ERNEST HIVES: 21 APRIL 1886 – 24 APRIL 1965
- A quick overview of the life and profession of Ernest Hives, born 21 April 1886
- Pivotal determine within the early days of the marque, driving Rolls-Royce’s success within the nice motor trials of the early twentieth Century, earlier than changing into Chairman of the Board in 1950
- Fourth in a sequence profiling the principal characters within the Rolls-Royce Motor Cars basis story because the marque celebrates its one hundred and twentieth anniversary in 2024
- Insights into the folks, personalities and intertwined relationships that indelibly formed the marque’s creation, improvement and lasting legacy
- Each account underlines and celebrates the important human dimension of ‘the best car in the world’
“Even for so gifted an engineer as Henry Royce, there’s a limit to how far theory can take you: there comes a point where someone has to determine whether your design actually works in practice. In the early days of Rolls-Royce, that was Ernest Hives. From humble origins, Hives turned his fascination for motor cars and outstanding self-taught driving skills into a glittering career with Rolls-Royce, first as an experimental test driver, then as one of the ‘works’ team contesting the great motor trials of the day. His observations and hands-on experiences from the road would have been crucial to Royce’s continuous improvement process, making him a key figure in the technical development of the ‘best car in the world’.
Andrew Ball, Head of Corporate Relations and Heritage, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
Ernest Walter Hives was born on 21 April 1886 in Reading, Berkshire. In 1898, aged just 12, he began a three-year apprenticeship with a local engineering company that had a sideline dealing in motor cars.
From the outset, the young Hives was captivated by these fascinating new machines. He saw his future in them and, like Henry Royce a generation earlier, he did not allow his humble background and limited formal education to impede his ambitions. He shared Royce’s unending capacity for hard work, putting in long hours and applying what was evidently a similarly lively and enquiring mind. In particular, he would watch and listen to those on the night shift, steadily building his knowledge of the motor cars’ inner workings and operation.
But his was not merely a theoretical interest, and he soon taught himself to drive by moving cars around the garage. We can assume this was with his employers’ blessing since, though still only 14, he quickly graduated to the road, where he taught clients to drive. His combination of technical understanding, an intuitive ‘feel’ for the motor car and outstanding practical skills would shape his career in the years that followed.
That nascent career took a defining turn sometime around 1903 (the precise date is not known) when Hives rendered assistance to a motorist who was having trouble with one of his motor cars (likewise, history does not record whether this was at the Reading garage or out on the open road). What is certain is the motorist’s identity: The Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls.
Whenever and wherever this encounter occurred, Rolls was so impressed that he promptly took Hives on as his personal chauffeur. The young man’s star continued to rise with a swift promotion to the position of mechanic at C S Rolls & Co, the prestigious London motor car dealership established by his new employer at the start of 1903.
But driving remained Hives’ true calling. He left C S Rolls & Co to work first at Owens and then Napier, for whom he drove in the gruelling Scottish Reliability Trials of 1907 and 1908, and also at the 1908 Brooklands meeting, where he sported jockey’s racing colours of yellow and white (which he described as looking like ‘a poached egg’).
In 1908, he made what would be the most pivotal move of his career; taking a job at Rolls-Royce, by now in its fourth year, as an experimental tester. His own account suggests he was less than overjoyed at the prospect, at least initially. “When I got to Derby in 1908 and walked out of the station it was raining hard,” he wrote later. “Looking up Midland Road, it was so drab that I spun a coin to decide whether to go on to Rolls-Royce or catch the next train home.” By such small possibilities, momentary choices and tiny margins for error are careers, lives and historical past itself so typically decided.
Rolls-Royce had created the brand new position of experimental tester following its exhibiting on the 1907 Scottish Reliability Trial. Not that the occasion had gone badly for the fledgling marque, quite the opposite: the 40/50 H.P. – higher generally known as the Silver Ghost – had comprehensively crushed the opposition, together with the Napier pushed by Hives; much more impressively, the punishing 15,000-mile take a look at had been the motor automobile’s first aggressive endurance run. Never one to relaxation on his laurels, nonetheless, Henry Royce noticed this overwhelming success as conclusive proof of the necessity for continued testing to, in his personal phrases, ‘take the best that exists and make it better’.
