It was all to the good that Henry Royce was born near Peterborough,* where, soon after his birth in 1863, the Great Northern Railway happened to have built a locomotive repair and maintenance workshop. For although his childhood was both impoverished (in his youth he was obliged to work variously as a bird scarer, newspaper seller, and telegram delivery boy) and harsh (he was just nine when his father died, and in the poorhouse), he had an aunt who with great prescience believed that to learn the trade of engine building would set the boy on course for life. So she paid for three years of apprenticeship for young Henry in the Great Northern Railway workshop, a place that would soon go on to build and repair some of the finest and swiftest ever of Britain’s steam locomotives. And just as she had hoped, her decision to pay her nephew’s fees set him on course for making engines himself. Though, to be sure, his would be motorcar engines that would come to enjoy great repute, and they would be of much greater mechanical delicacy than the ironbound, coal-gorging monsters on which he had trained and numbers of which he had helped bring out from the Peterborough railway sheds.
It would, in fact, be more than twenty years before Henry Royce came to make engines himself, and the motorcars to put them in. His first venture involved electricity, and was out of a workshop on Cooke Street in Manchester that manufactured and sold such newfangled devices as light switches, fuses, doorbells, and dynamos. He soon became moderately prosperous, married, bought a fair-size house in the suburbs, and embarked on the devotion of such spare time as he had to gardening and raising roses and fruit trees, a passion for the rest of his life.
Mechanical rather than electrical engineering was his true passion, though, and within a decade he took steps to incorporate the two, setting up a company named Royce Limited that produced a range of large-scale industrial electric cranes. The firm won a following and a fine reputation: its cranes were known to be both very well made and built with patented Royce-designed safety features that minimized the number of lethal accidents that were then plaguing the new world of Victorian highish-rise construction. Over the years his company flourished, even selling electric cranes to the Imperial Japanese Navy, and having one exactly copied by unscrupulous Japanese engineers, right down to its ROYCE LIMITED nameplate.
Around the turn of the century, a number of German and American companies suddenly entered the crane market, undercut the Royce prices, and nearly brought the company to its knees. Royce, in an early display of a case-hardened determination to make machinery of the highest quality whatever the pressure, insisted he would neither cut his costs nor trim his standards—and in time, the young company survived, stabilized, and gained a reputation for high-quality engineering, for precision products made beyond consideration of price.
If life were fair, the motorcar Henry Royce created in 1904 would be named the Royce-Rolls, as the latter, Charles Rolls, was little more than a salesman and promoter. In the machine shop, the engineers defiantly called their creations “Royces.”
Henry Royce was by now himself settled, stable, domesticated, and with money in the bank. His personal interest turned to automobiles. He was able to indulge himself—first, by buying, in 1902, a De Dion quadricycle, essentially two bicycles bolted side by side, with a small internal combustion engine suspended between them. France at the time had a near monopoly on the stripling car-making business, with firms such as De Dion-Bouton, Delahaye, Decauville, Hotchkiss et Cie, Panhard, and Lorraine-Dietrich producing small numbers of vehicles for a growing number of enthusiasts. The vocabulary reflects still the Gallic origins: words such as garage, chauffeur, sedan, coupe, and, indeed, automobile serving as reminders.
Henry Royce thought at first that the French cars were good-looking and admirably well made, and by craftsmen—and were far better finished than the rather cruder American cars that were also starting to appear on European roads. He soon began to take a more serious interest, and in early 1903 he purchased his first true motorcar, a secondhand ten-horsepower two-cylinder Decauville, which arrived in Manchester on a train and had to be pushed by Royce’s workers from the railway station to his Cooke Street workshop.
The “10 Horse Standard” was a state-of-the-art car of 1903. A dealer in London keenly advertised its recent achievements: “Edinburgh to London Without Stopping! Average speed of 20 miles an hour for the whole distance with a full load!” “51 Miles an Hour at Welbeck!” “75 Miles an hour at Deauville!” He claimed the car could travel up to thirty-five miles an hour in average conditions, could carry four people in comfort—an extendable cover for the tonneau passengers provided them shelter from the rain, though there was no shelter for the driver, nor any windshield—and petrol was just a shilling a gallon, “always available” at the dealer’s chambers.
