I have one of these from The Bay a few years back which had been completely restored. Nice rod, excellent for general float fishing.
Some general info on Mordex that I got from some basic research a few years back: Mordex appears to have started out as a precision engineering company in Sheffield in the mid 50's before going into making centrepin reels then branching out into general tackle including rods of all sorts: hollow cane with split top joints, all split cane float rods (the Popular and the De Luxe), solid fibre glass pike and spinning rods; hollow glass match rods with metal ferrules (like the Allcock's 'Billy Lane'), tubular steel rods very similar to the Taperflash by Accles and Pollock (they may have bought up the last of A&P's stock when they decided to stop making the rods and then rebadged them as their own) and finally spigot glass rods. They also put out such things as shot and hook lengths. It's possible that the reels, which were 'budget' versions of things like the Aerial (Merlin) and G&Y reels whose names all began with 'M', were the only thing Mordex actually made themselves. They were notable for their decal badges. All the rest of the stuff they put out was rebadged, although they may have just got the blanks in for rods (I believe they used some from Sportex also based in Sheffield) and finished them off themselves. As you might expect Mordex tackle turns up regularly at Sheffield auctions, car boots and junk shops. Back in the early 60s Sheffield Anglers' Society had 40,000 members, almost as many as Birmingham, so they weren't short of customers.
Their badge was actually
Royle Seal, Black Seal was a different company from near London, although the two logos are simialr. They might have tried to use Royal Seal initially but would not have been allowed to register it as a trademark (as it would imply Royal Approval). Their motto 'Flectes non frangas' was a pun on a Latin motto
Frangas non flectes often taken to apply to the law meaning (more or less) 'I can be broken but not bent' whereas the reversal on Mordex rods means, of course, that the rods would bend but not break.
Fairly likely that someone at the firm would have a degree in engineering (which then as now Sheffield University specialised in). In the 40s and 50s many universities, not just the Oxbridge ones, had O Level Latin as an entrance requirement for Arts degrees at least (a practice that continued until the late 60s at some) and so in grammar schools of the time Latin was routinely taught pre-sixth form to all those thought capable of university entrance, it was only when they came to sixth form that people chose arts or science stream (I chose something else). So not at all unlikely that an engineer back then might know Latin. The company was always something of an oddity.
Mordex started out, AFAIK, at a site on Petre St in Attercliffe now occupied by the English Pewter Company then moved in the late 50s to share premises with Hill Brothers in the W W Laycock Silversmiths Works (not to be confused with Laycock Engineering) near Sheffield Station, here's what it looked like 12 years ago before partial demolition and transformation into student housing
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.3758637 ... 312!8i6656 and here's what a bunch of 'urban explorers' found before then
https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/w ... 014.90272/. They then moved in 1968 to a building on Andrew St in an area called the Wicker which was, and still is, home to a lot of small scale back street engineering enterprises, with a subsidiary works on Snow Hill nearby. Finally in 1985 they're back on Andrew Street in a building named 'Royle Seal House' (which may well have been their original home there renamed) and they appear to have gone out of business in the late 80s (a lot of companies did) with Andrew St being subsequently demolished as part of a ring road development called 'Derek Dooley Way'.