[In the following review, Kynaston offers a mixed assessment of Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin, noting that the work contains “a reasonable amount of business matter, all sensibly deployed.”]

Two years ago, Margaret Forster published Hidden Lives, a justly acclaimed account of the Carlisle-based lives of her grandmother, her mother and her early self. A mixture of history and memoir, it deserves to become a classic. Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin, also set in Carlisle, is implicitly a companion volume.

In essence, it tells the story of Carr & Co, bakers and biscuit manufacturers, between 1831 and 1931. The dominant figure, during and after his life, was Jonathan Dodgson Carr, born in 1806 into a Kendal family that ran a wholesale grocery business. The Carrs, like many of their neighbours, were Quakers, and Forster relates with sympathy, as well as insight, how the Friends provided the young J.D. with not only an ethic grounded in the twin virtues of honesty and industry, but also an invaluable network of business contacts and intelligence, particularly through the monthly and quarterly meetings that took place beyond Kendal. Physically immense, emotionally mature beyond his years, Carr decided while barely in his teens that his future lay in baking, not groceries; and following a stern apprenticeship, he made his move in June 1831, conscious that Kendal already had twenty-six bakers and that Carlisle, some forty miles away, would soon have a railway connection to Newcastle.

Forster makes it abundantly clear that, once under way, Carr was an archetypal Victorian entrepreneur of the better sort: taking the large view, above all through building a factory that produced flour and did the baking, an early example of vertical integration; publicizing his wares vigorously and imaginatively, much helped by becoming, as early as 1841, the first biscuit manufacturer to acquire a Royal Warrant; and taking a close, paternalist interest, outside as well as inside the factory, in his strictly teetotal workforce. Forster is excellent on detail, ranging from the slowly improving conditions of life in nineteenth-century Carlisle, to the mainly modest life-style of Carr and his growing family, to the biscuits themselves—whether the twenty types of Rich Desserts, of which the Iced Routs were especially popular, or the more austere ship's biscuits, such as Cabin and Captain's Thin.

The problem is J. D. himself. A paragon of a husband and a father, a considerate employer, an enthusiastic supporter of such unimpeachable causes as free trade and the emancipation of slaves (even persuading Frederick Douglass to come to Carlisle and deliver a three-hour lecture), he was simply too good to be true. Fortunately, he was beset by a spiritual crisis in the late 1860s. Two of his evangelistic sons, believing that the Quakers no longer treated every word of the Bible as the literal truth, found themselves expelled from the Society of Friends, and J. D. and his wife sadly decided they must follow them into exile. “We would ever wish to remain, with love, your friends,” their letter of resignation to the Carlisle meeting ended. J. D. did not become a broken man—he died in 1884 still in harness—but the reader's attitude changes from respectful admiration to something like empathy.

Operating in the long shadow cast by their late father, the second generation proved neither chips off the old block nor a complete disaster. Unusually, however, the third generation did provide someone special. Theodore Carr, the eldest son of J. D.'s third son Thomas, became chairman of Carr's in 1902, discovered that the company had unsuspected financial problems, and until his death in 1931 did much to ensure that the family concern (as fundamentally it remained) continued to be a significant, if no longer a premier, force in the biscuit world. He was fiercely energetic, with a mechanical bent that ensured that Carr's did not fall behind technologically; he had his grandfather's zeal for social improvement; and he responded pragmatically to the rise of trade unionism. He also, shortly after the war, induced the American President, Woodrow Wilson, to spend some hours in Carlisle. Wilson's mother had been born there, and on a bitterly cold Sunday morning, as the rain poured down outside, the great peacemaker optimistically told those huddled in Lowther Street Congregational Church that “it is from quiet places like this all over the world that the forces accumulate which presently will overpower any attempt to accomplish evil on a grand scale.”

Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin may not be the work of an accredited business historian, but nevertheless there is a reasonable amount of business matter, all sensibly deployed. Where this very worthwhile account more seriously disappoints is in the somewhat meagre ration of quotations from contemporary letters and diaries. Almost certainly they do not exist, but the result is that the reader, although never bored, is rarely fascinated. Occasionally a historical study, through its wealth and choice of documentation, portrays a world to which, however microscopic, one completely surrenders. This is not such a study.

Tellingly, the most memorable pages occur in the prologue, as Forster recalls the mid-1950s when she and the other sixteen-year-old girls in her class were given a guided tour of Carr's (not yet taken over by United Biscuits). The lure in advance was the free packet of chocolate biscuits, the reality on the day was the “overwhelmingly rich, sickly smell, more like a stench” of the chocolate room, accompanied by the nauseating sight of “melted chocolate running into a machine in thick dark globules.” From their teacher's point of view, the trip was a complete success. “We were all very quiet on the way back to school, our heads full of nightmare visions of failing O-Levels and having to become cracker-packers at Carr's.” Briefly, we are back in the authentic, seductive world of Hidden Lives.