CHAPTER FIVE
Air Ministry Days
'Homme de destine'
In 1919, the Royal Flying Corps became the Royal Air Force and Rudston took the rank of Wing Commander, the RAF equivalent of the army's Lieutenant Colonel. In the same year, Rudston, then only 27, left the Royal Air Force with his old army rank to become a civil servant. His curriculum vitae dismisses the period with the cryptic note: 'Joined the air ministry to take charge of design and research aero engines.' This really does sell him short. He didn't join anything we would recognise today as an air ministry procurement division, simply because it didn't exist. His official title was 'Head of RD2 Section, Directorate of Research'. His brief was to create a system capable of equipping the new fighting unit, the Royal Air Force, with the very latest in engine technology, and to provide private industry with the incentive to spend money on the research and development of such engines. He told me that he encountered a lot of opposition; the Air Force officers who flew the desks at Whitehall were no Brooke Pophams. And he started with what is alleged to have been a pathetically small budget. The figure of £2,500 per annum is mentioned, worth about £41,600 today and, at the rate contractors charge the government, hardly enough to put a coat of paint on an engine, let alone develop a new one.
Recognising the need to do his best with what he had, he adopted an approach magnificent in its simplicity. To avoid the possibility of fraud by manufacturers, and also realising that they needed to stay in business and therefore make a profit, he broke each project into stages, one of which was the research and development stage. He issued a contract for a stage at a time, and at a fixed price. This gave him the power to pull out at the end of any stage if a project went wrong, and also provided the best possible control over cash flow for his suppliers. What's wrong with that, you well may ask? Well, nothing, and indeed Rudston's system stayed in place until the fifties, when it was replaced by the iniquitous 'cost-plus' contract. This provided one contract for the whole job with stage payments, the size of the cheque for the last of which being apparently determined by the company accountants rather than the air ministry.
The common ground for the many companies that made up the British aircraft industry at the time was provided by the Society of British Aircraft Constructors (now the Society of British Aerospace Companies). The SBAC was formed in March 1916 to encourage and develop some degree of standardisation in the industry, both in working conditions and in the crucial matter of interchangeability of parts. The SBAC is probably best known as the organisers of the International Air Show held biannually in September at Farnborough. Delegated members of the SBAC have effectively to wear two hats; although they represent the interests of their own companies, the interest of the industry as a whole is paramount. This was to cause Rudston some embarrassment in his later career. Rudston had close dealings with the SBAC from its inception, and became a delegate when he moved from the ministry into private industry. Rudston also sat on the internal combustion engine sub-committee of the Aeronautical Research Committee, and was a member of the Tank Corps Technical Committee. It seems very likely that this would have been the time that the bonds of a lifelong friendship were forged with a man who plays a very important role in Rudston's story - Sir Harry Ricardo. Rudston became an Associate Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1921, and a full Member in 1927.
Rudston's innate creativity found an interesting outlet during his Air Ministry period when he commissioned Peter Hooker Ltd. to develop two engines for potential use in airships; a conventional six-cylinder unit of 1500bhp and a very unconventional design that Rudston himself had invented. It was a four-cylinder opposed engine (like the Volkswagen beetle) but was a two-stroke, with two crankshafts geared together, one running at twice the speed of the other. This, Rudston believed, would effectively extend the expansion stroke of the engine and therefore save fuel. The project died when Hookers went out of business in 1927, but the idea is fascinating. I certainly have never heard the like of this engine, which sounds very much like something Harry Ricardo might have liked to have had a play with.
Rudston's family did not approve of Rudston's fiancée Mollie. Perhaps it was expecting too much of them to welcome her into the fold. Mollie was the third child of a working-class family which, because the mother was allegedly alcoholic, had known considerable privation. Her skills were limited to good plain cooking, and knowing how to keep her house and husband clean. Of the social mores and obligations of the haughty middle classes she knew nothing. The gulf between Mollie and her sisters-in-law was so great that one of them (Rose) actually said in her presence, 'Oh but Rudston! Isn't she rather a common little thing?'
Mollie and Rudston were married in church in 1921. Nobody from either family attended the wedding, there were just two friends to act as witnesses. That year, they honeymooned with their friends the Emptages in the tiny hamlet of Bucks Mills on the North Devon coast. The following year, they went to the Italian lakes. For every succeeding year, except for the 1939-45 war years, they returned to Bucks Mills, to the holiday home Rudston had created for his family. This holiday home proved to be so important to the family that the following Chapter is devoted to Bucks Mills.
As newlyweds, Rudston and Mollie set up home in a cottage in the Kent village of North Cray, now rather an ugly offshoot of London but in those days still part of the Kent countryside. Rudston commuted daily to his Whitehall job by rail as the area is well served for commuter trains and it would have made little sense to drive his unreliable two-cylinder Swift into central London on a daily basis. They were on their own apart from an excellent cat. The cottage had been empty for some time before Rudston bought it, and it was a regular occurrence at first to wake up in the morning to find a perfectly-arranged line of dead rats by the side of the bed, laid out by the cat for their inspection and approval. I understand that the cat completely cleared the area of rats and mice for them.
Mollie must have been rather lonely on her own in the village, and this may have been why the couple moved into town in 1926. Rudston bought a terraced house in Kensington; 48 de Vere Gardens, which runs down the side of the Albert Hall and faces the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, on the other side of Kensington High Street. I don't know what he paid for it, but I remember he was very pleased with himself when he sold it for £4,200 in 1948. It's probably worth more than a million today. Mollie took up riding, and had a horse, Farewell, which although the property of a riding stable nearby, was dedicated to her use. However, the move was not an outstanding success for her.
Both Rudston and Mollie 'blacklegged' during the 1926 general strike. This was the very first sympathetic strike, with roots in 1925 when the mine owners, caught between a government committed to maintaining the gold standard and the resumption of cheap 'brown' coal imports from Eastern Europe, had offered their men a strange deal - more hours (that is, fewer miners) for less pay. The miners threatened strike action, and a very jittery TUC, who were unsure of their constitutional position, finally agreed to call out in sympathy the transport workers, so that coal could not be moved, and the powerful print union, so that the government would be deprived of media support - the so-called 'triple alliance'.
Even today, and despite the excellent and generally impartial news coverage of television, people tend to buy the papers that tell them what they want to hear. In 1925, print was effectively the only means of mass communication. A terrified government, fearing anarchy, gave a temporary subsidy to the mining industry to enable wage levels and manning to be maintained, and used the winter of 1925-6 to prepare for a strike that they regarded as inevitable. Lists were drawn up of volunteer transport drivers, and Rudston, as a qualified railway engine driver, would certainly have been high up on that list.
