Rolls-Royce Celebrates 120 Years of Motoring

Photo byCourtesy of Rolls-Royce Cars

On May 4th 2024, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars marked 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.

Rolls-Royce marked the 120th anniversary of the first meeting between founders Henry Royce and The Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls on May 4th, 1904. The founders’ personal stories, the history of the company they founded, and its motor cars are well known today.

This story is 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 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 predestined, and the arcs of their respective careers up to that point make it appear almost inevitable. It came about through a web of chance connections and overlapping relationships; with these, given their vastly different backgrounds and social circles, it might have happened. We are proud to continue their remarkable story and to celebrate and build upon their unique legacy 120 years later. - Andrew Ball, Head of Corporate Relations and Heritage, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

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. However, to fully understand the marque’s origins and legacy, one must go back in time and examine the founders’ activities immediately before that first world-changing encounter in 1904.

HENRY ROYCE: THE ENGINEER

Photo byCourtesy of Rolls-Royce Cars

Henry Royce’s story began in late 1884 when he founded his first engineering company, F. H. Royce & Co., in Manchester. He initially produced small items such as battery-powered doorbells, but 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. 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 curious as ever. His choice of reading material on the long voyage was The Automobile: Its Construction and Management, initially written in French by Gérard Lavergne and translated into English that year. It was literally ‘the book’ on building a motor car, and Royce was enlightened and inspired by it.

Upon returning to England, Royce—physically and mentally recovered—immediately acquired his first motor car, a French 10 H.P. Decauville. The car was so poorly made and unreliable that, out of sheer frustration, Royce addressed its numerous defects.

Almost the opposite is true. Royce chose the Decauville precisely because it was an excellent, state-of-the-art machine, with the express intention of dismantling it, analysing every component, and producing his car from scratch. Any reasonably competent engineer could have upgraded a poorly built, substandard product, but 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’

Ernest Wooler was one of the lesser-known but vital contributors to the development of the first Royce cars. Born in Manchester in 1888, 15-year-old Ernest stood five feet four inches (1.62m) tall. Nicknamed ‘Little Ernie’ when he joined Royce Limited in 1903 as an indentured premium apprentice – a position for which his father paid a 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 drawings on the draughtsmen’s boards.

One morning, he received an ominous summons: Mr Royce 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 instructed and gave the pad to his employer. Royce waved it away. “You hold onto that and follow me,” he said, leading 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 sketched it and added the dimensions they quoted,” he recalled.

As Royce correctly judged, Ernie was the ideal person to capture the essential 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 several patents. In 1947, he retired to Hillsboro Beach, Florida, where he was elected the town’s first mayor.

SMALL THINGS MAKE PERFECTION

Royce had left school aged just ten, 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 prop shaft and differential rather than chain drive – in his 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
• A single-gear lever replacing 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 weighed around 20kg (over 40lb).

Royce subjected not only the Decauville 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 records, he covered some 11,000 miles during this research, many of them undoubtedly in the Decauville, which he kept until at least 1906.

Royce, the engineer, aimed to build the best car in the world. It was no vanity project or proof-of-concept exercise: he wanted his technical innovation commercially viable. Unfortunately, easy charm, a vast social network, and a way with words were not among his many gifts. But in London, a young man had these qualities in abundance.

THE HON. CHARLES STEWART ROLLS: THE SALESMAN

Photo byCourtesy of Rolls-Royce Cars

In many respects, The Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls was Royce’s antithesis: wealthy, aristocratic, sophisticated, well-connected and highly (and expensively) educated. They shared 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 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. Initially underwritten by Rolls’s father, Lord Llangattock, the enterprise imported and sold French Panhard and Mors cars and Minerva vehicles built in Belgium. The business 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 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 searching for a market, and Rolls, the consummate salesman seeking a game-changing product. All that was needed was something—or someone—to unite them.

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. After the meeting, Rolls agreed to sell every car Royce could make; the rest is 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 away—indeed, many things now considered essential would not arrive until the following century. From the vantage point of 2024, 1904 feels like ancient history: a grainy, distant, black-and-white world detached from our times and experiences.

Photo bySales stand 1905 Courtesy of Rolls-Royce Cars

Rolls and Royce met without television, penicillin or F.M. 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 before Wilbur and Orville Wright made the world’s first flight in a powered aircraft. Arthur Balfour was the British Prime Minister, Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt was the President of the United States and Franz Joseph I was the Emperor of Austria-Hungary.

The motor car, too, was still in its infancy; Ka.l Benz had used the first ‘true’ petrol-powered automobile, which had just three wheels. 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 most 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 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 tremendous technical marvel of 1904 was the 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 in this extraordinarily fertile, dynamic and optimistic age that Rolls-Royce was born. It was a time when visionaries and pioneers would shape how the world thought, functioned and behaved for years or decades, precisely what Rolls and Royce did with their new motor car.

By building a machine whose engineering, performance, reliability and durability surpassed everything before, Royce and Rolls set the standard for all the Rolls‑Royce models that would follow and 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 worldwide.

But their crowning achievement is to have made Rolls-Royce the global exemplar of excellence. Every product, service, device and technology invented since 1904 has aspired to be ‘the Rolls-Royce of…’ its industry or sector. The standard they set 120 years ago still drives innovation and improvement everywhere – including within the company they created.

SOURCE: Office of Corporate Relations and Heritage, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars

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