THE HISTORY MAN

IN the early days of LRM, a popular feature was Mike Manifold’s Country Garage – the fictional tale of a rural workshop and its imaginary customers. ‘Mike Manifold’, of course, was a pseudonym, and in 2014 when its real author decided to retire we searched for a replacement.

That search ended at a real country garage, in Norfolk. For some time I had been following the compelling blog of Richard Hall, who ran a Land Rover workshop (Glencoyne Engineering) in Thetford. I offered him the job and he agreed.

Real Richard replaced fictional Mike and Glencoyne became the Norfolk Garage, where the customers and their problems were genuine. It soon became more popular than its imaginary predecessor and today, six years on, Richard’s monthly diary is required reading for any Land Rover fan. Its author has become a legend in enthusiast circles, but this shy and retiring garage owner is known to few, other than his customers.

So who is the real man behind the Norfolk Garage? I went to Banham, in deepest rural East Anglia, to find out — and the end result is fascinating.

Richard Hall, tell us about yourself… I’m 52 years old, born in Stamford, Lincs, son of an RAF officer. I was sent away to boarding school aged eight, read History at Oxford, graduated in 1990. I was trained as an accountant with Ernst & Young; ended up as finance director of a precision engineering company in Ipswich. I was made redundant 2004 and set up Glencoyne Engineering, initially working out of an old barn in Suffolk, then moved to premises in Thetford, and after nine years there moved the business to Banham in deep rural Norfolk. It’s the ideal place to run a business like this: quiet and uncrowded, reasonable rents, but with good road and rail connections.

I’m married, no children, one basset hound.

Absolutely. Most of my early childhood memories are of the cars my father owned: the MG 1300 which