Silver Ghosts and Flying Eagles: Henry Royce’s Kent Connection

By Paul Tritton

In KAS Newsletter No. 119 (Spring 2020), Janet Hearn-Gillham marked the centenary of John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown’s non-stop transatlantic flight in a modified Vimy biplane bomber designed at the Vickers aircraft company in Crayford, north Kent. Here, Paul Tritton of our Historic Defences Group tells the story of another of the celebrated aeroplane’s Kentish roots – and a fantastic memento that came to light nearly 100 years after the flight.

First Rolls-Royce aero engine was designed in ‘eyrie’ on White Cliffs of Dover

While Vickers was developing their series of warplanes that culminated in the Vimy heavy bomber, F H (Henry) Royce, Rolls-Royce’s Engineer- in-Chief, was working in voluntary ‘exile’ on the cliffs above St Margaret’s Bay. Royce was busy designing the aero-engine that would help the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service match German air capability during the First World War and, in 1919, keep Alcock and Brown airborne for

15 hours 57 minutes as they headed eastwards from St John’s, Newfoundland, to County Galway.

After Royce and the Hon. Charles Stuart Rolls became business partners in 1904, Royce almost worked himself to death while designing a succession of luxury cars; he was also developing a serious bowel condition. A workaholic, reluctant to delegate, and indifferent to the toll on his health, Royce insisted on becoming involved in the minutiae of factory management. He was liable to dismiss an employee for a minor transgression summarily. An unhappy marriage worsened his unstable temperament.

In 1908 Rolls-Royce’s managing director, Claude Johnson, told the firm’s chairman, Ernest Claremont: “One cannot help wishing that a portion of Royce’s time should be spent right away from the works.

So long as he insists on being worried with all the small, petty-fogging, irritating details which must inevitably surround him so long as he superintends the works, his time and the value of his brains to our shareholders must to some extent be lost… his brain is undoubtedly valuable at the works but its most valuable property, namely invention, has not sufficient chance to be exercised.”

Top

Fig 1: Royce at his drawing board with colleague Bill Hardy. (Courtesy of Rolls- Royce Heritage Trust)

Bottom

Fig 2: Royce’s ‘elite designers’ Albert Elliott (left) and Maurice Olley at Buena Vista, Sea Street, St Margaret’s. (Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust)

In July 1910 Royce was devastated by Rolls’s death in a flying accident, and in 1911 his condition became critical when an emergency bowel operation followed a nervous breakdown. While he recovered, Johnson and Claremont decided that under no circumstances should he be allowed to return to Derby and its many distractions.

There followed a hiatus during which Royce lived and worked in the south of England during summer and the French Riviera during winter. He underwent a colostomy and separated from his wife, Minnie. She had a morbid fear of all things medical (especially pregnancy). A nurse, Ethel Aubin, was engaged as Royce’s live-in carer and companion. She and elite members of his design staff accompanied him everywhere – to Crowborough, Sussex, in 1912 while he was recovering from his recent trauma and in the following years to the Côte d’Azur (where houses for him and his staff, and a drawing office, were built at Le

Canadel) and to St Margaret’s Bay.

Royce lived at Eastward Ho! in Granville Road, St Margaret’s, during the summer of 1913, spent another winter at Le Canadel, and when he returned moved into Rothiemay, also in Granville Road.

He renamed the house Seaton, after the village in Rutlandshire where his forebears had been farmers and millers. The outbreak of the First World War thwarted his intention to spend further winters at Le Canadel until after the Armistice.

He and Ethel Aubin lived at Seaton for the next three years, with only one interruption, while his designers, Albert Elliott and Maurice Olley, had lodgings at Buena Vista (now Tigh-Na-Mara) in Sea Street.

“Royce had rented the house high up on the cliff,” Olley recalled many years later. ‘One of the front rooms was being prepared as a drawing office, with petrol lamps, which gave an excellent light, but

I’m sure must have been a fire risk. The view across to the French shore was magnificent. The bay window in the drawing office was a regular stage box for the war we didn’t know was coming.

Silver Ghosts on the Deal road

The team’s first tasks were to design improvements to Royce’s highly successful 40/50hp motor car, launched prosaically in 1907 as the Rolls-Royce 40/50 and later commonly known as the Silver Ghost, the name first bestowed on a special silver-plated version that completed a 15,000-mile reliability trial. One of Olley’s assignments was to test-drive Silver Ghosts along the road to Deal.

Britain’s declaration of the war on Germany on Tuesday 4 August caused consternation at Rolls- Royce. The workforce was taking its annual holiday and was ordered, through an advertisement in the Daily Mail, to return home immediately and “observe the most rigid economy.” The directors were momentarily in a state of panic.

