The Sunday Gentleman

by Irving Wallace

  All this may be had at the regular cost of no more than $18,787. But the real promise of luxury is found in the following line in the Rolls-Royce catalogue: “Quotations can be supplied for bodies of other designs to suit customers’ special requirements.” Most Rolls-Royce buyers have “special requirements” and no objection to added costs. While many other automobiles, the earth around, are custom-built for a variety of eccentric and expensive tastes, none are specially equipped so frequently and daringly as the Rolls-Royce. One English lady had the rear of her Rolls-Royce fitted out with concealed washstand, chamber pot and cupboard, and blinds that could be pulled down. An English industrialist had a Chubb safe built into his car. One Indian prince had his steering wheel made of two tusks of ivory he sent from India, another prince had the windows of his car of a special blue glass which would enable his harem wives to look out without being seen, and still another prince had an electrically operated perfume spray constructed beside the rear seat The Gaekwar of Baroda had his car interior upholstered in hand-embroidered silk which cost $32 per yard, while his wife sent a sample of her nail polish from India to London with the request that her Rolls-Royce limousine be painted in the same color. A wealthy African family, who had their Rolls-Royce roofed in canvas, requested holes for them to put their heads through so they could look about. A Middle East ruler had a small seat built on each running board to seat his lackeys. One Rolls-Royce boasted a collapsible bathtub in the rear; another, shown at the New York World’s Fair, featured a revolving cocktail bar which rotated when an electric button was pushed, and countless Rolls-Royces have been equipped with built-in bags for golf clubs and special holders for skis.

  But despite all of these added baubles, most of them hidden from sight, the Rolls-Royce is probably still the most conservative car on the market. Not only those who love exclusiveness and luxury buy it. It is also the car for those who worship tradition, longevity, and solidity. Perhaps this, rather than any other factor, is the car’s greatest appeal. The Rolls-Royce has never completely submitted to the craze for streamlining. It remains, like the Englishmen who make and drive it, ancient, square, strong, unobtrusive, and dependable. While the car has undergone many modifications since its invention, two things stand unchanged. The basic outline of the car, a sleek, rectangular candy box, has not been forsaken in forty-three years. And the radiator grille remains today exactly as it was in 1904. This grille has provoked much argument within the firm. The younger Rolls engineers feel its square shape is an aesthetic eyesore and the design outmoded. They feel, also, that the shape creates continued difficulties in manufacturing—the welding of the sharp corners is a tricky task, and special machinery is necessary to make the silver plating perfectly flat. The opposing school of thought, which includes the directors of the firm and the agents who sell the car, doggedly declares, “There is something solid and permanent about the radiator, and though fashions and cars come and go, the Rolls-Royce is always the same.”

  The Silver Lady mascot, on the radiator cap, is another bait for lovers of tradition. She is over thirty years old. Some owners treasure her so much that they have her unscrewed and brought in with them when they dine away from home, to prevent theft. This has given rise to the story that the Silver Lady is made of pure silver, and worth a large amount of money. The Silver Lady is made of chromium and nickel-plating, nothing more, and her value is purely sentimental.

  These unchanging factors of design, radiator grilles, and mascot serve to give the Rolls-Royce the appearance of timelessness. The Rolls people say that, while the life of the average automobile is seven years, it is not unusual to see fifteen- and twenty-year-old Rolls-Royces gliding about and appearing quite in style. As a matter of fact, Rolls-Royce was able to keep one unchanged model, the Silver Ghost, in production for nineteen years, longer than that of any other car model in history (including the Model-T Ford, which was in production for only eighteen years). The Silver Ghost model came out in 1907, and no change was made in it until 1925-26. Even in the twenties, according to Rolls engineers, this model did not seem old-fashioned, because its original design had been so far in advance of the times. After nineteen years, it still had the fastest pickup of any car in the world—from a standstill, it was able to attain a mile-a-minute speed in eighteen seconds. And in a day when most automobiles had the repose of a hula dancer, it was possible to balance a penny on the Rolls-Royce’s hood with the engine idling.

