Prestige on Wheels

When T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) was living quietly in England after World War I, Lowell Thomas asked him what he would choose if he could have any material thing in the world. Without hesitation, Lawrence said: "I should like to have a Rolls-Royce motorcar, and tires and petrol to last my lifetime."

In the 54 years that have passed since the first Rolls-Royce automobile rolled silently down an English country road, a good many men have wished for, and taken, what Lawrence held to be the most desirable of the world's goods. Since the first Rolls-Royce car was built, more than 3000 other makes have come and, most of them, gone. Still, wherever automobiles are known, Rolls-Royce is a magic name, and men believe as holy writ that it is what its makers say it is -- The Best Car in the World.

Why is this so? The Rolls-Royce isn't particularly fast, at about 110 miles an hour. There are many faster cars. It doesn't have notable acceleration. A good Chevrolet will leave it. It's not very exciting-looking, since its body styling changes only at long intervals, and then almost imperceptibly. How can it be true, then, that this is the best car in the world, and that driving one is an experience quite apart from driving any other automobile?

Some of its wickedly ingratiating charm is intangible, based on such things as the sure knowledge that nothing has gone into this car that was not the best obtainable in the world's markets; that no one laid a hand on it during its building but men who loved their work and believed in its worth; that when it left the factory, it was as nearly perfect as man could make it, because otherwise, as Sir Henry Royce once said, "The man on the gate wouldn't let it out." But the intangibles are only half the story, perhaps less than half. You must drive the car to know, and this is how it is:

I got up that morning at five o'clock, to see some friends living 100-odd miles away. It was early this spring, black dark, and there was a thin edge of cold on the air. The car was the model the company calls a Silver Cloud -- a standard sedan, the less costly, at $12,800, of the two currently being built. It had been loaned to me by the New York dealer, the venerable firm of J. S. Inskip, Inc. It was painted in two colors: sand and another, indescribable shade of mauve, a kind of rosy pink. The upholstery was a yellow-brown glove-leather, the woodwork South African burl walnut. The driver's seat, and all the others, too, are the proper kind: soft centers, firm outer rolls to hold the hips and shoulders. The driver's seat is adjustable up and down, back and forth, and for rake -- the angle on the vertical of the back. The arm-rests on the doors are adjustable, too.

The engine started instantly and began to warm itself at a fast idle. I pulled out the heater control -- there are almost infinite variations of heat and ventilation available -- and the little thumb-shaped button moved through two positions with soft hissing sounds from the hydraulic controls. I turned on the radio and put up the aerial. In three minutes the engine was warm and I moved the gear-selector lever to the first position and moved out.

After 10 miles or so to warm up the tires and lubricants in the gear-box, the transmission and the wheel-bearings, I began to demonstrate to myself something that I'd almost forgotten: the Rolls-Royce is not only the most luxurious car in the world, but one of the fastest over the road, point to point. At 75 miles an hour, on roads tagged for 35, you feel perfectly safe. With the windows closed, there is no great wind noise. The steering is reasonably quick, the Rolls-Royce power system gives a remarkable "feel" of the road, none of the deadness of most power steering, and (continued overleaf)Prestige on Wheels(continued from page 20) the brakes will take anything. You sit in utter comfort, totally relaxed, listening to the radio, and you run past every other car you see. When you pass another car, incidentally, you can count on one of two reactions: the other driver will cave in completely, pull over a little, almost tug on his forelock as if to say that he knows he's a peasant and has no right to contest with you, or he'll glare, stick his foot into the gas and try to show you what he thinks of the idle rich. He knows a Rolls-Royce when he sees one -- everybody does. If he wants to run with you, and the road is right for it, let him. You flick a lever on the steering wheel that changes the shock-absorber setting from soft to hard, and then, unless he is very enterprising, very good, and can take advantage of long straights, you run on the brakes and the gears; you just go right up to the corner, almost into it, before you touch the brake pedal. Then you hit the brakes good and hard, just once, drop down one gear, get back on the accelerator, and around you go. If he tries to do the same thing, he's going to be very busy, and he's going to get tired. He can't use his gears for braking because usually he'll have a two-speed transmission, against the Rolls-Royce's four. I ran this particular car every day for a week, every hour I could spare, and in that time only two cars passed me, and I passed both of them shortly afterwards and made it stick. I had some very fast trips. For example, I usually take an hour and a quarter to go from my home to New York City, if I'm not hurrying. In the Rolls-Royce, I made it in 50 minutes, and I still didn't feel that I was hurrying. (It's odd, but I think it's true that policemen find it hard to believe that a Rolls-Royce is going fast unless you do something dumb, like passing five cars at a clip.)

