Merlin

Does this kind of nit-picking matter? Well, yes. If this story, central to Rolls-Royce mythology, is untrue, how much else do we have to approach with caution? And it’s strange to think of how many worthies in Rolls-Royce motor cars have been going to the wrong venue for years.

The fact that the men were pleased to meet each other is beyond doubt. Rolls said afterwards: ‘I could not find any English-made car I really liked … eventually, however, I was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of Mr. Royce and in him I found the man I had been looking for for years.’ And Rolls commemorated that first meeting by sending Royce a silver Vesta case engraved with the date: May 4th, 1904, the conception of the company.

Frederick Henry Royce (Henry) was 14 years older than his new partner. He was born in 1863 in the village of Alwalton near Peterborough. The Royce family were millers and lived at one time in South Luffenham, the village in which I grew up, and his mother Mary King came from North Luffenham. We knew her family, and I know this as a deeply rural part of inner England: the country of the Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare. Henry Royce’s father James was also a miller, but suffered from the fatiguing Hodgkin’s disease and died in a poorhouse at the age of 41. Henry, like John Clare, therefore experienced poverty from early youth, and was sent out bird-scaring in the fields when he was still three years old. Many years later the little scarecrow would be Baron of Seaton, a village not far away in Rutland where his family had once been millers.

At this time, however, the family had no money and moved down to London, where one of the jobs Henry undertook was telegram boy. Curiously enough he is said by Rolls-Royce historians to have delivered telegrams of congratulations to 35 Hill Street, Berkeley Square, in the Mayfair district of London on the occasion of the Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls’s birth on 27 August 1877. It is hard to imagine two Englishmen born further apart along the social spectrum.

Henry Royce showed an aptitude for engineering and was sponsored by his aunt to undertake a premium apprenticeship at the Great Northern Railway works at Peterborough. Working under one of the best engineers of the day, he took every opportunity to educate himself, spending his evenings studying algebra, French and electrical engineering. For a young man of the working class the profession of engineer would be an honourable occupation. But after his aunt could no longer support him he struggled to find employment in one of the periodic economic downturns. He ended up in Leeds as a toolmaker working a 54-hour week for 11 shillings, about £90 in today’s values (£1.67p an hour). For several months he worked from 6 a.m. until 10 p.m. and all through Friday night, and eventually this was the kind of commitment he expected from his own workers when he started his own business. He also neglected to eat properly, and this affected his health.

Royce showed talent as an electrician and was eventually given the technical responsibility for the installation of lighting in several streets in Liverpool. However, his employers were bankrupted, and so he set up in business as F. H. Royce & Co. in Blake Street, Manchester with his fellow engineer friend Ernest Claremont, who invested £50. They lived together in a room over the workshop, rigging up hammocks and cooking their meals in an enamelling stove, a practice that may have led to the gastric problems both men suffered in later life. According to the Rolls-Royce historian Harold Nockolds:

Their only diversion at this time was a card game called ‘Grab’, which appears to have been a combination of all-in wrestling and strip poker. At any rate they both wore tightly buttoned overalls when playing the game, which generally ended in their rolling around the floor like a couple of puppies.5

Otherwise they were working around the clock making electrical devices such as an electric doorbell kit, which was a success and paved the way to the building of dynamos, electric motors and cranes. It was about this time that Royce patented improvements to the bayonet light bulb that we still use today. He started to show his particular genius: the ability to take apart previous inventions, work out how to improve them and then build better versions. He himself said: ‘Take the best that exists and make it better.’ This is one of the key characteristics of the Rolls-Royce method: they didn’t waste effort reinventing a wheel; instead they made it perfectly round and unbreakable.

In those days of gaslights any ship, mill, factory or office that wanted electric lighting had to buy a dynamo, and Royce’s were the best. Dynamos with heavily arcing brushes would swiftly burn out, but Royce worked out a way to achieve sparkless commutation and his dynamos just kept going. This was going to become the defining quality of the Rolls-Royce magic: reliability. And one day that was going to be a lifesaver.

