11-05-2025
The Meeting That Made The Marque
This week in 1904, Charles Stewart Rolls boards a train in London, bound for Manchester, where he has a meeting over lunch at the Midland Hotel.
The son of an aristocratic landowner and a true member of the Victorian upper crust, Rolls could have led a life of leisure hunting and fishing on his father's Welsh estate. Instead, he opens one of Britain's first car dealerships, C. S. Rolls & Co., in Fulham, West London, in 1902, four years after graduating from Cambridge as a trained engineer. His father, Lord Llangattock, had underwritten the business, which sells Panhard and Mors cars from France, as well as Minerva automobiles from Belgium. He is shown in his office below.
But Rolls is frustrated. His dealership stock is comprised entirely of imported cars. While Great Britain is manufacturing cars, none meet his clients' needs or his own standards. Of course, it has been a mere 18 years since the debut of the first automobile prototype, the 1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen. Since then, the car has become a rarified, expensive plaything for the rich, like Rolls.
Very much the enthusiast, Rolls had won the 1900 Thousand Miles Trial driving a 12-horsepower Panhard. A member of the Automobile Club of Great Britain & Ireland, it's here, among other wealthy enthusiasts, where Rolls meets Henry Edmunds, a fellow automotive aficionado and director at F. H. Royce Limited. Rolls admits his annoyance at not being able to find a good high-end British car to sell. Edmunds speaks of his 10-horsepower Royce automobile, shown above, being driven by Rolls, and arranges for a meeting between Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce.
Born a miller's son in Peterborough, England, Royce's life had started much differently. Working by the age of four, he became an apprentice at the Great Northern Railway Works Depot at age 14. He discovered his natural talent for engineering, joining the Electric Light and Power Company in Liverpool in 1882, where his career flourished. Unfortunately, the company did not, declaring bankruptcy six years later. It's then that Royce decides to set up his own shop with fellow engineer Ernest Claremont, establishing what becomes F.H. Royce and Company Ltd. With Royce as Managing Director and Claremont as Chairman, the company builds everything from electric doorbells to heavy equipment such as overhead cranes.
But cheap imports from Germany and the United States brought the company financial trouble in 1902, and Royce, shown above, takes a 10-week break after his health collapses. It's during this family vacation in South Africa that Royce reads "The Automobile: Its Construction and Management" by Gérard Lavergne. It's not light reading, but it had an impact on him.
Upon returning home, Royce buys a 10-horsepower Decauville, a state-of-the-art automobile at the time. He dismantles it, examining every part with the intention of building his own car from scratch. Royce said later that it was his goal to "take the best that exists and make it better". From 1902 to 1905, Royce repairs, investigates, and test-drives various brands, covering 11,000 miles.
By April 1904, the first Royce automobile, the 10 H.P. shown above, leaves the factory with a water-cooled 10-horsepower, two-cylinder engine and a carburetor design by Royce. It travels trouble-free 15 miles on its first drive. Having driven the car, F. H. Royce Limited Director Edmunds tells his friend Rolls of its smoothness and silence, and a lunch meeting is arranged at Manchester's Midland Hotel, this week in 1904.
Later that day, back in London, Rolls tells his business partner Claude Johnson that he had discovered "the greatest motor engineer in the world". Rolls agrees to sell every Royce using the name Rolls-Royce. The 10-horsepower car was not enough to meet the needs of clients, so Royce engineers the 15 H.P., followed by the 30 H.P., with a six-cylinder engine producing 30 horsepower.
But it's the introduction of the 40/50 H.P. and its 7.0-liter, six-cylinder side-valve engine that changes everything. Producing 48 horsepower, it's so smooth and silent, it's nicknamed the Silver Ghost, or alternately, the best car in the world. As was the case through the 1950s, every Rolls-Royce left the factory as a rolling chassis to be finished by an independent coachbuilder. The tradition has returned to Rolls-Royce today through its Coachbuilt division, continuing a way of making cars that first came to be when the company itself was born.
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