Hard Times – An Alwalton miller’s son who went from rags to untold
riches
‘WANTED, a Governess for a young Family. Acquirements – English, Music,
Drawing, &c – Apply to Mrs. ROYCE, Alwalton Mills, Peterborough’. With five kids,
and husband James fully committed to his new business as a mill owner, Mary
Royce clearly needed a helping hand, especially, no doubt, with the youngest of the
brood, Frederick Henry.
However, young Frederick would not be seen playing in the fields alongside Alwalton
Lynch* for very long. In 1867, when he was just four years’ old, his father’s fledgling
business failed to fly, and hard times beset the Royce family. His mother and sisters
took lodgings in Alwalton while the boys and their father went off to London, where,
in 1872, James would die a pauper in the Greenwich Workhouse. Thereafter,
Frederick was forced to find work for himself. Having had no formal schooling, nineyear-old Frederick became little more than a street urchin, scratching a meagre living
selling newspapers for W H Smith at Clapton and Bishopsgate railway stations, and
later delivering telegrams from the Mayfair Post Office. But even at nine, Frederick
was no stranger to paid work. At the age of four he had been sent out to work as a
bird scarer in a local farmer’s field.
He was boarding with an elderly couple whom his father had once known in Alwalton.
Living on little but bread and water (which it was claimed contributed to his later
chronic illness) Frederick remained at the lodgings until, at 14 years of age, he finally
escaped the streets of Dickensian London to become an apprentice at the New
England works of the Great Northern Railway in Peterborough.
He lodged with the Yarrow family, and George Yarrow taught the teenage Frederick
how to use a lathe, and the theory and practice of electricity. But Fredrick’s aunt,
who was paying the fees for the apprenticeship and for his lodgings, also fell on hard
times, and after three short years at the Great Northern, Royce was forced to leave.
Following a brief spell as a toolmaker in Leeds, the peripatetic Royce once again
found himself in London. Armed with little more than George Yarrow’s amateur
introduction to the rudiments of electricity, Royce managed to secure a job with the
Electric Light & Power Generator Company – first in London and later in Liverpool,
where he worked on street and theatre lighting as Chief Engineer.
By 1884 - at the tender age of 20 – Royce, in partnership with a friend, Ernest
Claremont, went into business in Manchester making household electrical fixtures,
including an electric door bell at 1/6 (7.5 pence).
But door bells and the like were soon replaced by more manly electrical appliances –
like electrically powered cranes (still being built by F H Royce Ltd until the 1930s).
Yet it seems that cranes were not adequately uplifting, and Royce turned his
attention to cars, and by 1904 had built three to exacting standards. At this point we
bump into Claude Goodman Johnson – later dubbed as the hyphen in Rolls-Royce –
and Charles Stewart Rolls, who together set up a business selling Royce’s motor
cars, with Rolls making the bodies. The trio went from strength to strength, and by
1906 they were confident enough to launch Rolls-Royce Limited, with Royce being
appointed technical director. In order to prove the reliability of Rolls-Royce cars, one
of the first models was driven 27 times non-stop from London to Edinburgh and back,
clocking up more that 14,000 miles in what amounted to a single journey.
Before his premature death, Rolls became the first aviator to fly non stop across the
English Chanel, and back. And he was also the first man to win the Isle of Man TT, in
a car. By coincidence, the young Post Office telegram boy we met earlier might well
have called on the Rolls household in Farm Street, Mayfair, where Charles Rolls was
born.
At some point in his career Frederick seems to have swapped Christian names, and
Frederick Henry became Henry Frederick – but, to the confusion of historians - he
sometimes reverted to the original order, especially when he picked up his OBE in
1918, and a knighthood in 1930 for services to the aviation industry. Yet despite the
official nominal order, his statue outside the company’s HQ in Derby (to which RollsRoyce Limited had moved in 1908) refers to him only as Henry Royce. He was also
quite sanguine about Rolls-Royce cars being called simply ‘Rolls’. “It’s just the car’s
first name”, he is reported to have said.
