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

Part 2: The Rolls-Royce Tour: On the Road

I didn’t only go to Crewe on my R-R Grand Tour. I also took in numerous related Rolls-Royce locations.

I first went to the village of Alwalton near Peterborough, up the A1(M), where Henry Royce was born, and where his ashes are interred in the village church. The church was locked that day, but I was later told there’s nothing much to see. A small brass plaque not much bigger than a beer coaster marks the location of his ashes. Opposite the church is a new cul-de-sac with a handful of new houses: Royce Place.

LEFT: Rolls' Birthplace, 35 Hill Street, off Berkeley Square. RIGHT: Rolls' Statue, Monmouth

In Monmouth in Wales I found Charles S. Rolls’ statue in the town square, dressed in aviator’s togs and holding a (model) Wright biplane in his hand. According to the caption, it was erected in 1911, not long after he died in a plane crash in 1910.

The inscription reads:

Erected by public subscription
To the memory of
The honourable Charles Stewart Rolls
Third son of Lord and Lady Llangattock
As a tribute of admiration
For his great achievements
In both scientific and practical
Motoring and aviation
And the first to fly across the channel
From England to France
And back without landing.
He lost his life
By the wrecking of his areroplane
At Bournemouth July 12 1910
His death caused world-wide regret
And deep national sorrow.

This statue was unveiled on Oct 19 1911
by
Colonel the Right Honble Lord Raglan CB

The Hendre

Outside Monmouth is the former stately home of Rolls’s dad, Lord Llangattock, a lavish stash called The Hendre. It is now the Rolls Monmouth Golf Club. The Club’s actually got a web site, too. If you want to look over The Hendre, and you are a golfer, get an introduction from your Golf Club, and play eighteen holes. The Hendre is several miles west of Monmouth, past a village called Rockfield. The road from Monmouth to the Hendre is a typical British minor road, barely one lane wide, and winding between hedgerows over Welsh hill and Welsh dale. Very picturesque.

It appears Monmouth has two famous sons: Henry the Fifth of Agincourt fame was born there. A statue of Hank V is in a niche on the front of the town hall in the aptly named Agincourt Square, and Charles Rolls’s memorial stands outside the hall. Rolls wasn’t actually born at The Hendre, or even in Monmouth. He was born in London, just off Berkeley Square. I found the actual Georgian house, 35 Hill Street, but there was no blue plaque on it commemorating Rolls. Tchah!

For those who wonder, the title Baron Llangattock is extinct. Charles Rolls’s father, the first Lord, was ennobled in the 1890s. Charles, the 3rd son, died unmarried in 1910. Lord Llangattock died in 1913, and the title then passed to his eldest son. The second-eldest son died in France in 1916, unmarried, and the second Lord Llangattock died in Monmouth in 1916, also unmarried. The title became extinct, and the estate passed to the eldest daughter, who married a descendant of Lord Tennyson.

TOP LEFT: Royce's ashes are buried in this church at Alwalton, on the A1 near Peterborough. TOP RIGHT: The Hunt House: R-REC HQ, Paulerspury. BOTTOM LEFT: The former R-R premises, Hythe Rd Willesden. BOTTOM RIGHT: School Rd, North Acton: former site of Rolls-Royce's London Service Centre.

Rolls and Bentley Second Hand Car Yards

I also had a quick squiz at a few well-known R-R specialists. I was staying with my brother in Hanwell, near Ealing in west London. Just around the corner from his house, in the Uxbridge Road, is Hanwell Car Centre, a narrow but deep showroom stuffed full of Bentleys and R-Rs. Opposite is another narrow showroom, and behind it an open-air car yard, also full of Hanwell Car Centre’s R-Rs and Bentleys. Within (a long) walking distance is Frank Dale and Stepsons, another specialist. They had some smick machines in there, including a very rare Stablimenti Farina Bentley Mk 6 "Cresta" from the early 50s.

Out in the sticks, I looked in on P & A Wood, who not only sell new and used R-Rs and Bentleys in a flyspot village called Great Easton some miles from Dunmow in Essex, but are also certified to rebuild Merlin engines for flying. As I drove out of Great Easton, an elegant Phantom 1 passed, heading towards the village.

RREC and Royce Foundation

But it ain’t over yet. I also went to Paulerspury, near Silverstone, which is where both the Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts’ Club and the Sir Henry Royce Foundation have their HQ. They occupy The Hunt House, originally built as HQ for the local Fox Hunt. Paulerspury is not big, but the only way I identified The Hunt House was from a photograph from the official website, since there are absolutely no signs on the building. If you go there, drive into the vast car park inside the yard. I parked out in the street, unsure if it was okay to barge in. It is okay. I failed to make an appointment to visit, which was a mistake, you definitely ought to ring a few days before, but one of the Directors took time off to show me all over the place, and I wound up in the Archives getting a copy of the build sheets for my Shadow.

