CHAPTER NINE
After the War
'Can you see steam coming out yet?'
As soon as Germany capitulated in May 1945, Rudston began to prepare for the Bucks Mills holiday that he and the family so desperately needed. The holiday itself, described in Chapter Seven, was a joyous celebration; not just of the victory but also the apparent strength of our family's stability. We had no way of knowing that this stability was about to be destroyed, and that the worst ten years of Rudston's life were about to begin. I see the beginning of his misery as being marked by the death of his beloved cat.
Soon after we returned from Bucks Mills, Mollie started to drink heavily again, and her mental health deteriorated at an alarming rate. At first, she was merely arrested twice for drunken driving, Rudston losing his own licence for six months on the second occasion as he held the insurance policy for the Austin. This caused him enormous distress, as it affected his ability to work. Later, when not unconscious in her room, she became a raging, violent and incontinent animal, and Rudston's home progressively became something of a no-go area for him, to which he only returned late at night. He found himself totally unable to help her, and was even advised by the family doctor that she was incurable, and that Rudston should 'finish her off with as much cheap gin as possible'.
Tragically, my own close relationship with my father was also damaged in the four years between 1950 and 1954. In my perception, the gentle, kindly man who made me toys; who had given me the joy of Bucks Mills and with whom I had shared such intimate times singing duets to his Mendelssohn oratios was gone forever. In his place was a man whose overt disappointment in me was something that I grew to fear. I still don't really understand why, as it was not in his nature to be unkind. I feel now that he was simply trying to manage a very difficult situation that he did not understand himself, was totally unable to control and that nearly destroyed him. All I know was that in the end, I ran away from the situation altogether, and the pain that it caused, and joined the RAF at nineteen. Though we later became reconciled after a fashion, it was not until he was dying that we were able to express our unconditional love for each other.
Rudston's domestic misery was to continue for nearly ten years, through what I regard as a very low spot in our country's history for everyone. Half a century on, it seems to be commonly believed that it was the war that changed the country's positive attitude to life, and that the VE and VJ celebrations acted as a well-oiled hinge that smoothly turned us from our fight for survival, and gave us the changed frame of mind in which we could happily lick our wounds and begin to rebuild. The reality seems to me to have been very different. In truth, the six years from 1945 to 1951, dreadful for our family, were not particularly happy ones for anybody, and I think that it took longer for us to recover from the war than it had taken us to win it.
Indeed, despite local tragedy, our spirits had been high during the war; sustained by simple but highly effective propaganda in which Winston Churchill was portrayed as a demi-god and worshipped accordingly. The applause following a line in a Tommy Handley song, 'We follow the man, we follow the man, who smokes the big cigar…' stopped his ITMA radio show for some minutes. By contrast, Adolph Hitler was portrayed, not as a man to be feared but as an object of ridicule and the butt of obscene schoolboy jokes; a little pompous corporal with a missing gonad, strutting his way round Europe. To the tune of Colonel Bogie, we children sang: 'Hitler has only got one ball. Better than having none at all'. Compared with Churchill, he seemed a very small man. To my ten-year-old mind, victory was only to be the start of the good times. We were the victors, and we would receive the spoils.
Then, when the expeditionary forces entered Bergen-Belsen at the invitation of Himmler, I (and I believe the whole country) was overwhelmed with impotent rage as I read, and saw on grisly newsreels, what the Nazis had really been up to. And Bergen-Belsen was only a transit camp. Bigger, more sickening horrors were revealed almost on a daily basis. The scale of the holocaust was far too big for a child used to a diet of puerile propaganda, or possibly anybody else for that matter, to comprehend. I found more empathy from the diary of a 14-year-old Dutch girl who had had such a short, sad life and from Wanda Wassalewska's book Rainbow, which described the German atrocities on the Russian front. Like many, I found no difficulty in continuing to hate the Germans.
The front-line troops who witnessed the horrors first-hand must have suffered most, and it is hardly surprising that military discipline showed signs of cracking. The Germans were the untermenschen now, and there is evidence of allied atrocities. A commando in the expeditionary forces told me of being pinned down for a day by German snipers, though the war was by then over. At dusk, the snipers came out of hiding with their arms above their heads. They were Hitler Youth, aged between fourteen and sixteen, and they were grinning. The British platoon commander gave the order: 'Shoot them'.