Royce was what we could call today a workaholic and a perfectionist: ‘For many years I worked hard to keep the company going through its very difficult days of pioneering, personally keeping our few machine tools working on Saturday afternoons when men did not wish to work.’

Men arriving in the mornings would often find him asleep at the bench with his head cradled in his arms, his machines whirling emptily. Discipline was so strict in the Manchester works that a man seen loitering or joking at his machine was likely to be dismissed without notice. He would allow a man half a day off to get married. He himself admitted that he was a shy man who suffered from excessive sensitivity. He still neglected his health; a boy in the factory would be sent after him with a glass of milk and told not to come back until he had drunk it.

The profits of the company were ploughed back in, and Royce began to make the best electric winches and cranes on the world market, so much so that when the Japanese Imperial Navy bought a crane for their dockyard and copied it, they copied the Royce nameplate, too!

There was a brief period of prosperity, and Claremont and Royce married the sisters Edith and Minnie Punt. Colleagues who marry sisters do not always find happiness for either the women or the men, and the Royces eventually separated in 1912. According to one historian both Edith and Minnie were uncomfortable with the physical aspects of their relationships.6 However, Henry and Minnie built a fine house in Knutsford in the fashionable Arts and Crafts style. It had a Royce electric generator in the back garden, giving them the first electric lights in the town. This is where Royce tinkered with cars and grew roses, his only hobby. Oddly for a Royce creation, his house had quality problems. In 2008 the owner said: ‘Half of the house had to be dismantled due to subsidence and next door’s house was made with a lot of the bricks.’ It would be worth around £1.6 million today, an indication of Royce’s rise from his humble rural beginnings as a scarecrow.

Around the turn of the century Royce had become interested in the new motor cars, and first bought a De Dion-Bouton and then a second-hand 1901 Decauville. The Continent was in the forefront of car manufacturing at that early stage, the French in particular. Perhaps surprisingly, electric cars were thought to be the future: ‘P1’, the first car Ferdinand Porsche made in 1898, had to carry half a ton (500 kg) of lead-acid battery. Performance was brisk but the range was short. So not much has changed in 120 years. It is slightly odd that Henry Royce, a manufacturer of electric motors, did not buy an electric Porsche; a four-motor example was ordered by the Englishman E. W. Hart in 1900. As a consummate engineer he probably realised the advantage of internal combustion engines: petrol has an energy density 60 times that of a lead-acid battery and at least eight times better than the best present-day batteries. A battery equivalent to the Silver Ghost’s fuel capacity of 12 gallons would weigh a couple of tons. When its energy was exhausted it would still weigh a couple of tons, unlike an empty petrol tank. And even a ham and cheese sandwich, weight for weight, is around 30 times more energy-dense than the best lithium battery.

As for Ferdinand Porsche, he served for a while as a chauffeur to Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the crown prince of Austria whose assassination would precipitate the First World War a decade later. (The word chauffeur comes from the French for stoker, or fireman, referring to the stoking of the boiler on early steam vehicles.) In the Thirties a keen motorist named Adolf Hitler admired the 1932 Czechoslovakian Tatra T97, a small, air-cooled, rear-engined economy car, and remarked to Porsche: ‘This is the car for my roads.’ Porsche copied many aspects of the design and produced the Volkswagen Beetle, which was strikingly similar. Tatra launched a lawsuit, but this was simply disposed of when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Dr Porsche then designed tanks and joined the Nazi Party, reaching the rank of SS-Oberführer. After the Second World War Tatra reopened the issue, and in 1965 Volkswagen paid Ringhoffer-Tatra 1,000,000 Deutsche Marks in an out-of-court settlement.

The Frenchman René Panhard was perhaps the most influential motor-car pioneer, as he laid out the shape that the petrol-fuelled car was going to follow for 100 years: it would have four wheels, with a radiator in front followed by an engine, then a clutch and a gearbox which would send power to the rear wheels. ‘C’est brutal,’ Panhard admitted of his sliding-pinion crash gearbox, ‘mais il marche’: ‘It’s brutal, but it works.’