Whatever name he chose to use, Royce’s journey from a poorly educated,
adolescent paper boy to a Knight of the Realm seemed to have been a path already
mapped out for the miller’s son from Alwalton. In 1548, Nostradamus wrote: ‘From
Albion's shore shall come a marvellous conveyance, a carriage silincieux bearing
the arms of Rolles de Roi.’ Uncanny, but then the same chap also predicted that the
world would end about four-and-a-half years’ ago.
More down-to-earth was Royce’s alleged response to a haughty, aristocratic lady
(think Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey – the timing’s right) who asked what would
happen if Derby ever produced a car with a fault. “Madam”, replied Royce, “The man
on the gate would not allow the car to leave the premises”. And when ‘R’, as he liked
to be known around the factory, was once asked the speed of his production line, he
thought for a moment, then said “I think I saw it move last week”. And of course,
Rolls-Royces never break down: instead, according to Royce himself, “…they fail to
proceed”.
In 1911 Charles Rolls died when his aeroplane crashed, and shortly afterwards,
Royce became too ill to work more than occasionally at Derby, and from then
onwards effectively ran the company from his home in West Wittering, and
sometimes from his villa at Le Canadel in France. Whether to France or the West
Sussex coast, Royce’s engineering staff would quite frequently be summoned to
discuss the latest Rolls-Royce aero- or automotive-engine development.
.
It was during one of these ‘at homes’ with some of his engineers at West Wittering
that Royce took them down to the beach and in the sand sketched out with a length
of driftwood an engine design that would later become the famous ‘R-Type’, which, in
1929, would secure the Schneider Trophy - a race for seaplanes. The 1929 event
took place off Calshot Spit at the head of Southampton Water, with Royce’s sandsketched engine installed in a Supermarine 6 designed by R J Mitchell, of Spitfire
fame. At 357.7 mph, the same aircraft also achieved the world air-speed record.
Admittedly there was a year’s work betwixt sand and Supermarine, but it was all
done in Royce’s drawing office at West Wittering. Two years’ later the engine would
achieve the same double – and raise the air-speed record to more than 400 mph.
This extraordinary, drawn-in-the-sand engine would later power Sir Malcolm
Campbell’s Bluebird to a world land-speed record. The R-Type engine was the also
inspiration for the later Merlin engine, which would power Mitchell’s Spitfire.
1931 was quite a propitious year for Rolls-Royce. As well as its engine powering the
Schneider Trophy winning aircraft for the second time, Rolls-Royce bought the ailing
Bentley motor car company. (Its founder, W. O. Bentley had also been a GNR
apprentice.)
In April 1933, engineers at Royce’s Derby works fitted a tuned engine to an open-top
Bentley, which was driven down to West Wittering for Royce’s approval. He decided
that the suspension ought to be modified to cope with the extra performance, so,
sitting up in bed until late into the night, he sketched on the back of an envelope a
design for an adjustable shock absorber. He handed the sketch to his nurse-cumhousekeeper, Ethel Aubin, with instructions for it to be posted to the Derby works.
But, before the letter could be delivered, Royce died, aged 70, leaving much of his
fortune to Ethel.
For many years the bust of Royce containing his ashes stood in No.1 shop at Derby
until they were sent to St. Andrew’s Church, Alwalton – a resting place he shares
with Peterborough-born Frank Perkins.
When Henry Royce attended the 1929 Schneider Trophy event he signed the
visitors’ book ‘F.H.Royce – Mechanic’. A modest epitaph for an extraordinary man –
who, it seems, was really Frederick all along.
*Alwalton can be accessed from Ferry Meadows by following the sign-posted
‘Green Wheel’ track from the bridge that crosses the Nene Valley Railway opposite
Lynch Farm. To reach the bridge from the Visitor Centre, follow the Wildflower
Trail marked yellow on the Ferry Meadows visitors’ map.