The matter came to a head on 2nd May 1926, when compositors at the Daily Mail refused to set an editorial condemning the triple alliance. The government retaliated by withdrawing its subsidy from the mines, and the strike began immediately. It collapsed after only nine days; miners and transport workers drifted back to work to find themselves locked out. They were only re-employed under the conditions the mine owners had wanted in the first place, and some never got back to work at all.
Paradoxically, this sad, bitter episode in our country's history was exciting and fun for both Rudston and Mollie. Rudston drove a commuter train into King's Cross, and Mollie worked in the station buffet, work that she felt was useful and that she was well-qualified to do. The job was not without hazard. Though strikers were generally good-natured, they did try to picket and their actions could range from greasing the grades on railway lines, so that engines were unable to get a grip and came to a dancing standstill, to overturning loaded trams (in Bradford particularly) at considerable risk to human life. Most public transport carried uniformed police as a deterrent and to protect the volunteers.
In 1929, Mollie became pregnant with my brother Henry. She was attended by the Queen's gynaecologist and, when Henry was born in September, had a virtually painless labour. Rudston hired a Norlands nannie, a very fine Scottish lady, who remained with the family until 1940 and always took part in the family summer holiday at Bucks Mills.
Rudston had a quirky way of giving pet names to those of whom he was particularly fond. For example, my Brother Henry was Sasperilla for some reason; I was Jinky. It is clear that two men in his life fell into this category; Sir Harry Ricardo and Sir Henry Royce. Sir Harry was known as 'Mr. Rik -a-doo' for some totally obscure reason, Sir Henry as 'The old man'. These two men above all were to influence the course of Rudston's future career.
Harry Ricardo was an extraordinarily able man who deserves his own thumbnail. Ricardo and Rudston were contemporaries (Ricardo was seven years older) and had remarkably similar backgrounds. Ricardo was descended from a family of civil engineers, and educated at Rugby and Cambridge, where he covered the groundwork he needed to become, arguably, the world's leading expert on the design of internal combustion engines. He seemed to be fated to live his working life about fifty years ahead of his time. For example, he designed and made the Dolphin car in a small works at Shoreham, Sussex before the first war. The Dolphin had a two-stroke engine, with its well-known benefits of providing a power stroke per cylinder every revolution and having few moving parts to go wrong or make a noise. Conventional two-strokes, though, have drawbacks. The underside of the piston is used to drive the gas charge into the cylinder, so that pressure lubrication of the crank bearings is not possible - they have to survive in an oil mist. Also, scavenging of exhaust gases from the combustion chamber becomes poor at certain engine speeds.
Ricardo accepted the benefits of the two-stroke with gratitude, and set about designing out the drawbacks, which he did by using a second cylinder to drive the gas charge into the working cylinder. As a result, the crank could be pressure lubricated, and scavenging was good at all speeds. Where Ricardo failed was in overcoming public prejudice against two-strokes! This is not surprising. The Edwardians may have been great engineers, but they had no grasp whatever of the concept of benefit selling. His advertisement for the Dolphin states weakly 'The charge is not compressed in the crank chamber', to which potential customers may well have said: 'So what?' That the engine itself was successful is proved by the fact that a large number were sold to Shoreham fishermen, who appreciated its lusty power in overcoming the tidal race of the river Adur at Shoreham harbour, and its ability to idle for hours on end when trawling. The prejudice against well-designed two-strokes exists to this day.
Against his wishes, Harry Ricardo was considered to be too important a man to be sent to war, the first two years of which he wasted in a reserved occupation, implementing crazy schemes on behalf of the Royal Navy Air Service. One of these was for a monstrous flying destroyer, which was to have an inboard engine, complete with attendant naval rating with oilcan, driving two propellers by chains. Happily, the thing was never made. Ricardo must have envied Rudston, left to get on with things his own way at Pont de l'Arche. But then he was given the job that was ultimately to end the stalemate on the western front and consequently the war. Ricardo designed the engine for the Mark 5 tank that crushed the German lines and brought about the armistice.
One would never wish to speak ill of the dead, but it does seem that the brass hats who were running the show from Whitehall during the first war could be breathtakingly incompetent. Tanks Mark 1 to Mark 4 were fitted with a 125hp variant of the so-called 'Silent Knight' double sleeve valve engine used in Edwardian luxury cars such as the Daimler and Mors, and quite possibly the worst possible choice for a tank that could have been made at that time. Its sole benefit, quiet valve gear at a time when poppet valve gear could be rather rattly, seems relatively insignificant in a noisy tank in the heat of battle. However, its habit of operating in a cloud of white smoke had the negative effect of making it easy for the enemy to spot and target. Moreover, its connecting rod bearings were only splash lubricated; fine on light duty on the straight and level but not quite so good at lugging a 16-ton tank out of a trench at an angle of 45 degrees, with all the oil at one end of the sump.
However, worse was to come, as the brass hats, who had maintained a thick veil of secrecy throughout the tank's development, suddenly decided that the right thing to do was to try the thing in combat, immediately and without preparation for that matter. This they did in a sort of glorious cavalry charge at 6.20am on 15th September 1916. The tanks actually did their jobs splendidly, proving that the theory of the mobile pillbox to break the deadlock of trench warfare actually worked in practice. They charged through the somewhat bemused British lines, across no-man's land and through all three German defence positions into enemy territory, where they ran out of petrol. They found themselves on their own, as nobody had actually thought of the need for a follow-up strategy to capitalise on the advantage they had created. The drivers were mostly captured, leaving the tanks as a gift to German intelligence. Fortunately, the Germans did not have time to follow up their advantage, and the end came at Amiens in August 1918 when 600 Mark 5 tanks fitted with Ricardo's 150hp engine penetrated 7 miles into enemy territory in a properly co-ordinated attack, taking 16,000 prisoners and capturing 200 guns. This action destroyed enemy morale and effectively ended the first world war.
Both at Pont de l'Arche and during his time at the Air Ministry, Rudston would have known of Ricardo's work on combustion chamber design, particularly after the war, when Ricardo had established his consultancy at Shoreham. He was completing his pioneering work on behalf of Shell which determined the octane scales for rating the fuels we use to this day. Rudston himself commissioned investigative work from Ricardo and Company into aero engine crank lubrication, and ultimately formed a friendly association with him that lasted until Sir Harry Ricardo died. But a far more crucial commission was to follow. The Air Ministry, through Rudston, asked Sir Harry to evaluate the potential of the diesel engine for long-range transport and patrol aircraft. In the event, Ricardo's reported that they saw no future for the diesel in aircraft due to the extra weight associated with the strengthening needed to withstand the cylinder pressures of a compression ignition engine. However, the research that Ricardo had carried out into high-speed diesels caught the eye of Shell, who had plenty of diesel fuel, which is a heavy petroleum distillation by-product, to sell. They continued to fund research at Shoreham, which led to the first AEC-Ricardo London bus engine in 1931 and, ultimately, to the high-speed diesel engine as we know it today, first used by Andre Citroen in a 2-litre version of his Rosalie taxi in 1935. Rudolph Diesel himself probably would not have recognised Sir Harry's creation. Prior to Ricardo's work, compression ignition was generally only used in massive stationary engines, thumping away at a constant speed.