There were few British cars of quality available due to the infamous 1865 ‘red flag’ speed restrictions. These called for motor vehicles to restrict their speed to 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in the town (6 and 3 km/h respectively), and for a man carrying a red flag to walk in front of a vehicle pulling a trailer. The 1896 Locomotive Act removed some restrictions of the 1865 act and raised the speed to 14 mph (23 km/h). This still inhibited the growth of the motor-car industry in Britain. No less an inventor than Thomas Edison wrote in 1901:

The motor car ought to have been British. You first invented it in the 1830s. You have roads only second to those of France. You have hundreds of thousands of skilled mechanics in your midst, but you have lost your trade by the same kind of stupid legislation and prejudice that have put you back in many departments of the electrical field.7

Henry Royce hadn’t given much thought to building his own cars until he drove the Decauville with its two-cylindered engine. This vibrated horribly and offended his perfectionist instincts. He was dissatisfied with other aspects of the Decauville, so in typical Henry Royce fashion he dismantled it, inspected the parts, made improvements and then resolved to build his own motor car. So runs another Rolls-Royce legend.

But if the Decauville was so bad, why was there so much of the French car in the genes of the Royce? The radiator looked so similar that when Charles Rolls saw the car for the first time he thought it was a product of the French factory. The rest of it looked much the same. Royce’s approach was always to ‘take the best and make it better’, which later became the central Rolls-Royce mantra. So he set about doing exactly that: copying what worked, improving what didn’t. As he said himself, inventors and pioneers rarely make any money, only those who take their ideas and make them work.

Meanwhile the end of the Boer War had caused an economic downturn, and cheaper foreign-made dynamos appeared on the market using Royce-patented designs without paying him royalties. Royce either had to make his own products more cheaply or diversify by making a new product. The first course would have been anathema to him, and he saw clearly that the motor car was the next big thing. It would be ideal for his business. His partner Ernest Claremont was more conservative and hadn’t been keen on the switch to electric cranes. He became more and more disenchanted with Royce’s diversifications and resisted the move into car manufacturing, especially when Royce kept borrowing men in the workshop for the more interesting business of building his first car.

‘In 1904 he had produced the first Royce car: this was before he met the late Hon. C. S. Rolls,’ wrote his friend Frank Lord:

The car was a 10 hp. two-cylinder, and was a revelation for its date, having properly lubricated joints to the drive shaft [instead of chains]. As he could not buy a satisfactory coil for the ignition, he designed one, fitting very large points of the purest platinum, which, although expensive in the first place, never seemed to want adjusting or cleaning. The coil itself was as nearly perfect as possible, thus from the very first making the car reliable in a part in which, with most cars, there was endless trouble.

The two friends took the Royce car on its very first run through Wales. ‘During the whole three days’ trial we never had a stop of any sort from any fault of the car, a pretty good performance for a car designed by a man who had never designed one before; yet only what you could expect from one designed by Mr. Royce.’8

Royce’s building methods clearly differed from those of other manufacturers, and this helped to achieve a high level of reliability. One example is the use of bolts where other manufacturers used rivets. These are mushroom-shaped pieces of steel used to fasten heavily stressed brackets such as spring hangers to the chassis, which is the long steel frame supporting the body. A hole is drilled in each piece and a red-hot rivet is pushed through the two holes. The ‘stalk’ of the mushroom is then hammered over, fastening the two pieces when the rivet cools. Here is Ernest Wooler, who had served as an apprentice under Royce in 1904:

I remember Royce carefully explaining to me as a child how a hot rivet never filled a hole when it cooled. A cold rivet was punishing the metal too much. So we made taper bolts fitted perfectly in a hand-reamed hole. It is such details that explain the difference between Rolls-Royce and other cars …9

This story contains Royce’s philosophy in a nutshell: take workmanship to the highest possible level. A nut on a tapered bolt could always be tightened if the bracket became loose. This small detail could become of vital importance. However, it would cost much more to make. One of Henry Royce’s remarks that seems to define his work was this: ‘The quality will remain long after the price is forgotten.’