An hour out on my first little trip, when full light had come, I had covered 56 miles. The road now was very narrow, winding, and bordering a river. Most of the time, between the bends, I could just touch 70 miles an hour before I had to shut it off, and on one of these little straights I passed a Mercury carrying a young man and woman. He didn't like being passed and he promptly repassed me coming out of a bend, where his superior acceleration counted. The Rolls-Royce has remarkable acceleration for a big five-passenger limousine-like car, but not that much. I tucked in behind him and waited to see what would happen next.

My friend started to run, and when he came to the bends he waited as long as he dared before he braked and then fought the wheel all the way around. I sat there and listened to the radio, right behind him. He became more and more annoyed and began to crowd his luck to the point of going around so fast his back end began trying to leave him, and a couple of times he came out of the bends with reverse lock on the steering wheel: turning right in a left-hand bend, to control an incipient skid. He began to brake earlier for the corners, not from choice, I knew, but because he had to -- his brakes were starting to fade. Then he began to cut the corners on the inside. He was hunched over the wheel, working like a miner, and his companion had begun to clutch a bit: after almost every corner I'd see her turn to him and give him the message. It was still early, and there was almost nothing on the road, but I dropped back because I did not want to buy a piece of his accident; I didn't want to be there if he met somebody on the inside of one of those bends. Sure enough, came a Renault. He missed it --just. His wife -- I was sure she was his wife, a girlfriend wouldn't have chewed him out so hard -- was hanging on the dashboard. She was reading him off continuously. But he was a tiger, and he kept on. A couple of minutes after passing the Renault he met another early bird: a tractor and trailer loaded with cement blocks. He missed again--but by a fantastically close margin. I ran up and hung on him. He was all through; I dropped a gear and ran past and away from him. I'm sure he felt as if he'd just done 100 miles at Indianapolis. As for me, I'd just been sitting there listening to a Brahms symphony. For all I know, he is a better driver than I am, but he didn't have the car. If the tractor and trailer hadn't convinced him I would have dropped back out of sight because I'd have been convinced that rage had so affected his judgment that he might kill himself. He didn't know what he was up against -- a big, high-riding sedan that heeled over almost not at all in the corners, that stuck to the road like a sports car, that required no "winding" of the steering wheel, and, most of all, that had brakes that will run up and down the Grand Canyon every day and never fade at all. There are three separate braking systems on a Rolls-Royce and their power-brake apparatus, in use for 20 years, is the world's best. The ribbed brake drums are 11 inches by three.

I did 100-odd miles on winding roads that day in less than two hours, and I didn't take one chance or have one close call. I enjoyed the corollary kicks, too: for instance, in going through towns, the little traffic breaks the local police will always give a Rolls-Royce. They don't seem to be able to help themselves. I liked the extra attention when I stopped for gas, too. You wait until the attendant has the hose in his hand and is wondering where the filler is. Then you push a button on the walnut dashboard and the electrically controlled flap flies up to show him the filler-cap, which screws tight to a threaded pipe, and is attached to it by steel cable. You'll find that he's exceptionally careful, but if he runs the tank over a little, it doesn't matter: the pipe is set in a little housing of its own, and the gas probably won't slop outside to the paint. If it does, the attendant will wash it off in a hurry, and carefully: he never saw a paint job like that in his life, and he doesn't want anything to happen to it. You don't let him open the hood to check the oil: you press a button and cut in a circuit that gives you a needle-sharp reading on a dashboard gauge. Water? Why should it need water? Before the first World War four Rolls-Royces ran for 1645 miles up and down the Alps, in competition, and they didn't need a cupful of water at the end. Grease job? You push a pedal, and lubricant is delivered to the chassis in measured amounts. How much gasoline does a Rolls-Royce use? Not as much as a Ford -- it is a six-cylinder engine -- but actually how much I don't know, and I couldn't care less.

