29 Apr 04
Charles Stewart Rolls (born 1877) was the third son of Lord and Lady Llangattock, was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge and raised in a privileged environment. A trained engineer, by the early 1900s, he was racing bicycles, motorbikes and early cars, and running a car sales business in Fulham, selling imported vehicles. Frederick Henry Royce (born 1863) came from a very different background: the youngest of five children, he started work as a boy selling newspapers and then delivering telegrams, until an aunt offered to pay for the 14-year-old to take an apprenticeship at the Great Northern Railway Works in Peterborough. He showed a natural talent for engineering, and took a job in London at the Electric Light and Power Company, whilst studying further at night classes at London Polytechnic. At 21, Royce started a company with his friend Ernest Claremont, making small electrical components such as doorbells, switches, fuses, dynamos and switchboards. FH Royce and Co established a foundry and works in Manchester, going public as Royce Ltd in 1894 and expanding into electrical motors and cranes; Royce developed and patented devices such as the bayonet lightbulb fitting, still in use today, and the three-wire electrical system.
Royce bought a De Dion Quadricycle and then a secondhand 10hp, two-cylinder Decauville car, but was dissatisfied with his cars' unreliable electrical systems and rough ride. In a corner of his workshop in Cooke Street, Manchester, he built his own car, basing it on the Decauville, but developing a new cone clutch, a three-speed gearbox driving a live rear axle, a rear footbrake and a handbrake. Its two-cylinder 1995cc engine had overhead inlet and side exhaust valves, features to appear in later Rolls-Royces. The 12hp, 39mph car cost £138 to make, and on the 1st of April 1904, it took its first test drive of 15 miles.
Royce made two more cars, each with improvements over the original. The second went to Claremont and the third to the company's other director, Henry Edmunds. Edmunds boasted about his car to a friend, Claude Johnson, who worked for Charles Rolls in Fulham. Rolls, selling imported cars, was frustrated at what he saw to be a lack of initiative in British engineering and wanted to invest in motor manufacturing in the country. Rolls and Royce met in the dining room of Manchester's Midland Hotel, and after a test drive of the vehicles, Rolls agreed to sell every car that Royce could build for him. He could be assured of each car's quality: Royce was determined not to follow the Henry Ford path of mass production and affordability, but "to turn out the best car in the world regardless of cost, and to sell it to those people who could appreciate a good article, and were able and willing to pay for it."
