On the 2nd of June 1910, Charles Rolls flew across the English Channel and back without landing, becoming the first man alive to do it and a national hero overnight. Forty days later, on the 12th of July, the tail of his airplane broke away above the cliffs at Bournemouth in front of a summer crowd. He was 32 years old. The achievement made him one of the most celebrated men in Britain.
The king sent a telegram of congratulations, Madame Tussauds began modeling him in wax, and newspapers across the country carried the story of the aristocratic flyer who had conquered the sky. Yet the same man was already drifting away from the company that bore his name. Two years earlier, he had formally proposed that Rolls-Royce build airplanes. The board, including his partner Henry Royce, refused, seeing flight as a deadly novelty rather than a business.
Rolls was overruled and stepped back from daily management, keeping only a seat on the board. Charles Stewart Rolls was born in 1877, the youngest son of the first Baron Llangattock. The family fortune came from London ground rents in Southwark and Bermondsey, which funded their estate, The Hendre, a Victorian mansion on the Welsh border. It was among the most modern houses in Britain, making its own gas and electricity and installing one of the earliest telephones in the county.
Rolls studied engineering at Cambridge, where his passion for engines earned him the nickname “dirty Rolls. ” He bought one of the first cars in Britain and later opened one of the country’s earliest dealerships in West London, importing French and Belgian machines, to the quiet disapproval of his class. The man who built the cars he sold could not have been more different. Frederick Henry Royce was born in 1863 into poverty.
His father’s mill failed, and when Royce was nine his father died. The boy sold newspapers and delivered telegrams before scraping together savings with a friend to start an electrical business in Manchester in 1884. Royce bought a secondhand French car around the turn of the century, found it crude and unreliable, and resolved to build a better one himself. In the spring of 1904, his first car ran out of his Cook Street workshop, a quiet, beautifully made two-cylinder machine that word soon spread about.
The two men met on the 4th of May 1904 over lunch in the grill room of the Midland Hotel in Manchester, brought together by a mutual friend named Henry Edmunds, a man history has largely forgotten but without whom there would be no such name. Rolls drove Royce’s car and understood at once that it was better than anything he was importing. By the end of the year, they had an agreement. Royce would build the cars and Rolls would sell them under a single joined name.
The cars would be called Rolls-Royce, with the salesman’s name first. The company was formally created in 1906. The following year, Royce produced a model that was finished in silver paint and given the name Silver Ghost. The car earned its reputation honestly.
In 1907, one was driven 15,000 miles under observation with no involuntary stop. When it was stripped down, the parts needing replacement cost only a few pounds. A motoring magazine called it “the best car in the world,” a phrase the press gave the company rather than one it invented. Within a few years, Rolls-Royce cars were being bought by millionaires and royalty.
The two founders had built a symbol. But the symbol was about to outlive them both. Rolls had been a balloonist for years, making more than 170 ascents, before he went up as a passenger with Wilbur Wright in October 1908. It was enough.
He was among the first Britons to fly in an airplane and became obsessed. He bought his own Wright biplane, built under license, and flew it more than 200 times, pouring his fortune into the sky. In the first half of 1910 alone, company historians later estimated, he spent the modern equivalent of close to a third of a million pounds on aviation. He gave up his executive duties and devoted himself entirely to flying.
In March 1910, he became only the second person in Britain to hold an official aviator’s certificate. On the evening of the 2nd of June 1910, he took off from near Dover in his Wright biplane, crossed to the French coast, dropped three envelopes of greetings to the French Aero Club, turned around, and flew back without landing. He had been in the air about 95 minutes. The crossing had been done before by Louis Blériot, but no one had ever flown both ways without landing.
His airplane was a fragile machine of wood, wire, and fabric weighing about as much as a grand piano. He sat exposed at the leading edge with a life jacket and air-filled bags as his only safety. Flight itself was less than seven years old, and the men who flew were dying at a rate that had become a public concern. Rolls spent the 40 days between his triumph and his death continuing to fly constantly.
On the 8th of July, he sat at his final board meeting, the last of his life. Four days later, on the 12th of July, he was at a flying meeting at Hangisbury near Bournemouth, competing in a spot-landing contest. To sharpen his chances, he had hastily altered the tail of his airplane. In the air, the modified tail gave way.
