Every Split Second Counts - My Life with Fast Carts, Fast Women and F1 Superstars. Martin Hines
thoroughly enjoyed the experience and, as I got older, I guess I thought I had what it took to be a movie star, if only a producer would spot my moody good looks and sheer animal magnetism. I felt I was perfect to become a cowboy or a chisel-jawed war hero. I loved war epics, especially when the Brits were particularly heroic as in The Bridge on the River Kwai or The Dam Busters. I also enjoyed gangster films with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, and action movies. My all-time favourite was Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back, in which he starred in his own heroic life story. (If there are any producers out there who want the rights to this book, I do have quite a lot of experience in front of cameras and I could do my own stunts!)
I was also interested in the technical side of films. I had a small cine camera and enjoyed making home movies, so thought it would be a good way to make a living, at least until I was ‘discovered’. I wasn’t sure how to go about it until Dad reminded me that Wally, who had now left the bike shop, worked in the transport department for Samuelson Film Services. The company was run by four brothers – Sydney, David, Neville and Michael Samuelson – and had started when, as a young TV cameraman, Sydney discovered the BBC would pay him £10 just to use his camera when he didn’t need it. A ten-week contract brought him a hundred quid and the brothers realised they had hit on a gap in the market. Samuelson’s became one of the biggest names in the industry, providing equipment for film and TV companies as well as making programmes of their own.
Wally explained there was a problem getting into the technical side of the business: you couldn’t get a job unless you were a member of the ACTT union and you couldn’t join the union unless you had a job. Fortunately, when he introduced me to the Samuelson brothers they took to me and said they would sort out the union card and I could work as an apprentice under Mr Vickers, one of the country’s leading camera technicians. This was a fantastic opportunity to learn a trade under the guidance of an expert. It was a rapidly growing industry that I was interested in and I would be with one of the top companies. Above all, it was the kind of hands-on, practical work that I enjoyed most.
My first serious assignment at Samuelson Film was to work on the hit TV show Candid Camera which trapped the public in hilarious situations. This was the first edition starring Jonathan Routh and one of those things that you never forget in life! One of the first programmes I worked on was when we took a Bubble car into a petrol station at Hendon Central to fill it up with fuel. They would normally take about two gallons but, unknown to the public and the garage staff, the car was just one big petrol tank with a Bubble body on it. The other classic I worked on was when goldfish were being eaten straight from the bowl. There were plenty of horrified faces from people who didn’t realise fish-shaped carrots were being consumed. Even with all this fun going on I still became restless and my dream job lasted less than a year.
I didn’t like working under someone and having him tell me what to do. It wasn’t Mr Vickers’s fault – he was fine to me – and I wasn’t being rebellious out of bloody-mindedness. I just came from a family that didn’t have a boss and it didn’t feel right. I needed to be my own boss and, by a stroke of great fortune, I was about to have the chance.
A Member of the Warren Street Boys
With kids now starting competitive racing at eight years old, it seems incredible that I was sixteen before I even sat in a kart. But you have to remember the sport was still in its infancy. The very first kart was built in 1956 by Art Ingels, a hot-rodder and racing-car builder in the States. He and some mates brought their karts with them when they were based in England with the US Air Force and within a few weeks it had started to catch on over here. It was more a hobby than an organised sport, an adrenaline rush for people like Wally Green, who turned to karting after he packed in speedway.
It was while we were watching Wally that Mum decided I could try karting and we bought our first TABs. Dad worked on them when we got back to the shop and was impressed with the quality. These weren’t toys: they were real little racing machines, albeit somewhat basic. He decided there could be a business in this growing craze. At the very least it might pay enough to cover the cost of our own karting, so we started buying and selling equipment and I had the chance to run the new company, imaginatively named Mart’s Karts.
One of my first jobs was to go and see Micky Flynn, a former American Air Force captain, who had remained in England after he was demobbed. He set up a company importing all those home comforts the Yanks who were still serving over here couldn’t buy in England, including karting gear from the big US companies such as Homelite and McCullochs. He was supposed to supply only the US bases but it wasn’t hard to persuade Micky to do a few deals for us too, just as long as we didn’t let on where we were getting the stuff.
Micky was one of the pioneers of kart racing in Europe and we had a series of ‘what a small world’ moments concerning him a few years ago. The first was when we spent a family Christmas in La Manga Club in Spain. Luke came back from an evening on the town and announced, ‘I was drinking with a girl who reckons you knew her grandfather. He helped start karting in England.’ Sure enough, she was Micky’s granddaughter. Some time later I was chatting to a guy in a bar over there who told me he had an affinity with karting because his grandfather had been involved and I was able to tell him, ‘Not only did I know your granddad, my son knows your sister!’ Eventually I met their mum, Micky’s daughter, and since then her husband and I have done a bit of business, so it’s gone full circle.
Dad always threw himself into every project wholeheartedly and quite soon Mart’s Karts wasn’t enough for him. He took on the lease at the Rye House track and within a few months had become chairman of the club. He decided this was going to be the HQ for our expanding kart business, so he and I knocked down the old wooden hut that stood near the track, dug out some foundations, mixed and laid the cement and erected a smart portable building to act as our new offices.
At first the business consisted mainly of selling bits and pieces off a trailer we used to tow behind the car to race meetings. At the time, most of the karts sold in this country came from two large manufacturers or were imported from Italy but that all changed when Dad got talking to a friend of his. Alec Bottoms was the plumbing half of building company Bottoms & Bartrup. He was also a motorsport enthusiast and he’d combined the two interests to produce a kart chassis he called the Zipper, which apparently was his nickname at school, though I don’t dare imagine why. It was agreed that I would race his Zipper Mark II chassis and it went well, so Dad suggested we should sell them from our shop.
We did OK with them, but Alec didn’t have time to build many himself, and, when he gave the job to a firm in Waltham Abbey, they too were slow in supplying us. Frustrated at losing sales, Dad approached Alec and persuaded him to sell us the jigs so we could take over the complete operation. Suddenly, Mart’s Karts was a major manufacturer. I wasn’t too keen on the name Zipper – although for a while we did use the slogan ‘There’s no flies on us, we’ve got a Zipper’ – but thought Zip had the right image, so we changed the name of the karts and decided it made sense to change the name of the company at the same time.
We worked on the karts, modifying them from my experiences as a driver, and they started to become very popular. The business grew rapidly and after a while we had to build a factory on a site I found on an industrial estate at Hoddesdon. That quickly became too small, so we found another plot of land just down the road and had plans drawn up for a bigger unit. Dad arranged for the design to be in two stages, with an extension that could be added whenever we needed it, but, just before building work started, I was chatting with the contractor and found out the extension would cost twice as much if we waited as it would if we had it all built at once. With the rate we were growing it made sense to me to go for it now, so I told him to go ahead. I forgot to tell Dad of my decision and, a few weeks after work had started, he went to have a look round and came back very excited.
‘The builders have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘They’re building the whole thing at once. We’re gonna get