Jonathan Minns - Telegraph Amid the sweet smell of coal smoke, hot steel, Brasso and machine lubricant, visitors could marvel at an 1802 model engine signed by Richard Trevithick; a scarlet Victorian horse-drawn steam powered fire engine; and (at 14.5 tonnes, the largest exhibit) a gold medal-winning Corliss engine built by Crepelle and Garland of Lille in 1889, for which Minns had outbid a scrap dealer. Although it was regarded as the most important private collection of its kind, funding was always a problem. Neither government nor the local authority offered financial support; a bid for lottery money failed; and visitors covered only a fraction of the costs. Minns subsidised it by undertaking contract engineering in Britain and abroad, and by designing and building other industrial museums. In 2002 he suffered four heart attacks, an experience he described as "absolutely fascinating." Tall and elegant, Minns was at various times an underwater archaeologist, an actor in Paris, a rancher in Mexico, a London plumber, a television presenter, the proprietor of a marriage guidance agency and, for nearly 20 years, a judge for the BBC's Tomorrow's World Award for Invention, presented annually by the Prince of Wales. When his Engineerium closed down in 2006, it was put up for auction - only to be saved at the last minute with a £3 million offer from a local businessman. Currently closed for restoration, it is due to reopen in 2016. Minns marked the closure with some bitterness. In every other profession, in art, in law, in medicine, in architecture, students are taught the history of the discipline. They understand that the past informs the present," he said, "but not in engineering, where the past is seen as irrelevant stuff... And yet the world has never had more need of engineers. The second of three brothers, Jonathan Ellis Minns was born on October 12 1938 into a family steeped in engineering. His father, the engineer Anthony Minns, kept a shed in the garden and taught his sons about wheels, cogs and rigging; an uncle was the hovercraft inventor Sir Christopher Cockerell; and his maternal grandfather, Sir Sidney Cockerell, was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (his other grandfather, Sir Ellis Minns, was Dean of Pembroke College). While the Cockerell pioneering spirit inspired him, his father's interest in steam strongly influenced Jonathan's childhood in a house crammed with working steam models. Through the family shipping company, he enjoyed clambering aboard Thames tugs, treacle barges from the West Indies, a steam pinnace at St Katharine Docks, and visits to many steam pumping stations and watermills all over England. Educated at Haileybury, at 17 Jonathan enrolled on an engineering apprenticeship with WH Allen in Bedford. A two-year placement with Gulf Oil took him to the United States, working in Boston, Texas, New Orleans and on the oil rigs of the Gulf of Mexico; but when he eventually returned to Gulf Oil in Britain he soon wearied of office life. While working on restorations for the wealthy antiques dealer and nightclub owner Horace (Hod) Dibben, he remodelled (with his younger brother Patrick) his mother's beautiful 11th-century house at Ramatuelle, in the South of France, before launching Jonathan Minns Steam in Hollywood Road, Fulham. There he stocked a profusion of Pre-Raphaelite nude images alongside oily engines, all restored to perfection. As well as the steam variety, he surrounded himself with live fashion models and other "beautiful people" of the 1960s London scene, while in the basement amateur engineers learned the intricacies of the lathe. Jonathan Minns as a man about town in London At the same time Minns was a consultant on steam engines to Christie's and ran the firm's Steam Model and Mechanical Antiquities sales, first in London and eventually at the Engineerium. In 1971, with a few friends and £350 capital, he saved the Goldstone pumping station in Hove a fortnight before it was due to be demolished. Having managed to persuade the authorities to list it grade II*, Minns started restoring it three years later. It was opened as a Steam Museum in 1976 and subsequently as the British Engineerium. Among its most popular exhibits were an 18-ton flywheel and "Chain Reaction," a history of the lavatory illustrated with working examples. As he assembled his collection, Minns had to recast missing flywheels, melted down for armaments during two World Wars, and cleanse steam engine parts of centuries of oily grime. One engine was found in a mouldering barn, another in a long-forgotten hospital. Minns's personal steam artefacts included The Little Gem - a traction engine on which he travelled all over southern England with his restored 1895 showman's wagon. He also ran Firebird, a steam launch, which he kept at Hurley on the Thames. He restored the Dutch tug Liberty and sailed one of the Dunkirk "little ships," Providence, a gaff cutter built in Cornwall in 1936. Minns was concerned that in a post-industrial age people should keep in touch with moving objects. Pure interpretation is not enough. Someone has to get their hands dirty," he declared. He deplored the tendency of centres like the Science Museum to put real mechanical objects in storage and instead offer multimedia interactive displays. "Our fate is a microcosm of the country's attitude to value-added manufacturing," Minns reflected. We make nothing, and we don't care. We're not even a nation of shopkeepers, we're a nation of shelf-stackers - Napoleon must be screaming with laughter. With his wife, Vanessa, Jonathan Minns lived at Hellingly in East Sussex in a beautiful watermill that he restored. She and their two daughters survive him. Jonathan Minns, born October 12 1938, died October 13 2013