The Rowntree Family of York

The name of Rowntree will always be associated with the making of chocolates and sweets and with its home town of York. Yet, as Paul Chrystal shows in this book, there was much more to this remarkable family than profitable manufacturing. Driven by their Quaker faith, generations of the Rowntree family engaged themselves with the welfare of their workers, improving not only the conditions they worked under but providing a range of benefits from housing to education. Their concerns ranged from the identification of the causes of poverty and work on its eradication, which has been seen as one of the beginnings of the welfare state, to supporting Quaker concerns with the treatment of the mentally ill, the causes and prevention of war and the education of the working classes. The book looks at the tensions that exist between business practice and a faith which demands absolute honesty from its adherents. The origins of the family are traced from its first records in the sixteenth century to the end of the twentieth century when Rowntrees was taken over by Nestlé.