The Rolls-Royce Grand Tour of Britain, 2002
by Terry Walker

Part 1: The Rolls-Royce Tour: The Road to Crewe

Every so often I haul off to the UK to visit my younger brother Barry, who lives in London, as well as the various cousins and in-laws I acquired when he married an English lady (and a very nice crowd they are, too.)

Since my last trip in 1999 I’d bought myself a Rolls-Royce and joined the RROC, so when my 2002 pilgrimage to the Old Dart came up I thought I’d make it a sort of Rolls-Royce Grand Tour. The centrepiece, of course, was the fabulous Crewe Experience, arranged through the kind services of Chellingworth Motors.

Crewe, for those who have never been there, lies well north of London, not far from Stoke-on-Trent, the "Potteries" made famous by Josiah Wedgewood and author Arnold Bennett. Crewe was just a village until the advent of steam, when it became a great railways centre. The railway workshops and engineering plants have largely gone, and now the Rolls-Royce/Bentley plant is the industrial heart of the town.

Early in the morning of September 11, 2002 my brother Barry, his wife Joan, and I piled into his Vauxhall Calibra Coupe and rocketed out of London on the M40, destination Crewe. Barry had looked up the directions on the official Crewe website, which obligingly provides a detailed local road map with the most convenient route to the factory gates!

We arrived at 10 am, right on schedule, and were soon being marshalled together into a 3-person tour group by our guide, John Spragg, a tall, genial moustached man with boundless enthusiasm. The factory was in the throes of it’s major conversion from Rolls-Royce and Bentley to just Bentley, with signwriters and builders all over the place. In addition, the new Bentley Continental and its production line, still under wraps, were being developed in an area fenced well off and out of our reach. As a consequence of this new model, some areas other visitors have seen, eg parts of Mulliner Park Ward, were also out of bounds.

TOP LEFT: Terry Walker and host John Spragg (the mandatory "I was there" photo); TOP RIGHT: The Royal Bentley - made of plasticine! BOTTOM LEFT: Barry & Joan Walker, and John Spragg; BOTTOM RIGHT: Le Mans Blower Bentley - ex Tim Birkin

Heritage

We started in the heritage / museum area near Reception, which was stuffed full of vintage Bentleys. This was not because they didn’t have any historic Royces any more, but because the Bentley Drivers’ Club or some similar organisation was having a big outing there the following weekend, and Crewe was happy to oblige. I was impressed by the luxurious and very fast 1930 Bentley 8-litre sedan; you can see why R-R bought up Bentley when it folded its tent in 1931.

Among the company’s own Bentleys on display was a genuine Le Mans team car, a 4.5 blower, still with all the extra gauges, lights for the racing numbers, and graffiti inside the cockpit. It cost the company two or three arms and several legs, I gather. There was also the red Bentley single seater, a private modification which raced for a squillion years and is still turning out to race. The aviation side was covered by examples of the W O Bentley designed rotary aero engine from WW1 (the BR-1), and the inevitable supercharged R-R Merlin V12.

Then we moved into the factory as such. We went into the body shell assembly room, where a couple of body shells were turning on spits as they were built up, then the engine assembly room (and those 6.75 litre V8’s are huge when you see them out of the car). Here about a dozen guys were happily building engines, and exchanging banter with our guide John Spragg. Then to the jewellery shop, the name for the brightworks department; radiators, badges, handles, air conditioning eyeballs, wheels, etc.

We were soon in the new woodworking section, where a brand new veneer laser cutter was being tested. With this new device they can inset contrasting veneer Flying B badges into the veneer dash, door mouldings and picnic tables. We came out of the wood shop clutching fragile little souvenir veneer cutouts of winged B’s and the like. They actually build up their own plywood bases for the trims from scratch. An amiable bloke in the section showed a small pile of loose veneer sheets approximately the size of the finished piece. Sandwiched between each paper-thin layer of wood veneer was a thin sheet of special adhesive. Apply heat and pressure, and the pile becomes a plywood block. Then it’s trimmed to finished size and shape, and finally the final top or finish veneer is bonded on. And, John Spragge told us, the little thin constrasting strip of veneer around the door trims and dash panels in Shadows and Spirits is an Australian straight-grain wood. They’ve been using it for years for that purpose. Naturally we Aussies (with a bit of prompting) made suitably appreciative noises. I now look at the veneer door trims on my Shadow with renewed interest. There’s a little bit of Aussie in many an R-R and Bentley made at Crewe.