Neither Sir Harry, nor Rudston, nor subsequently Rolls-Royce itself were happy about ascribing the invention or subsequent success of this type of engine to Rudolph Diesel, preferring the more generic description of oil engine or compression ignition engine. Their point is well taken. The principle was invented by Ackroyd-Stuart before Diesel took up the work and, in reality, it was men like Ricardo rather than Diesel who solved the technical problems that had previously prevented the diesel from being a serious competitor to the petrol engine. Be that as it may, diesels they are today and it is not the purpose of this book to change the English language.
Ricardo invented and patented the famous Comet combustion chamber, which made possible the clean-burning, variable speed small diesels of today. The engine he produced as a result of the work commissioned by the Air Ministry and subsequently funded by Shell was a six-cylinder sleeve valve design, but with only one sleeve which moved in a figure-of-eight fashion, ensuring perfect lubrication without an attendant cloud of smoke.
He had, in fact, repeated his Dolphin trick of taking an existing design and designing out its faults. However, the engine used by AEC in 1931 had conventional poppet valves but, of course, the Comet head. Ricardo remained convinced to the end that sleeve valve diesels were the way forward, but he had learned his lesson at Dolphin and, sensing the deep prejudice against sleeve valves in the motor trade of the time, never attempted to market them himself. However, he had the last laugh, as many thousands were used in the big Bristol air-cooled radial engines both before and during the second world war, and the Rolls-Royce Crecy (1) engine, designed by Ricardo as a replacement for the Merlin and Griffon engines, not only had single sleeve valves but was a two-stroke1!
One cannot help wondering if we might see single sleeve valve engines now, in an age when no-one cares much what goes on under the bonnet. Without valves, cylinder head design can be optimised, which is a major environmental benefit as it saves fuel and reduces pollution. If Sir Harry said they were right, then they were right.
I met Sir Harry once, in 1952. I was expecting a captain of industry, but he was not at all like that. My memory of him is of a kindly, gentle man who appeared to be interested in all my small doings. Just by meeting him, I felt encouraged. He received his knighthood in 1949, but his biographer John Reynolds says that the accolade of which he was most proud was his election as a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Society in 1929. This I can well understand. My Aunt Honor felt the same way about her Fellowship. Ricardo had a long association with Rolls-Royce and was a friend of Sir Henry for many years, taking his family on informal visits to West Wittering and to Henry's villa at Le Canadel on the Riviera.
Although Rudston placed the original feasibility contract with Ricardo's that led to the Comet design, it would be quite wrong to give him any credit for this work. Given Ricardo's interest in this particular line of research, the Comet would certainly have come along sooner or later. However, the termination of the feasibility study did have one significant spin-off benefit; it left Rudston with precise costings, design details and performance figures for two state-of-the-art diesel engines - the poppet valved and sleeve valved versions of Ricardo's Comet design. Moreover, the Air Ministry had examined other options for compression-ignition aircraft engines, and had converted a Rolls-Royce Eagle themselves, using their facility at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough. This engine had hemispherical combustion chambers machined into the pistons themselves, with a vertical multi-head injector, rather on the lines of a shower head, producing a fine spray over the whole piston area to ensure thorough fuel-air mixing. Rudston was a railwayman long before he became involved in aeronautics, and he began wondering if these new developments had any application for rail traction.
There were at that time very few internal combustion engines of any sort operating on British railways, which were electrified in the south-east commuter belt and mostly steam-hauled everywhere else. Denmark and Russia, however, both had small diesel-mechanical locomotives, and Germany not only had developed a good export market for diesel-electrics with Siam, but had a very elegant high-speed railcar running between Berlin and Hamburg. It was powered by two bogie-mounted Maybach V-12 diesels, each producing 410bhp. The transmission was electric. The Germans made a rather dreary promotional film for their rail car, which ended with a close-up of a snorting exhaust over the caption: 'Rekord Fahrt.' This appealed to Rudston's sense of humour, which could be rather lavatorial at times.
Locomotives powered by internal combustion engines were clearly a viable solution for developing countries, possibly with fuel and water shortages, but how would they meet up to the needs of a country like Great Britain, which not only had abundant supplies of coal and water, but also had a fully-developed railway industry based on steam? Rudston saw that the question was one of economics. He already had his costings for diesel power; he set to and performed similar calculations for the steam locomotive. His comparisons were based on diesel-electric transmission, since at that time this was the only system found capable of sustaining constant torque at speeds from zero to maximum
Rudston discovered that the capital cost of a steam locomotive was more or less constant, regardless of its size. By contrast, the cost of a diesel-electric set was roughly proportional to its power. In other words, the cost per bhp of the big steam locomotive was comparatively low; that for the diesel-electric set was more or less constant. Running costs for diesel were approximately half that for steam. He presented his findings in a paper entitled 'The compression-ignition engine and its applicability to British railway traction' which he read to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in January, 1933.
In addressing the Institution, Rudston was actually talking to men at the very top of their professions. Moreover, the subject was not new. Discussions had previously raged between enthusiasts, who saw the internal combustion engine in all its forms as the only way forward for the railways, and very senior railway engineers, who believed only in steam and electrification. Also, Rudston, though he had served his time on the railways, was not thought of as a railwayman, being associated solely with aeronautics at the time. The presentation of the paper was therefore quite a courageous act!
The paper was highly prophetic, and actually makes quite disturbing reading in the light of subsequent events. Rudston had discovered that the capital cost of diesel-electric express locomotives of around 2,000 drawbar horsepower was so high that it could never be amortised from lower running costs during the life of the locomotive. Consequently, he concluded that diesel electric could never replace steam for main line work in Great Britain. Its use was also ruled out on suburban lines with closely-spaced stations, where electrification was needed to provide the necessary high rate of acceleration. However, for branch line, shunting and general goods work, requiring drawbar horsepowers of around 500, the cost of the diesel-electric set became comparable with that of the steam locomotive and could actually save considerable sums of money in running costs, besides being environmentally attractive. These powers coincided with the capabilities of the diesel engines Rudston had been examining.
In making his recommendations, Rudston worked to the assumption that the diesel-electric locomotives would be assembled and maintained by the same railwaymen that cared for the steam fleet. He came down very heavily on the side of the Ricardo sleeve-valve engine with Comet heads, but for an entirely different set of reasons from those that had commended it to the aero industry. Rudston believed that the complete stripping and re-assembly of a sleeve valve engine, with its simple bell crank drive, would be well within the capabilities of men used to working with slide-valve steam locos. They would need extra training to cope with poppet valve gear. He rejected the RAE engine, with its pepper-pot injector, as being liable to injector blockage due to contamination by dirt or scale present in steam workshops getting into the diesel fuel.
