John Haynes
Creator of the Haynes car manuals that enabled many happy hours of tinkering under the bonnet
JOHN HAYNES, who has died aged 80, was the creator of the famous Haynes motor manuals, the car maintenance guides regarded as essential tools for those who like to spend their Sunday mornings under the bonnet tinkering with carburettors and pistons. The first Haynes Manual, for the Austin Healey Sprite, was published in 1966, and the first print run of 3,000 sold out in less than three months. Since then more than 200 million Haynes Manuals have been sold around the world and in 1979 Haynes Publishing Group floated on the stock market.
John Harold Haynes was born on March 25 1938 in Ceylon, where his father, Harold, was the manager of a tea plantation. From an early age John had a passion for cars, a passion which flowered at Sutton Valence School, Kent, where he persuaded his housemaster to allow him to miss rugby and instead spend his time souping up an Austin 7 he had bought for £15 into a more sporty, lightweight Austin 7 “Special”.
After selling the little car for £100 he wrote a 48-page, five-shilling booklet about how he did it. To his surprise, the print run of 250 copies sold out almost instantly.
After leaving school Haynes went into business in a small way selling various specialist books by mail order. Even when he was called up for National Service in the RAF in 1957 and was commissioned as a pilot officer, he continued with his budding business, establishing JH Haynes & Co in May 1960 with four titles in print, including the dubious-sounding High Speed Driving, for sale at 8s 11d.
The company operated from a rented single room in Regent Street, London, and was run alongside a mail order business in Cambridge.
Disaster struck when Haynes’s garage caught fire and his entire stock of 3,000 books was destroyed. But he bounced back and began dispatching stock from his parents’ home at Yeovil, Somerset.
In 1965 he was based with the RAF in Aden, where a colleague was having trouble rebuilding a beaten-up Austin Healey “Frogeye” Sprite. The car had come with a jargon-ridden British Motor Corporation manual which they found almost impossible to understand.
“I thought to myself: ‘I can do better than this’,” Haynes recalled. “So we bought an Asahi Pentax camera, and set about taking [the car] apart piece by piece and putting it back together.”
They photographed its parts and recorded each section of the operation as they reassembled it, in a readily comprehensible, how-to-do-this-yourself manner.
When the booklet sold out, Haynes saw he had a winning formula and applied the same techniques to manuals for other cars as well as motor cycles and musical instruments. His brother David printed the early manuals in Yeovil, where they opened a motorists’ bookshop.
By 1967 Haynes decided that he wanted to focus on the books full-time and left the RAF as a flight lieutenant.
Over the next 50 years, Haynes Manuals, with their familiar red and yellow logo, became an indispensable part of the kit for drivers looking to trim their motoring bills or chat knowledgeably about bleed nipples and big ends with mechanically minded friends. They came into their own during the 1970s when British cars became notorious for their poor build quality and unreliability.
The manuals became so recognisable that when a car manufacturer produced a press advert mimicking the style of a Haynes manual without permission, Haynes successfully sued for damages.
The business grew rapidly, expanding into Europe and North America, and in 1972 the company moved into more spacious premises based around an old Unigate creamery at Sparkford, Somerset. In 1979 the business floated on the stock exchange, though the family retained a majority of the stock. By 2011, 80 per cent of cars on the road were reported to have been given the Haynes treatment in some form.
Though motor manuals remained the bedrock of the business, in recent years the brand has printed detailed guides to such vehicles as the Flying Scotsman and extended successfully into historic aircraft, with detailed “owners’ workshop manuals” to the Spitfire, the Buccaneer, and the Shackleton maritime patrol aircraft, among others. There was even a “manual” for the USS Enterprise spacecraft from Star Trek.
There have even been Haynes Manuals on gay men’s health, a Haynes guide to babies for new dads (explaining infants in practical terms, the nappy change almost like an oil check) and a DIY wedding manual.
In June 2010 Haynes stepped down as chairman of the company. His son J Haynes (as he is known) took over: interviewed by Alan Tovey in The Telegraph in 2014, he maintained that the manuals still had a place despite the increasing sophistication of modern engines: “Today there’s an opportunity to look after and maintain them now, rather than do huge amounts of repair. Oil needs to be changed, brake pads wear out, fuses go, bulbs go.”
John Haynes always retained his passion for cars and became a notable collector. In 1985 he founded the Haynes International Motor Museum in Sparkford as a charitable trust, bequeathing to it his collection of 30 cars. The museum now displays more than 400 vehicles, and attracts more than 125,000 visitors a year. In 2014 it was recognised as Museum of the Year at the International Historic Motoring Awards.
Haynes was often to be found in the museum’s café, happily chatting to visitors.
When in 1995 he was appointed OBE by the Prince of Wales, the prince asked him if he had a manual for his Aston Martin. “I just replied: ‘No’,” Haynes recalled. “Of course, what I should have said was: ‘If you lend us your Aston long enough for us to take it apart and put it back together, you can have the first copy’.”
Haynes is survived by his wife Annette and by two sons. Another son died in October last year.