People say that, if I had a 10 per cent share in the drivers I have helped launch, I could retire. But that’s never been the aim. The goal has been to work with talented young drivers, get them in a Zip Kart and win everything there is to win.
It’s fair to say karting took over my life. It has taken me to the heights while providing enough kicks in the pants to stop me getting too cocky. It helped me through personal tragedies I thought would destroy me. Because of karting I have travelled the world, got to know a lot of interesting people, including some exceptionally beautiful women, and even entertained a future king and his brother. The buzz that captivated a sixteen-year-old on his first drive has never left him. I guess I’ve gone through life with a rocket up my backside.
It’s hard to believe your life is going to be ordinary when your birth is greeted by local church bells ringing for all they are worth. Of course, there are people who will tell you that the clamour outside the window of the maternity ward in Hampstead at precisely noon on 22 April 1946 was to mark the start of the annual fair, and that those bells had pealed like that on Easter Monday since the nineteenth century. But I prefer to believe they were a signal, telling me I was especially welcome into this world.
That was certainly the way my dad, Mark William Hines, once of Ipswich but by then a successful entrepreneur in Finchley, made me feel. And my mother, Maudie Lavinia Hines, saw me as a very special gift. She loved children and always said she wanted five or six, but she suffered several miscarriages and one son was stillborn, so I turned out to be her only child and was spoiled rotten by a very special mum.
They took me home to our large Victorian house at 26 Church Crescent, Finchley, where the council had moved them when their place in Long Lane was bombed during the war. By the time I was born, Dad had managed to raise a mortgage and bought the place for £2,250. Mum’s parents, Alfred and Maude Cushing, lived on the second floor and we also shared the house with a series of dogs. I’ve always been a dog lover, which may explain why I’ve known a few of the two-legged variety over the years.
The house was just a few hundred yards from Dad’s bike business and, as I grew up, the double-fronted shop next to a chemist’s became one of the centres of my universe. Dad started the firm shortly after World War Two. He’d made a few bob when he came out of the army by buying vegetables and selling them from a big carrier on the front of his bike. Rationing was still in force and, as a sideline, he would also collect people’s ration books and then go to the local grocer or butcher and negotiate a deal that meant everyone had their ration and he received a bit extra to sell on the side.
His best friend was Wally Green. They became mates in the army, where their sparky spirits often got them into and out of a variety of scrapes. At one stage, they were separated from their unit in a battle but managed to find their way back to their base, by now wearing bits and pieces of borrowed uniform. Parts of it had been cadged from officers, so the pair of them managed to pass themselves off in the officers’ mess until someone realised their accents weren’t quite pukka and had them slung out. Dad eventually left the army as a sergeant major first class, despite facing a court martial for pushing a local off a bridge in India after the guy had spat at the troops marching by. Dad was acquitted.
Dad and Uncle Wally – it was normal in those days for kids to call their parents’ friends Uncle or Aunt, even if they weren’t related – quickly built up the bike business and Hines & Green became renowned among serious riders as a place where the owners knew their stuff. The 1950s was the golden era of cycling. Only the wealthy could afford a car, so bikes were the most popular transport for ordinary people, and Dad and Wally sold a lot of standard machines such as Raleigh and Sunbeam. But their passion was for producing specialist models, crafted from lightweight materials, for racers. They were precision bikes, customised to the rider’s personal taste and specification. Dad and Wally were very good at what they did and also produced frames for leading manufacturers such as Kitchener and Claud Butler.
I started to hang round the shop from a very early age. It was a treasure trove, packed with bikes, saddles, wheels and parts, every surface covered in chains, handlebars, puncture repair kits and all sorts of odd bits of strangely shaped metal that made sense only to someone who knew bikes. There was a workshop out the back where Dad would sit and ‘true up’ wheels that had been buckled during a race, while downstairs in the large basement Wally and Harold ‘Pete’ Peters would build chassis and make repairs. Our bikes were much sought-after and a Hines frame was the first by a British manufacturer to finish in the top three of the Tour de France. Among our customers were ‘the forces’ sweetheart’ Vera Lynn, a massive singing star at the end of the war, and King Hussein of Jordan, who would turn up in his limo and send his chauffeur downstairs with a mauve velvet cushion on which sat the part he wanted replacing.
My first school was St Mary’s in Finchley, halfway between home and the shop. My grandfather had been the school caretaker for thirty-five years, so we knew most of the teachers and they treated me well despite the fact I was a bit mischievous and used to chase the girls even in those days. School was OK but it quickly became obvious I was never going to be an academic, and, however hard the teachers tried, most of what they taught me went in one ear and out the other. I never seemed able to concentrate and most lessons had me staring out of the window, wishing I was at the shop. The only subjects I enjoyed were art and, especially, maths – I could work things out in my head more quickly than the other kids, a talent that has stood me in good stead in many negotiations since. Throughout my school career, maths teachers loved me while most of the others were glad to see the back of me.
As soon as the bell rang for the end of the day I would usually make for the shop. I’d pack the odd parcel and try to look useful, but mainly I just enjoyed the chance to chat to Dad and watch him work. I got to know him very well and we started to form a bond that lasted until he died. It was never the most tranquil of relationships. We often fell out and had titanic rows and I knew at those times Dad would contradict whatever I said and, of course, I’d argue black was white if it suited me. But our bust-ups never lasted long and we always knew that beneath it all we loved each other. I have a similar volatile relationship with my son Luke. I hate it when we fight and I sometimes wonder if Dad is somewhere watching us and laughing because Luke is putting me through the same frustrations I inflicted on him.
Dad was the man I admired above all others. He was only about 5 foot 7 inches tall but he was a big man in every other way and strikingly good-looking, something he has clearly passed on to his son. OK, so some people might argue with that but no one can doubt the massive influence he had on me.
He taught me almost everything I know and made me the man I am today. He was strong-willed – after years of smoking eighty to a hundred cigarettes a day, he just stopped at the age of sixty-four and never lit up again. He was smart and inventive, always looking for new angles, new ways to stay ahead of the competition, and later he encouraged me to do the same.
And he was honest. He ran his businesses as a sole trader rather than a limited company because he didn’t think it right that when things became tough you could bale out and let others take the losses, then set up again under another name. He told me, ‘Your debts are your debts and you pay them. I stand by my business and I make sure I have the money to pay my bills.’ I’ve always been a sole trader, too.
Dad made a good living from the shop but we were by no means wealthy; yet, when the time came that I needed to go to a private school, he