Rolls-Royce Motor Cars PressClub · Article.
ROLLS-ROYCE MOTOR CARS: SHAPING THE WORLD FOR 120 YEARS
30.04.2024 Press Release
On 4 May 2024, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars marks the 120th anniversary of the first meeting between Henry Royce and The Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls. To celebrate this auspicious anniversary, Rolls-Royce considers the historical, technological and social context in which the marque came into being and the impact and influence of the Rolls-Royce name over its 120 years.
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Andrew Ball
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
This article in other PressClubs
- Rolls-Royce marks the 120th #anniversary of the first meeting between founders Henry Royce and The Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls, on 4 May 1904
- A brief review of the founders’ lives and careers in the years leading up to their historic encounter in Manchester, and the roles of other less well-known, but nonetheless pivotal, actors in the Rolls-Royce origin story
- An examination of the world and society in which Rolls-Royce was established and the marque’s contribution to the wider technological progress of the age
- Part of a year-long celebration of the extraordinary people, events and motor cars that make up Rolls-Royce’s rich and remarkable heritage
“From a modern perspective, 1904 can feel impossibly distant from
our own times. But it was an age of unprecedented invention,
innovation and technological progress, in which many of the things
we now take for granted first appeared. Rolls-Royce was born into
this extraordinarily dynamic, creative world and would go on to
shape it profoundly and irrevocably. Looking back, the meeting of
Rolls and Royce seems somehow predestined, the arcs of their
respective careers up to that point making it appear almost
inevitable. In fact, it came about through a web of chance
connections and overlapping relationships; without these, given
their vastly different backgrounds and social circles, it might
never have happened at all. We are proud to continue their
remarkable story, to celebrate and build upon their unique legacy
120 years later.”
Andrew
Ball, Head of Corporate Relations and Heritage, Rolls-Royce
Motor Cars
On 4 May 2024, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars marks the 120th
anniversary of the first meeting between Henry Royce and The Hon.
Charles Stewart Rolls. The founders’ personal stories, the history of
the company they founded and its motor cars are well known and
available to view elsewhere on the Rolls-Royce PressClub.
To celebrate this auspicious anniversary, Rolls-Royce considers
the historical, technological and social context in which the marque
came into being and the impact and influence of the Rolls-Royce name
over its 120 years. But to fully understand the marque’s origins and
legacy, one must first reach a little further back in time and examine
the founders’ activities in the years immediately prior to that first,
world-changing encounter in 1904.
HENRY ROYCE: THE ENGINEER
For Henry Royce, the story really begins in late
1884, when he founded his first engineering company, F. H. Royce &
Co. (he was christened Frederick Henry) in Manchester. Initially
producing small items such as battery-powered doorbells, the company
progressed to making heavy equipment including overhead cranes and
railway shunting capstans.
But after almost two decades of expansion and success, in 1902
the company was heading for financial trouble, owing to competition
from an influx of cheaper products from Germany and the USA. Royce’s
perfectionism and obsession with improvement meant he was not prepared
to enter a race to the bottom, or compromise the quality of his
products. Habitual overwork and constant strain seriously affected his
already weakened constitution, and finally his health collapsed entirely.
His doctors ordered him to take an extended break, so Royce
embarked on a 10-week visit to his wife’s family in South Africa. Yet
even on a medically imposed rest cure, his engineer’s mind was as
active and inquisitive as ever. His choice of reading material on the
long voyage was The Automobile: Its Construction and
Management, originally written in French by Gérard Lavergne and
translated into English that year. This was literally ‘the book’ on
how to build a motor car, and Royce was clearly both enlightened and
inspired by it.
On his return to England, Royce – now physically and mentally
recovered – immediately acquired his first motor car, a French 10 H.P.
Decauville. It’s often been assumed that this car was so poorly made
and unreliable that Royce, out of sheer frustration, set about
addressing its numerous defects.
In fact, almost the opposite is true. He chose the Decauville
precisely because it was an excellent, state-of-the-art machine with
the express intention of dismantling it, analysing every component,
then producing his own car from scratch. Any reasonably competent
engineer could have upgraded a badly built, substandard product: it
took a genius of Royce’s stature to, in his own words, “take the best
that exists and make it better”.
THE VITAL ROLE OF ‘LITTLE ERNIE’
One of the lesser known – but nonetheless vital –
contributors to the first Royce cars’ development was Ernest Wooler.
