CHAPTER TWELVE
The Final Years
Masters and men working in harmony
The White House in the wolds village of Worlaby in Lincolnshire, restored by Rudston as their retirement home. His rather odd choice of retirement transport can be seen on the right of the drive.
The White House in the low village of Worlaby, nestling under the Lincolnshire Wolds, is very beautiful, and Rudston and Mollie restored it to an extremely high standard. The long kitchen, with its hooked, beamed ceiling, was converted into an elegant 30-foot drawing room. The entire ground floor had hardwood parquet, and oil central heating was installed - and run to a temperature at the top end of the comfort zone. Rudston had paid £1800 for a five-bedroomed house, but found he had one too many windows for the number of upstair doors. A room had been completely sealed off. Was there, perhaps, a body in there, or a mystery in line with the film 'So long at the fair'? In fact, there was nothing in the large room they uncovered, and it became one of the best homes Rudston's organ ever had.
Both Rudston and Mollie did their best to throw themselves into the life of a farming village. Mollie rejoined the WVS, and used her new mini to ferry children around the country for the social services. She was immensely proud of the WVS, and extremely cross with the Vicar of Worlaby when he wanted to open a WVS meeting with prayer. As she very pointedly told him, the WVS is a branch of the armed services. Rudston, with more time on his hands, picked up his hobbies. He made the clock mentioned at the beginning of this story, and constructed a 'swell' organ - never a very great success. He earned low marks from Mollie from his efforts with Henry's magnificent new grain drier. Prowling round, he'd noticed, from his expertise with centrifugal superchargers, that the fans were poorly positioned with respect to their air inlets, and decided to make proper ducting himself out of sheet metal. This is immensely heavy work, and quite knocked the old man out for a bit. This was entirely his own fault, and the result of an obsession to get on with the job akin to his lifting of the steel rod in the 10,100 story.
He used to contribute to the Worlaby parish magazine under the pseudonym 'Fred', and this offering from the late sixties shows his distress at the decline in standards of loyalty, not just of the workforce of the time, but generally.
LOYALTY by FRED
I read in the papers this week that it is officially estimated that it requires three Britishers to do the work of one American. This applies generally to all industries except farming. This bit of news shocked me so much that I began to search for the reason. What have the Americans got that we do not possess? Why does not the three-to-one ratio apply to farming?
I have been about a bit now, and the most important change in the thinking of my countrymen since the days of my youth seems to me to be the devaluation of loyalty. Loyalty to one's country is looked upon as something which is quite out of date and almost ridiculous. Loyalty within the family has declined. Loyalty between employers and employed is not what it used to be. Loyalty to customers, who are the men and women who pay all the wages and salaries, is almost non-existent in the minds of some people.
What do we mean by loyalty? Just this: that we accept that we are under an obligation to work faithfully for our country, our family, our employers, our employees and our customers. Take a look at two examples of disloyalty about which we have heard this week. A dock strike is threatened because of a squabble between masters and men. Such a stoppage will be a vicious and staggering blow aimed at the prosperity of our nation. We have also read of tired passengers returning from their holidays with their families being forced by the porters at Paddington station to carry their own baggage because of a row between porters and their supervisors.
From these depressing thoughts it is a relief to turn our attention to our farming friends. Corn harvest is now over. Those of us who have had the time to stop and think cannot help being aware that the age-old spirit of loyalty to the harvest is as powerful today as at any time in the history of civilization. We have seen, once again, masters and men working in harmony so as to make certain that all is safely gathered in.
The townsmen have a lot to learn these days from the countrymen about the power of loyalty. Loyalty is not just a sentiment. It is the solid foundation on which alone a great nation can stand and endure.
This piece overlooks the fact that all had been safely gathered in from the 2,200 acres of Worlaby farm by my brother and a team of nine men. A generation before, the smaller farms that made up the acreage of the Worlaby estate had between them employed between 60 and 70 men to do the same job. There was much talk at the time of 'a flight from the land'; those in towns thought that nobody wanted to be a farm hand any more. In truth, people were turning from farming to factories simply because their jobs were disappearing (as, indeed, they had done before in the 1830's). Farmers had found better, more efficient ways of working than the intensive use of manpower.