At home, we had lost our great leader, rejecting him on the grounds that he was good at fighting the war but not at winning the peace. I was at home when Shug the paperboy delivered the infamous edition of the Daily Mirror. The front page, showing Churchill holding a revolver under the banner 'Whose finger on the trigger?' was a masterpiece of journalism and did untold harm to the Tories. Churchill sued and won damages, but the biggest damage had already been done. He was rejected in favour of Clement Attlee's socialist government by a landslide.
Today we can see that, with our empire lost, the immediate post-war years would have been extremely difficult for any government, and that it would be wrong to blame Attlee's socialist principles for the problems of the post-war years. But it certainly did not seem like that at the time. Attlee may have been a statesman, but he was no orator. In place of Churchill's sonorous, moving and beautiful prose, we had to endure the monotonous rattle of Attlee's staccato exhortations to further belt-tightening. A massive and expensive programme of nationalisation left everybody in private industry wondering if their jobs were secure. At my level, I grieved for the lost liveries of the GWR, LMS, LNER and SR.
On top of all this, we had to endure rationing and privation that went on for far too long; into the 1950's, in fact. Then, to make matters much worse, we discovered that while we were still beggared by our war loans, Germany was receiving massive aid to rebuild her shattered country. We were understandably angry. The face of the coin that had shown us at our best flipped over, to show us at our worst. The middle-class standards of morality and integrity, exemplified by Rudston and accurately portrayed by Noel Coward in Brief Encounter, became less meaningful. Such standards depended on the total career and financial security granted to the middle classes in the thirties. After the war, there was no certainty in anything. The government ceased to be taken seriously, and the nation's morale became very low.
The government's slightly pompous attitude to the nation probably did not help their case. One rather amusing example was the team of experts they despatched to look at a German motor-car factory in the British Sector, to see if it was worth seizing as part of Germany's reparations. The experts they selected came from luxury car manufacturers Sunbeam, who duly reported (well, they would, wouldn't they?) that the company was not worth having. The company was Volkswagen, and the product was the Beetle. The company fell into enthusiastic German hands, which was probably the best thing that could have happened to it. The British attitude to marketing at the time would surely have had little success with such a revolutionary vehicle.
Nationalism, cultivated during the war as patriotism, deteriorated into xenophobia. Curiously, the first targets of race hatred were not the black or Chinese settlers, of whom there were relatively few, but the unlucky Poles. Of them, it was said with saloon-bar certitude that they were, of course, better endowed than Englishmen and that their sole purpose in coming to Britain was to rape and pillage our women. They became the butt of the obscene schoolboy jokes of my peers.
The government was well aware of the state of the country's morale and, in their dying months, staged the Festival of Britain to bolster our spirits. It was not an unqualified success. All I remember of it was the accident on the Emmett railway and the resulting deaths. In the event, we had to wait for the return of prosperity in the fifties to begin a recovery into sanity - but the Britain that emerged, with all dominions gone and a new focus on short-term gain rather than long-term provision for the future, was very different from the Britain of 1945.
Quite soon after the war, with the importance of the Hucknall site greatly diminished, Hives reinstated Ray Dorey in his old job as overall manager there. Rudston was given a new job - that of technical sales manager, to provide marketing services for the full range of aero engine products. It was to prove to be a vitally important job in securing the future of Rolls-Royce in peacetime aviation, and I believe Hives selected Rudston for only one good reason - he believed that Rudston would do it well. Rudston, however, was bitterly upset. He saw this move as an act of revenge on the part of Hives. Normally never a man to show inappropriate emotion, he nevertheless lost his temper when Hives told him of the appointment. He told Hives: 'They always told me that Hucknall was the graveyard of careers!' and stormed out of Hives' office. Telling me the story the same evening, he added:- 'Hives just looked at me guiltily, you know!' To have shared his feelings in this way with a ten-year-old boy was quite uncharacteristic, and an indication of the measure of his distress. I believe that this incident shows that Rudston's usually good judgement was beginning to falter, because of the appalling deterioration in his home life.
Rudston must have known that the coming of peace had taken the heat off Hucknall, and Dorey, with his previous experience of running the show under peacetime conditions, was certainly the best man for the job. Rudston was by then within ten years of retirement, and his beloved Merlin was already obsolescent; out of production at Derby, which was already beginning to assemble the Nene, Derwent and Avon turbojets and was developing the Trent and Dart turboprops. These engines were the future of aviation, and Rudston knew no more about them than anyone else, since they were so new.
In any case, Ray Dorey's days at Hucknall were also numbered. Hives removed him from Hucknall in 1947, to work on the new turbojets and turboprops at Derby. It seems he was never happy, almost leaving Rolls-Royce to join Avro in 1951 and finally moving to the car division in Crewe, where his career seems to have fizzled out. He took early retirement in 1968, at the age of 61, and died only nine years later.
