Firm’s founder from a chocolate superpower
» WE don’t know the date of this advert, which was one of a number very kindly provided by John Penny, but we’re reasonably confident that it’s from the 1950s. And as you can see, Weber’s of Fishponds are selling the forerunner of the modern Cadbury’s Creme Egg, complete with yolks.
Weber’s is an interesting firm, one of a number of chocolate companies in Bristol’s complex family tree of confectioners.
Its founder, Robert Weber, came, of course, from Switzerland, a chocolate-making superpower even 100 years ago. He was born in 1860 and came to London as an orphan, and his original trade was as an apprentice lithographer.
By the 1890s he was living in St Pauls, Bristol, and working in the confectionery business, possibly as an employee of Fry’s or another local firm. A later census lists him as a the owner of a confectionery business, but by 1911 he was ‘manager’ in a chocolate works once more, possibly the result of business failure, or perhaps it was some sort of muddle in the census return.
We do know, though, that by 1914 the Weber Chocolate Co Ltd was up and running – he would have been in his fifties by then. This may have been through the takeover of, or merger with, an established local chocolate firm called Swann’s.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the company was that its large premises in Fishponds were requisitioned for the war effort and the Thrissell Engineering Company moved in to use the site for making barrels and breech casings for 20mm Oerlikon cannon (very heavy machine guns, basically), which were mostly used as antiaircraft guns, or as light guns by the Royal Navy.
Despite wartime rationing and shortages, a certain amount of chocolate production continued alongside the gun manufacture.
Robert Weber died in 1949, by which time he had amassed a modest fortune and acquired a large family home, Wynton Lodge, 35 Durdham Park. He had several children, some of whom appear to have followed him into the family business. It ceased trading in the mid-1960s.