Another example: as the first car neared completion it was noticed that the front axle (a long bar of steel carrying the wheels) was out of alignment by half an inch. One of Royce’s workers bent the axle without first heating it up red-hot, but then received a stinging rebuke from Royce, denouncing his work as ‘foul practice’. It would, he said, weaken the metal. The axle was scrapped.

That first car was for Royce’s own personal use, and a second was built for the more sceptical Claremont. There was a third such prototype, and these three cars were named the Royce 10. They still had only two cylinders, but Royce’s meticulous balancing made it virtually vibration-free. His work on the valve gear quietened what was usually a clattering cacophony, he fitted a large exhaust silencer and eliminated every other source of vibration and rattle. The result was an exceptionally smooth, quiet car that contrasted with the others on the market. This is what so seduced Charles Rolls.

It has been said that the influence of the Honourable Charles Stewart Rolls upon the company that bore his name was negligible. After all, he had clearly lost interest in the partnership just six years after his meeting with Henry Royce, and for half of that time he was keener on flying balloons and aeroplanes than on selling motor cars. Some purists call their cars ‘Royces’, regarding this as a truer indication of their origin.10 However, as we will see he brought a vital quality to Rolls-Royce Ltd, a quality the company has always traded on: prestige.

When – and if – Henry Royce delivered that telegram celebrating the birth of his future business partner, he must have felt the Rolls family was a long way from his own social stratum. Three out of four people living in Britain at the time worked as cash-in-hand tradesmen like the young Henry Royce, many of them employed as factory workers, shopkeepers and mechanics. And most aristocratic families like the Rollses would have a house in the town and one in the country, employing a large domestic staff of butlers, housemaids and cooks to maintain the household. What the Hon. Rolls was going to give Royce was access to a large number of aristocratic and wealthy customers for the Best Car in the World.

The Rolls family’s fortune had been made by a dairy farmer ancestor who had bought up both sides of the Old Kent Road for property development. He married shrewdly in 1767 and thus expanded his land ownership into other parts of London. His wife Sarah also brought estates in Monmouthshire which enabled him to become High Sheriff. His son, however, did what sons often do and gambled a fortune away in the 1790s. The press, with some glee, reported that a ‘dashing Cow-Keeper’s son in the Kent Road has, during the past summer, been pigeoned of near £60,000’. That’s well over £8 million today. The family recovered their fortunes and Charles’s father, John Allan Rolls, was raised to the peerage as Baron Llangattock of the Hendre. His London estates housed 60,000 of the working classes and brought in millions of pounds. The Duke and Duchess of York (later King George V and Queen Mary) stayed with Lord and Lady Llangattock at the Hendre in 1900, and Charles took them on motor-car excursions, probably the first time that the royal couple had been in a car.

At Eton Charles showed a precocious interest in engines, earning the sobriquet ‘Dirty Rolls’ (at least we hope it was for the engines). He decided to go in for a life as a professional engineer, and we have already noted how unusual this would be, particularly for the son of a lord. He installed a dynamo and lighting at the Hendre, his parents’ house in Monmouthshire, and he demonstrated a great deal of practical ability. Later on this may have endeared him to Henry Royce. When they met, Rolls was the better qualified by education (a Cambridge BA in Mechanical Sciences) and eight years of practical experience of buying, racing and selling foreign motor cars. Royce himself had no higher-level engineering or scientific education, but nor did other pioneers: Wilhelm Maybach, Ferdinand Porsche and Ettore Bugatti. This may have set them free in the new discipline. A close friend, Moore-Brabazon of Tara, later Lord Brabazon, described Rolls at this time:

Charlie Rolls was the strangest of men and one of the most loveable. He was tall and rather thin, and his eyes stood out of their sockets rather more than is normal. He was rather fond of a Norfolk jacket … and always wore a very high, stiff, white collar … While motoring he would turn his cap back to front … Incidentally, he was a snob, too: the way he used his superb powers of salesmanship to float early Rolls-Royce cars on the aristocracy of England left every other firm an ‘also ran’.11