The job of technical sales manager was certainly no sinecure. Hives had entrusted Rudston with the creation of the one area of expertise Rolls-Royce had always badly lacked - a strong marketing department. Unlike the Merlin, the new jets and turbo-props were eminently suitable for the civil aviation market, and Rudston was chosen to carry the message.
Despite his disappointment, Rudston set about tackling his new job as well as he possibly could. He assembled a superb team of artists and graphic designers in a new technical sales department (TSD) at Slack Lane in Derby, and these men and women produced literature of a quality that fully reflected the quality of the engines themselves. He introduced a new style of advertising to the world. At a time when space was used to tell potential customers as much about a product as possible, Rudston booked a series of whole-page advertisements in the broadsheets. The pages were blank, except for a small Rolls-Royce badge and, in small italic script, the slogan: 'The magic of a name'. Even he was a bit daunted by what he had done - remember this was the 1940's - but it worked. Rolls-Royce penetrated, and ultimately virtually monopolised, the civil aviation market. Some of the credit for this success must belong to Rudston. His target was always to be first with a tender, and the tenders Slack Lane prepared were beautiful works of art with full-colour line illustrations and working drawings. The whole image was of a company that knew how to do business, and would always put the customer first.
There was a side to the job that Rudston did not enjoy. It involved dealing with Hooray Henry, rather drunken suppliers as well as the press - a business that held no appeal to him. Instead of working on secret projects at Farnborough, he now had to organise the staging of the Rolls-Royce stand at the Farnborough air show - a drunken orgy he always hated, since he was himself a most abstemious man, and knew only too well the harm alcohol can do in the wrong hands. He told me of a lunch he hosted, where a famous journalist took two spoonfuls of soup, said: 'I must say - you Rolls-Royce people really know how to do yourselves proud. That was the best bloody lunch I've had in my life' - and then slipped quietly under the table. He also told me with some malice of how the famous journalist Mary Golding had got Hives cornered. There had been some problems with engine flame-out on the Avon turbojet, and Hives, as Mary was then an extremely pretty and seemingly meek young woman, had elected to talk to her himself about the matter. This was an error of judgement. Mary Golding was probably one of the greatest investigative journalists of her time. Hives only lasted five minutes before signalling to Rudston to rescue him: 'For Christ's sake, get that woman out of here!' Rudston chortled heartily over this story, feeling that someone had got the better of his old adversary.
There was a high spot in this job for Rudston in January 1949, at the dedication ceremony for the stained glass window that commemorates the Battle of Britain pilots. Fittingly, it is there to this day in the Nightingale Road offices, with its moving message: The Pilots of the Royal Air Force who, in the Battle of Britain, turned the work of our hands into the salvation of our country. It used to overlook a sectioned Merlin that is driven by an electric motor. The cutaways are beautifully done so that all the internal working parts can be seen in action. An executive once lost a finger in it by being unwise enough to point too close while showing his children how the pistons went up and down. The sectioned Merlin was later presented to the physics department at Repton where pupils at this famous school can view it to this day.
Rudston had to organise this ceremony, conducted by the Bishop of Derby, and delegated nothing. He trained the male voice choir in the responses and, in rehearsal, sang the prayers himself. He made the lives of the recording staff at Daltons, a local radio shop, a complete misery by rejecting recording after recording until they had the balance just right. He put hours of work into getting this simple function perfect, and on the day it was - though he was very angry with the Bishop for coming in on the wrong note. The whole business seemed to take him out of himself, and back to Windsor again.
Rudston's office at Nightingale Road was close to the main board suite, and his job involved constant liaison with its members. In the early 1950's, Hives finally offered Rudston a seat on the main board, which was something for which he had been working all his life. After consideration, he rejected the offer. He did not discuss his reason with me, but my brother told me that he felt that he could not accept the post because of his wife's illness, and that he was heartbroken.
I have seen other men reject major promotion, for whatever reason, and it always has a very bad effect on their careers. Things were never quite the same for Rudston at Rolls-Royce, and he was simply left to serve out his time in the publicity office.