Born in Manchester in 1888, 15-year-old Ernest stood five feet four
inches (1.62m) tall and was nicknamed ‘Little Ernie’ when he joined
Royce Limited in 1903 as an indentured premium apprentice – a position
for which his father paid the very considerable sum of £100 (over
£15,000 at today’s values). He worked a 56-hour week for a shilling a
day (about £7.60 now) in the drawing office, learning to make
blueprints – and, strictly against the rules, producing his own
drawings on the draughtsmen’s boards.
One morning, he received an ominous summons: Mr Royce himself
wished to see him. After severely reprimanding the unfortunate
youngster for his unauthorised handiwork, Royce ordered him to go and
fetch a typist’s notepad. Mystified, Ernie did as he was instructed
and gave the pad to his employer. Royce waved it away. “You hold onto
that and follow me,” he said and led the way to the workshops, where
he climbed onto the Decauville, took off his jacket and rolled up his
sleeves. Then, assisted by a fitter, he began methodically taking the
car apart. Nearby, Ernie sat on a box with his notepad. “Each piece
was handed to me, and I made a sketch of it and added the dimensions
they quoted,” he later recalled.
As Royce correctly judged, Ernie was the ideal person to capture
the basic data that would inform the design of the motor cars that
followed. It’s also tempting to wonder if Royce recognised a kindred
spirit; a young man starting at the bottom, but eager to better
himself. If so, he was right. In 1913, Ernie emigrated to America and
enjoyed a successful career as a design engineer, becoming an expert
in bearings and filing a number of patents. In 1947, he retired to
Hillsboro Beach, Florida, where he was elected as the town’s first mayor.
SMALL THINGS MAKE PERFECTION
Royce had left school aged just 10 and his formal
education consisted of evening classes in English and Mathematics that
he attended in his late teens; later, as the world-renowned Sir Henry,
he still self-deprecatingly described himself as being able to do no
more than simple arithmetic. But he had an instinctive, intuitive
talent that more than made up for his lack of academic credentials.
As noted, the Decauville was a highly evolved motor car in its
own right and Royce sensibly retained some of its key features – a
two-cylinder engine, live propshaft and differential rather than chain
drive – in his own designs. He also introduced numerous detailed
alterations and innovations: mechanically rather than atmospherically
operated inlet valves; a more effective radiator; replacement main,
big end and gearbox bearings; and a single gear lever replacing the
Decauville’s notoriously tricky twin-lever arrangement. From the
outset, he was obsessed with reducing the car’s overall weight,
beginning with the simple and obvious expedient of discarding the
Decauville’s bronze warning bell, which reputedly weighed around 20kg
(over 40lb).
It was not only the Decauville that Royce subjected to his
intricate and exacting scrutiny. Between 1902 and 1905 he repaired,
investigated and test-drove various makes of cars belonging to
(presumably willing) friends and acquaintances to gain additional
first-hand insights. According to his own records, he covered some
11,000 miles in the course of this research; many of them undoubtedly
in the Decauville, which he kept until at least 1906.
Royce the engineer was aiming to build the best car in the
world. It was no vanity project or proof-of-concept exercise: he
wanted his technical innovation to be commercially viable.
Unfortunately, easy charm, a wide social network and a way with words
were not among his many gifts. But in London, there was a young man
who had these qualities in abundance.
THE HON. CHARLES STEWART ROLLS: THE SALESMAN
In many respects, The Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls was
Royce’s antithesis: wealthy, aristocratic, urbane, well-connected and
highly (and expensively) educated. What they shared was a passion for
engineering and machinery – in Rolls’s case, racing cars, hot air
balloons and aeroplanes.
After graduating from Cambridge in 1898, Rolls had been briefly
employed as Third Engineer on his family’s steam yacht, the Santa
Maria, following a spell at the London & North-Western
Railway in Crewe. But after just a few years, he realised that his
considerable talents required a different outlet.
In January 1902, Rolls opened one of Britain’s first car
dealerships, C. S. Rolls & Co., in Fulham, west London, partnering
with the formidable Claude Johnson at the end of 1903. The enterprise,
initially underwritten by Rolls’s father, Lord Llangattock, imported
and sold French Panhard and Mors cars, as well as Minerva vehicles
built in Belgium. The business seemingly flourished, but Rolls was
frustrated that all his stock was designed and manufactured overseas.
