The gravestone of Charles Stewart Rolls

Image: © Jeremy Bolwell Taken: 23 Mar 2013

Charles Stewart Rolls (1877–1910) is best known as half of the famous motoring and engineering brand but was also an aviation pioneer and visionary. He was born in London into a family with land and estates locally here in rural Monmouthshire. He died in an early flying accident, aged just 32, at a flying display in Bournemouth. Charles Rolls was educated at Eton College, where he was nicknamed Dirty Rolls due to his passion for engineering, and Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied mechanical and applied science. He was very bright, dynamic and well-connected. He travelled to Paris at 18 to buy his first car, a Peugeot Phaeton, apparently claimed as the first car to be based in Cambridge and one of the first three cars owned in all of Wales. Rolls campaigned against restrictions imposed on 'new fangled' motor vehicles by vested interests who used the Locomotive Act to try and smother the infant car industry in Great Britain and became a founder member of the Automobile Club of Great Britain at 19. Rolls graduated from Cambridge, where he also won a Half Blue at cycling, and began his engineering career on the steam yacht Santa Maria, quicky followed by a position at the London and North Western Railway works in Crewe. However, his talents lay in salesmanship, motoring pioneering, envisioning progress in motor cars and engines and he was not a first class engineer but a big ideas man. In January 1903 with the help of £6,600 provided by his wealthy father, he started one of Britain's very first car dealerships, called C.S.Rolls & Co. and based in Fulham, importing and selling French Peugeot and Belgian Minerva vehicles. It was at this stage that Rolls was introduced to a Henry Royce a by Henry Edmunds, a mutual friend and also a director of Royce Ltd at the Midland Hotel, Manchester, on 4 May 1904. Rolls was impressed with the early Royce engines and agreed to take and sell all the cars Royce could make. These would now be badged as Rolls-Royces. Charles Rolls was Technical Managing Director on a salary of £750 per annum plus 4% of the profits in excess of £10,000. Rolls provided the money and business acumen to complement Royce's advanced engineering and technical expertise and experience. By 1906 Rolls travelled to the USA to promote the new Rolls-Royce cars. They were already winning awards for quality and reliability but Rolls' interest in the business was starting to wane and in 1909 he resigned as Technical Managing Director and became a non-executive director in order to indulge his real passion - flying. Rolls had been initially a balloonist, making over 170 balloon ascents. He was a founding member of the Royal Aero Club in 1903 and was the second person in Britain to be licensed to fly by it. In 1903 he also won the Gordon Bennett Gold Medal for the longest single flight time. He had tried to persuade Royce to design an aero engine but Royce was a car man. In 1909 Rolls bought a Wright Flyer aircraft built by Short Brothers under licence from the famous Wright Brothers and quickly made more than 200 flights. On 2 June 1910, he became the first man to make a non-stop double crossing of the English Channel in this plane, taking 95 minutes – faster than Blériot. On 12 July 1910 Rolls was killed in an air crash at Hengistbury Airfield, Bournemouth when the tail of his Wright Flyer broke off during a flying display. He was the first Briton to be killed in an aeronautical accident with a powered aircraft and the eleventh internationally. A statue in his memory, depicting him holding a biplane model, was erected in Agincourt Square, Monmouth. His grave here bears the inscription 'Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God'

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