In this respect, the farmers of thirty years ago were in exactly the same position that we are all in today. There just weren't the jobs to go round any more. This was not so in the food processing industry, which was booming at the time, and maybe Rudston's point about the need for total commitment to the demands of the land is actually underlined by the fact that what was almost invariably not gathered in, on a regular basis, was my brother's pea harvest. Peas have to be 'vined' (harvested) in a very small time slot, or they spoil. Bird's Eye factory workers invariably chose this time slot for their annual pay strike.
Rudston still had a company car, a Sunbeam Rapier, a nice car in my judgement but not to his taste. He achieved the distinction of knocking out the big ends simply by backing it out of the garage. The ground was icy, and he must have raced the high-performance engine. This car went at the end of his consultancy with Rolls-Royce and he bought, of all things, a second-hand Morris 1100.
Rudston always talked of Sir Henry Royce's death in 1933 with great sadness. On Wednesday, March 27th 1963, when Rudston was 71, The Guardian newspaper published a supplement to commemorate the centenary of Royce's birth. Rudston contributed, and what he said reveals much of the friendship and love between the two men. At 71, so soon after his retirement, he would have taken this commission as a great honour, and his work shows the influence of another friend of Sir Henry, Max Pemberton, whose massive book on the life of Sir Henry was certainly used as a source of reference by Rudston. Nevertheless, the special nature of the relationship between two great engineers is very apparent. The piece is reproduced in full. In much of the picture he paints of Sir Henry, Rudston could have been writing about himself:-
Royce was exacting in the demands he made on his staff. No-one who knew him well would deny that. Those destined to assist him personally were selected by what certainly appeared to be a ruthless process of elimination of the unfit. Regular working hours meant nothing to Royce. If there was a job to be done, a problem to be solved, work must go on far into the night, leaving only a few hours for sleep before returning to the attack.
Anyone who aspired to working for Royce had to be prepared to subordinate his private life absolutely to his employment. Discipline was so severe in the Manchester works when he was in control that a man seen loitering or joking at his machine or workbench was likely to be dismissed without notice. It used to be said that he allowed a man half a day off to get married.
But Royce was no tyrant. He took a very personal interest in each member of his staff, not only in his technical approach to his work but also in that which concerned the happiness of his private life. Royce's attitude towards his staff appeared to the casual observer to be a strange mixture of ruthlessness and kindly sympathy. In order to understand this seeming paradox it is necessary to realise that although Royce did not appear to adhere to any religious faith, he subjected himself to a rigid discipline.
Royce once told me that he believed man was put into the world so that he should do his utmost to improve it through his diligence. He lived this 'religion' up to his last hours of consciousness, and throughout his life he did his best to see that his staff followed his example. Here it is of interest to note that on a stone mantelpiece in his house at West Wittering were carved the words 'Quidvis Recte Factum Quamvis Humile Praeclarum'. This lettering was the work of Eric Gill, the sculptor, whom Royce met in West Wittering when Gill was staying with his father, the Vicar of West Wittering. Royce became friendly with Gill, and they often met. At one of their meetings Gill asked Royce what he thought was the basic reason for his success. Royce replied 'I have always believed that whatever I do, however humble the job is, if I do it as well as I can, it is noble'. Gill was so pleased with this thought that he had the words freely translated into Latin, and presented Royce with the inscription carved over his fireplace.
Royce could not tolerate insincerity, either in his work or socially. The importance of sincerity in engineering is paramount. This insistence on sincerity no doubt accounted for his friendliness with children, which was mutual. Children said what was in their mind, and he liked it that way. I remember seeing Royce showing off the features of a new car to a group of people outside his house. Among several adults was a little girl of about 10 or 11. She asked him quite an intelligent question, which he answered, and thereafter he concentrated his attention on the points she raised, forgetting all about the other members of the party. On the other hand, I was once with him at a tea party to which Dr. Hele-Shaw had invited Royce and others. Hele-Shaw was full of fun and given to practical joking. With great solemnity Hele-Shaw entertained his guests to a demonstration of water divining, using a hazel twig. This he manipulated so that it appeared to turn above a certain point on his sitting-room floor. It was a fairly obvious joke, but some members of the party appeared to be impressed. Royce, however, made it quite apparent that he was finding it difficult to be civil to Hele-Shaw thereafter, as Royce considered it was grossly improper for a man of science to deceive with intent those less educated than himself with a pretence of scientific experiment which was faked.