Rolls was at first fascinated by the speed of cycle racing, but he soon switched to motor cars when they started to appear. He wasn’t particularly academic, and he had to attend a private crammer to get him into Cambridge. However he made sure he was the first undergraduate to go up to Cambridge by car, and indeed he was probably the first owner of a car based in that town. He undertook a pioneer drive, the first from London to Cambridge, which he completed overnight with a companion in 12 hours, an average speed of 4.5 mph (7 km/h). On the way, while walking in front of the car with the obligatory red lantern, he encountered a policeman at two o’clock in the morning. To speed them up a little he invited the officer on board and they continued on their way at 20 miles an hour, the policeman holding on in terror until the engine overheated. Rolls used the Cambridge University Engineering Laboratories to work on his cars: first a 3¾ hp Peugeot Phaeton, then two motorised tricycles; a De Dion and a Bollee. Foreign-made cars were still ahead of anything being made in Britain.

Rolls’s biographer, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, did not seem to like him much, citing monomania, meanness and a ‘banana-skin-type of humour’. He recalled a jibe from a hansom cabby, reins in hand, who yelled ‘Old iron!’ at Rolls’s car as he thundered past. ‘Take it home and eat it,’ retorted Rolls (quite a well-judged reply, in fact). Montagu makes a good case for him as a visionary who contributed hugely to the progress of the motor car and aeroplane in British society. Once the revolution of the motor car was channelled into the evolutionary progress of his Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, Rolls switched his attention to aeroplanes.

As for his character, Rolls was clearly courageous and determined. It’s hard to believe as we drive our air-bagged safety machines of today, but early motor cars were extremely dangerous: an accident usually meant serious injury to driver and passengers. And an aircraft accident was usually fatal. Our modern cars evolved at breakneck speed thanks to men like the young Charles Rolls. Between 1894 and 1914 cars developed from motorised horse-drawn carriages to 120 mph (193 km/h) racing machines. We might think our present-day computer industry is developing fast, but consider this: engines grew from single cylinders to 12 cylinders, from sidevalve asthmatic wheezers to double-overhead-camshaft four-valve deep-breathers, from solid axles to air suspension, two-wheel braking to four-wheel braking, and maximum speeds from 12 mph to 120 mph (19 to 193 km/h). Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a computer doubles about every two years, and car technology during those hectic years raced along at much the same rate of progress.

The Hon. C. S. Rolls was at the forefront, participating in every car trial he could, goggles strapped to his face, cap on backwards, thundering ahead of a column of dust, screwing the maximum out of lethal machines. It’s hardly surprising that he had a taste for Wagner. But he wasn’t just gung-ho; his mechanical sensitivity enabled a rare relationship with his machines. Lord Montagu said of him: ‘everyone who rode with Rolls testifies to the quickness of his reactions, and to the sensation that he was at one with his steed.’ He won the Automobile Club Gold Medal for best amateur performance in the Thousand Mile Reliability Trial and was fastest of three British drivers in the 1905 Gordon Bennett race in the Auvergne, France, the ancestor of the Grand Prix. The engines became more powerful, and the cars faster and faster.

The rest of the technology, the suspension and the brakes, struggled to keep up with the pace and the power. Contemporary roads were nothing more than muddy cart tracks studded with tyre-puncturing horseshoe nails. One racing 1910 Vauxhall with suspension unrestrained by effective dampers encountered a stretch of road surface at such a high speed that the road-bump spacing coincided with the natural frequency of the body bouncing on the springs. The resulting resonance caused the size of the bounces to increase to such an extent that the whole car leapt up in the air, jumped over a hedge and crashed upside down into a field.

In Britain motor cars drove on the left as the Romans had before them. (The evidence for this has been found at a Roman quarry near Swindon. The left-hand set of grooves in the road leading down and away from the quarry were much deeper than the grooves leading up to it, suggesting that the heavily laden carts were leaving on the left.) There’s another good reason for driving on the left, which is that when leading a horse it is done with the left hand, keeping the right hand free for a stick (or a weapon). You would also want to walk along the middle, drier part of the cambered road, and so you would probably choose to walk the horse on the left side of the road. In the year 1300, Pope Boniface VIII directed pilgrims to keep left, and Italian cities had left-hand-driving traffic until Rome made the change on 1 March 1925 and Milan on 3 August 1926.