Australians have always had a sweet tooth. Confectionery makers were among the earliest advertisers as the first colonists established a lifestyle with few touches of home. By the 1920s, the industry had a number of large manufacturers including Hoadley, MacRobertson, Sweetacres and A. W. Allen. However, many types of confectionery could readily be produced at home and an enterprising businessperson devised the idea of a confectionery college to teach this potentially profitable skill.
The woman behind the business was Mrs Victoria Flora Cohen, described as a “well-built, superior looking woman of prepossessing appearance” who set up premises, at first in Brisbane and shortly afterwards in Sydney. The advertisements appearing in newspapers throughout Queensland offered “A golden opportunity to all” and “earnings from £5 to £10 per week after the first lesson”. Over the next few years, the company opened a retail shop and soda fountain in Queen Street, Brisbane and began operations in most other states, as well as in New Zealand. The headquarters moved to Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1924.
The operations of this company would certainly raise eyebrows and attract the interest of business regulators today. At the time, it was left to the press to draw attention to its shortcomings. Smith’s Weekly launched its first salvo in 1925, under the headline “The Sweetest Business Hoax in Australasia”. The paper claimed to have rejected Liberty’s advertising because “every new advertiser in ‘Smith’s’ receives editorial scrutiny before publication”. A reporter then conducted an interview with Mrs Cohen and found her unable to provide the contact details for even one successful student, or to substantiate the existence of the company’s many retail stores. The article claimed that one of the college’s so-called expert demonstrators was “an office girl who had never made a sweet in her life.”
Nonetheless, the college continued to operate. It even had imitators, including the short-lived National Confectionery College and the Commonwealth and Dominions Confectionery College, a business started by an ex-employee. The latter led to a legal battle between the well-built Mrs Cohen and the keen, dark-eyed Richard Kempley, who had evidently signed a contract that prohibited him from operating a business in competition with his former employer.
In 1930, as the Great Depression hit hard, the Australasian Confectioners Journal wrote scathingly:
It is a scandal that this ‘business’ (if such it can be called) should be permitted to proclaim glibly the fortunes awaiting the makers of sweets, when the whole industry if feeling the strain of economic conditions – when big factories have had to put off scores of hands and reduce wages…
What is badly needed in Australia is a law like the one they have in Germany – a law which forbids the publication of any advertisement which CAN be read to imply something not strictly true…
This sudden outburst of advertising energy on the part of Liberty Confectionery College, so called, is particularly despicable at the present time. The wording of the advertisement is obviously intended to attract those who have lost their jobs or are on reduced wages…
In 1939, as the country began to emerge from the depression, the Liberty Confectionery College began to encourage Australians to “Speed Up Prosperity” with advertisements in the Australian Women’s Weekly promoting sweetmaking at home. World War II caused a hiatus, with sugar rationing and price control, but some attempt was made to resurrect the business. The last advertising appeared in 1946 but it wasn’t until 1961 that the company was struck off the register. Victoria Flora Cohen died in Melbourne in 1968.