Rolls-Royce has been in business for 100 years next month. Kieran Fagan charts its growth, its triumphs, and its decline as the iconic leader of the British motor industry
"Ford and the world Fords with you, Rolls and you Rolls alone" - Lord Birkenhead
It is not just a car, it is an icon. More than an icon, it represents the nearest to perfection we are likely to achieve. It is the layman's definition of excellence: "The Rolls-Royce approach", "Rolls-Royce solutions".
And when we succeed, we buy one to tell the world. John Lennon had one painted in psychedelic colours; the Bagwan Shree Raneesh famously had 40 or 58, take your pick. The Brunei Royal family had a mere 23. The President of Ireland has a 1948 model, used until recently for State occasions.
It all started 100 years ago next month, in a hotel in Manchester. Motoring was in its infancy and one of its great advocates was the wealthy Sir Charles Rolls, later the first man to be killed in an aeroplane accident in England.
He also was the first undergraduate to attend Cambridge University in a car, in 1895, at a time when motorists needed to have a man with a red flag walk in front of them to warn the nervous public. When he met Royce, Rolls was importing Panhard cars from France for sale.
Henry Royce had humbler origins, a hands-on engineer, with a passion for making things better. He had already built his own cars, Royces, when he met Rolls. After the fateful meeting in Manchester, Rolls told a friend: "I have just met the greatest engineer in the world." At the factory the cars were always called Royces - not Rolls or Rollers - a tribute to his engineering genius.
But there was a hidden hand - Claude Johnson - later to be known as the hyphen in Rolls-Royce. His marketing expertise would prove crucial in establishing the Rolls-Royce brand, and behind the scenes he managed the potential difficulties that came with the very different talents of Royce and Rolls - deploying the tact and business acumen both founders lacked.
There were two jobs to be done. One was to advance the cause of motoring - the second was to build the best car in the world. Rolls and Johnson set about the first, Royce the second.
Between 1900 and 1910, the motorcar replaced the horse and carriage as the conveyance of choice of the wealthy. You can still see the carriage in many of the early designs, the uniformed chauffeur replacing the coachman but still effectively sitting outside. Bespoke coachbuilders, Mulliners, Park Ward, Hooper and Co and others were still making the bodies separately. The saloon car was yet to come.
Aviation, too, was in its infancy. By 1910 it had claimed most of Charles Rolls's attention. He was the first person to fly the English Channel both ways. Then it claimed his life when the tail of his small plane disintegrated, plunging him and it to earth.
Aviation was to be a leitmotif in the Rolls-Royce story. When war broke out in 1914, the market for luxury cars collapsed and Royce turned his formidable design powers to aero engines as the factory shifted to producing engines, armoured cars and ambulances.
Similar experience in the second World War led to Rolls-Royce becoming a major player in aviation engines. Eventually the two divisions - aero and auto - went their separate ways in 1971, both confusingly retaining the Rolls-Royce name.
But there were other Rolls-Royces in combat in the 1914-18 conflict. TE Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) with three Rolls-Royce armoured cars captured two Turkish posts, blew up a bridge, and wiped out a Kurdish cavalry regiment. "A Rolls in the desert was worth rubies," he said, "They were worth hundreds of men to us." In Ireland, similar Rolls-Royce armoured cars remained in use up to 1946.
The major amalgamations of the British motor industry took place after the second World War, when it was too late for most of them. In 1930, a rival company - Bentley - got into difficulties and was acquired by Rolls.
On the technical front, innovation continued. Electric starting motors became standard. A smaller car, with a three-speed gearbox, --the Twenty -- much disliked by the staff -- was introduced in 1920. One critic noted sniffily: ""The small Roll-Royce was not really an upper-crust car."" But it sold well.