Although the stated purpose of the paper was merely to encourage future research, so that railwaymen themselves could give the required lead to engine manufacturers, Rudston actually went quite a long way down the road of designing a practical locomotive, using his knowledge of the latest developments in the aircraft industry. For example, he advocated the use of evaporation cooling, in which quite small radiators can extract massive amounts of heat in latent form, by turning steam back into water. He also demonstrated how he felt the power bogies of locomotives and railcars should be assembled.
Reactions to Rudston's paper were mixed. Oliver Thorneycroft, representing Ricardo, was not surprisingly delighted, and contributed to the debate Ricardo's measured wear rates for the sleeve valve engine, which were about half that of the poppet valved equivalent. Significantly, he recommended supercharging as the way forward in improving the engine's performance even further. Wing Commander Cave-Browne-Cave, a major figure in aviation history, confirmed the validity of evaporation cooling, and suggested that the waste heat generated in the form of steam might be used for carriage heating, or even for driving superchargers. Corbridge, of Metropolitan Vickers Electrical, rather surprisingly criticised Rudston for mentioning none of the disadvantages of the diesel-electric system, although, of course, his bias would be towards complete electrification. In Corbridge's view, on-board generation was heavy, expensive and relatively inefficient. Old man Allen, past president of the Institution and a very senior engineer, hated the whole idea of moving from steam to diesel-electric, feared the railway engineers would never cope, and rapped Rudston over the knuckles for looking outside his own country for diesel-electric expertise, when we had some nice diesel locomotives of our own. (Rudston gave detailed replies to all these points, but was kind enough not to mention that he had passed over our own examples of diesel rail traction because they represented obsolescent technology. Critics of diesel engines as being smelly, smoky devices were told to take a ride on a London bus fitted with the AEC-Ricardo engine).
However, most telling of all this criticism, which in the main was highly constructive, were the responses of Colonel Davidson, vice president of the Institution, and J.F.Alcock. Both men felt that Rudston had dismissed the concept of mechanical transmission for diesel railway engines too summarily. Diesel mechanical locomotives would have enormous advantages in both initial and running costs. All it needed was for someone to make mechanical transmission work. As we shall see, Rudston himself was successful in overcoming this problem seventeen years later, so he certainly took the criticisms on board.
This paper, therefore, not only laid the groundwork for British Railways main-line locomotive 10,100, but also successfully and accurately forecast the future of rail traction as we know it today. It was read only two years before Britain began her massive rearmament programme, diverting our best engineering brains into other essential work.
The other man who was to influence, and indeed direct, Rudston's future activities was Sir Henry Royce. Prior to the first world war, aircraft engines were mainly of French or Spanish origin. Nobody had really entered the field in Britain. Clearly, equipment for the armed services has to be sourced at home. During the war, all car manufacturers had been ordered to cease production, and some had been moved to aero engine manufacture, either to a French design or to a design submitted by the government. However, Rudston had noted with approval the response of one single company, Rolls-Royce, who until 1914 had made nothing but cars. Sir Henry Royce, against the advice of his own board, refused to have any part in the manufacture of what he no doubt regarded as foreign rubbish; he set to and designed his own aero engine. He produced a twelve-cylinder glycol-cooled engine which, incredibly, went into service as early as March 1916 as the Eagle. It was designed for 200hp but actually produced 255. By 1918, the Eagle was delivering 360hp and was by far the best engine in service anywhere in the world, powering the fastest fighter planes in the field. It was also totally reliable, producing 100 hours' flying time between routine maintenance. Sir Henry and Rudston became friends after the war, and Rudston, with his wife Molly, was a fairly frequent visitor to Elmstead, Sir Henry's home in West Wittering, where he lived in semi-retirement. The two men were very alike. Maybe Sir Henry was slightly worse as a perfectionist, if perfectionism is a fault. Rudston told me that he regarded the boiling of an egg as a piece of precision heat treatment, in which the ratio of length to breadth was just as important as overall size, and actually measured it with callipers before he cooked it. He had a chart telling him how long to give it to the second.
Rudston and Molly travelled the seventy miles to West Wittering in the sporty little Swift motor car; hard work, and an indication of how much both men valued the friendship. Both were time-served engineers; both had patience, manual skill and a love of working with difficult materials. Sir Henry had similar formal training to Rudston in draughtsmanship and structural stress (Royce, too, served his time with the Great Northern), and both men had an instinctive 'feel' for the rightness of a structure. Sir Henry had designed the Eagle; Rudston had developed it in the field at Pont de l'Arche. Their sessions must have been intensely stimulating to both men, though perhaps rather heavy going for poor Mollie. Rudston's experience with torsional resonance in the crankshaft of the Gnome engine, for example, would have brought to Henry's mind his early disastrous attempts to fit flywheels at both ends of a crankshaft (which always ended in crankshaft failure). It also explained why the joint between the two-part block of the Silver Ghost always tends to leak oil (modern-day Ghost owners might deny this, but Henry knew it and had accepted that the cause was torsional resonance). Rudston, in fact, was quite an expert in the subject, and the power of two such men firing each other's enthusiasm must have been formidable.
There is no doubt that Rudston's friendship gave Sir Henry a new lease of life. Indeed, I am going to have the audacity to suggest that Rudston's visits rekindled Sir Henry's enthusiasm for aviation. Certainly, Miss Aubin, said to be Sir Henry's nurse but widely believed to be his mistress, and who tended to 'screen' him from Rolls-Royce boardroom worries, welcomed the visits of the Fells as being good for the old man. Sir Henry was also keenly interested in what Rudston and Harry Ricardo had to tell him about their work on high-speed diesels.
At this time, Rudston, in his ministry role, was concerned about the lack of investment in aero engines suitable for combat. The 12-year-old Eagle and its descendants were by then powering five out of every eight RAF fighter planes, but needed development. The only environment suitable for testing combat airframes and engines to the limit at that time was the international Schneider seaplane trophy, which we had taken from Italy in 1927 with Reginald Mitchell's Supermarine S5, powered by the reliable Napier Lion, an in-line three-bank engine. Traditionally, the development of the race engine was funded by the government through Rudston's department, to the tune of around £100,000 (roughly £2M today). Rudston believed that, though the trusty Lion was both lighter in weight and slightly more powerful than the Eagle, the Rolls-Royce engine offered more development potential. He discussed the idea with Sir Henry, who was keenly interested.