The machine lost control and fell from a height estimated at between 80 and 100 feet. Rolls was killed instantly by a fractured skull. He was the first Briton ever killed in a powered airplane and the first man to die in a powered aircraft on British soil. Newspapers placed him as roughly the tenth to twelfth airman in the world to die this way; the exact number depended on who was counting.
The inquiry pointed to the altered tail. There was no enemy and no sabotage, only a hasty modification and the hard ground. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Cadoc near the family seat, under words from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
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His death also helped to break Henry Royce. Royce had been driving himself without mercy for years, refusing to delegate, carrying every design himself. He had seen Rolls alive at the board just four days before the crash. Within a year, his health gave way completely.
Claude Johnson, the company’s commercial manager, took Royce to the best doctors in London. They found what is believed to have been cancer of the bowel. Royce underwent a major operation, and afterward the doctors gave him only months to live. He was carried to London for a second operation in an ambulance built on the chassis of one of his own cars.
The diagnosis proved spectacularly wrong in its timing. Royce had 22 more years in him, but he would live them as an invalid, far from the factory. He took a small team of designers and worked from quiet houses on the English south coast in the summers and a villa at Le Canadel in the south of France in the winters. Draftsmen carried drawings and parts to him, and he checked and corrected them before sending them back.
He was nursed throughout by a woman named Ethel Aubin. The claim that he never returned to the Derby factory after 1911 is very nearly true. The one exception came on the 9th of August 1914, when he traveled to Derby to inspect a captured German engine. He was allowed about an hour and stretched it to two.
That single visit apart, the man whose name is on the front of every Rolls-Royce ran the company’s engineering for more than two decades without working in its factory at all. It was Johnson, the man they called “the hyphen in Rolls-Royce,” who held the company together through both blows. He organized the selling, managed the men, and kept the business alive while Rolls chased the sky and Royce chased perfection. His name appears on nothing.
The family that gave the name its first half was destroyed. Charles Rolls’s father, the first Baron Llangattock, died in 1912. The title passed to the eldest son, John, who became the second baron. Both surviving brothers went to the First World War and both died in 1916.
Neither had left a son, and with John’s death on the 31st of October 1916, the barony of Llangattock became extinct. A title created in 1892 was gone in 24 years, and an entire male line was wiped from the earth in six. The estate passed to the surviving daughter, Eleanor, and her husband took the Rolls name by royal license. The house itself left the family in 1984 and is now a golf club.
The park where Charles Rolls once drove a future king and queen is a golf course. The war forced Rolls-Royce to do the very thing its dead founder had begged for. Royce, working from his sick bed, led the design of the company’s first aero engine, the Eagle, which first ran at Derby in 1915. The company built 4,681 of them.
In 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew nonstop across the Atlantic, powered by two Rolls-Royce Eagle engines. Royce went on to design a racing engine known as the R, said to have been sketched in the sand on the beach at West Wittering. It won the Schneider Trophy and pushed the world airspeed record past 400 mph. From the R came the Merlin, the engine that powered the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Lancaster, and the American Mustang across the Second World War.
More than 168,000 Merlins were made in total, and the engine helped to decide the war in the sky. After the war came jet engines, and Rolls-Royce became one of the leading aero engine makers in the world. The machine that had killed Charles Rolls, and the business he could not persuade his partners to enter, became the making of the firm he left behind. He had been right about the air; he had simply been right too early.
In 1998, the two halves of the company were finally pulled apart. The motorcar business was sold for £430 million, but control of the Rolls-Royce name itself rested with the aero engine company, which licensed it to BMW for £40 million. The most British car in the world is now built by a German firm under a name owned by an aero engine maker. The cars, the original purpose of the enterprise, became a badge to be sold.
The airplanes, the thing that killed one founder and was refused by the other, kept the serious claim to the name. Charles Rolls’s memorials are scattered and easy to miss. A bronze statue stands in Agincourt Square in Monmouth, showing him holding a model of a flying machine, unveiled in 1911 with his grieving father present. Another likeness looks out over the water at Dover.
A stone marks the spot near the Bournemouth cliffs. His grave lies in the quiet churchyard under the words about the pure in heart. The man has shrunk to a few statues and a headstone. The name has conquered the world.
Over the door of The Hendre, the family motto is still cut into the stone: “Open House, Open Heart. ” It opens now for strangers walking a golf course.