The Great Chocolate Bar ‘War’

Would you believe that a handful of teenagers once took on the largest candy makers in the land? They did, you know, during the Great Chocolate War of the 1940s? They made international news, if only briefly, but the memory of their rebellion lives on…

It can be satisfying, sort of, to know that some things never change. You know, ried and true stalwarts such as inflation Why, (I’m giving away my age) I can remember when a bottle of pop cost 8 cents. Mind you, it was a smaller bottle before they ‘super-sized’ it and it went to 12 cents. What is it, today? A dollar–plus GST, bottle return and environmental fee?

Believe it or not, in the 1950s when I was growing up in Victoria, 50 cents (my weekly allownace) bought me bus fare to and from town, a movie (with cartoon) and fish and chips!

But those days and those bargains, need I tell you, are long, long gone

In tidying up my files, I came upon a Canadian Press report, from September 2013. Four of the largest chocolate producers in Canada had agreed to pay $23.2 million to settle a class-action lawsuit before B.C., Ontario and Quebec courts for alleged “price-fixing and price maintenance in the Canadian market”.

I won’t go into the details but get this: Consumers who’d purchased at least $1000 worth of chocolate products between Oct. 1, 2005 and Sept. 30, 2007, were eligible to claim monetary compensation. Score one for chocoholics!

Oh, but if they hadn’t kept their cash slips when satisfying those chocolate cravings, too bad; without corroboration, their claim was capped at $50.

There was an earlier David-and-Goliath struggle
This isn’t the first consumer tussle between Canadian chocolate producers. There was the flash-in-the-pan Chocolate Bar Strike/War that began in Ladysmith and spread across Canada just after the end of the Second World War. It’s a story that’s been told before but here it is in the very words of one of the leading participants, Parker Williams of Nanaimo, who kindly wrote this account at my request. He’s done such a fine job, I’ve left it in his own words…

“In 1947, and a few years prior, us students from North Oyster and Chemainus were taken by bus to Ladysmith for our schooling. It was our habit during the noon-hour to hurriedly eat our lunch, then hike down town to the main street. There were two confectionery stores there, the ‘Wigwam’ and the ‘Hub.’ The Wigwam was the most popular place to frequent.

At that time us country kids were not too flush with money
Few received any allowance from parents. We could earn spending money from working for local farmers, during potato planting and harvest time, picking strawberries and helping at haying time. This was $1.00 a day work. To us the 5-cent piece had purchasing power. It could buy a bottle of pop, an ice-cream cone or a chocolate bar.

Sticker shock!
This one day in April ‘47, one of the kids went into the Wigwam to buy a chocolate bar and came out in a state of shock. The price of the chocolate bar had risen to 8 cents. This was an assault on the purchasing power of our precious 5-cent piece!

Once the shock had settled, an unorganized [protest movement] developed. Cardboard placards appeared and after school a picket line formed on the sidewalk in front of the Wigwam.

At this time I was the proud owner of an old 1923 McLaughlin Buick. The reason I was able to be a car owner at such a young age was that during the previous summer I had a job as ‘whistle punk’ in a VL&M Co. logging camp (my father was a longtime employee of the VL&M Co.).

After we arrived home that day on the school bus, the local kids talked me into chalking up the car with slogans protesting the increased price of chocolate bars

Then we all loaded aboard the car and drove into Ladysmith and parked in front of the Wigwam. Eventually we loaded the car with kids hanging on the running boards and bumpers, made a couple of passes up and down the main street, with those who couldn’t get aboard the car following behind.

The adults on the sidewalk looked on with some amusement. The lone local policeman was conspicuous by his absence. This was my only direct involvement in the protest.

The strike went on for another couple of days then died out as it was realised that the price of chocolate bars was not going to return to 5 cents. So we considered the strike a failure.

In retrospect, I think the reason for the uproar against the chocolate bar price was that during the war years chocolate bars were a scarce item. Storekeepers only received a small quantity each month from the wholesaler. These bars were kept under the counter for their favoured customers. School students were not considered favoured customers.

News was not covered as extensively in those days as it is today

We heard that there were protests in Nanaimo and Victoria, but that was it. We all promptly forgot the whole affair until, a few years back, ‘Travesty Productions’ did a documentary of the incident. It was only then did we learn that the protest spread right across the country.

The shocking part was learning that, back East, it was charged that the Chocolate Bar War was Communist-inspired. To us locals it was just another strike like that of the miners and loggers before us.”–Parker Wlliams

What had happened was, with war’s end and the lifting of government price controls, pent-up inflation had kicked in, big-time. Hence the 60 per cent hit on chocolate bars. At a time when most kids’ allowances were in the 15 cents per week range.

Or, put in real terms, a week’s chores wouldn’t even buy two bars!

When word of the Ladysmith protest quickly spread, young people on the Lower Mainland joined in by picketing their local candy stores. Within a week, demonstrations with bicycles and placards had spread across the province then across the country. Some apparently made their point by pooling their sugar rations to make home-made fudge thus boycotting candy stores. The Chocolate Bar War was on!

Most dramatic of all was the April 20, 1947 near-storming of the provincial legislature in Victoria by 200 screaming youngsters demanding the return of the 5-cent chocolate bar.

With little apparent restraint by parents and authorities, the movement continued to gather momentum. Success appeared to be at hand.

Then cold, hard reality

The Western World was already entering what would become the Cold War, democracy vs. communism, us vs. them. And the Toronto Telegram, reporting that the movement had been infiltrated by Red youth organizers, blasted the young strikers as “stooges of Moscow” for contributing, albeit unwittingly, to social chaos.

So much for the Chocolate Bar War!

Civic authorities then parents turned on the pressure and resistance petered out. Likely few of them understood the machinations of politics and patriotism; they were kids, after all.

But they’d just learned a lesson in capitalism and corporatism–one that cost them another 3 cents per chocolate bar. And a whole lot more since!

Only in Canada, eh?