Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory is the stuff of children’s fantasies, with its edible flowers and eatable pillows, its sugar-powered elevator and enticing chocolate river. No real-world chocolate works could ever match the magic of the one that bursts out of the pages of Roald Dahl’s beloved book about Charlie Bucket and the eccentric chocolatier, starring in his own spin-off film this Christmas. But if any can lay claim to be the inspiration for Dahl’s extraordinary creation, it has to be Cadbury’s.
It was Britain’s most famous chocolate firm that once gave Dahl the chance to experience something of the thrill that his schoolboy Charlie feels on seeing the incredible experiments going on behind closed doors in Wonka’s Oompa-Loompa-powered empire. As pupils at Repton school in Derbyshire in the 1930s, Roald and his schoolmates were recruited as Cadbury taste-testers, receiving
