There were many alarms along the way. Halfway to the summit of the Cumbrian Hills, the Ariel tricycle’s clutch failed and it began to roll backwards – accelerating as it descended towards the valley floor. It was then that the driver discovered, to his surprise, that the brakes only worked when the vehicle was going forwards. He managed to steer successfully to safety with his left hand while turned in his seat to watch the road over his right shoulder. Unfortunately that required him to push his passenger out on to the road. Some accidents were more prosaic. The Simms Motor’s wheels skidded on the tramlines in Bristol and overturned.
Mundane mechanical failures required heroic rectification. When the steering system on the Wolseley three and a half horsepower three-wheeler broke down, the driver completed the last fifty-two miles of the trial standing on the offside running board and kicking the front wheels in the direction he wanted the car to turn. The constant need for running repairs contributed to the competitors’ sense of adventure and increased the excitement of the spectators, particularly when the work was accomplished with an exhibition of the competitors’ insouciant ingenuity. The Marshall Dogcart broke its water pump just as it was about to begin the speed trials in the grounds of Welbeck Abbey. The engineer, the essential companion of every prudent driver, mended it with the aid of a champagne cork and two penny pieces. One competitor reported, ‘Even if you broke down on a remote road, while you were doing repairs, crowds of people would appear apparently from nowhere and gather round you so closely that you could not get on with the job.’1 There was, among the British population, a substantial minority of motor enthusiasts who were waiting impatiently for the general acceptance of what they knew to be the way in which the whole world would soon move from place to place.
Their impatience was understandable. The nation which had pioneered the canal and the railway engine had left the third stage of the transport revolution to countries which British patriots expected to follow the lead of Scottish engineers and English entrepreneurs, not point the way. Two Italians, Bassanti and Matteucci, had attempted to develop a gas-driven vehicle as early as 1853. It had not proved practical, but in 1859, Jean-Joseph Ellenoir, an engineer working for Gautier of Paris, adapted the idea so successfully that his company made and sold five hundred gas-driven automobiles in five years. Two Germans, Nickolas August Otton and Eugen Langen, saw the gas car and thought that they could develop a genuine internal combustion engine. They engaged a young engineer called Gottlieb Daimler, and by 1875 were selling over six hundred engines a year for installation in custom-built chassis. Karl Benz, comparing the success of the Daimler enterprise with the relative failure of his own metalworking business, decided that his hopes of prosperity lay in mechanical locomotion.
While continental Europe experimented, Great Britain slept. John Henry Knight of Farnham in Surrey built a steam car as early as the mid 1860s. Then, disheartened by the lack of public interest, he turned to the production of stationary engines in his Reliance Motor Works. In 1895 he built a three-wheeled car. But again his pioneering spirit was dampened by what he believed to be a bias against the automobile. The antagonism survived well into the twentieth century. ‘It is this prejudice which has allowed Britain to be flooded with French and German motor cars and the sum of money which has crossed the channel for the purchase of these cars must have been very considerable. Money lost to this country because our legislators refuse to allow motorcars to run on English roads.’2
In fact, in 1896 Lord Salisbury had relaxed the Locomotives and Highways Act – a statute which had been designed to regulate the conduct of traction engines and steam-driven agricultural machinery but which was applied to passenger motor vehicles. By the turn of the century, it was no longer necessary for a driver on the public highway to be preceded by a man with a red flag. According to Knight the change of heart came too late.
Had it not been for these restrictions we might have taken the lead in self-propelled carriages instead of leaving it to the Germans and the French. A lost trade is seldom, if ever, recovered. French-made cars are now to be found in most foreign countries and in our colonies and we may be sure that their makers will do all that they can to keep the trade they have obtained – partly through want of foresight on the part of the House of Commons.3
Motor manufacturers and traders are notorious for blaming the consequences of their own failures on circumstances beyond their control, but there is no doubt that before Liberation Day in 1896 – still celebrated with the London to Brighton vintage car run – the Establishment either disapproved or doubted the viability of motor locomotion.
