Obituary: John Saunders, engineer and motor museum founder

As the working class son of a railway guard and of a downstairs maid in a Bedfordshire country mansion, John Saunders’ childhood dream was an unusual one – he wanted to own a museum. He was a 66-year-old pensioner when he finally achieved that dream, opening the Stondon Motor Museum near Henlow, Bedfordshire, now a popular attraction for UK car and motorbike buffs, foreign tourists and wide-eyed children on school trips.

It is now the largest private motor museum in the country, with eight halls showing a collection of more than 400 classic cars, motor bikes (including AA and RAC, with sidecars), police cars, buses, fire engines and military vehicles.

An engineer by career, Saunders had already begun as a young man buying, refurbishing and collecting cars dating back to the earliest days of the motor vehicle at the turn of the 20th century.

He already had around 40 cars at his home and many more stashed in friends’ garages around the country, when he decided to live his dream.

He bought a former garden centre in the village of Lower Stondon, reluctantly removed remaining plants and replaced them with his vehicles. In 1994, he was delighted to have a fellow car buff – TV actor Steve McFadden (better known as EastEnders’ tough guy Phil Mitchell) – open his new museum with the attached publicity.

Over the best part of 20 years, Saunders expanded the museum to include army tanks, aircraft, a full-size replica of explorer Captain James Cook’s 18th-century sailing ship HM Bark Endeavour and more than 400 model aircraft and helicopters of all eras.

The latter were hand-made and painted by one man, the Rev Allon Taffs, who was pastor of Therfield chapel near Royston, Hertfordshire from the 1960s into the 1990s.

After his death in 2006, the Rev Taff’s brother donated the model planes – the result of 40 years’ work – to the museum.

Saunders’ own favourite exhibits, which he had bought and driven himself, were a 1971 Rolls Royce Corniche (with one of his many personalised number plates, FJS 22) and a Bentley Turbo R (Roadholding), which he later sold to help keep the museum funded.

Frederick John Saunders, always known as John, was born in Peterborough on 14 April, 1928. His father Frederick was a guard on trains of the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) before it became nationalised as British Railways. His mother Margaret was a trusted maid in the country mansion of one of the local gentry.

When the Saunders family moved to Hitchin, John went to the local Wiltshire-Dacre Junior School and St Mary’s before studying engineering at Luton Sixth Form College and later graduating BSc.

For the Kryn and Lahy metal works in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, one of his first jobs was to design a jib for a high-lift crane. Moving to De Havilland in Hatfield, he helped design the wings of the company’s Comet aircraft, as well as a one-man submarine for inspecting shipwrecks, before deciding to branch out as an entrepreneur on his own.

He first set up a TV tube and reconditioning business in Birmingham, lucrative in those days when our tellies tended to pack in regularly.

He then moved to London to take over a plastics business, Jekmoth, which had a royal warrant for making PVC suit covers to be used inside wardrobes in the suites of the Royal Yacht Britannia. He took amused pride in the fact that his creations kept moths away from the Queens’ clothes.

Saunders later found a niche in making cheap plastic greenhouses. After Women’s Own magazine advertised a greenhouse designed by Saunders, he sold thousands and, after upgrading his design, set up the company Norfolk Greenhouses in 1975, selling his wares by mail order.

The company is still going today, in Mildenhall, Suffolk, and Saunders was its chairman until his death. In the late 1960s, he bought a boatyard in the Norfolk Broads and designed a “caracruiser”, a kind of motor caravan with an outboard engine so it could be used on land and water. The vessel sold particularly well in Ireland and many still turn heads on the roads and waters of the Broads.

Saunders went on to buy Brundall Bay Marina and helped develop it into what is now the largest marina on the Norfolk Broads, with moorings for more than 300 boats. He sold it somewhat reluctantly in 1988 when he decided to focus his mind and his money on his dream – the motor museum.

Saunders was a Fellow of the UK’s Institute of Directors, based on London’s Pall Mall, which encourages entrepreneurs while promoting business practice which benefits not only the business  community but society as a whole.

John Saunders’ wife Joan, whom he married in 1953, died last year.

He died of throat cancer on 15 August and is survived by two sons, a daughter, ten grandchildren and a great grand-child.

PHIL DAVISON