The factory now has a moving assembly line, although you have to watch closely to see it move. It’s roughly L-shaped, in a newly rebuilt part of the factory, and a steady (if very slow) stream of Bentleys, and a stray R-R, were edging down the line as we watched. In the same room was the "Connolly shop", where ladies were cutting and sewing the leather trim (and another computer guided laser cutter was being installed); and two guys were sitting quietly hand-stitching the leather covers onto the steering wheels. While we were there the very last Crewe Rolls-Royce, a Corniche convertible, was coming off the line. It will be kept by Bentley Motors.

TOP LEFT: Cockpit of the Birkin blower Bentley. More dials than a clock factory. TOP RIGHT: 1904 10 hp (rego SU 13) 2-cyl 2 litre BOTTOM LEFT: Drivers of SU 13 lead a busy life with all these controls. BOTTOM RIGHT: 2002 Seraph "Last of Line" interior

Royal Bentley

Then to the showroom, which is really a luxurious room where customers, armed with leather swatches, carpet samples, veneer samples, and color chips, not to mention a stack of accessories, customise their car before it is even started. In this room we found SU13, the Manchester-built 1905 2-cyl 10 hp car, with a sprinkling of confetti in the back. It transpired that one of the people who had a guided tour recently turned out to be a young lady named Gammell, the grand-daughter of Sydney Gammell, who donated the car to R-R back in 1920. Since she was about to get married, the Company instantly offered SU13 to her as a bridal car. Ownership of the company may have changed, but everyone at Crewe is passionate about the company’s heritage. (John Spragg has driven SU13, and says it’s a handful. Virtually none of the numerous pedals and levers do what you would expect.)

Also in the showroom was the huge coachbuilt Bentley that HM the Queen used at the opening of the Manchester Games. Or at least I thought it was. Actually, it’s the styling "clay" from which the real car was built, but it fooled me. John Spragge proved it was clay by lifting off the winged B radiator ornament: inside the hole left behind was plasticine! How the hell they spraypaint plasticine I don’t know. NB, the royal cars are not black, although they look it on TV. They are a very dark red, very dark indeed. The magnificent clay buck is probably broken up by now. As the clay dries it shrinks, and the model starts to crack. The process was well under way while we were there, and John Spragg thought it would only last another two or three weeks. As another aside, there were two of those big Bentleys built up. One was mainly assembled to provide a full seating and trim buck and as a working prototype; the other was the final finished car. Bentley are now busily rebuilding the prototype to finished standards, as HM has indicated she liked the first one so much she’d like another one, please. Yes, Ma’am!

After years of having Pressed Steel stamp out and weld up their body shells, which were then delivered to Crewe "in the white", the company now weld up their own body shells from a myriad pressings supplied by several suppliers. They had to do so much rectification of the Pressed Steel shells that they figured it was quicker, cheaper, and much better to do it themselves at Crewe.

The Crewe Experience, as they now call it, lasted until after 1 pm, when we fetched up back in the museum/heritage area. We were surprised by the obvious high morale and esprit de corps exhibited by the workers. And our guide, John Spragg, was infectiously enthusiastic. It made no difference to him, or to the factory, that they were elaborately hosting the owner of a second hand, 30 year old Silver Shadow who had no prospect of buying a new car from them. I was an owner; that’s enough.

Millions are being spent at Crewe modernising the plant, but it is being spent wisely and not compromising the great tradition. The plant had been starved of capital for many years, specially during the latter years under Vickers, who themselves were in decline. Now the entire plant is being renewed, modernised, and updated from end to end, for, it seems, a second half century of car production at Crewe.

While we were there the last of the Rolls-Royce badged equipment was being gathered up and removed from the factory so that, come 1 January 2003, it is simply Bentley Motors, Crewe, Cheshire. However, the Company’s own collection of historic Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars, such as the original Silver Ghost and SU13, and its pride in its history, remains. John Spragg emphasised that they have not severed links with the Rolls-Royce brand entirely, since they are, by agreement with the new owners of the R-R brand, the sole source of all spares, etc, for all Derby and Crewe-built R-R cars. And they remain committed to looking after owners of all Derby and Crewe-built cars. (and Manchester-built, too, in the remote liklihood that you own one.)

Continued in Part 2

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