The real cause of Britain’s failure was the sudden disappearance of innovative mechanical engineers. During the half-century which preceded the First World War, what was once the workshop of the world had produced only two original inventions – the Parson’s Turbine, which became the major source of electrical generation, and the Dunlop pneumatic tyre. The inflatable tyre had a particularly British genesis. It was developed by a cyclist with little scientific training to make pedalling over cobblestones less uncomfortable. By 1900, the age of casual inspiration had passed. Progress was promoted by ruthless investment and imagination, which the Victorians concentrated on the colonies. So, thanks to Siemens and Edison, there were electric tramcars in Berlin and New Jersey during the 1850s. It was another fifty years before they appeared on the streets of Britain.
Between 1850 and 1913, the number of towns and cities in Britain with a population in excess of 100,000 rose from twelve to fifty, a process encouraged by industrial development, the railways’ increased ability to take food from farmers to shops and the reduced cost of domestic building. In Victorian Britain, horse-drawn trams carried workmen and their wives across Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. Electrification – Kingston-upon-Hull led the way in 1899 – made the tramcar an essential part of Edwardian working life and leisure.
Britain had been slow to realise the electric tramcar’s potential – as was it slow to recognise so many essential innovations. In 1902, over half of Europe’s total tramway mileage ran through always-progressive Germany. British electrical manufacturing capacity expanded, when it expanded at all, equally slowly. Mather and Platt and the Electric Construction Company took root but bore little fruit. The United States – in the form of Siemens Brothers, Anglo-American, General Electric and Westinghouse – filled the gaps and provided vehicles to supply what – after a delayed start – amounted to municipal tramway mania. Between 1900 and 1914, 161 new electric systems were created in Great Britain. In 1905, the Royal Commission on ‘Means of Transport and Locomotion in London’ recommended a large extension of electric tramways in the capital – at a flat-rate fare. For amongst electric traction’s many advantages was its minimal cost.
In Liverpool, the cost of travelling on a horse-drawn tram had averaged out at a penny for two-thirds of a mile. After electrification in 1903, the ‘penny ride’ was extended to two miles and a half. Ten years later, Birmingham had a ‘halfpenny fare stage’ of up to one mile and a half, as well as a ‘workman’s fare’ of one penny for anything up to four miles. In both cities, over 80 per cent of journeys were made at, or below, the penny rate. The low fares liberated the urban poor. In 1901, the citizens of Manchester averaged fifty-six horse-drawn tramway journeys each year. When the system was electrified, the average number of journeys increased almost threefold, to 158.
Tramways became so popular that, for one brief moment, they were fashionable. At the official inauguration of the London County Council’s Electric Tramway in 1903, the Prince of Wales was photographed with his hand lying lightly on the driver’s handle – though there was no suggestion that he should actually drive a tram. On inauguration day a ‘royal ticket’ was issued to all travellers. It bore the Prince of Wales’s feathers and the proud boast, ‘The first ticket was sold to His Royal Highness for one halfpenny.’ The Tatler entered into the spirit of the occasion with its idea of a joke. ‘New responsibilities will be added
to Royalty if hardworking Kings and Princes, in addition to laying foundation stones and planting trees, are to be called upon to drive tramcars.’ At least the magazine had realised that the capacity, cost, speed and reliability had made the electric tramcar irresistible to the growing towns and cities of Edwardian Britain.
The motor car was welcomed with more caution. Even the Automobile Journal, which might have been expected to rejoice at the triumph of internal combustion, was apprehensive about the enthusiasm with which horseless carriages were being promoted. Its report of the Great Trial of 1900 was typical. Instead of rejoicing at the success which had been achieved in popularising the motor car, its editorial complained about the way in which salesmen had exploited the event: ‘The public will be induced by misleading assertions to purchase vehicles which will disgust them, once and for all, with automobilism. The natural argument will be that if this is the sort of car which is able to be “first anywhere”, a day spent in assisting an itinerant knife grinder now and again by way of relaxation would be equally exhilarating and less expensive.’