Hives joined the corporate’s newly fashioned experimental division, and instantly proved a pure at this extremely structured, technically exacting work. His insights into the subtleties of a motor automobile’s efficiency and responses – that it developed a resonance noise at a sure velocity, that the chassis felt both too stiff or not stiff sufficient below cornering, or that the engine appeared to have a ‘flat spot’ at a selected rpm (revolutions per minute) – would have been invaluable to Royce and his design workforce. Indeed, such had been his presents that when the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) introduced its headline 1911 endurance trial from London to Edinburgh and again, Hives was robotically chosen to drive Rolls-Royce’s entry: Silver Ghost 1701.
Designed as an ‘Experimental Speed Car’, 1701 simply gained the occasion, through which entrants accomplished your complete 794-mile journey between the 2 capitals locked in high gear. Under Hives’ knowledgeable dealing with, the automobile averaged nearly 20mph and returned a then unheard‑of gasoline effectivity of over 24mpg – genuinely astonishing figures given the parlous state of Edwardian Britain’s roads, and a testomony to Hives’ abilities, braveness and powers of focus behind the wheel, in addition to Royce’s engineering.
Rolls-Royce adopted up this efficiency by contesting the much more daunting Alpine Trials, held over eight days and a couple of,600km on a few of the highest roads in Europe. After an embarrassing underperformance by a ‘privateer’ automobile in 1912, Managing Director Claude Johnson was wanting to set the document straight and approached the 1913 occasion in sometimes energetic and uncompromising vogue. He assembled an official ‘works’ workforce of three specifically ready Silver Ghosts, every with a hand-picked driver and mechanic, plus a fourth automobile constructed to the identical specification pushed by personal proprietor James Radley. Hives was one of many firm’s high drivers – as confirmed by his being the primary to exceed 100mph in a Silver Ghost – and subsequently an apparent choice for Johnson’s new crack workforce. Piloting the Number Two automobile, accompanied by mechanic George Hancock, he accomplished a near-faultless run (he was docked a single level for stalling on leaving the parking space in Salzburg) that earned him one of many workforce’s three silver medals, in an total efficiency that noticed the Silver Ghosts typically accepted as ‘the fastest, quietest and strongest cars in the event’.
Alongside his racing exploits, Hives continued to make an important contribution to Rolls-Royce’s analysis and improvement efforts as an experimental tester, introducing the primary ‘chassis bump rig’, that would take a look at chassis’ elements to destruction. He additionally undertook the nonetheless probably hazardous work of testing Royce’s newest designs on the open highway. Having settled on France as the perfect place to hold out high-speed highway testing, he made common sorties alongside a route he devised between Paris and Royce’s winter house at Le Canadel, close to Nice. For somebody who had adored motor vehicles since childhood, this will need to have been as near the proper job as it’s attainable to get.
The natural-born expertise and sheer love of driving that Hives first demonstrated as an adolescent by no means left him. Many who knew him spoke of a ‘sixth sense’ he had when driving, seeming to know instinctively if the highway forward was clear and when he may take the quickest line via a nook or wanted to ease off.
As his profession progressed, Hives turned more and more concerned with growing Rolls-Royce’s aero engines in addition to its automotive merchandise. In 1937, he turned a Board Director and General Works Manager; his most vital act was to separate the corporate’s motor automobile (chassis) and aero engine operations into two unbiased entities, which stays the case to this present day.
In 1946, he turned Managing Director, and in 1950, Chairman of the Board: that very same 12 months, he obtained a peerage and, as 1st Baron Hives, accomplished a unprecedented journey from working as Charles Rolls’s chauffeur to main the nice firm his late employer had co-founded nearly 50 years earlier. Yet the person who had doggedly labored his manner up from a Reading storage to the House of Lords at all times remained modest, describing himself with an understatement worthy of Royce’s equally understated self-characterisation as ‘just a mechanic’. Respectfully, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars begs to vary.