It was within only a few weeks of buying the car that Royce made a fateful decision. He was enjoying his machine, and he drove it almost daily, but while the design was acceptably chic, the mechanisms inside, in his view, turned out to be sorely wanting. The car was noisy. Its acceleration was poor. It overheated easily. It was not in the least reliable.
He promptly announced to his team that he would strip the car down to its bare essentials and redesign it from the wheel treads up, creating in the process an entirely new kind of car that would be, in every respect, mechanically perfect and utterly reliable. He would do the initial work in his own time, and if what he then created seemed at least the beginnings of an ideal, he would set Royce Ltd. to manufacturing entirely new cars based on his redesign of the French machine, and he would call it a Royce. The Royce 10 horsepower. The Royce Ten.
Painstakingly, and almost entirely by the employment of a delicate hand and a steady eye, the new car took shape. Like the Decauville, the Royce had two cylinders, each with a bore of 95 mm and a stroke of 127 mm. The fuel inlet would be at the cylinders’ top, the exhaust valves on their side. There would be a water-cooled jacket at the front of the engine, ensuring that the machinery never overheated. Royce designed and hand-made a new kind of carburetor; he made a new wooden-cased trembler coil, with hand-finished points of pure platinum, which never seemed to need either adjustment or cleansing, and from which came the ceaseless rain of high-voltage sparks to ignite the fuel. Usually it was the coil that gave the greatest amount of trouble in a 1904 car; Henry Royce’s gave, at least in this department, none. Moreover, Royce also fashioned a highly accurate distributor, which made certain the cylinders were ignited at exactly the moment they received the jolt of the petrol-and-air mixture that keeps an internal combustion engine running.
He introduced a driveshaft instead of a chain drive. He saw to it that every gearwheel fit perfectly and was lubricated generously. He perfected the car’s suspension, always aware that people would be riding in this vehicle, and had to be kept both comfortable and safe. He fashioned cylinder-head gaskets from the leather of his apron. He designed tapering bolts that would replace the rivets of the French design. He made an enormous, overgenerous, multibaffled silencer for the exhaust system, so determined was he to cut the exhaust roar to no more than a dull murmur. His gearbox had three forward speeds, and the clutch was lined with leather. He replaced the worm gears on the steering system and the shoes on the braking system—and by then testing countless times, by analyzing every breakdown, he made certain that his Royce Ten would be a more than acceptably reliable alternative to the now-picked-over carcass of the sacrificed Decauville, albeit vastly costlier by being so. “No wear, frettage or indication of malfunctioning was too trivial for him to notice,” said one of his later and more famed engineers, Sir Stanley Hooker, “and to make efforts to correct.”
The first Royce Ten emerged from the Cooke Street workshop on March 31, 1904. In short order, two more machines, each one better and more finely constructed than its predecessor, were rolled out into the street. Then a new board member of the Royce company, a man named Henry Edmunds, photographed one of the gleaming new cars and sent the picture down to London to a friend—the friend being the Honorabl
e Charles Rolls, a leisured near-beer aristocrat, daredevil, showman, and car enthusiast (and member of the Self-Propelled Traffic Association) who at the time was trying to sell Peugeot and Panhard cars to rich customers in the quietly exclusive streets of Mayfair, Knightsbridge, and Belgravia.
On receipt of the small black-and-white snapshot, Charles Rolls was mesmerized, instantly electrified. He realized, from Henry Edmunds’s description and from this one picture, that at long last a British car of merit equal or superior to those from Continental manufacturers could now be had for the asking. He wrote to Royce, initially asking, then demanding, then begging that this most extraordinary mechanic come down to London to meet him. He wrote letter after letter. Each, however, was rebuffed.
