Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. 1988 copy. Pages in good condition. Some light marking due to age. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> It would be hard to find two men born with the same surname so totally different in circumstance as S.C. Rolls the author of this book and the Hon. C.S. Rolls of Rolls-Royce fame. The former a lowly-born tough little artisan motor mechanic; the latter the inspired young aristocrat with a passion for motor cars and a Cambridge University engineering degree – who joined F.H. Royce to establish Rolls-Royce in 1904. Sam died well into his nineties in a Northampton nursing home whilst Charles crashed to his death the first Englishman to be killed in a flying accident – in 1910 when only thirty-three. Both achieved lasting fame from their very special relationship with the immortal Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost motor car which by 1914 had achieved world acclaim and had justly acquired an unsurpassable reputation and the soubriquet ‘The Best Car in the World’. Sam Rolls was one of that generation of noble and passionate young patriots who thronged to the recruiting offices when the call to arms rang forth in 1914. As a qualified motor mechanic with a full apprenticeship behind him he was master of his trade at a time when the horse was still paramount in military minds and upon the field of battle. Very early in 1914 Churchill thankfully back in the Admiralty – had evaluated the potentia! danger of that new and menacing dragon of the clouds the Zeppelin. Conscious of the great damage these machines could inflict upon property and morale on the British mainland he ordered the flimsy content of the Royal Naval Air Service to France with instructions to deny the maintenance of Zeppelin bases within an area of one hundred miles radius of Dunkirk. (SP)