Rolls-Royce [antikvár]

Early in May 1904 three businessmen sat down to lunch at Manchester's newly opened Midland Hotel to discuss motor cars. The Midland has no doubt witnessed many such commercial meetings but this one triggered a chain of events that was to create the most illustrious of all names to be associated with the automobile. For, as a result, Rolls-Royce Ltd was established. At first sight Rolls and Royce must have made unlikely dining companions. Frederick Henry Royce, who was 41 at the time, was a miller's son and largely self-taught, and had achieved commercial success in the face of overwhelming personal odds. By contrast, at 26 years of age, the Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls, a peer's son, had followed an assured aristocratic path to Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and was supported, to some extent, by a wealthy father. The final member of the luncheon party was Henry Edmunds, who knew both men and had effected the meeting. His catalytic role must surely make him godfather of the Rolls/Royce alliance. To find out how this historic meeting came to take place, and what drew the two principal characters into the same unlikely orbit, we must examine the respective careers of Royce and Rolls and the times in which they lived. Henry Royce Frederick Henry Royce was bom on 27 March 1863. His father, James Royce, described himself as a 'farmer and miller' on his marriage to Mary King. That took place in 1852 at Woodham Ferrers, Essex, which was Mary's home. In all, five children were bom to the couple, Henry being the youngest. But by the time of his birth the family had moved to Alwalton, near Peterborough, where James managed mills for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, the body concerned with Church of England properties and stipends. History has cast James Royce as a shadowy, luckless figure but it should be remembered that agriculture was in a state of decline at the time, so how much was due to circumstances or personality is difficult to establish. What we do know is that James took Henry and his other son, also called James, with him when he left the quiet banks of the River Nene for the bustling, friendless streets of London in the hope of obtaining work. Meanwhile his wife and daughters remained in Alwalton. The year was 1867 and Henry was four, but James Royce seems to have had as little success in London as he did in niral Lincolnshire. Ill fortune seemed to haunt the man for he died in 1872 at the early age of 41. This left nine-year-old Henry faced with the task of getting work for himself. For a time he sold newspapers for W.H. Smith and, at the age often, hebecamea telegraph boy in London's opulent West End. By all accounts Mary Royce did her best for her youngest but she seemed to have been ill-equipped for early widowhood. In later life Henry spoke little of his early years, but he did tell a close friend that at this time his food for the day was 'often but two slices of bread soaked in milk'. Fortunately help was at hand, for his aunt had a little money and Henry's mechanical aptitudes were clearly developing because she managed to secure a L20-a-year apprenticeship for him at the Great Northern Railway Works at Peterborough, only a few miles from his birthplace. He was 14 at the time and he later recalled that there 'I acquired someskillasa mechanic but lacked technical, commercial and clerical experience.' The three years spent with the Great Northern instilled some stability in his all too insecure and unhappy life. Apart fi-om benefiting from mechanical skills, he embarked on a bout of self-education, teaching himself those subjects he had missed when his energies were geared to survival. Elementary education, it should be remembered, did not become compulsory in England until 1888. So he sharpened up his mathematics and teamed algebra, and began teaching himself the rudiments of the new power source that had clearly captured his imagination: electricity. By good chance the owner of his lodging, a Mr Yarrow, had a lathe in his garden shed, along with a carpenter's bench, shaping machine and grinder, tools that Henry was able to use to develop his extraordinary skills in the working and shaping of metals. Then, tragically, fate again intervened and his aunt found herself unable to continue payments for his apprenticeship. So, in 1879, he was again looking for work. He travelled north to Leeds where he worked for a firm of machine-tool makers who paid him 11 shillings for a 54-hour week. Later he was to remember starting work at 6 am and finishing at 10 pm for months on end. Then, by chance, he saw an advertisement for a tester with the London-based Electric Light and Power Company, which had acquired the patents and services of that versatile American inventor, Hiram P. Maxim. Royce got the job and moved back to London, taking lodgings in Kentish Town. He continued his self-education by night, also attendmg Professor William Ayrton's evening classes and other lectures at the Polytechnic in Regent Street. Royce's ability and dedication must have made a good impression on his employers for in 1882, at the age of 19, he was sent to Liverpool to manage the firm's affairs in that city. His responsibilities included the supervision of the then somewhat precarious business of theatrical electric lighting, but his employment with the Lancashire Maxim and Western Electric Company was destined to be shortlived for the enterprise foundered. Henry, however, had struck up a friendship with another young electrical engineer, a London doctor's son named Emest Claremont.