Above, left

Fig 3: Afternoon tea at Seaton, c. 1915, with Royce, his nurse Ethel Aubin (centre) and Claude Johnson’s secretary, Florence Caswell

Above, right

Fig 4: Seaton, Henry Royce’s home at St Margaret’s Bay, is prominent at the top of the hill, left, in this undated view of St Margaret’s Bay during the early years of housing development in Granville Road. (Courtesy of St Margaret’s History Society)

The company’s only income came from sales of Silver Ghost chassis and engines (specialist coachbuilders made the cars’ bodies). Rolls-Royce faced bankruptcy because who, in such uncertain times, would spend the equivalent of up to £200,000 in today’s money on a new car?

Johnson prepared to lay-off about fifty percent of the workers at Derby and halved the working hours of those who remained. He told his staff: “A week ago the Rolls-Royce business and its property were worth a very large sum of money. I cannot say whether when the bank opens again on Friday [7 August] the bankers may not take the view that the Rolls-Royce business is worth nothing at all and therefore they may refuse to let us draw another penny from the bank.

Anyone with their eyes open can see that the sale of Rolls-Royce cars must be absolutely stopped.”

Eventually, the company was saved by government contracts for munitions, and for chassis and engines for military vehicles.

Nevertheless, it is astonishing that at first, Rolls-Royce’s directors seemed oblivious to the possibility of converting their factory to make military materiel, which would be required in incalculable quantities for the battles to come.

At the outbreak of the First World War, there was a critical shortage of aero engines for the RFC and the RNAS, which between them could muster only 179 aeroplanes with which to patrol the Western Front and Britain’s shipping lanes. The nation’s aircraft constructors were being urged to build more aeroplanes – and quickly – but were dependent on engines built in France, clearly now an unreliable source.

Despite having one of the country’s most modern internal combustion engine production lines, and a workforce fully capable of adapting them to build aero engines, the company decided in the first few days of the war that it “would not avail itself of the opportunity, now possibly arising, of making or assembling aero engines for the British government.” The decision was short-lived. Royce and Johnson were soon persuaded to build Renault air-cooled engines under licence and a similar type designed by the Royal Aircraft Factory. Royce disliked them, having for the past

10 years designed a succession of highly-reliable water-cooled engines for the Silver Ghost and its predecessors. Royce sketched out his ideas, and on 9 September 1914 Maurice Olley completed the first drawing, headed ‘200 HP Aero Engine Crankshaft Detail,’

Above, left

Fig 5: Seaton, built in 1947 on the site of the front garden of Royce’s house of that name. (Courtesy of St Margaret’s History Society)

Above, right

Fig 6: Henry Royce with an experimental Silver Ghost at Claude Johnson’s house, Villa Vita, Kingsdown. (Courtesy of Rolls-Royce Heritage Trust) for what became the water-cooled Eagle aero engine; soon, other components took shape on the drawing boards at Seaton.

By now, Royce and his team were working in a war zone. Gunfire on the Western Front could be heard on the White Cliffs. St Margaret’s Bay was vulnerable to German raiding parties that could quickly have embarked unseen from submarines surfacing close to the shore at night. The only telegraph cable between England and France ran from St Margaret’s Bay along the seabed to Calais, carrying vital military communications. There were observation posts, and gun batteries on the cliffs, Army checkpoints on the coast roads and the Dover Patrol was on active service in the Channel. Two miles away, at Swingate Aviation Camp, the RFC was dispatching fighters to the battlefields.

St Margaret’s was not an ideal place in which to design a top-secret engine for Britain’s warplanes.

Had the Germans known this was happening under the noses of their bomber pilots, they would indeed have considered capturing

Royce or stealing his designs. From November until Spring the weather on the east Kent coast can be harsh so, unable to travel to Le Canadel, Royce spent the winter of 1914/15 at Bognor Regis and Bournemouth, whose milder climate at that time of the year was ideal for those with delicate constitutions. He returned to Seaton in early 1915 and remained there for the next two years, becoming a familiar sight as he relaxed after work taking walks along the cliffs. Everyone in the village knew who he was, but no one could have been aware of what was keeping him so busy.

In January 1915 the first contract for Eagle aero engines, worth £23,750 (about £2.3million at today’s values) was placed by the Admiralty on behalf of the Royal Navy Air Service. The first airworthy version powered the prototype Handley Page 0/100 twin-engined bomber on its maiden flight from Hendon Aerodrome in north London on 17 December. In June 1916 the Eagle went into active service with RFC FE2d fighters.

Royce went on to improve the Eagle.

It remained in production until 1924, by when more than 4,600 had been built for fighters, bombers, flying boats, troop transporters, airliners and many other British aircraft.

By the end of 1917, Royce and his retinue had seen and heard enough of the war. The searchlights, bombing, gunfire and depth charges were making life extremely uncomfortable. Royce may have wanted to stay to the bitter end but Ethel Aubin, responsible for keeping him fit and in good spirits, had other ideas. Together they went house- hunting along the Sussex coast to find somewhere quieter and safer. Eventually, they viewed Elm Tree Farm, West Wittering, which became their English summer home.

