Preface
I could not have written this book on my own. My grateful thanks go to family members, not only for their encouragement but also for correcting my defective memory and collaborating by contributing their own recollections, to the Bank of England for providing up-to-date figures on the effect of inflation on the value of the pound (correct at November 1995), to John Reynolds for his encouragement (John is the author of Engines and Enterprise, the biography of engineer Sir Harry Ricardo who plays such an important part in Rudston's story), to Brian Leverton, Rudston's successor in the Rolls-Royce Rail Transport Department and to Ken Tyler, who has contributed his own reminiscences of his time with Rudston at Derby and Shrewsbury. Ken and Rudston were friends, and Rudston was Godfather to one of Ken's sons. A valuable source of reference throughout has been Peter Pugh's excellent book on the history of Rolls-Royce, The Magic of a Name. Above all, I would like to thank Mrs. Karry Gardner, who lived at Ayton Lodge for many years. It is my good fortune that by profession she is a forensic accountant and financial auditor, and Chapter 1 of this book would not exist without her patient and professional research on behalf of our family.
John Fell April 2007
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 - The making of the man (1892 - 1900)
Chapter 2 - School days (1900 - 1907)
Chapter 3 - A time-served engineer (1907 - 1915)
Chapter 4 - The engine repair shops at Pont de l'Arche (1915 - 1918)
Chapter 5 - Air ministry days (1918 - 1934)
Chapter 6 - Bucks Mills - a tranquil interlude (The holiday cottage)
Chapter 7 - The wilderness years (1934 - 1939)
Chapter 8 - Belper, Hucknall and the war (1939 - 1945)
Chapter 9 - After the war (1945 - 1957)
Chapter 10 - 10,000 (Rudston's mainline locomotive)
Chapter 11 - The rail transport division of Rolls-Royce (1957 - 1962)
Chapter 12 - The final years (1962 - 1977)
Introduction
The lovely chalk wolds in the north of Lincolnshire run roughly north-west from the river Humber to south-east, to separate the coastal marshes from the rich soil of the river plains. Near the Humber, on the south-westerly aspect of the wolds and nestling under their protection are the five 'low' villages of Horkstow, Saxby-all-Saints, Bonby, Worlaby and Elsham; pretty villages that were once the homes of farmers but, since job losses following farm mechanisation, now have a mixed population of farmhands and commuters.
On 2nd December 1977, the villagers of Worlaby gathered in the little church of St. Clements to say goodbye to my father, the old man they all knew as the Colonel. He was remembered with fondness. Upright even in his eighties, he had been active in village life and, with high standards of behaviour learned in a childhood when Victoria was on the throne, he was unfailingly courteous and civil to everyone he passed on his constitutional walks. In his time in Worlaby, he had touched the lives of everybody in the village. He had been chairman of the board of governors of the village school, an RDC councillor, a contributor to the parish magazine and a devoted grandparent and great grandparent. The organ functioned well at the service because he had been the one to maintain it, along with the organs at Bonby, Saxby and Horkstow. Pipe organs were his hobby.
To many in the church, particularly the relative newcomers to Worlaby, my father's funeral service was perhaps perceived as no more than a witness to the passing of a military gentleman of the old school, who had served his country to the best of his ability and gone on to serve his community in his retirement. But Rudston Fell was much more than that. He was not a professional soldier, though he had indeed served bravely during the Great War, where he achieved the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and was awarded his DSO for gallantry. In fact, he was a highly talented design engineer; one of the extraordinary band of men who trained in Edwardian England, when our little island commanded the riches of an enormous global empire, and went on, by God's grace, to be in the right place, at the right time, to save their country from defeat during the dark days of the second world war, when we so nearly lost everything.
Rudston's story is surely one well worth the telling. Without certain actions taken by him in the 1920s; brave actions that put his own career in jeopardy, Rolls-Royce could well have ceased to exist as a manufacturer of aircraft engines, so that the Merlin would not have been developed at all.
And it is arguable that, without the Merlin, we would have lost the Battle of Britain and, probably, the second world war.
