, succeeded.

Rowntree’s Crystallised Gum Pastilles were an instant hit. They were delivered far and wide via Britain’s new railway network. Sales and profits went up. The business began to grow.

Joseph Rowntree never stopped taking risks, whether it was in the construction of a purpose-built factory on Haxby Road, or in handing over so much of his wealth to the charitable trusts which operate to this day.

Perhaps he felt able to do so because of his deep and abiding Quaker faith. Being a member of the Society Of Friends influenced every aspect of his life: his choice of profession, his education at Bootham School, his political beliefs.

As a Quaker, Joseph Rowntree was a pacifist. When the First World War broke out, he warned against the dangers of jingoism – a courageous position at a time when patriotic feelings were running high. This juxtaposition of York’s leading industrialist being a fervent supporter of pacifism during the Great War is now being explored in the major community theatre production, Blood + Chocolate.

And the third major force in Joseph Rowntree’s life, alongside his business and his faith, was his family. His father granted him greater freedoms than most Victorian patriarchs, but also took the teenaged Joseph junior on a trip to Ireland to see the deprivation caused by the potato famine at first hand. Joseph was never to forget what he witnessed on that journey, and it would inform his social and political agenda for the rest of his life.

He was a loving father to his own children, and in a wider sense to the family of workers he employed at the cocoa works. From pioneering workplace reforms, such as the introduction of paid holidays and a company doctor, to his regular walks along the cliffs at Scarborough with new apprentices, he cared for the staff with a paternal eye.

Compassion, a burning anger at social injustice, and a sense of duty to his fellow man: the qualities that made Joseph Rowntree a great man are hard to find among the tycoons of today.

•Chris Titley will be signing copies of his new book, Joseph Rowntree (published by Shire Books, price £6.99), at Janette Ray Booksellers, 8 Bootham, York between 2.30pm and 5.30pm on Saturday, October 12.