The Hon Charles Stewart Rolls (1877-1910), sculpted by Lady Scott. This statue, erected at Dover, commemorates Rolls's cross-Channel flight of 1910

Britain in 1860 was a very different country from the one we know today. The railways had recently begun to spread their net across the countryside. The stage coach and the carrier's cart, travelling on watrebound roads, remained important elements in the nation's transport system. Victoria's Prince Consort was still alive, the Whigs were in power, public hangings could still be witnesses. But change was coming. The great Exhibition of 1851 had proclaimed Britain's indrustrial might and inspired the nation to further progress in practically every field but road transport. There had been attempts at running steam coaches but vested interest in horse transport halted further developments. It was left to Etienne Lenoir in Paris in the early 1960s to start the ball of automobilism rolling when he made a 7 mile jaunt from Paris to Joinville-le-Pont in a lash-up carriage by a gas engine. Even in the tiny village of Alwalton, some 5 miles south-west of Peterborough, things were changing. James Royce, scion of a long line of millers from South Luffenham, 12 miles away, was busy converting his flour and bone mills to steam power. His wife, Mary, a farmer's daughter, was preparing to present him with their fifth child. Apart from the mechanical instincts it may have inherited no-one could have predicted the influence this child would have on the whole area of mechanical transport. The baby was born on 27 March 1863 and four months later was christened Frederick Henry Royce. James Royce's attemps to mechanize his mills ended in finacial failure in 1867 and, disheartened, he took his familly off to London. Hardship

Sir Frederick Henry Royce (1863-1933) by Derwent Wood, RA, at Derby. Royce, a commanding figure over 6ft tall, was created a baronet in 1930

At this stage an aunt in Fletton took pity on the boy and paid for an apprenticeship at the new Great Northern Railway works in Peterborough. The cost was £20.00 a year. She also paid for his keep with the Yarrow familly. Frederick was doubly fortunate, for he found his work instructive and absorbing and Yarrow himself was a skilled fitter and machinist with his own lathe, shaper and tools in a back garden workshop. What Royce did not learn at the railway works he was taught by his landlord. His skill with machine tools was probably learnt in the garden shed.

In 1879 Royce had his apprenticeship cut short when his aunt, affected by the slump, could no longer afford to support him. It was not the best time for a 16-year-old to find work but Royce was not easily put off. Most of the engineering works were in the north of England so there he went, trudging up the Great North Road of Bradford and Leeds carrying testimonials from the superintendent of the locomotive works which, as Yarrow's son wrote later, "should have got him work anywhere". In Leeds he eventually found employment with a firm of toolmakers at a salary of 11 shillings for a 54 hour week. What little spare time he had was spent studying the new science of electrical engineering that was to become a lifelong passion.
 

He was confident of his knowledge of electricity and when a job was advertised as tester with the Light and Power Company in London he applied for the post, and got it. Street lighting by electricity was in its infancy but Royce's machanical ability, allied to his knowledge of the subject, not only proved adequate but caused him to be sent north as technical adviser to the newly formed Lancashire Maxim and Western Electric Company in Liverpool. When the parent company in London folded the Lancashire company also closed but the episode had lasted sufficiently long for Royce to have acquired valuable experience and knowledge. When he was not working he attended lectures at the London Polytechnic and became a protege of Professor Ayrton, the battery pioneer. Moreover, he had accumulated a little capital. The ups and downs he and his familly had experienced imbued him with the determination to succeed. To this end he formed a small manufacturing company in Manchester with a friend and fellow electrical engineer, Ernest A. Claremont. His stake was £20.00 and Claremont's £50.00. The first jobs in their workshop in Cooke Street were subcontracts for lamp parts and small switchgear. As motive power for their machinery they used a steam engine that Royce had been given by a friend. The partners lived above the workshop and prospered modestly through hard work; prudence and Royce's intense concern for detail and his mechanical and electrical .

The interior of the Cooke Street factory, Manchester, in 1904. By the Royce's engineering business had been established 20 years.