I like to imagine the scene in Cooke Street in late April of that year. There was yet another letter sitting on Henry Royce’s desk, but one that, yet again, the engineer had had no time to answer. The letter had come from London; now it was in Manchester, and Henry Royce knew it would be yet another plea from this metropolitan swell, this Old Etonian and Cambridge graduate, pleading for Henry Royce to go down to London for a meeting.
But Royce was not planning to budge. He was far too busy, and the work he was performing in his cramped little mechanical shop was consuming his every waking moment.
All of the previous early-spring week, I like to suppose, he had been working on a near-impossible self-imposed task: he had been trying to machine a forged-steel crankshaft into such perfect balance that, once set spinning, it would never stop, as no one side of the shaft would be heavier than another, which would have tended to slow down the spinning. On the day the letter from Mr. Rolls arrived, he was fiddling with a micrometer, trying to measure the tolerances of the oddly shaped shaft, polishing and filing its extended segments until his gauges showed they were no more than a hundred-thousandth of an inch different from one another, were essentially identical, were as perfectly balanced as it was possible to make them.
Henry Royce was fully enraptured with building his motorcars. They each, he told his workers, would in the end, after trials and testings and endurance exercises and rebuildings, be cars like no other. The components of each would be so lovingly sculpted, machined with such unyielding accuracy, that the resulting cars would be eternally reliable, whisper-quiet, intensely powerful, and, to devoted engineers if not necessarily to the general public, things of consummate mechanical beauty.
So now, with the crankshaft made and tested (and indeed, made with such perfection that, once spun up to speed by hand, it manifestly did not want to stop), the latest version, the third, of his Royce Ten passenger-carrying, fully motorized, and entirely English built conveyances was ready to be tested, to be driven. The completed engine was bolted onto the chassis. The drive train—also a thing assembled by hand, its component parts polished with chamois leather until they gleamed and flashed in the afternoon sun—was connected. Wheels with pneumatic tires were bolted onto the axles. Fuel was carefully poured into the tank.
Royce then inserted the nickel-steel hand crank into the slot beneath the cooling radiator, a radiator whose Grecian-looking temple top gave the brand-new automobile an unusual appearance of dignified nobility. He turned the crank once, twice, three times.
At first, nothing. Royce adjusted a lever, turned a knurled brass wheel, opened a valve a little more. And then, with a series of low grunts and an initially alarming burst of dark smoke from the engine, exhaust that made the workers step back in alarm, the motor caught, fired, and then promptly settled down to a low thunder of rotation.
The engine was so very quiet. It didn’t make the raucous and tinny din like the Decauville. No, this one was something else. The exhaust burbled gently. The tappets clicked near-silently. The camshaft lifted and lowered the valves with the silky sound of well-oiled metal. Once the bonnet—a new word, invented for the motorcar’s hood only the year before—was closed and secured around the shuddering engine, it fell truly silent, and only its heat and the hand-sensed feel of its vibration assured the awestruck engineers that it was still firing—“firing on all cylinders,” as the phrase would soon have it.
The test driver then clambered aboard; adjusted the choke, his cap, and the magnetos; and set his goggles over his eyes. Someone opened the double wooden doors of the works and glanced up and down Cooke Street to make sure it was clear of passing horses and pedestrians. The driver eased the transmission into first gear, released the brake, grasped the steering wheel, released the clutch—and Henry Royce’s third handmade motorcar near-inaudibly slipped out into the street and glided off for the low hills on the horizon, starting its own first real-world expedition.
It was then that Henry Royce opened the envelope.
It was indeed a letter from Charles Rolls, but on this occasion, there was no plea that Royce go south to London. On the contrary: if it was convenient, Rolls himself would come up to Cooke Street, and would come to see if it might be possible to manufacture and sell the best car in the world. Might Royce be amenable? Both parties, the letter said, revered the notion of making a superior motorized passenger conveyance that would be built on the principles of absolute precision, no matter the cost. Might Henry Royce think of the writer and himself one day going into business together, and perhaps calling the new company by some arrangement of their commingled names?
