Myth Buster Charles Rolls
Debunking the most common old wives’ tales
CHARLES ROLLS HE WAS BEHIND 1 ROLLS-ROYCE’S AVIATION INTERESTS
R-R co-founder and keen pilot, Charles Rolls, wasn’t responsible for Rolls-Royce’s aviation interests. He had used RR employees and facilities to work on Britain’s first airship, Nulli Secundus and wanted to manufacture the Wright Brothers’ Wright Flyer plane under licence, but company directors stopped the airship work and refused the Wright Flyer request. Royce rejected the idea of an aircraft engine believing the market to be too limited. R-R only moved into aeronautics in 1914 – four years after Royce’s death.
ROYCE WAS A 2 TENANT OF THE ROLLS FAMILY
The Rolls fortune came from properties in London and Wales. Some 60,000 working class people rented from the Rolls family in the capital in the late Victorian era. Many houses were on Old Kent Road, and there’s speculation that Henry Royce may have been a tenant when he lived in a flat there during 1881/1882. No evidence supports this – or the claim that he delivered congratulation messages to the Mayfair residence where Rolls was born in 1877 as a 14-yearold telegraph boy.
ROLLS MET ROYCE 3 AT THE MIDLAND HOTEL IN MANCHESTER
The first meeting between Rolls and Royce is recorded as at the Midland Hotel, Manchester, in May 1904. However, one of those attending, Henry Edmunds, noted it as the ‘Great Central Hotel’. There was no such place in Manchester, but there was a ‘Great Central Refreshment Rooms’ next to the London Road station where Rolls and Edmunds probably arrived from Euston. Was this the actual location?