What Does the Rolls-Royce RR Logo Mean?

Henry Royce was an engineer from Manchester who started an electrical and mechanical business in 1884 and became known for his cranes. After building three experimental cars he met the London motor dealer Charles Rolls at the Midland Hotel in Manchester on 4 May 1904. That December Rolls agreed to sell every car Royce could make under the Rolls-Royce name. Rolls-Royce Limited was registered on 15 March 1906.

The monogram follows from that deal. One R stands for Rolls, the other for Royce, and the two overlap so the pair reads as a single shape. On the grille badge the two surnames are spelled out as well, ROLLS in a panel at the top and ROYCE in a matching panel at the bottom. The sources used here do not credit a designer for the monogram.

The split mirrors the real roles. Rolls sold and promoted the cars, praising their quietness and smoothness, and Royce designed and built them. Rolls was killed in a flying accident in 1910, and Royce died in 1933. The manager Claude Johnson, who helped bring them together, described himself as the hyphen in the name.

Early advertising pushed Rolls more than Royce. The later badge gave both surnames equal weight, with the double R sitting exactly between them.

Early radiator badges carried the monogram in red. In 1933 it was changed to black. A common story says this was a mark of respect for Henry Royce, who died that year. According to the Wikipedia account of the company, the documented reason is different: the red sometimes clashed with the coachwork color a client had chosen, and the change was not made as a mark of respect for Royce, whatever is commonly stated.

That is worth knowing, because the mourning version is repeated all over the internet.

The figure of a woman leaning forward with her robes streaming back like wings is not part of the RR monogram. The first Rolls-Royce cars of 1904 had the emblem and no mascot. Claude Johnson later asked for a more dignified ornament, and the sculptor Charles Sykes presented the Spirit of Ecstasy in February 1911. Eleanor Thornton, the secretary of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, is credited as the model for The Whisper, the figure that led to it. Whether she also posed for the final version is only said to be possible.

So a Rolls-Royce has two identifiers: the double R on the grille and the Spirit of Ecstasy above it.

The earliest artwork in our archive is a heraldic crest around a ROLLS ROYCE plate, and a second crest adds the line "The Best Car in the World," a phrase Autocar coined in 1907. A bare double R in an oval cartouche also appears. A 1973 badge has a navy plate with a silver-gray double R and no words. The familiar tall grille badge with ROLLS and ROYCE dates in the archive to 1998, the year BMW licensed the name and logo, and the current archived logo is a solid black double R with no plate or wording. The company's reasons for that last simplification are not documented in the sources used here.