RB 211 ORIGIN.

[Stanley]

RB 211 ORIGIN.

In November 1940 Rover took over several mills in Barlick and the surrounding district and transferred their operations into them. Bankfield Shed in Barlick was the site chosen to house an experimental division of the company under the direction of a man called Frank Whittle. This was the refinement of the first experimental jet engine. The Germans were also working along the same lines but were hampered by lack of vision and, in the end, by military defeat. In 1942 Rolls Royce took over the Rover aero engine interests and Barlick became the main centre for the design and testing of the new engines. To this day, Barlick is a world centre of design and manufacture of turbine and fan blades and Rolls still have two factories in the town.

Incidentally, it has often been said that the specification number of the first commercially successful large fan engine, the RB211 was based on ‘Rolls Barnoldswick’. It would be nice if this was true but Les Say, a works manager at Rolls in Barlick told me that this wasn’t true, it was simply a design number picked out in the usual way.

Much later I bought the three volumes of the official history of Rolls Royce and on page 37 of volume II Peter Pugh says: “Over the years there has been considerable debate about the origin of Rolls-Royce prefixing its aero engine numbers with the letters RB. The custom began in the summer of 1944. Rolls-Royce had inherited Whittle's method of numbering engines when it took over the Rover gas turbine business but the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP) asked for a change to prevent confusion between engine types and bomber aircraft types. Before this the W.2 derived engines produced by Rover, and later by Rolls-Royce, were known by Whittle's type-number with suffixes denoting the sub-type W.2B/23, W.2B/26, W.213/37 and W.2B/4 1. Inevitably these were abbreviated to B.23, B.26, B.37 and B.41 which caused confusion with bomber aircraft numbers used by MAP. The engines were reclassified using the prefix, RB, to denote Rolls Barnoldswick.”

Of course Les didn’t have the advantage of the research done by Peter Pugh as official historian for RR. I think we can take Peter as the definitive word on this one.

SCG/13 November 2007

[Stanley]

I hope that clears that up!

[Stanley]

I still think that Peter Pugh's evidence is perhaps the best.
Incidentally I got to know Les Say because like me he was one of the founding trustees of the Bancroft Trust.