As a human being, my father was kind, broadminded and tolerant; a man of our times, without the arrogance one might expect of a late Victorian (Rudston was born at a time when Great Britain was the most powerful nation in the world, and Victoria still had nine years of her reign to run). Physically, he was to grow into a well set-up man, tall for his generation (almost exactly 6 feet) and good-looking, with facial features surprisingly reminiscent of the late Sir Lawrence Olivier. He was proud of his ability to behave well in any environment; an ability manifested by all his sisters and undoubtedly learned from his mother Alice. Good behaviour by itself, though, is rather stuffy, and Rudston had a marvellous counter-balance with a streak of pure mischief in his nature. He had a fund of somewhat lavatorial humour, and loved to lampoon the ridiculous or pretentious in life. There are many examples of this side of his nature in this book. But his humour, though sometimes crude, was never sexual. Sex to Rudston was an embarrassment, not to be talked about, really rather a nuisance and a distraction from more important things like good engineering. Women played little or no part in the sphere of his life in which he preferred to operate.
Rudston claimed to be a Conservative, and in some ways was conservative by nature. But politically he was rather pink. He had worked on the factory floor, and made no distinction between the man who operated a precision machine tool and the man who designed the part being made. To Rudston, both were gauged by the standard of excellence manifested in their work. But he had seen the appalling way in which Edwardian management sometimes treated their blue-collar workers, and cared deeply for the welfare of men under his charge. Indeed, Rudston was a deeply compassionate man, and this is well demonstrated by the love he gave to his family.
Because he belonged to a generation whose wealth came from manufacture rather than commerce, Rudston had no understanding whatever of the workings of modern finance. It was his naïf belief that something had to be made and sold at a profit for wages to be paid and service costs to be met, and if the profit wasn't big enough, the company would ultimately go bust. He would have shaken his head in disbelief at the man who says: 'My house made me £20,000 last year - and I didn't have to lift a finger'. He might well say something seemingly stupid like: 'But if you sell the house to realise your £20,000, surely you'll have nowhere to live?'
As a family man, Rudston had no peer. He provided his wife Molly and his boys, my older brother Henry and me, with a fine home, a lovely holiday cottage, private education and, so far as he was able, every opportunity to succeed in life. Even more telling, he loved and cared for Molly during the dreadful days when she became so very ill with her alcoholism, and at the end had the joy of seeing her move into recovery so that they could spend their twilight years together in happiness.
In later life, Rudston viewed the changes to his world with some dismay. Paradoxically though, it was surely men like Rudston who contributed to these fundamental changes in the fabric of our society and, indeed, to their own obsolescence by creating today's reliable, safe road and air transport and modern telecommunications, and therefore a new way of life for us. We are not living in better or worse times than Rudston. We have simply moved on, into a different world. There are indeed many ways in which our world is incomparably better than Rudston's. Nevertheless, our world is the direct legacy of his. It is, though, depressing to see how little real progress we have made in engineering terms since the 1940's.
Though he retained his old RFC rank throughout his life, and indeed was known as 'the Colonel' to the end, as he pottered round the lanes of Worlaby in his old age, Rudston makes it clear in his own chapter (Chapter 5) that he was a 'reluctant hero', serving on a hostilities-only basis. He was proud of his RFC rank, but not, I think, inordinately so. I remember that he was more amused than annoyed when someone to whom he had refused employment during the Slack Lane days looked him up in the Army Lists for 1939-45 and, finding him not there, wrote him a most abusive letter accusing him of being a charlatan. But his working life brought him into constant contact with serving officers of similar rank, and there is no doubt at all that his continuing use of his rank on retirement was of great service to his employers. Besides, I think that his wife Mollie rather liked being the colonel's lady!
This, then, is Rudston's story. I have tried to be as objective in telling it as a son can ever be, though some may feel that I have been over-critical of the great company of Rolls-Royce, when I tell of events that occurred when the company had descended to the nadir of its history. The events are germane to Rudston's story, so I make no apology for including them. In any case, surely there is great merit in the fact that Rolls-Royce overcame these problems to become great again and, under the guidance of the formidable Lord Hives, played its own role in saving our country.
As the son of a successful father, I could remember Rudston in many ways. As the smartly-suited executive at the Farnborough Air Show. In faded blue overalls, with bent head crowned by an obscenely scruffy railwayman's hat, contemplating the finer points of his locomotive's engineering. In disreputable, tattered pullover and slacks, working on his beloved organ on a Sunday morning. In his second-best suit with collar and tie, totally carried away by the thunder of the mighty organ in Worcester Cathedral. As someone of great kindness, with a great sense of fun; someone with whom one could have a laugh.
My most poignant memory, though, is none of these. It is of him on holiday in the cottage he created for us. I see his rear view, clad in blue Aertex shirt, his white and rather bandy legs protruding from baggy khaki shorts, and hear the squeak-squeak of his blue-and-white shoes as he plods up Bucks Mills hill, feet turned well out, to collect his morning paper.