Rudston must have had quite a selling job to do at the Air Ministry, since the decision to back the Eagle, changing horses from Napier to Rolls-Royce, was actually a major gamble. The Eagle's reputation was for extended service life in the field. A racing engine is a very different matter. It only has to work for an hour, during which time it must produce a phenomenal power-to-weight ratio. In the end, Rudston and the Rolls-Royce engineers carried the day, and Rolls-Royce managing director Basil Johnson was summoned to a meeting at the ministry to be told the good news. Rudston's deputy Major Bulman chaired the meeting which was held early in 1928, possibly because Rudston himself was at that time about to leave the Ministry to join Rolls-Royce and might be perceived as being partial to the proceedings. Bulman was a very able man who took charge of aero engine development for the remaining inter-war years. We have his own record of the proceedings of that meeting, at which Air Marshall Higgins was also present. The meeting is a turning point in Rudston's story:-
To our utter amazement, (Basil Johnson) begged to be excused from our commission. Racing and all its aspects were things, he said, strictly to be avoided by his firm. Its reputation for sheer quality and perfection must not be smirched by sordid competition of this sort. To participate unwillingly, and possibly fail, would be a calamity to the firm with the loss of prestige, for which the Air Ministry would have to accept grave responsibility. And so on, in dreary defeatism. As I listened to this miserable plea to be 'let off', knowing that the firm's engineers were straining at the leash to go ahead, I uncontrollably blurted out in my fury a single word, unprintable in polite context and essentially masculine. Higgins turned and looked at me for a long second, and then in a steely voice of real Air Marshal calibre said to our guest, 'Mr. Johnson, I order your firm to take on this job. We have complete faith in your technical team. The necessary arrangements will be made between our respective staffs. Good afternoon.'
Significantly, Bulman then reports that his first act was to telephone the glad tidings to Derby.
There is evidence to suggest that Major Bulman may have been rather less than honest with us in his expression of 'utter amazement' at the way this crucial meeting proceeded. It is Rolls-Royce folklore (oral rather than written history) that Rudston had previously instructed his people to take no notice whatever of anything the Conduit Street board might have to say about the Schneider project, and to confine their dealings to Sir Henry and the Derby engineers. I believe that the likelihood is that this piece of folklore is true. Bulman would hardly have sworn at his guest, who after all was managing director of a very important company, and Higgins would not have ordered him about and then sent him packing, unless they had done their homework and felt safe in their actions. Johnson must have left that meeting feeling utterly humiliated, and with his plans for the future of his company under extreme threat. He must also have had a very negative opinion of Rudston, who had shown himself to be an extremely powerful civil servant. Rudston himself may have lacked the power to order private industry around, but those he advised, such as Air Marshall Higgins, certainly had such power - and were obviously not afraid to use it.
Not everybody at Rolls-Royce, therefore, was pulling in the same direction at that time. To understand why, it is helpful to look a little at the history of the company. Nineteen years before, in 1910, Charles Rolls had been killed in an air crash caused by structural failure of the tail-plane of his aircraft, which was more than enough of a blow to the young company in itself. To make things very much worse, Henry Royce had been taken seriously ill that same year with gastric problems subsequently attributed to his eating-on-the-job lifestyle when, as a young man, he was working all hours to build his business. Claude Johnson, the great managing director who effectively created Rolls-Royce, believed that the loss of both Charles and Henry would be the end of the company. He therefore persuaded Henry to move out of Derby and down to the south coast, where he could spend his summers concentrating solely on design and innovation, in company with a hand-picked team of Rolls-Royce men who occupied a design studio nearby. For many years, the studio did not even have a telephone, messages being passed to the occupants by a man on a bicycle. For winter, Claude built Henry his villa at Le Canadel on the French Riviera which became something of a Rolls-Royce enclave, with a drawing office, separate house for visiting designers and even its own power station. Claude had his own villa nearby, to keep an eye on Henry. His idea was that Henry would be completely freed from the worry of the day-to-day executive decisions involved in running the company, so that he could devote all his time to the advancement towards component perfection that, Claude believed, was fundamental to its success.
Claude Johnson's sudden death in 1926, only two years previously, had been a very great blow to Rolls-Royce. CJ was aptly dubbed (by Oldham in 1960) the hyphen in Rolls-Royce; he was the agent that bound the company together. He was a man of immense stature, not only controlling and actively promoting the firm's commercial interests, but also effectively freeing Sir Henry to indulge his flights of inventive fantasy as he wished. Claude's place was taken by his brother Basil, a piece of nepotism that history records as being not altogether successful. Indeed, in Rolls-Royce archives, CJ tends virtually to be deified, whereas Basil is ignored or even somewhat vilified. In fact, they were both human and therefore liable to human error. The truth is that there were signs that CJ's grand Edwardian gesture to preserve the health of Henry Royce was not suited to trading conditions in the mid-twenties, and the company was becoming dangerously fragmented well before CJ's death. In consequence, it was losing ground in the fiercely competitive motor industry of the time.
Indeed, by 1928, Rolls-Royce had quite severe problems. Virtually every component of the three cars they produced, the 20, the 20-25 and the 40-50, came from Sir Henry's drawing board and were not interchangeable. Although the cars were very expensive, component costs were so high that very little profit was made on an output of only a few hundred cars a year. Moreover, the 'baby' Rolls, the 20, had not proved to be a great success, mainly, it is said, because people insisted on fitting heavy, opulent bodies to the car and then grumbling when they were overtaken by lesser vehicles. In fact, it could be argued that Sir Henry's obsession with individual component perfection was not in reality a very good way to design complete cost-effective cars, for which seamless teamwork is paramount.
CJ must have been aware of the problem. A great deal of Rolls-Royce talent had been imported from Napier. Elliott, Hives, Rowledge, and Sidgreaves were all very able ex-Napier men, but the extent to which they had been able to develop their abilities probably says more about Napier's project management skills than it does about Rolls-Royce. Poaching good men from a competitor only goes halfway towards solving perceived weaknesses in the design team. A climate then has to be created in which they can give of their best.
It would be, of course, very unfair to judge the skills of project management of a company in the 1920's by the standards of today. Nevertheless, it does appear that the structure of Rolls-Royce, with its isolated islands of component design under the absolute control of one rather obsessive man, is not one that would be considered satisfactory today. It smacks more of dictatorship than project management. Although their views are held to be controversial, some Rolls-Royce enthusiasts believe that Rolls-Royce's structural inability to give individual design talent its head was reflected in the quality of the products themselves. All agree that, in its day, the Silver Ghost fairly laid claim to being best car in the world. Subsequent models, although indisputably fine cars, could not truly lay claim to this title. Motoring design had moved on; in some ways, Rolls-Royce had not. It was clear that the ethos of the magic of the name could not sustain sales forever on its own.
CJ's overseas project, the Springfield, Massachusetts factory, needed capital investment and even then might have proved not to be viable. It was hard to convince the American market that Springfield cars could possibly be as good as Derby-built cars, and in any case American manufacturers were beginning to produce vehicles that were every bit as good as (and in some respects better than) the Rolls-Royce. In England, the bank had frozen Rolls-Royce borrowings, and had made it clear that any overseas investment made by the company would be regarded as a reduction of the UK overdraft facility. (Springfield was subsequently sold off, but cannot be regarded as a total failure, as the lessons it provided in American automotive practice were not lost on Ernest Hives, and many were implemented when he came to power. Ernest Hives is to become another key figure in this story).