Lack of faith, as much as a shortage of capital, resulted in most Edwardian motorists being forced to rely for their vehicles on imports from Britain’s more adventurous neighbours. In 1895 F. R. Sims had founded the Daimler Motor Syndicate to import German engines. A year later, his company was taken over by Harvey J. Lawson who – on the strength of having sponsored the Great Trial – believed himself to be the ‘Father of the British Motor Industry’. He claimed further paternity to several ‘ghost companies’ – most of which never built or sold a car – before he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to twelve months’ penal servitude. Edwardian England was in desperate need of an engineer of genius and a true entrepreneur to set the motor industry on its feet.
There was no shortage of volunteers for that role. Between 1900 and 1913, 198 new makes of motor car were offered to the British public. One hundred and three of them failed to establish a place in the market and were abandoned by the companies which made, or planned to make, them.4 The most successful new models were developed by companies which enjoyed the advantage of experience in vaguely related fields. Star and Sunbeam (in Wolverhampton), and Swift, Rover and Singer (in Coventry) were bicycle makers. Wolseley (in Birmingham) made sheep-shearing machinery. It was men with dirt under their fingernails, not gentlemen enthusiasts in goggles and gauntlets, who began to build an industry.
Wolseley survived despite the resignation of Henry Austin, one of its more imaginative engineers. Austin’s aspiration to found a motor company of his own was initially based on his attempt to build a motor car which could be sold for £150. By increasing the size of his engine he gradually increased the size of his business to the point at which the suffragettes thought his buildings were big enough to be worth burning down. William Morris, an Oxford cycle dealer, first diversified into motor sales and then began to assemble a two-seater with a distinctive brass ‘bull-nose’ from parts bought from other vehicle manufacturers. Morris and Austin were to become the motor giants of interwar Britain. They achieved that status by overcoming formidable opposition. Between 1903 and 1906, the annual value of motor imports into Great Britain rose from £800,000 to £1,448,000. Then, in 1908, Henry Ford began to export his American Model-T to Europe. Three years later he established a factory in Manchester for the assembly of motor parts imported from the United States.
Although the popular enthusiasm for motor cars was beginning to grow, the Establishment remained basically antagonistic. In 1905, the Marquis of Queensberry – admittedly an eccentric – explained on his application for a gun licence that he needed something with which to shoot motorists who drove along the roads on his estate. In the same year a Mr E. A. Macdonald was prosecuted for causing a public nuisance in so much as ‘he did use on the Highway, to wit Regent Street, a locomotive … which did not consume, as far as practicable, its own smoke’.5 Popular disapproval matched, or perhaps even caused, a general reluctance to invest in vehicle manufacture. In November 1906, the Motor Trader offered its explanation of why France and Germany were keeping ahead of Britain: ‘For the most part of ten years the British motor industry has been swimming on an ebb tide. It is generally agreed that one of the chief factors in the prolonged period of suspense and trial has been the disinclination of the British capitalist or inventor to put money into the industry.’6 Fortunately, the men who established the reputation – if not the volume sales – of the industry were at hand. A few weeks after that editorial was published, Rolls-Royce announced its first public share issue.
Henry Royce was a polytechnic-educated electrical engineer. In 1884 he left the Electric Light and Power Company to make electrical components in his own factory. Initially he concentrated on the small end of the trade – electric bells, lamp-holders, switches and fuses. Then he expanded into the production of dynamos and switchboards. Within a couple of years he was building electric cranes, a remarkable advance for a company which was founded on capital of £75. His companion in all the new ventures was Ernest Claremont, a colleague from his earlier employment. Their partnership proved what, in Edwardian Britain, could be achieved by a steady hand guiding an innovator of genius.
