Charles Stewart Rolls’ sad end

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On July the 12th it is 110 years ago that Charles Stewart Rolls died in a tragic aviation accident. In a demonstration run during an air show in Bournemouth, Rolls’ Wright Flyer fell from the air, killing the man, 32 years young, under the eyes of the spectators. Just 10 days earlier Rolls had crossed the channel from the UK to France and back – non-stop - in 90 minutes. Louis Bleriot’s famous crossing of the same Channel may have happened a year earlier, Rolls’ record flight definitely took this idea one step further. King George sent a personal message of congratulations to the daredevil.

But by the time Rolls had already resigned as a motor manufacturer, fully devoting his life to aviation rather than motoring and saying that he preferred flying over driving since "there are no policemen in the air". Rolls was only the second person in Britain to hold a pilot's licence and sadly the first to die in an aircraft accident.

The tale of Rolls’ – the son of Lord and Lady Llangattock of Monmouthshire - meeting with Royce has often been told. On May 4, 1904, CS Rolls travelled from London to the Midland Hotel in Manchester to meet an engineer named Henry Royce. He was a man whose British-built automobiles were said to embody qualities of refinement and silence - the qualities Charles Rolls so eagerly sought in the cars sold through his London-based business, C.S Rolls and Co. Would it surprise CS Rolls if he’d found out that Rolls-Royce, over a decade later, would live forth both as an automobile manufacturer and as an aero-engine manufacturer..?

Words by Jeroen Booij.

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