To make matters worse, Basil Johnson had inherited an unexplained discrepancy in stock of £250,000 when he took over in 1926 (about £12.5M today) which at the very least suggests that someone was rather careless. He had previously been sales manager at Conduit Street, so that he was strictly a car man. The car market was in recession, and manufacturers were beginning to join forces to survive. Basil Johnson had already turned down approaches from AC and bodybuilders Barkers; it is clear that his sights were already set on the under-capitalised Bentley company, whose 8-litre chassis was a very serious competitor to the 40-50 for owners of a sporting turn of mind.
In truth, the Rolls-Royce board had always been nervous of aviation. It had been forced upon them during the first world war and, indeed, they had made a lot of money. However, the war had ended suddenly, and this had rather caught Whitehall on the hop. The result was massive cancellations of orders. It is also highly significant that, among all the great aircraft engine manufacturers of the time (Napier, Bristol, Armstrong Siddeley and so on), Rolls-Royce was the only company to have no customers at all in the civil aviation market. The engine market for the growing civil aviation industry was fiercely competitive, and its needs were largely met mainly by British radial engines, and by French, Italian and American engine manufacturers whose cheaper air-cooled radials were probably more suited to this market anyway. There is no doubt that Rolls-Royce could have developed engines for civil aircraft but - and this is the crux of the matter - they had virtually no marketing expertise at all. The Honourable Charles Rolls had taken the company above commercial competition. With the type of cars Rolls-Royce made, the customers beat a path to their door without invitation. That, perhaps, is the scenario the board hoped to recreate.
In fairness, the board had a precedent for their way of thinking in a decision which had been taken before, in 1914, by CJ himself. He had carried a board resolution that Rolls-Royce would not concern itself with aero engine manufacture during the hostilities, and had produced a document which included plans for the massive lay-offs he saw as inevitable with the collapse of the luxury car market during the war. That this was no more than a knee-jerk panic reaction is shown by the fact that he very quickly overturned this decision, first taking sub-contract work building vehicles for the armed services on Rolls-Royce chasses and aero engines to other manufacturers' designs and then (allegedly somewhat reluctantly) producing Henry's Eagle, which was destined to be the fore-runner of the Merlin. In his book The Magic of a Name, Peter Pugh records that Henry Royce and CJ were not quite seeing eye-to-eye at this time; CJ wanted to concentrate on sub-contract work while Henry was more interested in developing the Rolls-Royce design.
Rolls-Royce history in 1929 was, in fact, in the process of repeating itself, but with one important distinction - global war was not, at that time, seen as inevitable by the great majority of people. The whole country was sickened by the memories of a war which, as Rudston so often said, had wiped out an entire generation of young men, and hopes that there could never be another had come dangerously close to belief. Many influential people in the thirties, for instance, felt that a Germany in economic ruin was more dangerous than a country recovering its national pride under the guidance of Adolf Hitler's National Socialists. They felt that at Versailles, the allies had ruined Germany by massive demands for reparations after the war, and that enough was enough. It was not, at that time, a matter of appeasement; Hitler was not even in power, and the series of territorial demands that were to lead to war nine years later could not possibly have been foreseen.
The members of the Conduit Street board were far from being lightweights. They were very experienced men. Chairman Lord Wargrave was primarily there to maintain links with the nobility, to ensure future car sales. William Cowen controlled sales, repairs and final tests after bodywork had been fitted. Major Cox headed up the London sales team, T. Bellringer looked after service and repair at Cricklewood, and Lee Evans was responsible for final inspection. Arthur Wormald was also works manager and was therefore based at Derby.
Finances were prudently controlled from Derby by old-timer secretary John de Looze, whose history with Royce began in 1893! He had worked with Royce's partner Claremont in the days when Royce made electric cranes, when they were trying to moderate Henry's enthusiasm for various diversifications including motor cars; a venture Claremont famously and disparagingly described as 'Henry's two guineas an ounce project'. He had been involved in the row with the Honourable Charles Rolls twenty years before, when it was discovered that Rolls had been using the Lillie Hall repair depot in London to manufacture drive shafts for the Army's dirigibles, which was against the Board's policy at the time, and also that Rolls had brought some bad debts into the company. It is reasonable to suppose that de Looze would have kept a wary eye on anything to do with aviation. Indeed, it is said by Pugh that the budgets he released for aero engine work were pitiful, and were only sufficient to support committed maintenance of existing engines. There was nothing available for research and development.
It will be seen that Managing Director Basil Johnson had a heavy burden of responsibility. With the exception of Lord Wargrave, all his board members had clearly-defined areas of executive responsibility within the company, all connected with cars. The responsibility for deciding and implementing company policy therefore fell largely on his shoulders alone. Basil had inherited a company in trouble, and was relatively new to the job. The safest way forward that he could see lay in a continuance of Claude's policies, though he was not without ideas of his own. He saw that, to survive, Rolls-Royce needed to join forces with other car manufacturers, and had set his heart on Bentley, a move that would not only increase profitability but also get rid of a tiresome competitor. It is really not surprising that such a board, committed to rebuilding the car business, was reluctant to be side-tracked into aviation. De Looze's policy of starving aviation business of funds would have meant the ultimate demise of aviation work without fuss.
However, Basil made one mistake that was to cost him dearly. All the evidence suggests that Sir Henry's last word had always been law as far as the company was concerned. Moreover, the various memoranda he produced from the design departments at Le Canadel and West Wittering show that he was far from out of touch with the real world. They show a reasonable grasp of commerce and contemporary trading conditions. His way of working was to send his designs direct to Derby, where they were converted into reality by teams headed by three key men:- Arthur Rowledge, his chief designer, Arthur Wormald, works manager and the only executive director to be based full-time in Derby and Ernest Hives, who at that time was in charge of the experimental department and had the further title of technical adviser to the board of directors.
Consequently, Derby was much closer to West Wittering in day-to-day liaison than was Conduit Street. I am sure that the board was aware that the Derby engineers, particularly Hives and Rowledge, were anxious to build the Schneider engine, but they would have felt that the final decision on the future of the company rested with Conduit Street and not with the board's employees at Derby. It also seems that they may have made a grave error of judgement in not taking Sir Henry seriously enough. Illness (and, according to Rudston, a degree of hypochondria) had certainly greatly reduced the old man. He spent his days at home, protected from day-to-day affairs at Rolls-Royce, not only by the policies of his previous managing director Claude Johnson but also by Nurse Aubin, a redoubtable lady of whom the board of directors was rather scared. The stories they told of Sir Henry suggested that the infinite patience and search for perfection that had produced the Silver Ghost motor car and the Eagle aero engine were no longer properly valued by the company and in consequence had degenerated into a sort of nit-picking cantankerousness. It was said, for instance, that he had taken an entire day to try to tighten a loose screw in his garden gate because he was dissatisfied with the state of his tools. Even then, he failed to get the job done because, by the time he'd got his screwdriver to the state of perfection he demanded, it was too late to do the job anyway. This type of story, told with an indulgent laugh, suggests that the board no longer regarded Sir Henry as a major force in the company's affairs.