In 1902 Henry Royce bought a DeDion ‘Quad’ – a four-wheeled motor-powered vehicle with such eccentric habits that Royce built a rockery at the end of his drive to act as a buffer when it ran out of control. He graduated to a DeVille which, although more reliable, did not meet his exacting engineering standards. Then he decided that the only car with which he would be completely satisfied was a vehicle of his own construction. So he began to build a two-cylinder ten-horsepower ‘Royce’ which, he hoped, would combine the values of silence, durability and reliability. The car made its first appearance on the public highway on 1 April 1904. It was such a success that one of the directors in the still expanding electrical company sent photographs to Charles Rolls, a gentleman car salesman and enthusiast who had driven the most powerful – that is to say twelve-horsepower – car in the 1900 Great Trial.
The Honourable Charles Rolls (Eton and Trinity) dealt in luxurious Panhards. Because of his aristocratic associations, he attracted a better class of customer. In 1903 Lord Rosebery bought a ten-horsepower two-seater as a coming-of-age present for his son, and the Crown Prince of Romania bought the same model a month later.7 But there was a liquidity problem. Rolls sold his cars one by one, but Panhard delivered them in batches of four. For a while his father, Lord Llangattock, bridged the financial gap, but Rolls was anxious to find a manufacturer who was more understanding – and ideally British, not French.
It was a shareholder in Henry Royce’s electrical crane company – Henry Edmunds, a founder member of the Automobile Club – who suggested that the Royce car ought to be produced for sale. Rolls was the ideal man to provide advice on the state of the market. At first Royce was reluctant to meet him, but Edmunds was persuasive. Neither man seemed enthusiastic about combining forces. On 26 March 1904, the matchmaker was still finding both parties difficult. ‘I saw Mr Rolls yesterday after telephoning you and he said it would be much more convenient if you could see him in London, as he is so much occupied and further that several other houses are now in negotiation with him, wishing to do the whole part of his work.’8
Royce refused to go south, so Rolls and Edmunds travelled north – by train. The meeting, which took place in Manchester’s Midland Hotel on 14 May 1904, got off to a bad start. Rolls thought that the ‘Royce’ which he had passed on his way from the station was a Deauville. But the afternoon ended with the agreement that Royce should make motor cars for sale to the general public and that Rolls should be his sole agent.
Once persuaded that his car would sell, Royce’s ambition was boundless. The agreement between the two men required him to design and build four distinct chassis* with different sized engines and to have at least one model ready for the Paris motor show of 1905. The ten- and twenty-horsepower models were exhibited complete, along with a fifteen-horsepo
wer chassis and a thirty-horsepower engine. The ten-horsepower model was never put on the market. Royce realised that his strength was the ability to produce a car which met the needs of a more exclusive clientele. Its great virtue would be smooth running and silence. Indeed it was for those qualities that in December 1904 Autocar commended the ten-horsepower ‘Tonneau’. It called the car a ‘Rolls-Royce’.
From the start, Rolls had no doubt about the success of the venture. He was that kind of man. He moved his showrooms from unfashionable Fulham to Mayfair and cancelled first his Minerva and Orleans franchises and then his contract with Panhard. So great was the confidence of both partners that when, in 1906, it was decided to wind up the Rolls distribution company and amalgamate it with the motor car division of Rolls Limited, the Motor Trader believed that Rolls-Royce had overreached itself. ‘We cannot help thinking the promoters have made a very weak appeal to the investing public. The price is steep for a name only a few years old.’9
The shares were offered in the hope that ‘personal confidence in the personalities which appear in the directorate’ would see them through. And so it did, with a little assistance from more tangible proof of the firm’s visibility. In 1906 Rolls-Royce won the Manx Grand Prix and, with already substantial confidence further boosted, the company designed the forty-horsepower Silver Ghost – a car which established the company’s reputation and remained in production for twenty-seven years. Then came victory in the 15,000-Mile Trial. It seemed that by any standard Rolls-Royce had fulfilled the boast of an early advertisement. ‘Not one of the Best – the Best in the World.’10
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