The Magic of a Name: The Rolls-Royce Story, Part 1

The First Forty Years

Peter Pugh

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781848319622
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Automotive Transportation & Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The Magic of a Name tells the story of the first 40 years of Britain's most prestigious manufacturer - Rolls-Royce.Beginning with the historic meeting in 1904 of Henry Royce and the Honourable C.S. Rolls, and the birth in 1906 of the legendary Silver Ghost, Peter Pugh tells a story of genius, skill, hard work and dedication which gave the world cars and aero engines unrivalled in their excellence.In 1915, 100 years ago, the pair produced their first aero engine, the Eagle which along with the Hawk, Falcon and Condor proved themselves in battle in the First World War. In the Second the totemic Merlin was installed in the Spitfire and built in a race against time in 1940 to help win the Battle of Britain.With unrivalled access to the company's archives, Peter Pugh's history is a unique portrait of both an iconic name and of British industry at its best.

CHAPTER ONE

THE PRIME MOVERS

‘BOTH MEN TOOK TO EACH OTHER’
THE GODFATHER
HENRY ROYCE
THE HON. C.S. ROLLS
THE HYPHEN IN ROLLS-ROYCE
ERNEST CLAREMONT

‘BOTH MEN TOOK TO EACH OTHER’

THE HISTORIC FIRST MEETING OF Henry Royce with the Hon. C.S. Rolls took place on 4 May 1904 at the Midland Hotel in Manchester (now the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza, Midland, Manchester).

The two men could hardly have come from more different backgrounds. The Hon. C.S. Rolls (his father had been raised to the peerage in 1892 as Baron Llangattock of the Hendre) had been educated at Eton and Cam-bridge, and moved comfortably in London society among his aristocratic and wealthy friends. Henry Royce had known poverty and hardship all his life and, in that well-worn phrase, the only university he had graduated from was the one of ‘‘ard knocks’. The one characteristic they had in common was a certain prickliness, perhaps in both cases born of shyness rather than arrogance. How would the two react to each other?

It was not a casual meeting, but one which had only been arranged after much planning and persuasion by Henry Edmunds, who came to be known as ‘the Godfather’ of Rolls-Royce. Edmunds was to say some time later in his Reminiscences:

Mr. Rolls accompanied me to Manchester, to which I was then a frequent visitor, as I had to look after several business concerns there and held a trader’s ticket between London and Manchester. I well remember the conversation I had in the dining-car of the train with Mr. Rolls, who said it was his ambition to have a motor car connected with his name so that in the future it might be a household word, just as much as ‘Broadwood’ or ‘Steinway’ in connection with pianos; or ‘Chubbs’ in connection with safes. I am sure neither of us at that time could foresee the wonderful development of the car which resulted from my introduction of these two gentlemen to each other. I remember we went to the Great Central Hotel at Manchester and lunched together. I think both men took to each other at first sight and they eagerly discussed the prospects and requirements of the automobile industry which was still in its early infancy. Mr. Rolls then went to see for himself the Royce car; and after considerable discussions and negotiations on both sides it was decided to form a separate concern in which the name of Rolls was conjoined with that of Royce, forming the compound which is held in the highest regard today. [Edmunds refers to the Great Central Hotel but there was no such hotel in Manchester. The Midland Hotel was next to Central Station, and he must have been confused.]

There have been a number of imaginative accounts of the conversations between Rolls and Royce at this first meeting but, as C.W. Morton pointed out in his History of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Vol. 1, no reliable evidence has come to light as to precisely what was said or what business arrangements were made. Edmunds gave the occasion only a few sentences in his Reminiscences of a Pioneer and Sir Max Pemberton, who lived close to Royce in his latter years in West Wittering, wrote The Life of Sir Henry Royce and talked to Royce, unfortunately did not record a first-hand account from the great man himself. Indeed, Rolls only spoke publicly once about the meeting. At a dinner given by Rolls-Royce to mark the achievement of Percy Northey, the driver of one of the company’s first ‘Light 20 hp’ cars, in coming second in the first Tourist Trophy race run in 1905 on the Isle of Man, he said:

