[In the following mixed review, Corley suggests that Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin would have benefited from more of a business history perspective.]

Many gaps remain in the ranks of full-length business histories, and one of especial value would be a history of United Biscuits (UB): from 1948 onwards the leadership of Hector (now Lord) Laing tamed this combine into one of the country's major forward-looking enterprises.

Among the units in UB, which to the author's surprise is still allowed to operate in remote Cumbria, is Carr & Co., a biscuit-making company which forms the subject of Margaret Forster's book entitled Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin. An attractively written and produced work by someone brought up in Carlisle, it is primarily aimed at those interested in local and family history, nostalgia and a good read. A novelist, she clearly learnt how to use original sources for her non-fiction works. However, if she had here employed a ‘business history’ approach, that would have helped to improve the book for the whole of her readership.

Her hero is the founder, Jonathan Dodgson Carr (here irritatingly called JD), who set up the Carlisle firm in 1831; Rich Desserts and Captain's Thin were popular types of biscuit. A humane Quaker, he is attractively portrayed as a physical giant with formidable mental energy. Having started with a bakery, he soon created an integrated business ranging from com merchanting and corn milling to retailing, a fleet of ships for transporting wheat being added later. Although hours were long, 63 a week, the factory was clean and airy, and there was a bath, schoolroom and library, as well as a weekly employees' meeting attended by one of the Carrs. He was visibly in charge, ploughing back profits for expansion, but making misjudgements in his later years before he died in 1884.

His eldest son Henry succeeded him, but he and his brothers did not know the business as the father had done. When Henry died in 1904, the firm was found to be in serious debt, with many errors and discrepancies in the books. The ‘Buddenbroks syndrome’ (after Thomas Mann's novel about a business dynasty) might have been expected to apply here, with the third generation hastening the firm's decline. Mercifully, a youngish nephew—Theodore Carr—who did understand the business and was forever modernising and experimenting, took over and was in charge until his death in 1931. The book explains how he got rid of the milling and other interests to concentrate on biscuit making; however, his achievements are not as sharply described as those of his grandfather.

It has to be said that the later Carrs were a full and provincial bunch, not enlivened by details of their private lives. Some figures of company performance would have helped. In 1974 UB produced a compilation by J. S. Adam, A Fell Fine Baker, whose chapter on Carr's was unaccountably not used by the author. That showed that in 1939, for wartime allocation purposes, production data were shared by biscuit firms. Carr's was well up in the big league, producing 14,500 tons annually, not far behind the 16,400 tons of Huntley & Palmers. Adam also gave Carrs' profits in 1927 at [pounds] 66,000; as the present book states that that year's profit was four times the pre-war average, profit in 1914 could have been only [pounds] 16,600.

Business histories on the whole are not good at describing conditions of work, but the author has used tapes recording the reminiscences of employees, more of which would have been greatly welcome. Among other topics, her account of how J. D. Carr and the rest of the family resigned from the Quakers, for doctrinal and not social reasons (he insisted on taking his bible into meetings), is correctly given at some length. In short, a mixed but very palatable and nutritious assortment.