Ernest A. Claremont, Royce's original business partner, was the first chairman of Rolls-Royce. On his house was a crest and the legend 'Be industrious'

In 1893 Royce and Claremont married the daughters of Alfred Punt. They also acquired the services of John De Looze, who would look after the financial side of the enterprise, then booming because of the electric motor business. No doubt it was on the advice of De Looze that F.H. Royce and Company was reconstitued as a limited company in 1894 when the manufacture of cranes began. It was now known as Royce Limited. The directors were Royce, Claremont (who proved a talented businessman), a friend of Claremond and De Looze. As secretary and accountant De Looze subjected every item of expenditure to searching scrutiny. Although they were his bread and butter Royce knew all about the shortcomings of DC motors and generators and was an early enthusiast for three phase current for workshop use. The drum-wound motors the partners produced as their capital grew were eagerly taken up by the textile trade and by mine owners for hauling gear. Then came the first Royce workshop cranes, driven by his motors, which were a complete innovation. They not only made money but took the pulley-hauley out of a lot of factory jobs that had hitherto called for lifting tackle and muscle power. The impression has often been given that the cranes were small equipment and that the undertaking was a minor one. By the turn of the century many of these products were, in fact, travelling cranes for dockside and steel mill use propelled by motors of up to 70hp rating, with sophisticated switchgear, all built and designed by the company, which was soon able to maintain a considerable drawing office, steelworks and foundry all under the supervision of Henry Royce. The cranes were a big success because they were well made, quiet running and extremely long lived. They were also expensive. Royce's precept was always that the quality remains when the price is forgotten. In times of financial stability this is not a bad principle, but it tends to be forgotten when there is a heavy drain on finances, for example in a recession. It worked well enough in the golden 1890s to the extent that the company's capital was increased to £30,000.00 in 1899, equivalent at today's values of almost £1 million. Before he even thought of motor cars, therefore, Royce had become a man of substance, a respected

The turn of the century was a difficult time for the British economy. The slump that followed the Boer War affected all aspect of business. The position was made worse for Royce Limited by price cutting indulged in by newcomers to the crane business attracted by the Manchester company's success. That Royce became interested in motor cars in this period appears to have been a coincidence and at first he did not consider them as an alternative product to cranes but simply as an efficient means of transport. The De Dion quadricycle, his first purchase, could hardly have been so described, yet this crude but ingenious device may well have triggered in him the desire to make something better. It is certainly behind the remarks he made later in life about the crudity and general mechanical inferiority of early motor cars. His approach to the problem of improvement set a pattern that he followed in later years. It was to go out and buy the best example of what he wanted, take it apart and then build a better one. It was a straightforward approach that served him well.

Once Royce had made up his mind to make his own car his partners well knew that they could not gainsay the project. His opinion was formidable  and his determination impressive. Moreover, he had been right in the past so they stood back and allowed precious resources and manpower to be diverted into buildind a batch of three cars. Two apprentices, Eric Platford and Tom S. Haldenby, helped erect them. Royce, a hard taskmaster, inpired intense respect and loyalty and both Platford and Haldenby stayed with him until their retirement. Platford became chief tester when Rolls-Royce Limited was founded in 1906 and ran the final test department in the 1920s. Haldenby was a right hand man to Royce when he planned the Derby factory and was in charge of buildings and maintenance there. He was later instrumental in laying out the factory at Crewe. 

It was not by chance that Henry Edmunds entered the picture. A company director by profession and a keen motorist and amateur driver by inclination he first became involved with Royce limited when Claremont approached him to buy a block of shares in the cable-making firm of W.T. Glover of Salford, of which he was a director. As a pionner electrical engineer, he introduced the incandescent lamp to England. He knew Royce well. Edmunds lived in London and commuted to Manchester regulary. Moreover, as a member of the tightly knit motoring community he was friendly with Lord Llangattock's son, the Hon Charles S. Rolls. From conversations with Rolls he knew that his firm of C.S. Rolls and Company, which sold quality French cars, was anxious to market a really high-quality British motor car. Royce was busy making two cylinder vehicles, while Rolls preferred three or four cylinders, yet Edmunds knew that Royce's car was a refined and well built as anything in his experience and that Rolls would approved. Royce refused to go to London to meet Rolls, so Edmunds persuaded Rolls to make the journey to Manchester. The men met over lunch at the Midland Hotel in May 1904. Afterwards they tried the car. Rolls wascaptivated by the vehicle and by the man. No mean mechanic and a qualified engineer himself, he undoubtedly saw that, while the Royce car was better than good, the man who made it, given the right encouragement, had the talent to build infinitely better machines. He returned to London proclaiming that he found the best motor engineer in the world and sent Claude Johnson, his partner, to assess the car and make business arrangements.