You may ask yourselves how it was that I came to be associated with Mr. Royce and Mr. Royce with me. Well, for a considerable number of years I had been actively engaged in the sale of foreign cars, and the reason for this was that I wanted to be able to recommend and sell the best cars in the world, irrespective of origin … the cars I sold were, I believe, the best that could be got at that time, but somehow I always had a sort of feeling that I should prefer to be selling English instead of foreign goods. In addition I could distinctly notice a growing desire on the part of my clients to purchase English-made cars; yet I was disinclined to embark in a factory and manufacture myself, firstly on account of my own incompetence and inexperience in such matters, and secondly on account of the enormous risks involved, and at the same time I could not come across any English-made car that 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.

Pemberton maintained that Rolls’s business partner, Claude Johnson (the hyphen in Rolls-Royce, of whom much more later), accompanied Rolls to Manchester to meet Royce. This is very unlikely. Edmunds would surely have mentioned it in his Reminiscences, and Wilton J. Oldham in his biography of Johnson, The Hyphen in Rolls-Royce, said:

[Rolls] returned to London full of enthusiasm and went straight to C.J.’s flat to tell him about his trip to Manchester, saying, ‘I have found the greatest engineer in the world’ … Claude Johnson was as enthusiastic as his partner when he, too, had inspected the 10 hp Royce car and met its designer; so it was quickly arranged that the firm of C.S. Rolls & Co. would have the sole selling rights of the marque, one of the conditions being that the car would be sold under the name Rolls-Royce.

In a later book Oldham maintained that Rolls had persuaded Royce to have a car sent down to London by train. Rolls collected it and drove it round to Johnson’s flat at midnight, knocked him up and said: ‘I have found the greatest engineer in the world.’

He then insisted Johnson get dressed, and drove him round the deserted London streets. (Johnson was living at this time in St. James’s Court facing Buckingham Gate, by coincidence exactly opposite the current location of Rolls-Royce’s head office.)

Paul Tritton, a dedicated scholar of the early years of Rolls-Royce, wrote in his book The Godfather of Rolls-Royce:

These stories [the ones told by Wilton Oldham and John Rowland giving details of conversations between Rolls and Johnson] have plenty of entertainment value … but are not taken literally by Rolls-Royce scholars!

In Tritton’s view it is likely that Rolls had certainly seen, and probably driven, the first Royce 10 which was in the south of England in April and May 1904 for the Side Slip trials. He could well have driven Johnson round London late at night before he went up to Manchester to meet Royce. While in Manchester he probably drove in the second Royce 10 which was allocated to Ernest Claremont.

What is not in doubt is Rolls’s excitement about the car. As Harold Nock-olds wrote in his famous book, The Magic of a Name, first published in 1938:

Rolls at this time had a prejudice against two-cylinder engines and he climbed into the high passenger seat of the little Royce prepared for all the vibration and roughness that were usually associated with the type. To his amazement he found that the car had the smoothness and even pull of the average ‘four’ allied to a quite phenomenal degree of silence. He came, he rode, and was conquered.

THE GODFATHER

Who was Henry Edmunds, the man who introduced Rolls to Royce? Paul Tritton wrote a book, The Godfather of Rolls-Royce – the life and times of Henry Edmunds, MICE, MIEE, Science of Technology’s Forgotten Pioneer, which served to place Edmunds in his correct place in the history of technological development in this country, and to give more substance to his place in the history of Rolls-Royce.

Edmunds was born in Halifax in 1853 into a middle-class family. His father was a partner in Edmunds and Hookway, a firm of engineers and iron merchants. Edmunds was educated at private schools until he was 15, when he joined his father’s firm. By the time he was 18 he had designed an oil engine, and in 1873 he and two friends patented an oil vapour lamp which could light and heat a cottage or generate steam for a marine or locomotive engine. For the next twenty years Edmunds was to enjoy several adventures while establishing himself in the electrical industry, including a meeting with Thomas Edison, apparently at the very moment of the first reproduction of mechanically recorded speech. In 1893, Edmunds became the Managing Director of W.T. Glover of Salford, Manchester, one of Britain’s largest manufacturers of electricity cables.

