Royal Enfield: Not 'Royal,' not in 'Enfield'

An antique Enfield rifle made by BSA was appropriately on display at a motorcycle show, next to a World War I BSA motorcycle. What did it have to do with Royal Enfield? Nothing.

 As with so many other realizations in my life, it started with my wife. 

She was reading my item about a 1915 BSA motorcycle displayed at the Dania Beach Vintage Motorcycle Show. The motorcycle was displayed alongside a World War I British Enfield rifle, manufactured by BSA. 

"Oh, so this combines both BSA and Royal Enfield!" she commented. 

"What???" I responded. Then I saw what she meant. 

How had I failed to realize this all along? 

The name "Royal Enfield" is a complete fiction, a creation of clever marketing. 

Royal Enfield, of course, has nothing to do with BSA (although there was also a BSA factory in Redditch, England, ancestral home of Royal Enfield).

Royal Enfield has nothing, really, to do with the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, England, which designed that rifle.

Royal Enfield is in no real sense "royal." Unlike the Royal small arms factory, the motorcycle company never belonged to the monarch.

Royal Enfield's longtime motto, "Made Like a Gun" may be a valid comparison, but Royal Enfield never made small arms itself, although it certainly made a wide variety of armaments, including cannon shells and parts for guns.

Royal Enfield made, and still does make, "Bullet" motorcycles, but although it once made shells for cannons, I don't know of it having made what are commonly called "bullets."

Royal Enfield products have always stood on their merits. But, apparently, the firm's marketing in its early days relied on stolen prestige.

The British firm Royal Enfield descended from George Townsend and Company, a maker of needles in Hunt End, near Redditch. The bicycle craze of the 1880s pulled the firm into making bicycle parts and, by 1890, its own bicycles.

When Albert Eadie took over and became managing director in 1891, the name changed to Eadie Manufacturing. Author Peter Miller describes what came next in his book "Royal Enfield, The Early History."

Towards the end of 1892 "the Eadie Manufacturing Company gained a sizeable contract for the supply of Enfield rifle components to the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield in Middlesex. The contract was to prove highly lucrative and helped guarantee the future of the company."

The Eadie company was just adding a new line of bicycles equipped with the new Dunlop pneumatic tires, replacing sold tires.

"In recognition of the successful completion of the contract with the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, it was decided these should be marketed under the Enfield name," Miller writes.

This was obviously a matter of courting fame by association.

In 1893 the word "Royal" was added to "Enfield" to designate a line of even higher quality bicycles to be sold alongside the Enfields.

The trademark logo, usually displaying a cannon, and the motto "Made Like a Gun," came the same year.

Royal Enfield's "Made Like a Gun" logo usually featured a cannon, but this 1902 ad for its first motorcycle featured a military rifle with bayonet. The Enfield armory had stopped production of percussion cap rifles like the one shown in 1867, long before the Enfield Cycle Co. formed.

Also in 1893, the Enfield Manufacturing Company was formed to market the bicycles made by the Eadie company.

In 1896 the New Enfield Cycle Company formed to combine the Enfield sales department and the division of the Eadie company that was making its wares. (Eadie separately continued making bicycles, and was eventually acquired by BSA!)

There were many corporate changes to come, including dropping the "New" from the Enfield Cycle Company name, and getting into, and then out of, the business of making automobiles.

By 1898, all machines were identified as "Royal Enfields."

Of course, these were all still bicycles!

The first two-wheeler Royal Enfield we would recognize as a motorcycle appeared in 1901. But, in 1906, the Enfield Cycle Company dropped motorcycles, sales of which were in a slump, and fell back on its profitable production of bicycles.

Royal Enfield was back in the motorcycle business in 1910, when the market perked up.

The "Bullet" name, meant for sports models, came along in 1933.

For a far more complete version of the early history of Royal Enfield, see Jorge Pullin's year-by-year "Virtual Museum" relating the events of 1898 to 1929 on his blog "My Royal Enfields."