Charles Stewart Rolls was a pionneer of motoring in the United Kingdom. As a young man of 19 studying engineering at Cambridge he had imported a 3½ hp Peugeot of the Paris-Bordeaux type and shattered the tranquility of the university town. In common with the Hon Evelyn Ellis he had used his car freely on the public highways, disregarding the 4mph speed limit and the requirement to be preceded by a man with a red flag. Only the wealthy could afford motor cars at that time and it was their influence, and that of the Self  Propelled Traffic Association that they formed, which caused the speed limit to be raised to 12mph in November 1896.

In his way Rolls was a man as dedicated as Royce. Having espoused motoring he did it impulsively when and where he could, always with the emphasis on competition. He won, for example, the 1,000 Mile Tour organized by the Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland. With the Hon John Scott-Montagu he shared the honour of being the first Briton to race abroad. That was in 1899 when he completed in the Paris-Boulogne race driving a 12hp Panhard. He finished last by a considerable margin and realized he had much to learn. The following year he rode as mechanic to S.F. Edge in the 1900 Paris-Toulouse-Paris event on a 16hp Napier, the first-ever British car to challenge the continentals on their own ground. He drove his own 60hp Mors in the historic Paris-Berlin race in 1901 but failed to reach Bordeaux in the 1903 Paris-Madrid. Subsequent to meeting Royce, he drove a Herbert Austin designed 96hp Wolseley in the Gordon Bennett race of 1905. His eighth position in the big international race of the season was an outstanding effort.
 

Rolls had set up in business in London as an importer and vendor of high-class French cars in early 1902 and traded fromLillie Hall in Seagrave Road, Fulham. As with most things he did, the enterprise was well organised. A feature of Lillie Hall was an extensive machine shop, equipped to make spare parts that could not be obtained from the manufacturers, and space to display used cars. A showroom in Brook Street in the West End was opened later prior to the final move to Conduit Street in 1905. The cars he supplied to a noble clientele were mainly Krebs-Panhard, Mors, Minerva and Clement. The discovery of Royce and his car pleased him enormously because he was an intense patriot and was irked by the refusal of British designers to learn from teh advances being made by their counterparts in Europe. So Rolls and Johnson undertook to sell all of Royce's car production. The agreement signed in 1904 provided for Royce Limited to make cars for a new firm, Rolls-Royce Distributing Limited; the cars would be known as Rolls-Royce. Almost two years elapsed before the partners decided that the time was ripe to form a full association and for Rolls and Johnson to concentrate their energies on selling Rolls-Royce cars exclusively. Rolls-Royce Limited was registered in March 1906 with a nominal capital of £60,000. The new company took over all the assets of Rolls's company and the car activity of Royce Limited, which continued to make cranes. Claremont and Johnson, meanwhile looked for new premises for the factory and Royce busied himself with designing a successor to the 30hp six-cylinder car.

The 1905 catalogue of Rolls and Co announced the Rolls-royce range. This is the cover of a facsimile reprint.

To separate car manufacture from Cooke Street, where the crane buniness was brisk, a number of sites where examined. One of them was alongside the Cooke Street premises, off Stretford Road. Others were at Bradford and Coventry. Then Derby Corporation offered a substantial tract of land at Osmaston.

Claude Goodman Johnson has been described as the hyphen in Rolls-Royce; he was certainly a remarkable man. A couple of generations back his ancestry seems to have been little different from that of Royce. He described his forebears as 'trademen, farmers and yeomen'. Johnson's father failed as a trademan and moved to more amenable employment in the science and art department of the South Kensington museum where he rose to the position of curator. He was a devoted father and did night duty at Bethnal Green museum to pay for his son's education at St Paul's school and South Kensington Art School. Claude soon discovered that he was not cut out to be an artist and he found employment at the Imperial Institute where, as part of his duty to arrange shows and exhibitions, he helped organize the Great International Motor Exhibition promoted by Harry J. Lawson's Motor Car Club in 1896. The exhibits assembled from many manufacturers brought home to a distinguished gathering the significance of self-propelled personal transport. Furthermore, the part that Johnson played in mounting the exhibition did not go unnoticed.