Later in the 1890s other directors joined W.T. Glover, including Ernest Claremont, Henry Royce’s partner at F.H. Royce & Co. Ltd. of Cooke Street, Manchester. Claremont became an important link between the two companies as F.H. Royce & Co. Ltd. (later Royce Ltd.), already well-established as a manufacturer of electric motors and dynamos, had recently developed electric cranes. (Royce’s companies went through three different legal entities. From 1884–94 the company was F.H. Royce & Co., from 1894–99 F.H. Royce & Co. Ltd., and after 1899 Royce Ltd.) While this association with Royce Ltd. was developing, Edmunds also became friendly with Rolls and Johnson through his interest in cars and his joining the Automobile Club, where he served on the committee alongside Rolls. And, of course, Johnson was the RAC’s first secretary. He donated the Henry Edmunds Hill-Climbing Trophy.

In 1902 Henry Royce began to work on a DeDion Quad, and in 1903 on a second-hand Decauville (George Clegg, an employee at Cooke Street in 1902, remembered that the Decauville arrived by train and was pushed by employees round to Cooke Street) – convinced that he could improve on it. At this time, Edmunds became more closely involved with Royce Ltd. He gave Ernest Claremont some of his shares in W.T. Glover in exchange for a block of his shares in Royce Ltd. Helping Royce make the decision to build the three prototype motor cars in the autumn of 1903, apart from Edmunds’s encouragement, was the post-Boer War slump which left Royce Ltd., along with many others, with spare capacity. Royce, mindful of the survival of his company and faced with declining orders and prices, felt that motor cars could be a new product on which he could use his talents as an electrical and mechanical engineer.

While Royce was experimenting and building his cars (he had already built a rockery at the end of his garden to prevent the embarrassment of plunging into his neighbour’s garden in the DeDion Quad if the brakes failed) Rolls was asking Edmunds if he knew of a source of new cars.

I wish you could give me any information you may get hold of relating to improvements in the building of motor cars. I have some ideas of my own which I should like to follow out; and there are many opportunities of doing so.

Edmunds was now determined to bring Rolls and Royce together, and on Saturday 26 March 1904 he wrote to Royce:

I saw Mr. Rolls yesterday, after telephoning to you: and he said it would be much more convenient if you could see him in London, as he is so very much occupied; and, further, that several other houses are now in negotiation with him, wishing to do the whole or part of his work. What he is looking for is a good high-class quality of car to replace the Panhard; preferably of three or four cylinders. He has some personal dislike to two-cylinder cars. I will do all I can to bring about this arrangement with Mr. Rolls; for I think your car deserves well; and ought to take its place when it is once recognised by the public on its merits.

On the same day he wrote to Rolls:

I have pleasure in enclosing you photographs and specification of the Royce car, which I think you will agree with me looks very promising. I have written them asking if they can make an early appointment to meet you in London; and also whether they can arrange to send up a car for your inspection and trial. The point that impressed me most, however, is this. The people have worked out their designs in their own office, and knowing as I do the skill of Mr. Royce as a practical mechanical engineer, I feel one is very safe in taking up any work his firm may produce. Trusting this matter may lead to business to our mutual interest in the future.

Six days later, on 1 April 1904 (it was officially recorded as 31 March to avoid April Fool jokes), the first Royce 10 hp made its first run, and later in the month was involved in the Side Slip Trials. On Monday 18 April, the endurance trials began with the 145 miles from London to Margate and back. Edmunds drove and was accompanied by Goody, who normally acted as his chauffeur but in this instance went along as his mechanic, and also by the official observer, Massac Buist, and a reporter from the Morning Post. The car performed well, as it did the next day on a journey to Marlborough and the day after on two trips to Slough and Beaconsfield.

As we have seen, Royce and Rolls finally came together on 4 May 1904. Edmunds helped the negotiations between them following this meeting which he had arranged, negotiations which culminated in the famous agreement of 23 December 1904.

