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Aviation History
1954
1954 - 1286.PDF
FLIGHT, 7 May 1954 571 The Two Rs A Commemorative History of Rolls - Royce Aero Engines COMPILED BY H. F. KING, M.B.E. The Hon. C. S. Rolls. Sir Henry Royce, O.B.E. TWO men, with the agreeably alliterative names of Rolls and Royce, and with notions and ideals even more happily matched, met in Manchester fifty years ago this month. Rolls—the Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls—possessed wealth, an Eton-and-Cambridge education, a degree in mathe matics and applied science, and a fine record as a motorist. He was a sportsman, as distinct from what we should nowa days call a playboy, and he had consistently displayed a manly daring at the wheel and a determined approach to the tech nical problems of motoring. In 1894, at the age of 17, he was taken by his father, Lord Llangattock, to France, where the great game and business of motoring was flourishing uninhibited. Having shipped home a 3£ h.p. Peugeot, he drove it to Cambridge in excess of the speed limit—at 4£ m.p.h.—and in 1896, when the man-with- the-red-flag was put out of business, he turned to racing and records. It was not in his sporting ventures alone that fortune favoured him, but in the business of C. S. Rolls and Co., which he established with Claude Johnson in 1902. In 1903 he set a world speed record of 93 m.p.h.; but the car was a 70 h.p. Mors, and by the following year, when his books showed orders for a hundred fine Continental cars, he could still not find a British product which measured up to his standards. Henry Royce—the second party to the meeting—had known in his youth none of the luxuries and pleasures which birth had bestowed upon Rolls. At ten years of age he started work as a telegraph boy, later attending a technical college, and serving a few years in the Great Northern locomotive shops at Peterborough. Then, after a spell in an engineering works at Leeds, he set up a business in Manchester, making arc lamps and dynamos. The slump after the Boer War caused him to turn his ambition to cars. Disappointed with a foreign model which he acquired, he decided to put his own ideas into practice, and in 1903 he completed a two-cylinder car of 10 h.p., having handled much of the precision work himself. One of his first three cars went to Henry Edmunds, a pioneer motorist who had lately become a director of the firm of Royce, Ltd.; and it was he—"the godfather of Rolls- Royce"—who arranged the meeting in Manchester. The two men took to each other immediately, and having tried out Royce's car, young Rolls undertook to sell its maker's entire output. But he was looking much farther ahead than 10 h.p. and two cylinders; he saw before him the golden market of Edwardian England and the engineering perfection that was to link his name with that of Rolls in a monogrammatic symbol of excellence. So he began to ply his partner with suggestions and demands. The "two Rs" were first officially linked in business association at Christmas 1904, by a working agreement between the two firms; and thenceforth the Rolls-Royce car began the ascent to its long-held pinnacle of fame. By 1906 Royce's production was large enough to allow Rolls to stop his sales of other makes of car, and Rolls-Royce, Ltd., was founded. Royce's old partner, A. E. Claremont, became chairman; Rolls was technical managing director; Johnson became commercial managing director; and Royce was nominated chief engineer and works director. While Rolls had been winning the T.T. race, and another at the Empire City track, New York, Royce had been busy with a 40/50 h.p. six-cylinder car, for the Motor Show of 1906. This became the Silver Ghost. Rolls, who had become a member of the Aeronautical Society in 1901, was already a keen balloonist; then, having met the Wright brothers, he turned to heavier-than-air craft. He was awarded his pilot's certificate (No. 2) on March 8th, 1910—the very same day that Lord Brabazon received his No. 1. On the Wright biplane he made the first heavier-than- air crossing of the Channel by an Englishman, and the first double crossing by any aeroplane in history; but soon after wards—on July 12th, 1910—he crashed to his death at the Bournemouth flying meeting. He was the first Englishman to die in an accident to a powered, heavier-than-air machine. "Although only 33 years of age," said Flight, "Mr. Rolls had already done what it has fallen to the lot of very few men to do, and what only a very small percentage of men are capable of doing, whatever may be their opportunities." The technical achievements of Royce in aero-engineering are outlined hereafter; the more personal aspects of his career, and that of Rolls, have already been told at length—especially in Harold Nockolds' book The Magic of a Name, in Rolls— Man of Speed, by Laurence Meynell, and in the monograph Frederick Henry Royce, by our late managing editor G. Geoffrey Smith. In 1910 Royce became seriously ill and thereafter was absent for long periods from his new factory at Derby. He worked on in the south of France and on the south coast of England. Following the British Schneider victory of 1929—made possible by that masterpiece, the "R" engine—a baronetcy was conferred upon him, and he heard from his bed how an improved engine of this type sent a Supermarine S.6B to final victory in the Schneider Race of 1931. He died on April 22nd, 1933. Royce shunned publicity ("I am only a mechanic," he would say); but the ensuing record of his company's achieve ments in aero-engineering alone is some measure of his greatness. Flight-testing has made a vast contribution to Rolls-Royce successes. Depicted in this "Flight', photograph are a Fairey Battle (Merlin), Hawker High Speed Fury (Goshawk), and Heinkel He 70A (Kestrel).
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