At the end of the week I gave the car back to the dealers, and the next car I drove was my own year-old Detroiter, a carefully maintained automobile, and, I had thought up to that time, a pretty good one. I had braced myself for the shock but even so it was appalling. I was all over the road trying to steer the thing. Every shift-point was marked with a clank and a jerk that rattled my teeth. My ears were assailed by the din: bangings and muffled thuds from the engine, groans from the transmission, squeaks and rasps and grunts from the body. When I ran into a corner it seemed to me that the tire-howl would wake the dead. After a few score miles, of course, things got better -- the car began to handle again, the noise level seemed to drop and I was comfortable once more. Comparatively comfortable, only. Once you've put 1000 miles on a Rolls-Royce you'll never, never really like another automobile. You can't. You've had it. You may get more sheer sensual kick out of faster cars: a Porsche, a Ferrari, but you'll never find anywhere else the same sensation you knew in the Rolls-Royce, the conviction that here, by the old Harry, is the ultimate in land transportation, here is that magic, wondrous thing --a gentleman's carriage.

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A rich man's son made the Rolls-Royce possible, but a poor man's son built it: Henry Royce, born in 1863 and orphaned nine years later. Royce had little schooling, and when he had to go to work he did a good many 14-hour days, running messages in London streets, on a couple (continued on page 46)Prestige on Wheels(continued from page 22) of slices of bread and a cup of milk. The boy was a born mechanic, perhaps close to a genius, and with a little break here and there, he clawed his way along until, at 21, he had a small company of his own, making electrical appliances. He went on to make bigger things -- dynamos, electric cranes, and by 1899, when he was 36, he had $100,000 worth of orders on the books. A little later he began to be interested in the contemporary automobiles. They were, he decided, mechanically disgraceful. He bought a Decauville, took it apart and put it back together again a few times, and then in 1903 announced that he was going to build three automobiles of his own. The depression following the Boer War had hurt his own business, and branching out into anything as hazardous as motorcars seemed a poor idea to his associates, but he did it anyway.

The first car ran on April 1, 1904. It was a two-cylinder roadster of entirely conventional design. Much of it Royce had made himself, and by hand. He pushed himself unbelievably hard, and the people who worked with him would have been excused if they had lynched him. Royce could, and did, work three days and nights without leaving the shop and with almost no sleep or food. He paid his mechanics five shillings a week, and their week was usually 100 hours. That would be literally a dollar a week today, say five dollars actually, devaluation considered. He begrudged them every minute of idleness, he saw no reason they should not work and eat at the same time -- if they had to eat. As for him, he rarely bothered. But because he was really a kindly man, and because he worked out of a passion to build, to create, and not to make money, his employees took it, and even appeared to like it. When they felt they were starving, they would send out for food, and someone would force Royce to eat some of it, usually an egg, a glass of milk, or a piece of bread. He'd grumble, but usually he'd stuff it down.

Royce's intention in his first car was primarily to make it a quiet one. He had been appalled by the racket most cars made. And when the car rolled out of the shop that day in April, exactly 54 years ago this month, it was quiet, although it was hard to tell at first: every mechanic in the place was swinging a hammer against an anvil in celebration.

He built the other two cars and sold one of them to a man who introduced him to the Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls, third son of the first Baron Llangattock. Rolls was young, rich, and full of the vital juices: he had raced motorcycles and automobiles, he was a dedicated free balloonist, and he learned to fly an airplane almost as soon as it was possible to do so. Rolls and a Claude Johnson were partners in an automobile sales firm in London, and when they had driven Royce's car they abandoned their other franchises, and the firm of Rolls-Royce came into being. Claude Johnson was a major figure in the firm from the first day on, and so were two of Royce's crew of slave-driven co-workers, one of whom rose to be general manager of the company.