  One final factor serves to keep the Rolls-Royce popular on the blueblood circuit. This is the unique three-year guarantee that accompanies each new car. If anything goes wrong in the first three years, repairs or replacements are made entirely free of charge. The directors of the company like to say they can make this guarantee because of the high quality of work done by their ten thousand employees. As the auto’s creator, Sir Henry Royce, once remarked, “It’s impossible for us to make a bad car—because the doorman wouldn’t let it go out.”

  Only the Rolls-Royce factory at Crewe makes automobiles (the others at Derby and Glasgow turn out airplane engines), and here the work is painstaking. Some parts are tested as many as eight times before leaving the shop. No chassis leaves Crewe without traveling fifty miles in a trick saloon body, so built that it amplifies every unwarranted sound in the engine and transmission. The final test of a new model consists of 20,000 consecutive miles of rough driving through the Derbyshire hills, through London traffic, over the routes nationales of France, and into the Alpine passes of Switzerland. As a result of this care, Patrick Balfour, author of Grand Tour, was able to drive a Rolls-Royce to India without any trouble, and Humfrey Symons was able to drive a Rolls-Royce from London to Nairobi, Kenya, and back again, without adding “a single drop of water to its radiator.”

  In order to maintain the car throughout the world, and to facilitate spare-part replacement, Rolls-Royce, Ltd., has small service depots in Brussels, Rome, Zurich, Oslo, Lisbon, Copenhagen, New York, Bombay, and, “in season only,” at Cannes and Biarritz. To work in these depots, English boys must go into apprenticeship at fifteen, become specialists at twenty-one, and only then are shipped to duty in some distant comer of the world. The technical heads of the depots are required to return to Crewe periodically, like old boys returning to Eton, to keep in touch.

  Rolls-Royce, Ltd., is run more like a men’s club than an automotive firm. This does not imply a disdain for profits. The firm has continually made money. Anyone farsighted enough to have invested $28,000 in Rolls stock over forty years ago could sell out for $250,000 today. (But this is admittedly only a drop in the bucket, compared to growth in stock value realized by less conservative companies.) Much of the Rolls-Royce company profits are reinvested to preserve the amenities of fife—and the reputation of the car. There is a London School of Instruction over twenty years old for owners, their families, and their chauffeurs. Any Rolls-Royce driver may attend the school’s lectures on correct lubrication and maintenance, and the lab demonstrations explaining the chassis, which last for twelve days. Upon completion of the course, the owner or chauffeur is rewarded with a sterling-silver badge.

  Another club touch is the inspection service. During the three-year guarantee period, a Rolls-Royce representative (“usually public-school”) calls upon the new owner annually. “Good day, Your Grace,” the Rolls inspector will begin, “how are the pheasants this fine morning?” After an hour spent discussing the unpredictability of pheasants, the terrors of the local golf club, the scandalous conduct of Labour leaders, and the prospects at Aintree, the inspector win tactfully inquire as to the health of the automobile.

  Usually at this time the Rolls man will extract an immaculate set of overalls from his attache case, pull them on, crawl under the car and examine it, then take the owner for a spin and gently point out how the car is being mishandled or neglected.

  The chumminess with which Rolls-Royce, Ltd., approaches its customers is also practiced on its employees. Within the giant new auto factory at Crewe, in the airplane
plant at Derby, and in that London turning, off Regent Street, where the main sales offices stand at 14-15 Conduit Street, the men who rule Rolls-Royce behave to each other like so many subdued Rotarians or Eagles. Every company executive and department head, no matter how important or unimportant he may be, addresses every other executive by initials. This was begun over two and a half decades ago, when many members of the firm who had been knighted by the current king were embarrassed at having their old co-workers call them “Sir.” The General Works manager at Crewe, Ernest Hives, who started as a test driver and is now more directly responsible for producing the car than any other single executive, is known as “E. H.” But the man who really guides the company today is “R.”—Sir Henry Royce—dead fourteen years, but still the boss.