Royce used to refer to his men as 'Knights of the rubber' (By which he meant 'eraser' - JF). The amount of work put into each design was far in excess of anything practised elsewhere, and the utmost patience had to be exercised by all the members of his team when trying to meet the high standard which Royce insisted upon. Royce used to say that all the problems should be solved on the drawing board, and when the part was made and tested 'it should only be to prove that the design was right'. Some of his best work was, however, completed at almost incredible speed. In 1914, after war broke out, the Admiralty approached Royce to design a 250hp aircraft engine, and work on the project began in September 1914. This engine came to be known as the Eagle, and for its period the design was revolutionary and far in advance of anything in existence at the time. The first engine was running on the test bench in the beginning of March 1915, just six months after the first scheme was on paper, developing power in excess f the specification at the first attempt. The engine was an outstanding success from every point of view, and was still in use in various parts of the world ten years after the war ended in 1918. It never required any major modification in its service life.
It is true to say that the design was based on information obtained by Rolls-Royce's private research, the result of which at that date was not available to other makers. All Royce's instructions and designs had to be transmitted 200 miles to the works in Derby. Copies of Royce's correspondence about this time are still in existence, and show that he was at all times completely in touch, grasping the technical points at his seaside home in the south seemingly as easily as if he had been on the spot in the Derby works.
After the first world war, Rolls-Royce's interest in aircraft engines lapsed, as it was the policy of the management of the day to concentrate on motor cars, This policy was finally reversed by the intervention of Royce himself in 1927 (sic), and it was also Royce who made himself personally responsible on behalf of the company for the design of the famous R engine which enabled the Supermarine monoplane to win the International Schneider Trophy for Great Britain in 1929 ands again in 1931. The production of the R engine was as spectacular an achievement as the production of the Eagle engine of earlier days, both as regards the speed with which it was developed and the excellence of its performance.
Royce possessed a quite exceptional ability to inspire those who worked with him to reach heights of achievement which did not appear to be attainable. Nobody complained of overwork, and nobody suffered from what is now called a 'nervous breakdown'. If the 'old man' wanted it done, they did it - somehow. Royce seldom gave an emphatic instruction. He usually spoke very quietly and almost as though he was shy. He always had time to listen to what anyone had to say, however junior the speaker might be. He was extremely modest about his own achievements, and always ready to recognise and admire the good work of his competitors where this was justified. Those who worked with him at his home seemed to become imbued with his spirit. It was noticeable that they always seemed to understand what was in his mind, when he might appear far from lucid to a stranger. His sketches, badly drawn, generally very small and almost incomprehensible, were instantly transformed by his chief designer into beautiful freehand drawings in perfect perspective. They all talked his language, using vivid expressions which, to the uninitiated, had no relation to engineering terms. Even his way of talking, his changes of facial expression and verbal emphasis seemed to become common to his staff.
Royce was not a great inventor. He used to say 'We are not pioneers.' Judged by any standard he was a very great engineer with a brilliant analytical mind. When it is remembered that his regular education ceased in early youth and that thereafter he was self-taught, he may be rightly described as a genius. As a master of men he has seldom been equalled.
Readers will note that Rudston dates the re-entry of Rolls-Royce into the aero engine business as 1927 and not 1929. This we know to be wrong. Is this a simple mistake or (more likely I think) is Rudston giving us the date when Sir Henry himself became convinced that the Schneider engine development must go ahead, choosing to ignore the nonsense at Conduit Street which was to come?
