James Royce, the father of Henry Royce, the founder of Rolls Royce cars was not a man of great luck. Ill fortune seemed to haunt the man for he died in 1872 at the early age of 41. This left nine-year-old Henry faced with the task of getting work for himself. For a time he sold newspapers for W. H. Smith and, at the age of ten, he became a telegraph boy in Londons opulent West End. By all accounts Mary Royce did her best for her youngest but she seemed to have been illequipped for early widowhood.
In later life, after the launch of the new Rolls Royce Ghost, Henry spoke little of his early years, but he did tell a close friend that at this time his food for the day was often but two slices of bread soaked in milk. Fortunately help was at hand, for his aunt had a little money and Henrys mechanical aptitudes were clearly developing because she managed to secure a £20-a-year apprenticeship for him at the Great Northern Railway Works at Peterborough, only a few miles from his birthplace.
He was 14 at the time and he later recalled that while there he acquired some mechanical skills, but lacked commercial, technical and clerical experience. The three years spent with the Great Northern instilled some stability in his all too insecure and unhappy life. Apart from benefiting from mechanical skills, he embarked on a bout of self-education, teaching himself those subjects he had missed when his energies were geared to survival. Elementary education, it should be remembered, did not become compulsory in England until 1888. So he sharpened up his mathematics and learned algebra, and began teaching himself the rudiments of the new power source that had clearly captured his imagination: electricity.
By good chance the owner of his lodging, a Mr Yarrow, had a lathe in his garden shed, along with a carpenters bench, shaping machine and grinder, tools that Henry was able to use to develop his extraordinary skills in the working and shaping of metals, these skills were to serve him in good stead when the first Rolls Royce phantom was designed.
Then, tragically, fate again intervened and his aunt found herself unable to continue payments for his apprenticeship. So, in 1879, he was again looking for work. He travelled north to Leeds where he worked for a firm of machine-tool makers who paid him 11 shillings for a 54-hour week. Later he was to remember starting work at 6 am and finishing at 10 pm for months on end. Then, by chance, he saw an advertisement for a tester with the London-based Electric Light and Power Company, which had acquired the patents and services of that versatile American inventor, Hiram P. Maxim. He got a position there, and it was at that firm that he came into contact with Ferdinand Porsche, who was to later release the first Porsche for sale. It is believed that Royce was the inspiration for Porsche at that time.