Two hours of test driving later, the little black car swept back onto Cooke Street, its still-ghost-whispering engine now bathed in warm oil, its driver astonished and delighted by its performance. All reports from the journey were peerless. The car had exceeded all expectations. And so, that evening, emboldened by the evident success of his new creation, Henry Royce wrote back to Charles Rolls. By all means come up to Manchester, he said, and we will meet on May 4, two weeks from today. Perhaps, after all, we may be able to do business together.
THERE IS A brass plaque outside the entrance to the Midland Hotel on Peter Street in Manchester that memorializes the first time Charles Rolls and Henry Royce formally met, as scheduled, on May 4, 1904. All that Royce was hoping for from the meeting was the funding to allow him to continue making motorcars of ever-more-demanding exactitude. What Rolls wanted, as he told Henry Edmunds on the railway journey up from London that morning, was for his name to be associated with some great creation such that he might in time become a household word, “just as much as ‘Broadwood’ or ‘Steinway’ in connection with pianos,” wrote Edmunds, “or ‘Chubbs’ in connection with safes.”
The sight of a brand-new Royce Ten, and of Henry Royce’s evident quiet pride in his having made it, did the trick—as did a short, smooth, faultless ride through the streets of Manchester in a car that manifestly did not frighten the horses. (The terrific noise of most others did.) Rolls returned to London that night by train, and evidently supped well in the dining car, because he was out and about at midnight proclaiming to all in Belgravia who would listen, “I have found the greatest engineer in the world! The greatest engineer in the world!”
The lawyers got to work the next day, a formal deal was struck two days before Christmas, and the partnership formally came into being. There had been no difficulty in securing the order of their names for the new firm. Henry Royce happily let pride in the quality of his machines supplant any fuss about nomenclature, so it was readily agreed that it would be “Rolls” first and “Royce” after, conjoined by a hyphen: Rolls-Royce. Rolls-Royce Limited.
At a dinner in 1905 that followed the first-place win of a Royce car in a race staged on the Isle of Man—and yes, automobile production began with almost indecent haste just as soon as the company had been formed; the winning of competitions provided a perfect publicity device—Charles Rolls told of his first meeting with Royce. He had been trying to peddle French-made cars to the London beau monde, but then:
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 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.
The very earliest cars made at Cooke Street were known not so much for style or speed or strut or panache as for their quiet and their reliability. A decade after the first handmade Tens nosed out of the factory came the stories of endurance. A farmer in eastern Scotland, for example, had run his Ten for over one hundred thousand Highland miles with not a single breakdown, and his car hadn’t been all that expensive: Royce charged £395 for a Ten, at a time when a sixty-horsepower Mercedes cost £2,500 and a six-cylinder Napier a little more than £1,000 (£100,000 in modern sterling, $128,000 in 2017 prices).
It was not all beer and skittles, though. There were occasional setbacks. Charles Rolls took one car across to the Isle of Man and decided, imprudently, to coast it down a long hill in neutral. He then, even more imprudently, tried to engage his gears, but forgot to match his engine’s speed to that of the coasting car and, in the process, ripped the gearbox apart and stripped the gears down to toothless bare metal. Henry Royce was not best pleased, but gritted his teeth: after all, the Honorable Charles Rolls was known in the company, and not for nothing, as Number One.
It is tempting to suppose that the more modern cars—the mighty monarch-and emperor-carrying Phantoms and all their Silver-prefixed siblings; the Dawns; the Wraiths; the Clouds; the Shadows; the Spirits; the Spurs; the Seraphs; and maybe even the non-Silver-prefixed Corniches and the Camargues—were the company’s finer creations. It is tempting to suppose that these cars’ legions of refinements and new technologies and layers of opulence and comfort—with many essentially meaningless improvements, such as the use of unblemished hides from cattle kept well away from barbed-wire fences, a suspension system that automatically compensated for the steadily lessening weight of fuel in the rear-mounted tank, Axminster carpets so thick that a lost earring might never be found, dashboard marquetry made for the most elegant of city drawing rooms, and door trim veneers chamfered from ancient trees and matched so they appeared as if in mirrors—exactly reflected Henry Royce’s dream for the eternal and the immaculate.