The pre-1928 discussions between Rudston in his ministry role and Sir Henry are something of an enigma. Rudston's agenda seems clear enough. He needed a state-of-the-art engine, and wanted Rolls-Royce to make it. He was negotiating the deal with the company's most senior director, Royce himself. The first step was to arrange the build of an engine for the Schneider trophy. But what of Sir Henry's agenda? He clearly disagreed with the other board members about the wisdom of developing the aviation business, as he had done before in 1915. Boardroom disagreements are not uncommon in any company, and there is a right way and a wrong way of dealing with them. The right way would have been for Sir Henry to commission a report, possibly from Rudston, before Rudston left the air ministry, and submit it to his board for their consideration. But his track record shows that Sir Henry had little time for the democratic process in the boardroom, nor indeed, any experience of normal day-to-day boardroom negotiations. Claude Johnson had shielded him from all that. In consequence, when Sir Henry felt that something should happen, then in his view it had to happen, regardless of what anyone else might think. For example, when Claremont wanted him to concentrate on making cranes at the turn of the century, he produced the 10hp Royce car. When CJ and the board wanted to concentrate on building engines under contract during the first war, he produced the Eagle. In the matter of the Schneider engine, therefore, Sir Henry behaved exactly as he always had behaved. We can be sure that he must have been party to Rudston's instruction to his ministry staff that they should deal only with certain Derby engineers and Royce himself. He must have also given Rudston some very solid assurances on his future in Rolls-Royce to persuade him to give up his ministry job. Maybe Rudston was naïf to have accepted oral assurances, but we must remember that at this stage in his career, Rudston had no experience whatever of the politics of working at management level in private industry. Does one see a picture of two dedicated engineers, carried away by their own enthusiasm for the Schneider project, and giving little or no thought to the implications of their actions?
And why did the board respond differently this time to Sir Henry's directives? I think we can speculate that the answer lies with Basil Johnson. His brother Claude, like Sir Henry, had been an autocrat, though prepared to follow Sir Henry's lead when under extreme pressure. The rest of the board simply followed along. Autocracy seems to have been a tradition at Rolls-Royce, and it was subsequently fully embraced by Ernest Hives, as we shall see. But Basil was a new boy, heading up a very experienced board of old-timers. He was committed to cars. He had been humiliated by Higgins and Bulman. Now, he must have felt that Sir Henry had engaged in activities calculated to sabotage the Conduit Street board completely. The importation of Rudston to sort out Conduit Street was an insult, whether calculated or not. This time, Basil Johnson was not prepared to accept Sir Henry's autocracy without a fight, possibly because the company had come a long way between 1914 and 1928, and also because Sir Henry's health was failing and he was no longer taken as seriously as he had been.
This, then, was the background to a decision by the Conduit Street board of Rolls-Royce that could well have meant our defeat in the Second World War.
In 1928, Rudston left the Air Ministry and, like a lamb led to the slaughter, joined Rolls-Royce as Technical Assistant (Aero) to the main board at Conduit Street. The appointment had been made by Sir Henry himself, and was the clearest possible signal to Basil Johnson that Rudston's judgement was to be respected, and the company was to be committed to aviation. The job carried a nice perk as the stock in the showroom below the offices was available for his private use. This was a considerable step-up from the unreliable Swift, which had a two-cylinder JAP engine capable of a torque that was far too much for the car's flimsy back axle. The Swift was sold, and the family transport became the latest model Rolls Royce. In fact, Rudston did not own a car again until 1939, being provided with the hand-built luxury of what he called a 'charity chariot'.
Rudston's first job, commissioned by Sir Henry himself, was to prepare a comprehensive report on the current state of the aircraft industry for Basil Johnson. Rudston's background at Pont de l'Arche and in the Air Ministry would certainly have given him the overview necessary to produce an extremely authoritative document, which he duly presented to Johnson.
However, by joining Rolls-Royce as adviser to, and therefore servant of, the board, Rudston effectively abdicated his power and placed himself under their control. And Basil Johnson was not in agreement with Sir Henry's directive. I believe that the events that followed Rudston's appointment to Conduit Street can be seen, not as the actions of small-minded men but as those of a board of directors forced into a corner by Royce and desperate to regain control of their company. As a spin-off benefit, they could, at the same time, dispose of the services of a troublesome newcomer who had the 'old man's' ear and who had proved himself quite capable of leading the company in what they perceived as entirely the wrong direction.
Johnson's hostility to Rudston became overt. He could logically either have accepted or rejected Rudston's report. He did neither. He simply suppressed it, so that it never reached Sir Henry through the proper channels. Subsequent events, though, show that it did reach him ultimately. Because of their friendship, and because the original commission had come from Sir Henry, I think it is more than likely that Rudston, in some desperation, departed from strict protocol and gave him a copy during their later discussions at West Wittering. The existence and suppression of this report is not folklore, but is recorded in Rolls-Royce archives and documented by Pugh in The Magic of a Name.
This led to the fatal, extraordinary decision. In 1929, the Rolls-Royce board, led by Basil Johnson, and despite Sir Henry's expressed interest in the future of aviation, decided to pull out of aero engine manufacture altogether, and to concentrate on what they believed they did best; make cars. That was the last straw for Sir Henry. He was furious. Basil Johnson had grossly underestimated his power of mandate, and paid the price. Sir Henry ordered that funds were to be made available so that Derby's aero engine production and research and development facilities could concentrate on the 1929 Schneider engine and its successors. Basil Johnson was made to take early retirement on the grounds of ill-health at Sir Henry's suggestion (in Rudston's words, he was sacked), and Arthur Sidgreaves took his place. It is said that BJ's send-off party was the biggest in the history of the company, which seems rather hypocritical. So, under rather sad circumstances, the future of the Merlin engine was secured. This was the first and only time that Rolls-Royce competed at its own expense in the years between the wars. Competition was not company policy, so Sir Henry's decision was very controversial.