There were four models in the first Rolls-Royce line: a two-cylinder, a three, a four and a six. Later Royce added a V-eight-cylinder model called the "Lega-limit" because it was impossible to drive it over 20 miles an hour, and thus impossible for any speed-trap cop to tag it. It was one of his few mistakes. Then as now, motorists preferred to take their chances. The six-cylinder car was run in various touring-car competitions and did well, and the company soon had more orders on hand than could be filled. These cars have nearly all disappeared now, and in any case would be notable only as collectors' items. In 1907 the Silver Ghost model was introduced, and with it, the fame of the name Rolls-Royce really began. The Silver Ghost was one of the milestones of automobile history, one of the greatest cars ever built. The car was so good that it was in production for 19 years, longer than any other automobile ever built, with one exception: the French-made Citroën, built for 23 years and six months.

The Silver Ghost was a six-cylinder car. It was phenomenally quiet, utterly smooth in running, and built to last almost forever. There is at least one Silver Ghost running today with 500,000 miles on the odometer. In 1907 the accepted way to advertise a car was to do something spectacular with it. Rolls-Royce looked for impossible hills, and sent Ghosts up them with nine men aboard. They ran a car from London to Glasgow and back nonstop at a rate of 20.86 miles to the gallon. They ran one nonstop for 14,371 miles and had it stripped by the Royal Automobile Club, with instructions to replace every part that showed even microscopic wear. The cost was two pounds, two shillings, say $10.50. Beyond any doubt, they had made the best car in the world.

In 1910 Rolls was killed flying a Wright airplane. Not long afterwards Henry Royce had a complete physical collapse, induced by overwork and, not surprisingly, malnutrition. He was by now a wealthy man, and he was starving to death because he still wouldn't take time to eat. His physicians gave him three months to live. Claude Johnson took him to France to recuperate. They stopped in a little village called Le Canadel, and Royce said he thought he would like to live there. A villa was built for him and for the rest of his life -- 23 years -- he was never within 100 miles of the Rolls-Royce factory. Nonetheless, he ran the shop with an iron hand. An office was built near his home, staffed with draftsmen and secretaries, and from then on Royce built automobiles by mail. Year after year a tremendous volume of letters, orders, sketches and designs flowed into the home office at Derby. Nothing on the Rolls-Royce, not a cotter-pin or a bolt-head, could be changed without his knowledge and consent, and his wild-eyed insistence on quality first and economy last, dead last, motivated everybody in the company.

Royce made the best automobile the world has seen on the simplest principles. He insisted, fanatically, everlastingly, that only the best raw material in the world be bought; then, that it be fashioned into the most efficient form, regardless of cost. Then, that every part be tested to destruction and the flaw that caused it to break eliminated. Last, that the individual parts be joined by devoted men doing the very best they knew how. Royce once heard a mechanic say that a certain part was "good enough as it was." He almost had to be physically restrained, his rage was so great. He was monumentally disinterested in cost. He wanted quiet timing gears, and he had quiet timing gears, finished and stoned by hand. To finish them cost as much as the whole price of a small automobile. The cost of making a Rolls-Royce engine was seven times the cost of a top-quality competitive engine, the cost of the steering gear, 12 times. You could buy a competitive clutch complete for the cost of one plate alone on a Rolls-Royce clutch.

The steel Royce used was made for him in Sheffield, and he had a man on full-time duty in the mill to see that it was made as he wanted it. When parts were processed out of this steel, every one of them had an extra piece, an "ear," to be cut off when the piece was finished, and sent to the laboratory for testing. This was solely to determine if any change had taken place in the metal during the manufacturing process. If the laboratory reported a microscopic change, the piece was junked. Royce used no rivets in his chassis, only square-headed nuts and bolts. The holes for the bolts were hand-reamed, and the sides of the hole were not parallel, they were tapered. Then the metal around them was polished, and examined under magnification to detect hairline cracks. If a crack showed under the glass, the whole chassis went straight to the scrap pile. If there were no cracks, then the bolt went in, and the castellated nut was tightened to an exact tension. To test a completed car, Royce had it put on his "bumping (continued on page 68)Prestige on Wheels(continued from page 46) machine." This was a simple rig: two huge wheels sunk halfway in the floor. The wheels were irregular, cam-shaped. The car to be tested was chained in position over them, and the wheels started turning. Every time one of the bumps came around, the car was shaken from one end to the other. High-quality automobiles were broken up on this machine in three minutes, but Rolls-Royce cars would sit there and take it for 100 hours. If one of them didn't take it for 100 hours, the men responsible could count on some sleepless nights. During World War I, T. E. Lawrence used Rolls-Royce armored cars in the Arabian campaigns. These were ordinary chassis stripped of their limousine or touring-car bodies and hung with up to three tons of armor plate. Lawrence had nine cars like that, and they were driven over rocks and sand, with virtually no maintenance, for 18 months before anything failed. Then one of them broke a rear-spring bracket.