During 1949, Rudston became restless about his motoring. I'd sensed something big was coming for a while. He'd been talking more and more about an engineer he'd met, Alex Issigonis, who had had three front-wheel drive Citroens and swore by them. Issigonis reckoned that the only way to drive a light car was through the front wheels - though, said Sir Alex, front wheel drive would only work with engines below two litres capacity. In 1950, just before the Ford was sold, a gleaming silver monster appeared in the drive. Goodness knows how father got hold of it. New cars were like hen's teeth in 1950. They were assembled to a quota, and most went for export. He paid £746 for the Citroen Light 15; with his usual sense of timing, he had bought it just before car tax (an Attlee government ploy to ensure that the bulk of British car production went for export) was imposed.
He adored that car, rarely driving it below an indicated 80. It changed his life. It had a fault in that it was very badly finished. I went into the garage one morning and thought it had grown a second front wing. The entire underside had simply peeled off and was lying on the wheel. Even there he was lucky. A Rolls-Royce bus reversed into it, badly damaging the front end. The car was discreetly whipped away to Crewe to be mended, and came back a gleaming black - a real Rolls-Royce finish.
Rudston and I took to visiting the cathedrals of England on Sundays, aiming to be there in time for Evensong. This is a treasured memory for me. We went to Worcester, Lichfield, Lincoln, York, St. Alban's, Ely and probably many more, stopping on the way to buy a pork pie which we'd eat in the car. Once, travelling at great speed, we left the road on a bend and went through an open gate into a field. Father found the incident hilarious. He'd reckoned that on that one occasion, the Citroen's fabulous roadholding was been perhaps a little overstretched. Father was always moved by the sound of the mighty organs. I believe it was in Winchester (yes, we got that far once) that he was invited into the organ loft to play, but he refused.
It was on one of these outings, on our trip to Worcester, that I received my one and only piece of sex education from Rudston. The objective of the drive itself was always to average fifty - no mean achievement on country roads in Shropshire at that time - but this time he was brought to a sudden halt by a crowd of women on horseback. This was intolerable, of course. After swearing, he said: 'Never forget this, John. Women are always a damn nuisance'. Unfailingly courteous to the sex, I nevertheless feel that Rudston Fell, like many of his kind, found women slightly intimidating and no more than a distraction from the important business in hand, which was engineering.
I remember once driving with him, northbound from Cirencester on the great, dipping and apparently deserted Fosseway; straight as a ruler and fun to speed along at 80. We were approaching the brow of a hill on the apparently deserted road when, for no obvious reason, he stood on his brakes and we screeched to a halt. Two cars came over the brow, one overtaking the other blind. Had father not stopped, we would probably have died. He was white and shaken. All he said was: 'I smelt that.'
The only accidents Rudston ever had were in that Citroen, and they both involved the same component - a hub cap. The first involved an Austin 7 Ruby saloon and an old lady. In those days, old ladies always drove Austin 7 Rubies. She chugged straight over a halt sign and headed for Rudston, who was on the main road and had managed to anticipate the collision, blow his horn and then stop when he saw that the warning was unheeded. Rudston's attempts to remonstrate with the old lass were ended by a very horsy lady who arrived on foot: 'It's no use you blowing your horn at my mother like that. She's stone deaf, you know!' The second incident happened during the sad time of Rudston's driving ban. He used to exercise the Citroen occasionally in the drive, and managed to reverse into the rockery.
I must confess that I wasn't so lucky. The Citroen was garaged in a stone outbuilding at Bucks Mills, and I had the misfortune to catch a front wing on a stone wall. The damage was quite severe and very noticeable. Rudston gave me a very thin time for a day or two, as he considered that the damage would be taken as a reflection of his own driving abilities.
The first front-wheel drive Citroens, in production from 1934 to 1955 in England, are easy to love and I have owned many, including a gorgeous two-seater roadster with dickey seat. On a wet surface, the sweep of the front wings throws water many feet into the air, and this caught Rudston out in Warwick. There used to be a ford just below the castle, and, for reasons that I still cannot fathom, Rudston decided to overtake a small family saloon in the deepest part of the ford. Our bow wave was spectacular. Unfortunately, the other driver's window was open, and he and his family were drenched. We didn't actually stop, but I know Rudston didn't feel very good about the incident.
