C.E.J. Haime & Son was in the motor trade in the early 1900s, supplying and repairing vehicles during the pioneering days of motoring. Claud Haime was an all-rounder of the old kind, with several irons in the fire at once: the garage, an HMV dealership selling radios and gramophones, and greenhouses where he grew flowers well enough to win awards for their cultivation. Cars, music, and prize blooms, all from one pair of hands. Nearly a century later, his great-grandson continues the family's connection to the motor trade.

The Haime name itself comes from Dorset, and the trail runs back a very long way.

THE MILLER OF SHAFTESBURY. In the latter 1600s a John Haime ran the mill on Mill Lane in Shaftesbury. The family mill is long gone, but the street isn't - it was renamed Haimes Lane after the family, and you can walk down it today. Several of its cottages are now Grade II listed, and a building called Mill Place still stands where the mill once worked.

THE SOLDIER WHO PREACHED. The miller's grandson, John Haime (1708‑1784) - a gardener, then a button-maker - enlisted in the Queen's Own Regiment of Dragoons and marched out of Shaftesbury on Christmas morning, 1739. At the Battle of Dettingen in 1743 - the last battle in which a British army was led in the field by its reigning king - he stood under French cannon fire for seven hours. At Fontenoy in 1745 his horse was shot dead and fell on him; an officer nearby had just asked him "where is your God now, Mr Haime?" when a cannonball carried the officer's head away. Between battles he preached in the open air to crowds of a thousand soldiers at a time, and when complaints were made about him, the Duke of Cumberland interviewed him personally - then issued a general order that Haime might preach anywhere, and no man should molest him. Home from the wars, he brought Methodism to Shaftesbury itself, and was once jailed in Dorchester on a charge of "causing a riot" - that is, for refusing to stop preaching. The town's Quakers paid his prison fees to get him out. John Wesley made him a travelling preacher in 1747, befriended him personally, and took him as a travelling companion. He claimed that despite fighting with all his might through his battles, he never once managed to kill or wound a man - his horse always shied, or his carbine misfired. He died in 1784; his gravestone is preserved in Whitchurch Methodist church in Hampshire to this day, and his life is recorded in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

THE THUNDERER. A later member of the same family, Charles Haime (1775‑1855) - born at Compton in Dorset, a shepherd on Salisbury Plain in his youth - became one of the most formidable preachers of his era. Press-ganged into the army by men who disliked his religion, he refused to drill on a Sunday until the exasperated officer threw him out. Arrested for preaching without permission, he answered the charge by preaching at the magistrate, who cut him off with: "That is enough - I see you are called to preach. Go about your business." He went about it for fifty-four years. He rode into villages no preacher had ever visited, hiring the local crier to announce him (at Clovelly the crier improvised his own ending: "I hope you'll all go and get better"). When a landowner threatened to evict any tenant who let him preach, he rode overnight to Exeter and back to secure a licence in time for the next evening. Crowds grew so large that pulpit stairs collapsed under the weight, and on one occasion - aged nearly seventy, with a thousand people locked outside a full chapel - he climbed in through the window and walked over the congregation's heads to reach the pulpit. They called him The Thunderer. One convert put it more plainly: "He takes hold of the sinner's conscience, and wrings it like a dishclout." His own records show the membership of his eighteen circuits grew by more than 5,500 under his ministry. When he finally retired in 1839 he asked to be listed as a supernumerary "not by age, accident, or disease, but by extraordinary labour - worn out in the work."

His life was published in 1865 - An Itinerant Preacher; or, Sketches from the Life of the Rev. Charles Haime, written by his son. A copy survived in the library of Oxford University, and it has since been digitised: you can read the whole thing free at archive.org (search the title).

None of the above is motor trade, and we won't pretend it is. Our trade story starts in the family garage in the early 1900s. But some things evidently travel down a family regardless of the trade - turning up in all weathers, doing the work properly, saying what you mean, and not being moved off your ground by anyone. A man who rode through the night to Exeter to keep a preaching appointment would have understood a VIN lookup answered the same evening.

Old-school standards. Modern motors.