Clearly, Edmunds’s advice was requested. Royce wrote to him on 8 August 1904.

With reference to Mr. Rolls taking our manufactures, he has at present in his possession an agreement we have got out on these lines, and with reference to his suggestion that you should be named as umpire, I should be most happy to agree to this as I know your anxiety would be for everything to be quite fair on each side. I must thank you for your introduction, which is promising well, and I think we ought to be of great service to each other.

In the agreement, Rolls contracted to take all the cars built by Royce Ltd., who agreed to deliver a range of two-, three-, four- and six-cylinder chassis rated between 10 and 30 hp.

Thereafter, Edmunds was not much involved, although he was a guest of honour at the formal opening of the firm’s factory in Derby in 1908, and it was on this occasion that he was first referred to publicly as ‘the Godfather of Rolls-Royce’. He continued to act as a director of W.T. Glover, which pioneered urban electrical distribution and electrical installation in mines, and was already Managing Director of Parsons, a manufacturer of non-skid chains. As far as we know, he was not involved further with Rolls-Royce Limited, but without him the company might never have come to exist.

Who were the two men that Edmunds brought together?

HENRY ROYCE

Frederick Henry Royce was born on 27 March 1863 in the village of Alwalton near Peterborough. He was descended from generations of farmers and millers, and his grandfather had been a pioneer in the installation of steam power in water mills. His father, James, in the family tradition, trained to be a farmer before moving on to milling, renting a mill at Castor, Northamptonshire in 1852. He had just married Mary King, the daughter of a large-scale farmer in Luffenham, Rutlandshire. In 1858 they moved to the mill at Alwalton with their first son and three daughters.

James proved to be unreliable and seemed unable to apply himself consistently, probably due to his suffering from Hodgkin’s disease. By the time Henry Royce was born in 1863 he was in financial trouble, and was forced to mortgage the Alwalton Mill lease to the London Flour Company. In 1867 he moved to London to work for this company, taking both his sons with him but leaving his daughters with his wife in Alwalton. He died in 1872 in a poor house, at the age of only forty-one. He proved the exception in a family of prosperous farmers and millers.

Henry Royce therefore knew poverty in his early life, and even before he was four he was earning money birdscaring in the fields near Alwalton. After his father died, he sold newspapers for W.H. Smith and also delivered telegrams in the Mayfair area. Royce’s grandfather had taken most of the Royce clan to Canada, leaving few relatives in Britain to give support to James’s widow and children. Fortunately, when he was fourteen an aunt on his mother’s side agreed to pay £20 a year (about £2,200 in today’s terms) for him to be an apprentice at the Great Northern Railway works at Peter-borough. He lodged with a Mr. and Mrs. Yarrow, went to evening classes in English and mathematics, and learned a great deal about machining and fitting in the workshop in Mr. Yarrow’s garden. At the same time he continued to earn money by delivering newspapers.

After three years, the aunt felt unable to continue her support. This was a serious setback for Royce, since failure to complete his premium apprenticeship denied him ‘skilled status’. However, Royce found work as a toolmaker with the Leeds engineering firm, Greenwood and Batley. Although it did not take long for Royce to secure this job, it was a very worrying time. As Pemberton says in his biography:

Unfortunately, at that time there was one of our periodical seasons of trade depression. Henry Royce tramped, as he told me himself, many weary miles upon a vain quest. His powerful recommendations opened no doors. Great houses were discharging, not engaging...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Names in Rolls-Royce
• Chapter One The Prime Movers
• Chapter Two ‘The Most Perfect Cars’
• Chapter Three ‘The Achievement of a Thinking Designer’
• Chapter Four The Acme of Refinement
• Chapter Five ‘We Must Never be Satisfied’
• Chapter Six ‘Are We in the Aero Engine Business?’
• Chapter Seven Preparing for War
• Chapter Eight ‘The Whole Story is Engines, Merlin Engines’
• Chapter Nine Holding it all Together
• Chapter Ten ‘The Turbine Engines Have Arrived’
• Short Biographies
• Bibliography of Books Consulted
• Photo Credits
• Index