The Eagle begat a series of increasingly powerful and reliable engines and, after Royce died, the immortal Merlin. His ultimate design was specially engineered for the international Schneider Trophy flying contests in 1929 and 1931. Having won the event in 1914 and 1922, and lost it in 1923,

1925 and 1926, Britain regained the trophy in 1927, the winner being the Supermarine aircraft company’s S5 seaplane, designed by Reginald Mitchell. A Napier Lion engine powered the S5, but

Mitchell doubted whether this would provide enough power for the S6 he was designing for the 1929 race.

Royce solved with the problem with his R (for Racing) engine. Flown by Richard Waghorn, the S6 won the trophy at an average speed of

328.64 mph (nearly 50 mph faster than the S5 in 1927). The next race, in 1931, was won by John Boothman piloting Mitchell’s S6B seaplane, which achieved an average of

340.08 mph thanks to a 2,350hp version of the R engine. This third successive victory secured the trophy for Britain in perpetuity. An R-engined Supermarine later set a world airspeed record of 407.5 mph.

In 1930 Royce was created ‘Sir Frederick Henry Royce, 1st Baronet of Seaton’ for services to British aviation. In 1918 he had been appointed OBE in recognition of his wartime achievements. He died on 22 April 1933, shortly after his 70th birthday.

Above

Fig 7: The suitcase in which the letter was found is examined at Claude Johnson’s former home at Kingsdown during a visit hosted by the house’s owners Richard and Rogy Nelson. From the left: Richard Nelson, Hugh Riddle (Claude Johnson’s grandson), Maurice Richardson (Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts’ Club), Rogy Nelson, Christine Waterman (St Margaret’s History Society) and Rolls-Royce historian and author Tom Clarke. (St Margaret’s History Society)

Thanks to Ethel Aubin’s ‘24/7 t.l.c.’ he had lived for more than 20 years after the onset of what was feared would be his fatal illness. During the last weeks of his life, a drawing table was fitted to his bed, and he started to design what was to be his last aero engine, the PV12. From this evolved the Merlin, first tested five months after he died, and subsequently to power the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters, the Avro Lancaster bomber, the US Army Air Force’s Mustang P-51B/C and about 40 other warplanes and civil aircraft. Of the four Eagle engines that survive, two are on Alcock and Brown’s Vimy biplane at the London Science Museum.

Surprise in a suitcase

More than 100 years after Alcock and Brown’s flight, and the published books and articles on their triumph, a forgotten memento came to light in a battered suitcase. Letters and photographs that had belonged to Claude Johnson, who lived at Villa Vita (now South Foreland House) at Kingsdown, a stroll along the cliffs from Seaton, were contained within.

The collection, now in possession of Johnson’s grandson, Hugh Riddle, was first appraised by Dover Museum while preparing an exhibition to commemorate the 100th anniversary of C S Rolls’s non-stop cross-Channel return flight on 2 June 1910.

To the surprise of the museum staff, the suitcase contained a letter addressed to Claude Johnson and carried by Alcock and Brown in a consignment of letters and parcels that comprised the first- ever transatlantic airmail. It was written on 11 June 1919 (three days before take-off) by Eric Platford, head of a team of Rolls-Royce engineers sent to Newfoundland to prepare the Vimy’s two Eagle engines for the flight. The letter is now in the Henry Royce Archives.

The KAS Magazine is privileged to be the first to publish it.

Platford wrote: “[the] Vickers machine is now practically ready and if weather fit should be off tomorrow or the following day. I am anxious that you should receive a letter on the first Transatlantic aerial mail especially using R.R. engines, so trust this letter will arrive safely which I feel you will appreciate as a souvenir …I should be glad if you would convey my congratulations to Mr Royce and the Works for the excellent engines. If the flight is not a success I feel sure it will not be the engines themselves but the installation work. The engines on all machines have always run like clocks and have everyone’s full confidence. The installation work requires much more serious thought and experience. Did you receive my letter to you in the Sopwith Aerial Mail which I understand was saved? “

Left

Fig 8: The historic ‘Alcock & Brown’ letter, courtesy of the Henry Royce Archives

Harry Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie Grieve had attempted the non-stop crossing a month before Alcock and Brown in a Sopwith biplane, optimistically called The Atlantic. However, its Eagle engine overheated and they had to ditch in the ocean. They were rescued 750 miles of the Irish coast. The fate of Platford’s letter to Johnson is not known.

The British aircraft industry made such rapid progress post-WW1 that in June 1961, only 42 years after Alcock & Brown’s triumph, an RAF Avro Vulcan V-bomber made the first non-stop flight from England to Australia in 20 hours and three minutes. It too carried historic airmail – including photographs of the Kent v. Australia cricket match then in progress at Canterbury.