Henry Royce – Mechanic (Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust Historical Series #12), 1989, 1989

Document Type: Book (Historical Study).

Purpose: Informational.

Authority: Author Expertise.

Series: Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust Historical Series #12.

NB: The Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust and the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation are closely related. From "Rolls-Royce: The Pursuit of Excellence" (1984): "Both organisations share the history of the early days and work closely in harmony. This Historical Series of books was started by the Trust and it is intended that a series shall follow, produced by both organisations in the same format, thus building up an embracing library of true Rolls-Royce history."

Scope: Personal memoir (and quasi-biography) about Henry Royce, written by Donald Bastow, a life-long automobile engineer. Bastow was an early member of the Rolls-Royce design team and worked closely with Henry Royce in the early years until Royce's death in 1933.

From the author's preface: "A talk about the writing of biographies which I attended some time ago contained the suggestion that the final work would incorporate only about 15% of the material which the compiler had amassed. In this booklet the jettisoning has had to be even more severe: on the basis of relative word contents it has been possible to retain only a little over 2% instead of the 15% referred to above. Luckily the position is not quite so bad as that. If one were to accept the dictum, referring to technical writing, that a good illustration is worth a thousand words, the abundance of illustrations included, making some allowance for exaggeration, has partly made up for the loss.

The intention here however has not been to provide a comprehensive biography, but enough to show how a considerable organisation owes its present existence and scale to the application of the abilities and aspirations of one man in the engineering of its products. In the other aspects of a company's activities this one man needed to be, and was, ably backed by devoted and almost equally determined individuals.

The choice of material to be published here has been governed by several factors: the contents of the existing booklets in this series; new information on the Royce family; establishing the reasons for the poverty and hardship of Royce's early life; demonstrating the logicality of the various developments in the products; and a desire to show some more detail on the results of the isolation of Royce from the Derby works on himself and his immediate staff. One effect of that isolation was the need to keep abreast of developments, in the car field in particular, by reading. I believe we had copies at West Wittering of 'Autocar', 'Motor', the SAE Journal, 'Automotive Industries', 'La Vie Automobile' and publications from the French Société des Ingénieurs de l'Automobile; we certainly had some of them, and all of them at Derby later. We would get our own copies of the publications of the Institution of Automobile Engineers. There was no local centre of this Institution and therefore no meetings we could attend. I need hardly say that we were expected to study such publications in our spare time!

Frederick Henry Royce was a remarkable man: in his prime he was boisterously and persistently active, intolerant, parsimonious, in some matters even cheeseparing. He acquired a remarkable grasp of the technical needs of two quite diverse industries. By his own omissions he eventually lost his boisterousness, but by then the company had acquired the necessary momentum to maintain its progress."

Contents (list of chapters from the Table of Contents): "Foreword Author's Preface 1. Introduction 2. The Royce Family - Farmers, Millers, Pioneers 3. Early Days - Poverty, Hardship, Endeavour, Achievement, Marriage, Prosperity 4. Cars Before World War 1. The Road to the Luxury Market. Derby Works. R's Illness. 5. The Aero Engines, World War 1 and Onwards - Eagle to Merlin.. 6. Cars Between the Wars: 20hp, The Phantoms, Wraith. The Bentley Arrives. 7. Coping with R's Separation From The Works. Some Colleagues. .... 8. R's Designers - This Little Band 9. Other Colleagues. Imagery. 10. Life at West Wittering: A Village Idyll.. 11. R Himself. 12. Conclusion. APPENDIX: Six Cylinder Crankshafts