Asked to sign a guest-book, Royce always wrote, "Henry Royce, mechanic." It was his great pride. He never learned how to use a slide rule, but he could pick up a piece of brass and file out a perfect fitting by hand and eye alone. He made a virtue of his lack of schooling: he came to every problem with his mind unhampered by preconceived ideas. He was wonderfully original and inventive, and his patience was limitless. The production of one solution to an apparently insoluble problem did not impress him. He wanted a dozen solutions, out of which the best could be chosen. Complexity intrigued him, and the Rolls-Royce "Merlin" airplane engines which won the Battle of Britain had their origin, years before, with him. The first air crossing of the Atlantic, eight years before Lindbergh, was made with Rolls-Royce engines.

Laden with honors, Sir Henry Royce died in April 1933, 70 years of age and redesigning to the end. After mature consideration, the company board of directors agreed to make, in his memory, a change in the traditional square-shaped Rolls-Royce radiator that had not been altered since the very first car: the red enamel of the name plate was changed to mourning black, and it is still black.

Rolls-Royce has made fewer models than any other great firm. The great ones were, and are, The Silver Ghost, the Alpine, the Phantom I, the Phantom II, the Continental, Phantom III, the 20-25, the Silver Wraith, Silver Dawn, Silver Cloud, and Phantom IV. They were all six-cylinder cars, except the P-III, a 12, and the P-IV, an 8 made, so far, only for the British royal family. The Silver Dawn appeared in 1939, and was the first Rolls-Royce it was possible to buy "off the peg." Prior to 1949, Rolls-Royce made the chassis only, and turned it over to a coach-maker for bodywork. In 1949's austerity, the company decided that the day of the chauffeur-driven car was waning, and built the Dawn, a standard, but very luxurious sedan, for $10,500. The Silver Cloud and the Silver Wraith are the two models in current production, at $12,800 and $19,500 respectively. The Silver Cloud, successor to the Dawn, has a standard body. When you buy a Wraith you get a more powerful engine, a longer wheel base, and custom coachwork. Incidentally, if the ostentation of a Rolls-Royce bothers you, if you are afraid that the hired hands down at the plant are apt to ask for a new wage scale if they see you driving one, the company has a solution for your problem. Rolls-Royce also makes the Bentley, and the Bentley Model S is identical in every particular with the Rolls-Royce save for the radiator shell. Instead of the massive squared-off R-R radiator, instantly recognizable from Chappaqua to Canberra, the Bentley has a fairly unobtrusive one. You ride in the same utter luxury that a Rolls-Royce provides, but only the cognoscenti know that you spoiled $15,000 to buy the car.

Custom coachwork, of the kind that goes into a Wraith made for a demanding customer willing to spend money, is almost unknown in this country. Literally anything is possible, and your maddest whim will not raise the coach-maker's eyebrow a millimeter. He has heard it all before. He has made bodies for Indian maharajahs who bought Rolls-Royce cars in dozen lots, to give to their friends. Any fabric the world knows can be used for upholstery, and any leather: ostrich, peccary, morocco, zebra hide. The woodwork can be anything you like: rosewood, sandalwood, acacia, mahogany. Rear-seat TV is a standard option, so is a complete bar, or a dictating machine. Rolls-Royces have been made with solid silver ceremonial ablution sets for Mohammedan princes, they have been fitted with medicine chests, record libraries. An English noblewoman had a chamber pot built into her limousine. Folding tables front and rear, lighted vanity-cases, rear-window defrosters and such trifles are standard on every car. When Mike Todd gave Mrs. Todd a Rolls-Royce he had it upholstered in black and white kidskin. The folding trays in this car are marked Liz and His. Mike Todd was riding in this Rolls-Royce, incidentally, when a newly rich buddy, proud of the telephone he'd just had installed in his Cadillac, called up and began, "Mike, I was just rolling along the West Side Highway here and I thought I'd give you a buzz and ..."