If I have succeeded at all in my portrayal of Rudston the man, readers will have grasped that, although occasionally given to mild coarseness on a strictly man-to-man level, Rudston was a man with impeccable standards of personal behaviour, though admittedly he was tolerant of lower standards in others, perhaps because of his Doncaster years. He would overlook poor behaviour, but I believe would never have condoned unkindness. And yet, judged solely by behavioural standards, Rudston's eulogy of Royce is not very flattering! It was a bit rude of Sir Henry to ignore people who had probably travelled some way to see his new car. It was certainly rude to disapprove overtly of a host who was trying to entertain his guests with a harmless conjuring trick. As for tyrannising his people, The Magic of a Name by Peter Pugh confirms that Royce did allow a designer only half a day off to get married - and it was a Saturday! The designer was being punished because the bride in question was Royce's personal secretary. Thereafter, Royce employed a man in the job. To the best of my knowledge, this was the only time Royce ever denied time off for nuptuals. Rudston would never have behaved in this manner.
And yet, a eulogy it is. What Rudston would have found poor behaviour in others, he condones in Sir Henry. The clue to the bond between these two men surely lies in Sir Henry's absolute standards of engineering, illustrated by his belief that testing of a component should only be to prove 'that the design was right'. Royce knew perfectly well that this was a counsel of perfection that could never be achieved by a human being. According to Rudston, Royce had a quiet, rather high-pitched voice that would rise even further in pitch when excited. Rudston could mimic this voice quite well, as in the matter of the oil leak between the two halves of the Ghost's crankcase:- 'Yes, it always leaks! It does, you know. I've never got that right'.
To both Rudston and Royce, the concept of 'good enough' did not exist. This is very apparent, so far as Rudston is concerned, in my anecdotes of his personal engineering work. Perfection was the goal, but both men knew this was only in the province of some Master Architect. Their job was to approach perfection as closely as it was within their ability to do so. They were not high priests, but brothers in a sort of engineering religion with a deeply spiritual element. I believe that Sir Harry Ricardo, whose personal standards were much closer to Rudston's than Sir Henry's, was another of the same kind.
Rudston told my sister-in-law that the time he spent in Worlaby were the happiest days of his life, and I am sure that, left to himself, he would never have moved away from the beautiful home he had created there. My brother and sister-in-law could not have done more to ensure that they were settled in, and they soon made friends in Worlaby, in particular two elderly sisters, the Spilmans, who lived opposite The White House. It must have come as a great shock when they announced their intention to move to Brighton, where I was living.
In truth, Mollie had never settled to village life. Her story shows that the periods of her life when she was at her happiest were in the bawdy atmosphere of the 1914-1918 barrack room, and during the exciting action of the second world war. The rigid class structure of a Lincolnshire village made her uneasy.
Rudston bought a town cottage, 48 Borough Street, Brighton, which had room in the garden for an organ loft. He traded both his 1100 and Mollie's mini for a new Riley Elf, a sort of upmarket mini, and they made the move in the February of 1967. The ultimate decision to go was Rudston's. Although both seemed happy in Brighton, I think Mollie made more of it than Rudston. She rejoined her preferred church, a vast High Anglican red-brick edifice only a few minutes away from home, where the staff of two priests usually equalled the size of congregation. She went faithfully every Sunday, and she was saddened (and everyone else was extremely angry) when neither priest bothered to visit her during her terminal illness. She was only one minute from Brighton's main shopping thoroughfare, and found the huge shops, with their vast stock for tourists as well as residents, a very great joy. She became close to Margaret, my first wife, and also to Margaret's mother Lilian. The pair of grannies trooped up the steep hill to my daughter Lucy's Christening (Lucy is my fourth child) chuntering and wondering how many more times they would have to make that particular journey. Margaret and I lived close by, and we all formed the habit of dropping in on each other quite informally.
The Brighton family soon found that Mollie's four favourite words were: 'Darling! - Let's go shopping!' She showered Margaret and our daughters with gifts, but seemed to find great difficulty in accepting thanks. Handing over a quite obviously brand new garment, always in the right size for the recipient, she'd say something on the lines of: 'I was going to chuck this old thing out, but I wondered if it would be any use to you'. If she did parcel up a gift, the label usually told us that her pet cat was the donor.
Their only Christmas in Brighton was rather sad. We were to have spent it with my parents and Mollie had worked hard to make it memorable, but on the day, we were all in bed with 'flu. Mollie actually brought our dinner round to us, but we were all too ill to eat anything. We vowed to get it right the following year.