He could find no car produced domestically that met his clients’
needs, or his own standards as both a trained engineer and a lifelong enthusiast.
As 1904 dawned, the elements of a potentially transformative
partnership were in place: Royce the gifted engineer in search of a
market; Rolls the consummate salesman seeking a game-changing product.
All that was needed was something – or someone – to bring them together.
HENRY EDMUNDS: THE CRUCIAL CONNECTION
Rolls had befriended Henry Edmunds through the
Automobile Club of Great Britain & Ireland (later the Royal
Automobile Club). Edmunds was a director of Royce Limited and had
driven one of the company’s early 10 H.P. cars. His enthusiasm for the
car was such that Rolls requested a meeting with its creator, which
Edmunds duly arranged. On returning to London from Manchester, Rolls
told Claude Johnson that he had found “the greatest motor engineer in
the world”. Rolls agreed to sell all the cars Royce could make and the
rest is, literally, history.
THE WORLD IN 1904
So much for the personalities. What of the world and
context in which Rolls-Royce was formed?
Much of what is taken for granted today was still decades in the
future – indeed, many things now considered essential would not arrive
until the following century. From the vantage point at the time of
writing in 2024, 1904 feels like ancient history: a grainy, distant,
black-and-white world detached from our own times and experiences.
Rolls and Royce met in a world without television, penicillin or
FM radio. Construction work had just begun on the Panama Canal; The
RMS Titanic wouldn’t set sail on her fateful maiden voyage
for another eight years. King Edward VII was two years into his reign,
having succeeded his mother, Queen Victoria, in 1902 – the year that
also saw the end of the Boer War, one year prior to Wilbur and Orville
Wright making the world’s first flight in a powered aircraft. Arthur
Balfour was British Prime Minister, Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt was
President of the United States and Franz Joseph I was Emperor of Austria-Hungary.
The motor car, too, was still in its infancy; Karl Benz had
produced the first ‘true’ petrol-powered automobile – albeit with just
three wheels – in 1886, and motoring remained largely a hobby for
daring, well-heeled enthusiasts like Charles Rolls. The world would
have to wait until 1913, when Henry Ford displayed the world’s first
moving assembly line, for cars to become accessible and affordable to
the majority of the population.
But the seeds of our modern life were there. This was the
belle époque, an unusually protracted period of peace and
political stability in Europe that gave rise to economic confidence
and prosperity, which in turn encouraged a surge in innovation. The
preceding 20 years alone had seen the invention of the vacuum cleaner,
electric oven, dry-cell battery, ballpoint pen, cinema, pneumatic
tyre, x-rays and radio. The great technical marvel of 1904 was
City of Truro, the first steam locomotive in the world to
exceed 100mph – a record that stood for 30 years.
There were significant social and cultural advances, too, with
the appointments of Britain’s first black mayor, and first female
university professor. The London Symphony Orchestra gave its inaugural
concert and the Coliseum Theatre opened in the West End. Literary
circles were graced by titans including Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, Jules
Verne, James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy and P. G. Wodehouse; concert halls and
opera houses premiered works by Debussy, Sibelius, Ravel, Elgar,
Puccini, and Mahler. New types of music also bloomed, as the
syncopated rhythms that would inform Jazz proliferated through Ragtime.
It was into this extraordinarily fertile, dynamic and optimistic
age that Rolls-Royce was born. A time in which visionaries and
pioneers would shape how the world thought, functioned and behaved for
years or decades to come; exactly what Rolls and Royce did with their
new motor car.
By building a machine whose engineering, performance,
reliability and durability surpassed everything that had gone before,
Royce and Rolls set the standard not only for all the Rolls‑Royce
models that would follow, but for the motor car itself. In so doing,
they shaped a technology that would transform work, travel,
communications, communities, infrastructure, design, technology,
materials society, politics, economics and culture in ways they could
never have predicted.
A PERMANENT LEGACY
Rolls and Royce fulfilled their mission to create
‘the best car in the world’. They gave their names to a dynasty of
motor cars that defined, and continues to define, superluxury motoring
across the world.
But perhaps their crowning achievement is to have made
Rolls-Royce the global exemplar of excellence. Practically every
product, service, device and technology that has been invented since
1904 has aspired to be ‘the Rolls-Royce of…’ its industry or sector.
The standard they set 120 years ago is still driving innovation and
improvement everywhere – including within the company they created.