Charles Rolls

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a Bournemouth crowd, a biplane engine, then nothing)
Nineteen ten. He was thirty-two.

[Verse 1]
The Honourable Charles Stewart Rolls, of Monmouthshire,
motorist, balloonist, aviator, and salesman,
who met a quiet engineer named Henry Royce in Manchester
and said: you build them, I will sell them, and we'll put both names on.
Two years of partnership. That's all the two of them had.
Then Rolls found aeroplanes, and aeroplanes were new.

[Chorus]
First Englishman killed in a powered aeroplane crash!
Bournemouth, July the twelfth, nineteen hundred and ten!
A display, a crowd, a tailplane failing, and a man
whose surname is now a byword for the finest thing on earth!
Charles Rolls. Thirty-two years old.
He had the name for two years. It has had a century.

[Verse 2]
And Royce lived on till 'thirty-three, and built and built,
and never much liked being photographed or being known,
and the two names sit together on a grille in perfect balance
as if they were two equal men across an equal span.
They weren't. One of them was there for twenty-four months
and then was gone, and the name kept going without him.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There's a particular unfairness in a hyphenated name:
it implies a partnership of equals and a shared long labour,
and half the time it's a young man who died early
carried the rest of the century by the one who kept working.
Rolls is not a company. Rolls was a person. Briefly.
The hyphen is doing an enormous amount of work.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the crowd, and then silence)
Thirty-two.
He'd had the name for two years.