Rudston staged a strange and uncharacteristic act of rebellion during the early fifties. The late forties were harsh, austere times under the Attlee post-war government, and the higher rate of income tax imposed by chancellor Hugh Dalton actually reached 19s 6d (97p) in the pound. Companies wanting to reward senior executives cast around for a suitable perk, and that is how the company car concept was born. We are the only country in the world to have such a ridiculous scheme. Rudston was promised one, but it didn't turn up in 1950, though other executives were beginning to get theirs. At that time, his new Citroen was more than adequate compensation. A couple of years later, he was again promised his company car. He gave the Citroen to my brother, but again the promise failed to materialise. We endured a short, miserable period of Rudston driving cars borrowed from the Rolls-Royce pool (he particularly hated the Humber Hawk, which had a sloppy column gear change that he never really mastered) until he finally lost patience and bought a one-year-old Mark VII Jaguar from his dentist, Keith Heughan. It was a huge, powder-blue beast with glittering chrome, and, I thought, very beautiful. I nearly killed myself in it during a 90mph drive, for which I had no permission, but that's quite another story. It had two fuel tanks with separate pumps and gauges, and you could actually see the needle of the gauge going down as you drove.
The one thing that was politically incorrect at Rolls-Royce at that time was to drive a Jaguar, and Rudston knew it. He told me with great glee of the day chairman Hives spotted it: 'That your Jag?' It was considerably smarter than the car Hives was driving. The Jag didn't last long after that - a smart, brand-new Vauxhall Cresta, top-of-range, arrived very promptly, courtesy Rolls-Royce. Rudston nearly killed himself and my mother second time out in that Vauxhall. It was immensely powerful, with very poor roadholding, and after the Citroen Rudston wasn't used to that. The Jag was sold. I don't think Rudston ever really liked it - he didn't really like the attention it attracted - but I was sorry to see it go. But I think he liked the Vauxhall even less. It had a bench front seat, which failed to give his passengers any lateral stability, and the fault was compounded by a huge gap between the seat and the door, into which his passenger fell whenever he forgot that his beloved Citroen was gone and overdid his cornering. He managed to put this car into a ditch outside the gate of Worlaby House some time before my brother took the estate over. The idea of the farm had been mooted, and Rudston and I had driven up from Derby to have a look. A very hefty farm worker helped us out of that one.
Two years later, Rudston had a replacement company car, a Cresta that was even worse that the first one. It was two-tone in grey and 'mountain rose' (pink), and had a wrap-around windscreen with an edge scientifically designed to remove the patella from the knee when boarding. It actually went quite well and held the road better than the first effort, but Rudston was totally disgusted when the rather ostentatious fins on the back rusted through from the inside in less than a year. The car was always garaged. 'That metal', he said, 'was chosen for its deep drawing properties and not for its durability'. I spent a miserable wet Bucks Mills holiday lying on my back under its dashboard. The wiper mechanism was very badly made and had fallen apart, and the only way we could go anywhere was for me to operate the linkage by hand.
In 1950, Rudston was given a first class executive rail pass, a perk from the British Railways Board for his work on 10,100 (see next chapter). Instead of cashing his weekly cheque at Lloyds bank in Derby, he took to catching a London express and cashing it at the Royal Automobile Club. When I was around, he took me with him. He was most particular about his comfort, standing on the platform watching the pipework between the carriages and refusing to board until he saw steam issuing from the heating pipe behind where he was going to sit. When he did board, he'd draw the blinds until we moved off to discourage fellow passengers. He frequently treated me to lunch in the first-class restaurant car, which in those days was very upmarket. The rolling stock was finished in the most exotic hardwoods, and the service and food were excellent.
In 1952, Mollie entered treatment after nearly dying and a short spell in hospital. I travelled with them from Derby to the treatment centre near Staines in Middlesex and had to drive back, though I had only just passed my driving test, as Rudston was deeply upset and in tears. This was the first of only two occasions I ever saw him weep. The second was when I had to tell him of the death of his mother Alice. Treatment didn't work the first time, so Rudston and I had to endure the agony of seeing her relapse again. But she very soon took herself back into treatment, and this time she recovered. She was never to drink again, and Rudston had his beloved, vivacious Mollie by his side for the remainder of her life. Few marriages indeed survive this appalling disease.
Rudston retired from his job as technical sales manager in 1957. He had a massive and very loving send-off from his people at Slack Lane. He drove them unmercifully but they loved him as he gave them full outlet for their creative talents and were aware that the person he drove hardest of all was himself. Hives, the Rolls-Royce chairman, also retired that year and threw a farewell dinner party in London. Rudston and Mollie were both invited, and it gave Rudston great joy that they were able to share the happy occasion. I remember them both setting off for the journey by rail, Rudston resplendent in a very unaccustomed dinner jacket. The evening clearly meant a great deal to both of them, and both were rather nervous. It seemed they had a very good time, unmarred by his appearance which, in hindsight, they both treated as a joke. Apparently, his nerves had got the better of him on the train to London. Finding the train lavatory flooded as usual, he rolled his trousers up to mid-calf, and it was only on the train home that Mollie noticed they were still at half mast.