The Foundation keeps all old Derby and Crewe records, all the build sheets for all the cars up to 10 years or so ago, factory road test records, correspondence, coachbuilders’ records and drawings, a library, a training facility, a museum, and etc etc and still etc. Incidentally, they are still keen on keeping track of all the Rolls-Royces and Bentleys they have records of, so if you feel in the mood and you know the recent ownership history of your car, write a letter identifying your chassis number and revealing all to:

Barbara Westlake
Archivist
Rolls Royce Enthusiasts Club
The Hunt House
Paulerspury
Towcester, Northants, NN12 7NA
United Kingdom

or you can email it to her at: admin@rrec.org.uk

They have quite a bunch of R-R prototype engines on show, including a 4-ohc fuel injected version of the trusty 6.75 litre V8. They opted for turbo for production. They naturally have a Merlin engine, as well as a Meteor engine, which is the tank version designed by R-R but manufactured for some years by Rover. And they have the one-and-only Peregrine engine, the projected very small Rolls-Royce engine from 1932. The engine never went into production, but the chassis it was intended to fit was used as the basis for the Derby Bentleys. There was also a Motor Show cutaway display Silver Dawn 6 cylinder engine, which rotates by electric power, so you can see all the bits in action, and it even has 6 little red lights which flick on and off to indicate the spark plugs firing. This was discovered in a box in the basement of the old R-R showrooms in Conduit Street when R-R moved out, and was donated to the Club. It had to be stripped and restored, though, after nearly 40 years of neglect. They also have one of the beefy Rolls-Royce industrial diesel engines built at Rolls-Royce’s Shewsbury "Oil Engine" factory, later sold off to Perkins Diesel.

They also have some original "Royce & Co" electrical equipment: the biggies are an electric crane and an electric wharf winch, the latter a sort of colossal version of the hand powered winches you see on yachts.

Naturally I visited the RREC Shop in The Hunt House, and after browsing for a while bought a copy of the official parts catalogue for the Silver Shadow on CD-ROM for just fifteen quid. They have similar parts catalogue CD-ROMs for most models, even the Phantom III. Alas, they don’t have any workshop manuals on CD yet, but I expect they will come. I bought a RREC T-shirt, and a dinky-toy type model of a Bentley T1, as near to my Shadow 1 as they had. It was available in one colour, chocolate brown. I suppose I could pull it to bits, replace the Bentley Rad with a hand-made R-R rad, and respray it white, but somehow I don’t think I’ll bother.

TOP LEFT: Frank Dale and Stepsons had this rare Stabilimenti Farina Bentley Mark 6 "Cresta" for sale. TOP RIGHT: Hanwell Cars Showroom (No 1 of 3), Uxbridge Rd. BOTTOM LEFT: Hanwell Cars' outdoor yard. All those R-R and Bentley cars and not one I could afford! BOTTOM RIGHT: Cutaway Merlin, Brooklands

Brooklands

Finally, I checked out Brooklands. The once mighty high-banked speedway is a giant technology park now, but a section of the Members’ banking, including the bridge and the entry tunnels under the track, is preserved. So too is the Edwardian clubhouse and what the Americans call "gasoline alley" and Brooklands types called "the village", the workshops where racing specialists worked. Brooklands was the home of Vickers Aviation for many years, and thousands of Vickers planes were built there. It has a wind tunnel, a high-altitude chamber, and heaps of historic aircraft all over the joint. In one of the hangars is a large collection of jet engines, mostly Rolls-Royce, and a sectioned, cutaway display Merlin engine. (These Merlins are everywhere!). It also has the first air travel ticket booth in the world, built at Brooklands in about 1910. The car Museum part includes Brooklands beasties like the Napier Railton, and the ill-fated land speed record car Babs, dug up from Pendine sands a few years ago and now restored.

I only touched the edges of the endless potential of the Rolls-Royce Tour. If you include Bentley, there is the workshop where the first ever Bentley was built in 1919, in a mews just off Tottenham Court Road, plus the site of the old Bentley plant at Cricklewood. There is Royce’s house at West Wittering (a museum now, I think). I didn’t get to look at the showrooms in Conduit Street, although they still exist.

The Fomer Premises

I did go to the former Mulliner Park Ward plant and R-R Service Centre at Hythe Road, Willesden, where Corniches, and Phantoms 5s and 6s, among others, were built. The building still stands, stripped of its R-R logos. It is now a colossal used-car supermarket.

Not far away, I visited a site whose importance didn't register on me then. As I was walking through Acton, I saw an R-R sign on a wall, and an arrow, and naturally followed to see what was up (see photo of the sign). There was a large car service centre there with a few R-R and Bentley cars outside plus some exotica like Lamborghinis. From memory, it was an H R Owen establishment, Owen being long established R-R and Bentley dealers, among other makes. What I didn't realise until I read it in Praeclarum recently, was that this was the School Road, Acton premises which had been the Rolls-Royce London service centre for many years until they sold it and concentrated operations at Hythe Road.

What Next?

More ambitious might be retracing the famous London-Edinburgh Trial route, and posing outside the Cat and Fiddle, or perhaps visiting the Isle of Man and driving around the TT course, where C S Rolls made the cars famous by winning the TT. And, if you time it right, how about going to the annual RREC turnout, invariably held at an obliging Stately Home and stuffed wall to wall with all the best classic R-Rs in the UK?

I had also sketched in the notion of driving down to Goodwood and checking out the site of the all-new R-R factory in Sussex. I didn’t get around to it, so maybe that’s a future project. I doubt very much if I could have got inside the gates, even if I had driven up in an R-R instead of my brother’s Calibra coupe. It will be interesting to see if the new R-R outfit embraces former owners with the heartfelt enthusiasm that marks Bentley at Crewe! I hope so.

Return to Part 1

#