"Excuse me just a minute, will you, chum?" Todd said. "My other phone is ringing."

When a Rolls-Royce is delivered, anything that does not meet the immediate approval of the owner will be changed forthwith, naturally. The same will be true three years later, too. And the Rolls-Royce guarantee not only runs for three years, in contrast to the three-month guarantee of ordinary cars, but should anything break on the car, not only the replacement part is free -- the cost of putting it into the car is on the house, too. Almost anything one hears about a Rolls-Royce is true -- almost anything. The most-repeated brag, completely untrue, is probably this: that the Rolls-Royce hood is sealed at the factory, and its opening by any but a factory mechanic voids the guarantee. The story originated in the fact that the pre-war Rolls-Royce bonnets, or hoods, were fastened by outside locks. The fact is that any competent mechanic can service a Rolls-Royce, using the tool kit provided with the car. It is true that the factory maintains a school for drivers in England, and the silver pin signifying completion of the two-week course is highly prized. (Before the automatic transmission era, four days of the curriculum were allocated to teaching gear-shifting! No automatic transmission made today offers the smoothness of which a trained chauffeur was capable.) For a few years in the 1920s Rolls-Royce cars were made in America, at Springfield, Mass. The factory was largely staffed by Britons, and the cars were identical in quality with the English models, differing only in their left-hand drive, but they didn't sell well, since they lacked the "Made in England" cachet, and the factory was given up in 1931.

The original owners of Rolls-Royce cars admire them, prize them, but the stage of absolute veneration is reserved for the second-, third- and fourth-hand owners, usually men and women who could not have afforded the initial cost of the car. These aficionados are banded together in The Rolls-Royce Owners Club, with headquarters in the United States and members all over the world. Their cars are often marvels of restoration and maintenance. There are probably more immaculately restored Rolls-Royce cars in existence than any other make can boast, and some of them, like James Melton's 1907 tourer, or Stanley. Tarnopol's 1927 P-I double-cowl phaeton, are almost incredibly perfect. (The aluminum bonnet of Tarnopol's car is polished with jeweler's rouge!) The R.R.O.C. serves as a central repository for all manner of information bearing on the car, conducts elaborate meets in which members' cars are displayed and (concluded overleaf) exercised, and publishes a slick-paper periodical, The Flying Lady. Title of the magazine derives from the famous Rolls-Royce radiator emblem, properly called "The Silver Lady," which was designed in 1911 by the English sculptor C. A. Sykes. The model is supposed to have been the mistress of a British nobleman who was prominent in the motoring world of the day. For as long as the radiator opened on the outside, two caps were furnished: the Lady, and a plain cap to be put on if the car had to be left unattended for any length of time. Good pre-war Silver Lady caps bring up to $50 today. The contemporary model is smaller, and, of course, permanently attached, since the radiator opening is covered by the hood, as it is in all modern automobiles.

Only hard-headed, realistic men can sustain a commercial endeavor for half a century, and Rolls-Royce policy has always been carefully trimmed to the times. Today's Rolls-Royce cars are not quite so lavishly made as were the old Ghosts, P-Is, P-IIs and P-IIIs. Today's buyers are not so demanding as their fathers were.

But it is still the best car in the world, legitimate descendant of the fast and rakish London-Edinburgh model, the fabulous Continental, and the Phantoms and Wraiths that have borne the world's great men, and witnessed great events. The old Rolls-Royce cars -- you must never call one a "Rolls" -- will be with us for decades more, oiled like watches, guarded as Renaissance paintings are guarded. The litany of the old body styles -- Salamanca, Tilabury, Riviera, Mayfair, Carlton -- will be recited as long as we ride in automobiles, and while there are men willing and able to pay for perfection, Rolls-Royce will provide their transportation.

Above: 1913 Silver Ghost Alpine tourer

Below: 1933 phantom II sports roadster

Above: 1930 Phantom I sports sedan

Below: 1937 Phantom III club coupé