Preface
The concluding chapter of Rolls-Royce:
the Growth of a Firm describes the unprecedented
expansion of the company's aero-engine production, during
the First World War, the novel experience of its
management in high-level negotiations with Air Ministry,
Admiralty and War
Office ministers and officials within the United Kingdom,
and the British Purchasing Mission and various
sub-contractors within the United States. The procedures
involved in the disengagement from war were themselves
complex and demanding. It was the company's first
extensive experience of what was to become, after little
more than a decade of apparent pre-war normality, the
complex environment of State monopsony in the field of
aircraft engines, to which the motor-car business
eventually became almost a secondary interest. In 1919
and 1920 there was evidently a strong belief that much of
the pre-1914 environment could be restored and the reflex
actions of the company generally suggest a concerted
effort to return to the familiar. But great wars shatter
the moulds in which they originate. Things are never
quite the same. Markets change, the old security is
challenged by new products and opportunities. Imagination
and enterprise are at a premium and firms which give full
scope to both survive at the expense of those which do
not. Two of Rolls-Royce's three founding patrons, Royce
and Johnson, were still alive, although Royce was an
invalid whose energies had to be most carefully sustained
and husbanded in an environment specially arranged for
this purpose. Johnson maintained a vigorous and forceful
presence in the company's affairs, though he continued to
be as self-effacing as ever, declining the knighthood
which he was offered at the end of the war. Both these
men nevertheless realised that adaptation was the key to
survival in an era which was to prove as testing as any
which the company had lived through. It could accurately
be described as `The Years of Supremacy', for in both the
chosen fields of technology - aero-engine and automobile
- the company was to entrench the world-wide reputation
which its products had acquired. But this required
prodigious efforts and many mistakes were made - and,
within the family at Derby, admitted. The qualities which
predominate are those of endurance, the ability to
anticipate and survive great technical challenges, strong
commercial competition, the appalling near-disaster of
the Great Depression, and the immense problems which
rearmament presented both to designers and
administrators.
At the end of the period covered in this volume (1939) a
new generation was at the helm. The personalities who
gave their names to the institution had disappeared,
leaving a reputation to be sustained which was as
challenging as any that has ever been inherited by the
management of a British institution. There are a few -
the Brigade of Guards, the Royal Society, All Souls, the
Royal College of Surgeons, the Cavendish Laboratory - in
which a tradition of excellence and achievement is
regarded as fundamental to the survival of each in its
own sphere. In this great and continuing national
tapestry Rolls-Royce represented a similar ambition in a
field which has increased steadily in importance as the
nation's survival has come to depend less on the
traditional factors which dominated the nineteenth
century and much more on industrial performance. New men
were required in new institutions. New traditions of
excellence had to be established in an unfamiliar
environment. The arduous nature of that continuing
challenge is described in the chapters which follow.
I.S.L.
September 1977
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