Henry Royce

Biography

Frederick Henry Royce was born in Alwalton, Huntingdonshire, on 27 March 1863. His father died in 1872, and the boy was delivering telegrams for the Post Office by 1876 before an apprenticeship with the Great Northern Railway at Peterborough. In 1884 he set up F. H. Royce and Company in Manchester; his first patent, granted in 1897, covered a bayonet-cap lamp socket.

In 1902 or 1903 he bought a Decauville car, which became the starting point for his own design. The first Royce car was finished on 1 April 1904, and on 4 May that year he met Charles Rolls in Manchester. A December 1904 agreement put the cars on sale under the Rolls-Royce name, and Rolls-Royce Limited was registered on 15 March 1906 with Royce as chief engineer and works director. Its six-cylinder 40/50, the car later known as the Silver Ghost, was shown in London that November.

Poor health from 1911 sent him to the south of England and to France, and from late 1917 he lived at Elmstead in West Wittering, Sussex, where a design team worked around him. His Eagle aero engine appeared in 1915; the R engine he began in 1928 powered Schneider Trophy winners in 1929 and 1931. Royce was created a baronet in 1930 and died at West Wittering on 22 April 1933. The PV-12, launched that October, became the Merlin.