When Lawson's Motor Car Club was revealed to be a body designed to promote his trading activities many pionner motorists moved over to the newly formed and independent Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland, founded by F.R. Simms and Harrington Moore in 1897. With recollections of the Imperial Institute exhibition, Simms and Moore invited Johnson to become secretary. In this job, where he was often called upon to organize competitive events, he inevitably came into regular contact with Rolls. The friendship was confirmed when Rolls convincingly won the gold medal in the club's 1,000 Mile Tour on 23 April 1900 driving a 12hp Panhard. At a dinner held later Johnson was presented with £100 to mark the club's appreciation of his work in the race. The award was proposed by the Hon C.S. Rolls.
 

This photograph of Rolls appeared soon after his Channel flight of 2 June 1910

It was not surprising, therefore, that when Rolls started his business he should ask Johnson to join him as a partner. Johnson had become disappointed by the development of politics within the automobile club and was happy to run the new business while his partner got on with his motor racing, ballooning and flying. These activities not only brought Rolls excitement, they also provided publicity for the firm and attracted many clients. Given his flair for running trials and demontration it was natural that Johnson should have sought to demonstrate Rolls-Royce cars by these means. He thought up the 15,000 mile trial for the 40/50 Silver Ghost, the London-Edinburgh run and suggested participation in the Alpine Trials. On another level his wisdom was never more apparent than in 1911 when he persuaded Royce, seriously ill from overwork and dietary neglect, to quit the factory and live in semi-retirement with a personal drawing office nearby where he could supervise engineering designs. This separation from the factory meant that royce had to learn to commit his design thoughts to paper as well as verbally to the stream of designers shuttling between the works and his retreat. The effect of this was to create a body of engineers who worked and thought like Royce. Furthermore, by persuading the board to adopt a one model policy from 1906 to 1922 with the 40/50, Johnson helped secure the company's financial security and it's reputation for quality products. Johnson was responsible for establishing a winter home for his engineer-in-chief at the little village of Canadel sur mer, near Lavandou on the French Riviera. A convinced Francophile, Johnson had built his own Villa Jaune there two years before Royce's health collapsed. After a convalescence at Overstrand in Norfolk where a nurse, Ethel Aubin, looked after him, Royce was taken to the Villa Jaune further to recuperate and

From then on Royce was nurtured and cared for by the ever-present Aubin, whose attention and encouragement extended his life by many years. Even before Royce separated himself from the works the company suffered a severe but not disruptive loss with the death of Rolls. Long before he had met Royce, Rolls had been fascinated with flying those globular, lighter than air machines, baloons. He was Britains's foremost aviator, was a founder member of the Royal Aero Club and was on the point of tryingto establish, against his partners' wishes, a Rolls-Royce aeroplane company. For some time he had ceased to be involved in the actual running of the motor car company. He was a great friend of the brothers Eustace, Horace and Oswald Short who built his balloons. After Wilbur and Orville Wright demonstrated heavier than air flight, the Short brothers built Rolls a Wright flyer under licence. In this machine, in June 1910, Rolls became the first Englishman to fly the channel and since he did not land on the other side but turned over Sangatte and flew back, he became the first man to make a double crossing nonstop.

Royce, Ethel Aubin and their dog relax in the sun

This three year guarantee against chassis defects was reproduced in a 1921 catalogue