I regard Lord Hives as one of the best chief executives this country has ever seen. Under Hives, morale at Rolls-Royce had been very high, and this undoubtedly had its effect on productivity and quality. At the same time, Hives had created immense research and development facilities to protect the company's short-term future, and was active on many committees that were crucial in maintaining the lead he had established for Rolls-Royce as Britain's top supplier of aero engines. After the war, it was Hives who began to implement the diversionary activities, such as the rail traction division at Shrewsbury with which Rudston was associated, first as manager and then as a consultant, and the Rolls Royce and Associates company that was responsible for the control systems for nuclear submarines. These actions were taken because Hives had foreseen market saturation in the company's traditional activities in the long-term future, and wanted to protect the Name for all time.
What is the more remarkable is that Hives had achieved what he did largely in the war years, when resources were in short supply and when his workforce was continually increasing in numbers to a peak of more than 30,000; many of them females with no previous industrial experience. After the war, he had to oversee a massive scaling-down in activities and, in my view, it is entirely to his credit that he still managed to find jobs for 23,000 employees in Derby, with thousands more employed by subcontractors in the area.
Hives was assisted in his post-war scaling-down by the government who needed to help secure employment for ex-servicemen in an industrial market that was contracting. They did this by perpetrating (my opinion only) a monstrous confidence trick on the nation's womenfolk, who had kept the country going during the war. They were told, not that they were now redundant in industry (I doubt that anyone had even heard of redundancy at that time) but that they were letting their menfolk down in some way if they were not at home to feed and care for them. They were assailed on all sides by ridiculous propaganda showing them how much better life would be for them in the kitchen, and the extraordinary thing is that our womenfolk fell for it that time (happily, they never did again). Many of these women were highly talented at their crafts, particularly, for some strange reason, the heavy welders, and were much better at their jobs than the men who replaced them.
There were few women left at Derby by 1950, when I began my apprenticeship at Rolls-Royce, but we did have one all-female shop, the Number 2 Press shop. Strong men spoke of this shop with fear. The shop was all-female because no man in his right mind would work there. These were indeed females, but not as portrayed by the media of the time. Their work was heavy, but they were well up to it. Immensely powerful, and as broad as they were tall, they predated Germaine Greer by fifteen years with their cogent feminist arguments. The major difference was that, whereas Greer used words, the ladies of the No. 2 press shop settled their arguments with a dangerously well-aimed club hammer. The first instruction given after entering the main works was that apprentices must on no account ever enter this area of the factory on our own - and that was after an apprentice who tried it suffered quite a serious and very personal injury at the hands of these ladies.
Lord Hives in his day successfully and consistently brought out the best in Rolls-Royce, as Churchill brought out the best in his countrymen, but I wonder if history will record both Hives and Churchill as failures in one crucial respect. Neither left an effective successor. A number of strong and able men, who might well have been able to implement Hives' long-term strategies, found his autocratic management style oppressive and left the company in his time. Certainly, after his retirement, sureness of judgement and firmness in the taking and implementing of management decisions seemed to fade away, leaving only the arrogance. Diversionary activities were not properly pursued, and associates were upset by unilateral actions such as that allegedly taken against Clayton's at Shrewsbury (see Chapter 12). By 1970 Rolls-Royce had become a one-product company. The product was the Olympus engine, and quite normal development delays were enough to precipitate the crash that was to bankrupt the firm until the government rescued it.
In 1957, when he retired as technical sales manager of Rolls-Royce, Rudston's railway interests became his fulltime preoccupation. He was to serve Rolls-Royce as manager of the company's rail traction division for another five years. In 1958, he bought Mollie a new baby - one of the very first minis, a Morris, designed by Alex Issigonis. Sir Alex had designed a car based on the principles of the Citroen. If the mini is the parent of today's ubiquitous front-wheel-drive hatchback, then the Citroen is certainly the grandparent.
Soon after, he bought The White House, a near-derelict farmhouse in Worlaby, one of the lovely low villages tucked under the wolds near Brigg in Lincolnshire, and only a few minutes' walk from my brother's farm, and renovated it to a high standard. Derby was sold, and Rudston and Mollie began a new life together.
But that is not the end of the story. We must now turn to what, although a failure in the eyes of the world, was in fact a very major achievement. In hindsight, perhaps the failure was the world's and not Rudston's.
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