It was not to be. Mollie collapsed in her bank in March 1968 and died in the following November, her ten-stone cheeriness reduced to only four stone. To the end, she denied the fatal nature of her malady, and was planning the Christmas that never happened. Her last words were: 'Isn't it wonderful to be surrounded by so much love'. Rudston was deeply shocked by her death. He had always believed that he would be the first to go. A few days after she died, just before the funeral, I took him to Hove Park to see the little steam trains. The tiny engine came unhooked from the carriages as it was pushing its load of people into the makeshift station. The brake-less carriages rolled into the buffers, and everybody fell off backwards, on top of each other. Rudston collapsed with mirth. His emotions were very near the surface.
After her death, we discovered that Mollie had been a very efficient manager. There was more than enough in her bank account to cover the expenses of her funeral. She had probably been saving up for Christmas.
I took Rudston to London with the casket of ashes. He was going to spend time with Henry and Catherine in Worlaby, and there was to be a memorial service that I didn't attend. I'd said my goodbyes at the funeral in Brighton. We went to the Royal Automobile Club for lunch, and the porter dropped the brown paper-wrapped parcel. Rudston was distressed for an instant; then he laughed. 'She'd have enjoyed that', he said. I'm so grateful for the little time we had with them in Brighton.
Rudston vacillated for some time between Brighton and Worlaby as the place to spend his final years. In the end, he chose Worlaby, and this was certainly the right decision for him.
Worlaby House is a magnificent building in a small park whose trees were always faithfully husbanded by Henry, and could well pass for a country seat of the landed gentry. Henry and Catherine as a team turned it into the seat the family had never had, complete with family portraits and a great sense of history, and with such success that many people in the area believe that it had been in the family for a very long time. They actually moved in in 1959.
Although he lived as part of the family, Rudston had his own flat with sitting room, bedroom and bathroom within Worlaby House, and he installed his beloved residence organ in the family's billiard room.
By this time, Rudston's standards had become out of tune with the rest of the world. In 1970, Rolls-Royce crashed. It was Derby's major employer; its loss, and the failure of the many subcontractors who depended on it, affected around 40,000 families and effectively would have destroyed the City of Derby. At that time, the government's rescue package had not been formulated.
The chief executive had doubled his salary in that terrible year, in order to secure a better pension. I, a child of those times, was not particularly surprised. The company was going anyway, and nobody would be further hurt by the actions of someone from the boss class. We'd already come to expect that sort of thing. Rudston, though, was white with anger: 'He has betrayed his workforce. What a terrible example for Britain!' This demonstration of the standards of another age seems almost comic today.
After the crash, I telephoned Rudston in some anxiety. I believed he had a blind spot where the company was concerned, and that he had held a lot of shares. Was he penniless? If so, I assured him, he would always be looked after. He laughed. 'Oh, I got rid of those shares ages ago', he said. I think he'd sadly accepted that the days of the great engineers were gone for good. The world he'd known now belonged to a different breed.
Catherine promised that Rudston would die in his own bed, and honoured this promise, for which I am eternally grateful. He remained part of a happy, stable family to the end. He outlived mother for nine years, dying at Worlaby House on November 27th, 1977, which was Advent Sunday. They were years of decline. In the early seventies, the quality of his life was spoilt by gallstones, which meant that he had to live on a diet that he hated. He survived an operation in 1975 (in fact, he was pretty tough, and was found wandering around the hospital quite soon after the operation, drip trolleys in tow, looking for a lavatory). He was immensely proud of his gallstone, which he kept in a glass bottle. His last two years were of good quality. But atherosclerosis was taking its toll, and he was distressed to find his usefulness disappearing. I spent time with him in that year, taking notes for his life story. On one of these visits, he said to me in great despair: 'I can't do anything now'. Without the ability to practice engineering, he felt that his life had little purpose.
Rudston is buried with Mollie in the village of Worlaby, against the west wall of the parish church. Next to him is the grave of Dame Honor, the sister who became one of the world's leading cytologists. Their family has never forgotten them. My brother Henry's four sons built a little garden of remembrance around the graves and, though the family left Worlaby some years ago, the garden was still beautifully tended when I visited it this Spring.
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