  In 1947, the board of directors held a critical meeting in London. They were debating a technical change, a radical innovation in the postwar Rolls-Royce. The majority favored the change, but the minority refused to give in, and there resulted a stalemate. Finally, one dissenting director rose and said, “Most of you favor the change, but the important thing is—would Henry Royce have done it?” After a few moments, each man present agreed that Henry Royce would not have done it. Promptly, the majority switched their votes, and the innovation was unanimously dropped.

  Royce was a powerful personality, brilliant and dogmatic, and most of the executives who run the firm today are his devoted disciples. Through them the impact of his person is still felt. Another factor which enables Royce to rule the company from the grave is “the bible.”

  Before World War I, Royce suffered a severe breakdown from overwork. He was given three months to live. He survived for twenty years. But he never again went within a hundred miles of the Rolls-Royce plants. Instead, he dwelt in a villa in southern France, in a seaside English-type house, surrounded by a permanent staff of three company designers and two personal secretaries. Royce ran the factory by correspondence, accurately remembering and discussing even the position of various machines. In 1915, after Royce had produced a flood of letters concerning his first airplane engine, the directors of the firm reverently collected all his correspondence and printed it as a 301-page book. Only six copies of the leather-bound volume were run off, and each was stamped on the blue cover “Strictly Private and Confidential.” These six copies were distributed among the heads of the designing and engineering staffs to be used as reference volumes. Today, kept under lock and key, these books are called “the bible,” and company executives like to murmur, “It is one of the most secret engineering documents in the world.”

  Frederick Henry Royce, the son of a miller, was born in 1863. After only one year at school, he found it necessary to work as a newsboy, telegraph messenger, railway apprentice, toolmaker, and electricity tester, until he invented an improved dynamo at the age of twenty-one, made money, and was able to marry. Enjoying his sudden prosperity, he bought a French car, but was dissatisfied with it, took it apart, found its faults, and decided to build a better car. On April Fool’s Day, 1904, he tested his first handmade automobile. He drove it the fifteen miles from his workshop in Manchester to his home, followed by another car in case his creation broke down. But it did not break down, and thus the first Rolls-Royce was born. In this automobile, Royce did not try to give the world something new. He wasn’t a trailblazer. Instead, he tried to give the world something improved, something better. In days when automobiles rattled, screeched, whined, and shook, Royce produced a quiet, gliding, 10-horsepower, two-cylinder, luxury buggy.

  That same year, Royce was introduced to a young man named Charles Rolls, third son of a wealthy baron. Rolls, a daredevil balloonist, as well as a cycle and auto racer, had joined with a friend named Claude Johnson, a cultivated bibliophile, to open one of London’s largest automobile salesrooms. Rolls and Johnson sold Panhards and Minervas, but when they went for a ride in Royce’s new car, they were smitten. In March, 1906, Rolls-Royce, Ltd., was formed with a capital of $240,000. The new car, with models selling at from $1,580 to $3,560 each, was to be called Rolls-Royce-Johnson, but that was too cumbersome, and in the end, it was called Rolls-Royce because that name had the sound of “quality, luxury, and something British.”

  In 1910, after being taken up for his first airplane ride by Wilbur Wright at Le Mans, France, Charles Rolls forgot about the new automobile that he was backing. He bought a Wright Brothers plane of his own, and in July of that same year, at the age of thirty-three, was killed while trying to pull it out of a steep dive. In the early twenties, Claude Johnson died. And so Henry Royce, surviving his own illness, ran the growing company alone via penny post.