Basil Johnson moved sideways to Bentley in what turned out to be rather a poor career move. Bentley was acquired by Rolls-Royce in 1931, and Johnson was told that there was no job for him in his old company. The manner of this acquisition is not strictly relevant to Rudston's story, but students of automotive history might find it of passing interest, perhaps putting them in mind of the manner in which Andre Citroen's company was acquired by Michelin three years later. Both Rolls-Royce and their great rival Napier were keenly interested in Bentley, which had always been under-capitalised and was in serious trouble by 1930. Rolls-Royce presented Bentley with a rescue package for joint trading which, though expensive, would have secured Bentley's future. Rolls-Royce pulled out of the deal at the last possible minute, and Bentley folded immediately. Napier attended the bankruptcy hearing in the firm belief that they would be the only bidder; a belief that is certified by the fact that Bentley's entire stock of unsold and incomplete chasses had already been moved to the Napier works. To the surprise of both Napier and Bentley, their bid was capped by an agent acting for an un-named company . Napier promptly increased their offer, and the judge called a halt to the proceedings with the understandable objection that he was presiding over a court of law rather than an auction room. He instructed once-for-all sealed bids, and the unknown company acquired all the assets of the Bentley
company. The unknown bidder, of course, turned out to be a front for Rolls-Royce.
Basil Johnson's name has not gone down in history, but I feel it would be wrong to eulogise the great Claude at the expense of his brother. There is more to the story than that. Basil's antipathy to the aero business and to racing were legacies from CJ himself. Pre-1914 rallies had shown that the Ghost had limitations. The image of the best car in the world could not survive a second place in competition with other marques. It was CJ, not Basil, who subsequently removed the traditional means of comparison by stopping all participation in competitive events, refusing to release performance figures (the power of the engine, sir, is adequate) and offering speed-merchant customers only the mildest tuning. CJ is rightly regarded as a great man, even today. In 1928, only two years after his death, he was revered as something of a god-figure. It is clear that Basil had been placed in an extremely difficult position by Sir Henry and Rudston. He had worked loyally for the company for years at Conduit Street. As Chief Executive, he was merely trying, the best he could, to continue his brother's policies. Viewed in this way, it was not Basil who was out of line with established company policy but Rudston, Sir Henry and the design team at Derby.
It can also be seen that Sir Henry's actions in sacking Basil Johnson and instructing the preparation of an engine for the 1929 and subsequent Schneider trophies, although they secured the future of our country, would have left Rudston with no friends at all at Rolls-Royce. His appointment as technical adviser (aero) would have trodden very hard on the toes of Ernest Hives, relegating him to the role of technical adviser (cars), based in Derby and far away from the boardroom action in Conduit Street. This would not have suited Hives at all. The actions Hives took when he came to power in 1936 showed his deep commitment to the aero engine division - but he had to come to power to implement the necessary changes. It is really hardly surprising that Hives regarded Rudston, who had effectively taken on the entire Conduit Street board and had been instrumental in getting the managing director sacked, as a rather dangerous man to have around. It was naïf of Rudston to perceive him as a possible ally (if indeed Rudston ever did). Rudston certainly soon regarded him as hostile, and relations became strained.
There is one possible explanation for Rudston's acceptance of the Conduit Street job, but it is conjecture only. Rudston was as ambitious as the next man. He had had a highly successful career at the Air Ministry, and I simply cannot believe that he would have abandoned that to act as some sort of consultant to the board of a private company. There has to be more to the story. I think it more than likely that Sir Henry had indicated that there would be a seat on the main board for Rudston within a reasonably short time. If Sir Henry had lived, Rudston's career perhaps might have followed a very different course. Sadly, he entered his terminal illness too soon after the dismissal of Basil Johnson for the changes to become effective.
Rudston's achievements as an inventive engineer of the highest order are beyond dispute, but he was not experienced as an engine designer. His funeral eulogy credits him with the design of the Merlin, but that is quite untrue. The honour for that belongs to Rowledge and the Derby team. In truth, there was nowhere senior for Rudston to go in Rolls-Royce Derby at that time - but (conjecture again) he could have been very useful to Royce heading up the board at Conduit Street. There is no evidence that such an appointment was in Sir Henry's mind at that time - but it does make sense of these strange happenings.
During Rudston's final years at Conduit Street, Rolls-Royce was to bring honour, not only to the company but to the country as a whole. The 1929 Schneider competition was won for Great Britain by Flight Lieutenant Waghorn in a Supermarine S6 Seaplane, powered by an H series Rolls-Royce Buzzard engine, a close relative of the Eagle. Only about three months were available to prepare the engine, which in standard form developed 825hp. This was raised to 1850hp by adding a double-sided centrifugal supercharger and a special fuel mix. The key Rolls-Royce men in this achievement, which meant day and night working, were ex-Napier men Hives and Rowledge.
Because a victory in the 1931 Schneider Trophy would have been our third in a row, entitling us to keep the trophy in perpetuity, it was regarded as very important, not only to Rolls-Royce but to the whole country. However, the government dropped a major bombshell only six months before the 1931 race was scheduled by announcing that it would not be subsidised 'in view of the current economic situation'. They were shamed into changing their minds by one wealthy woman, Lady Houston, who told them that if they were not prepared to pay for the event, she would stump up £100,000 to foot the bill herself. In the event, Rolls-Royce had less than six months to prepare the engine. Archives record that it was Hives who led the team who did the work. It is a matter of history, of course, that Flight Lieutenant Boothman won the trophy for Britain for the third, crucial time at an average speed of 386mph, and that the following day, the winning Supermarine seaplane raised the absolute air speed record to 407mph. The Italians apparently took fright and scratched their entry for the race at the last moment. The engine prepared for the 1931 race was, of course, the Merlin.
Sir Henry Royce died in 1933, and Rudston moved sideways into the wilderness, to become engineering director of Armstrong Siddeley at Coventry, in 1934. I suspect that he was sickened by the whole mess at Conduit Street rather than by Rolls-Royce itself. As we shall see, he was to return to the company only six years later. But by then Rolls-Royce was committed, and the Merlin lived on, to save our country in 1940. Rudston's actions, though they damaged his own career, proved to have been fully justified. During the war, the Merlin became the preferred front-line engine, not only in the air but on land and sea as well.
Footnote
1. The Crecy, which had a potential for producing 5,500hp, never actually went into production on chairman Ernest Hives' instructions, on the stated grounds that, as it did not have a designated airframe, it was of low priority. There was an element of truth in this, but there is rather more to the story. Hives had under development at that time an engine based on Frank Whittle's design, with a double-sides impeller. It was soon to be joined by the Derwent and the more powerful Nene, both Rolls-Royce designs, and by the time I joined Rolls-Royce in 1950, the brilliant axial-flow Avon, and a new engine, the Trent, were in production. The Derwent, Nene and Avon were our first turbojet engines. The Trent, drawing heavily on the design experience of the Merlin gearbox, was the world's first turbo propeller engine. Hives, in fact, had taken a massive wartime gamble which paid off. After the war, jet engines were the only ones in demand - and Rolls-Royce was the market leader in the field for a long time.
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