One fear was that because Rolls sold cars in chassis form, the specialist coachwork manufacturers who made the bodies would make them too heavy, and give Rolls a reputation for being underpowered. But a truly stunning car was in development, the Phantom 1. American manufacturers were astonished at its performance and bought models, took them to pieces and copied Royce's solutions to problems that had dogged them for years.
However, the big prize lay in capturing the Royal Family market, and what it brought in its wake. Not just in Britain but all over the world, in palaces and cabinet offices, in embassies and legations, in boardrooms and mayors' parlours, the choice was Rolls-Royce.
And there were the rich. "The man who goes to Poole's for his clothes, Purdey for his guns and Hardy for his rods, goes to Rolls-Royce for his car," said press baron Lord Northcliffe, approvingly. The second World War again shifted the emphasis to aero engines, with continued engineering success. In two wars Rolls-Royce was a major contributor to the defeat of Germany. The irony to come was the eventual sell-off to not one, but two German car makers.
When war ended in 1945 names like Austin, Morris, Hillman, Wolseley, Riley disappeared in too little too late mergers. However, the twin marques, Rolls-Royce and Bentley sailed serenely on, producing excellent cars for a discerning and wealthy client base, impervious to the pressures that brought lesser companies to grief.
The end was a long time in coming, and when it did, it contained elements of farce, hubris and - in my view - tragedy.
Rolls was the favoured child, and Bentley, with its proud tradition of high performance on and off the racetrack, had been neglected. "By the end of the 1970s, Bentley was like the star player prematurely left on the subsititutes' bench," says Richard Feast, author of Kidnap of the Flying Lady. Certainly the only difference between a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, and Bentley T-series was cosmetic.
There had been problems too in 1971, when the aero division encountered difficulties over the RB211 turbo-fan engines, and the two companies, aero and motor, were separated, both confusingly retaining the Rolls-Royce name - a fact that would come back to influence the current car world. Something more insidious was afoot as well.
The car arm's then owners, Vickers, took fright at a slump in car sales in the early 1990s and an era of "technical co-operation" with BMW began. In layman's terms Vickers took the cost cutting route of letting BMW do the development work on Rolls-Royce cars, and sacrificed the company its independence.
When the crunch came, BMW had a stranglehold: Rolls-Royce cars were becoming more and more dependent on German know-how and parts. If things did not go BMW's way, it could cancel its technology co-operation agreement, and there would be no more cars, maybe for two or three years, while Rolls played catch up.
The crunch came in 1998. What happened is simply incredible, ithe real meaning of that over-used word. Vickers wanted out, and Volkswagen and BMW were competing bidders. VW won, buying Bentley and what it thought was Rolls-Royce for £430 million as a going concern, factory, stock premises and the like. But, as it turned out, the Rolls-Royce name was not part of the deal.
This belonged to Rolls-Royce PLC, the aeronautic operation which had licensed the name to Vickers under a deal that it would re-inherit control of it if ever they sold the car company on. The aero group then shocked the car industry by handing over the rights to the Rolls-Royce car brand to BMW for a mere £40 million.
BMW already had the all-important technical knowledge about the current range, which continued to be produced under interim arrangements, until both companies could produce new separate model ranges.
Put yourself in the position of a VW shareholder. Your company has paid top dollar for the most prestigious car brand in the world, and handed it over to a rival for a song. No wonder VW's then chief executive was uncomfortable to be asked repeatedly when the deal was announced: "Dr Piech, don't you think you have made a fool of yourself?"
Today in Ireland there's a chance you may spot the green Bentley logo displayed at some larger VW dealerships. Bentley has hit the gound running with its success at Le Mans and the impressive sporty new Continental GT, already seen on Irish roads.
David Archibald, regional director of Rolls-Royce UK, will visit Ireland shortly to assess the market opportunities and put in place a dealer network that fits. It looks like he has some catching up to do.
Both marques have joined battle. But those who value the engineering skills which Henry Royce and his successors brought to car design must mourn the placing of the final nail in the coffin of the once-proud British motor industry.
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