  Royce was a fantastic character. He was an engineer with no knowledge of mathematics. “I never use a slide rule,” he said; “I can do simple arithmetic.” His sense of touch was nearly perfect. Purely by feel, he once filed a brass hubcap into an exact-fitting hexagon. He took to playing the flute because he was interested in its sound waves, and he stopped going to church because, he insisted, “You can’t be an engineer and still keep going to church.” He hated waste and inefficiency. Once, observing a laborer awkwardly sweeping a shop floor, he yanked off his coat, grabbed the broom, and demonstrated how to use it properly. He abhorred golf and tennis because they were nonproductive pastimes, and advocated gardening instead. When he died in 1933, he left the surprisingly small estate of $450,000.

  As a result of his death, one change was made in the Rolls-Royce car. The front nameplate, a small metal plaque on the radiator grille, had always been made of silver with the RR in red. The year of Royce’s death, the RR was changed from red to mourning black. It has remained black until this day.

  Today, it is the airplane engine—the first of which Royce finished in 1915—rather than the car engine, that brings the company its greatest amount of revenue. Rolls-Royce aero engines have made history. They fought the dogfights over France in World War I. They helped Alcock and Brown become the first humans to fly the Atlantic in 1919, eight years before Lindbergh. And during World War II, Rolls-Royce turned out 20,000 engines per year or one million millionaire’s horsepower per week, the only engine to fight against the Luftwaffe and help win the crucial Battle of Britain. Today, planes powered by Rolls-Royce hold every world’s record set for piston and turbine engines.

  But while the airplane engine brings in the big money, the men of Rolls-Royce spend most of their time coddling the automobile. It is their first love. All of their energies are devoted to the Rolls-Royce they are building for tomorrow. “The chief change in the postwar car,” says W. A. Robothan, head engineer at Crewe, “will be in making it simpler. Today, the owner-driver is largely predominant, and only 5 percent arc chauffeur-driven. We are going in for increased durability. Our target for the postwar car is that it should run 100,000 miles without a major overhaul, which on the average means ten years of life.”

  Recently, an English journalist most accurately summed up the wonder of Rolls-Royce, Ltd. “It is as British as the weather,” he concluded. “It stands for the highest grade precision work, yet can turn its hand to mass production. Its name means civilian luxury, yet its products won the aerial dogfights that saved Britain and mankind. It serves the elite, yet is run by promoted laborers in soft collars.

  “No one understands Britain who does not understand Rolls-Royce.”

  WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

  A slightly shorter version of this story on Rolls-Royce appeared in The Saturday Evening Post for November 8, 1947. When I had researched the story in London, a half year before, I had found the Rolls-Royce people friendly but somewhat less than fully cooperative. As Inside Information, the house organ of the Curtis Publishing Company, explained it at the time:

  ‘To Wallace, brought up like all other Americans on a diet of promotion and advertising, their reluctance came as a surprise. He learned that Rolls-Royce gives practically no information to British magazines and absolutely nothing to the newspapers.

  “‘They were very stuff
y about it and did not approve,’ he says. ‘I was unable to get any cooperation in doing research, and none of the officials would talk about the can they were manufacturing for Indian princes and such.’

  “The writer patiently set out to explain to the Rolls-Royce management that their business would not be hurt by a magazine article, that undoubtedly many people in the United States had mistaken ideas about the company and the high prices it charged for its motorcars. Perhaps Wallace’s own use of advertising and promotion techniques impressed them; in any event, their air of aloofness became one of friendly—though a trifle reserved—cooperation.

  “‘When I broke them down, finally, the word got around London fast,’ Wallace says. ‘A few evenings later, the editor of a big London daily telephoned me at the Savoy Hotel. He had heard, he said, that I was doing a piece on Rolls-Royce for The Saturday Evening Post and that I was getting material.’

  “Then the editor asked Wallace, ‘Could I have a reporter come around and interview you, old chap?’

  “‘But why interview me?’ Wallace replied. ‘I’m not a story.’

  “‘Well, you see, it’s the only way we might find out something about Rolls-Royce!’ the editor told him.”

  The point of the published anecdote was, indeed, correct. In fact, a year later, the English magazine, John Bull, had to come to me in the States to request permission to reprint my story in order to inform their readers about one of their great English institutions.