Chris Haynes

As the Haynes Motor Museum celebrates its 40th anniversary, its founder's son Chris Haynes recalls life with his father – and growing up in petrolhead heaven

- Mark Dixon

‘DID I HAVE A CHOICE?’ splutters Chris Haynes in mock indignation when I ask him whether he had an interest in cars as a child. Well, sometimes the enthusiasm of the father is not passed down to his offspring... but, as it happens, Chris and his elder brothers Marc and John - always known as ‘J’ to distinguish him from their dad - all inherited that gene. Just as well, since all three have been closely involved with their father’s legacy, the Haynes Motor Museum that was set up 40 years ago.

‘I was 12 when the museum was founded in 1985,’ explains Chris. ‘The success of the Haynes Manuals had allowed my father to build up a significant car collection, which was dotted in sheds and barns all over the place. One of the impulses to set up the museum was that someone asked him where his AC Cobra was, and he couldn’t remember! But, of course, things were very different in the ’70s and ’80s.

‘At the time, two very significant car collections were being sold off because their owners had died, and my father thought that was a horrifying prospect. By setting up a charitable trust, he could donate his cars to the trust and keep them in one place, and give something back to the motoring world that had given him so much pleasure and success.’

Many readers will have some acquaintance with the John Haynes story; how he realised that factory workshop manuals were too technical for the average car owner, so set out to publish his own. The 250 copies of his first booklet Building a 750 Special, run off on a Gestetner duplicator when he was 16, sold out in ten days but things got into gear during a posting to Aden with the RAF in 1964, when he helped a friend rebuild an Austin-Healey Sprite and produced the first recognisable Haynes Owner's Workshop Manual about it.