Royce's exile from the works and that was effectively Cooke Street, for his visits to Derby were very rare called for a considerable duplication of design effort and a cumbersome method of working, but Claremond and Johnson knew well that Henry Royce was the firm's biggest asset. The arrangement adopted in principle was that Royce should have, near his house, a drawing office with a resident team of designers draughtsmen who would turn his ideas into working drawings. In common with many great designers Royce was not a draughtsman and conveyed his ideas in notes and sketches. The drawings from his 'bureau' were sent to Derby where the parts were made up in the experimental department and tested. Royce beleived that the only effective way to judge a product was to get something into metal and give it to the experimental department to have it rig-tested, road-tested and redesigned until it was perfect. If he had a shortcoming it was that he tended to waste time on refining the design of components before he had finalized the overall design. The Rolls-Royce 'Bible', a carefully pruned collection of memos between Royce and the Derby design team and experimental department, reveal his insistence on the finest obtainable finish for working surfaces and the best materials. From before the First World War Royce's British home had been at St Margaret's Bay, Kent; later he shifted to a house and farm at West Wittering, Sussex, away from the bombs. The drawing office at West Wittering was located in the village about a mile from the house. In 1919 Royce's design team was headed by T.S. Barrington; A. G. Elliott and Bernard Day answered to him and R.C. Hall looked after metellurgy. In the 1920s Elliott was Royce's chief aide at West Wittering and Le Canadel. Day was chief of the drawing office and Charles Jenner chief engine draughtsman. Day oversaw chassis design and Ivan Everden correlated the work of the chassis engineers and the coachbuilding companies that bodied the chassis. At Derby, initially, E. Harvey Baillie and Maurice Olley were chief production draughtsmen until Olley went to the United States to launch the Springfield project. Ernest W. Hives, assisted by W.A. Robotham was chief experimantal engineer.

While Royce exerted absolute authority in motor car design the aero engine side, which had started in 1914, he left to elliott and A.J. Rowledge in the 1920s. Royce, however, dictated policy and was ready to intervene if he saw things going the wrong way. Arthur Sidgreaves took over as general manager from Basil Johnson who had assumed the duties of chief executive upon the death of his brother in 1926. Sidgreaves, under the chairmanship of Lord Herbert Scott, guided the company through the difficult, yet busy, prewar period and for most of the war years before he died in 1944. It was in these years that the aero-engine side expanded greatly.

Ostensibly the weakest link physically in the chain, Henry Royce survived all his original partners. After his death in 1933 the outstanding figure to emerge was Ernest Hives. As chief experimental engineer he had been responsible for making Royce's design work. He made parts from drawings sent from Royce and put them on the road to be broken or proved. He had joined the company in 1908 as a tester cum competition driver, he drove a 40/50 Ghost in the 1911 London-Edingburgh run and was a memeber of the works team in the 1913 Austrian Alpine Trial. In the 1920s, when Royce tended to be over-preoccupied with detail, Hives made many important engineering decisions and offered them for judgment to his chief engineer. As often as not he would drive the cars down to Le Canadel himself, sometimes in company with Robotham, who later became chief engineer.

Hives could be both exasperating and inspiring. He disliked delegating authorithy and seldom gave praise. But his decisions were soundand sometimes inspired, such as when he decided that the only engine for the Rolls-Bentley in 1931 was the 20/25hp unit suitably hotted up. He is said to have had sixth sens as a driver. There are many tales of how he would cut blind corner after blind corner and then suddenly take the correct line on the next one., when there was invariably a car coming the other way. He made his mark as generalissimo of the aero-engine programme working under Rowledge and Elliott, although the whole episode was very much a Derby operation. In 1936, on the retirement of Arthur Wormald through ill health, he was appointed general manager of the works and was largely responsible for getting the vital Marlin production scheme under way. Impatient with civil service bickering Hives persuaded the board to build what was the best light alloy factory in Europe. It was to prove of enormous importance in the conduct of the war for without it, Britain could well have lacked Merlin engines in quantity in 1939. Another far sighted, Johnsonian move he made was to swap Meteor tank engine production for the Whittle gas-turbine project, which had been given to the Rover company but was proving a little beyond them. In so doing he laid the foundation for the modern day aero-engine business. Between Royce's death and his own retirement Hives brought along men such as Robotham, Dr Llewellyn Smith and Harry Grylls to carry on the Royce tradition of design and workmanship. Hives and Elliott became joint managing directors in 1945 and Hives went on to become the first engineer to be appointed chairman of the company. T.S. Haldenby, who had helped build the first Royce car, succeeded him as general manager. Royces, as the firm was known in Derby, rarely let a good man go. And they made many a good man that much better.

Ernest, later Lord, Hives started as an apprentice with Charles Rolls and became chairman of Rolls-Royce. This photo shows him leaving Buckingham Palace in 1943 after his investiture as a Companion of Honour.