John Barnes was one of Britain’s leading independent early-film historians. Not content with spending decades researching and writing an authoritative multi-volume work on the origins of cinema in England, he, with his wife Carmen, also ran a private cinema museum at St Ives, Cornwall.

The first venture of its kind in the UK, the museum operated at a time when public funding for such projects was almost non-existent. When it closed in the 1980s much of the collection was lost to the nation and ended up in Italy.

John Stuart Lloyd Barnes was born in 1920 in London, where the family had a business, W. H. Barnes, making pianos. His mother, Garlick Barnes, was an artist, though Barnes’s creative inclinations took him in other directions.

He and his twin William showed an interest in film from an early age. By their midteens they were making their own documentary films, including one recording sports and a fire at their school, Canford, in Dorset. Several of these were shot in Cornwall and at other venues in the Southwest of England, a region with which he had long ties. Others were filmed in Kent, including With the Gypsies in Kent and In the Garden of England (both circa 1938).

Both brothers also attempted fictional films. Screen Archive South East’s catalogue includes a seven-minute film which John Barnes made when he was only about 15, entitled Kidnapped.

The plot summary was to the point: “Two boys kidnap a young girl as she sleeps in her bed and hold her to ransom. The girl’s father is slow to respond to the kidnappers’ demands — they carry out their threats to kill the girl. The kidnappers shoot dead two other men before they are caught and hanged.”

The brothers spent some time working with the art director Edward Carrick and at the same time built up a collection of Victorian optical toys, other “pre-cinema” items, books and original documents.

They served in the Royal Navy during the war, after which they moved to St Ives, where they staged an exhibition of cinema artefacts in 1951 during the Festival of Britain.

John Barnes was not only a passionate collector; he also recognised the importance of explaining and contextualising his collection. He preserved items, from lantern slides to cameras and projectors, and regularly leant them to museums and exhibitions, along with advice and information about their function and significance.

In 1962-63 Barnes and his partner Carmen, who was later to become his wife, opened the Barnes Museum of Cinematography in St Ives. A treasure trove of all-but-forgotten cinema artefacts and equipment, it attracted scholars and visitors from overseas.

There was a plan to move the collection to London, but it never happened and the museum closed in 1986. Many of the earliest items went to the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin — much to the regret of British historians and collectors, though at least some are at Hove Museum.

Equally important was Barnes’s five-volume work, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, 1894-1901, which documents films, equipment and personalities of the early days. The first volume appeared in 1976, and Barnes spent more than 20 years researching, writing and revising the series.

Later books were devoted to a single year each. Gleaning information from catalogues, adverts, business records, oral testimony and other sources, he tried to record every film made in the period.

The film historian Luke McKernan paid testimony to Barnes’s achievement on his Bioscope website: “Few of us who work in this field will be able to leave behind so much of such solid and lasting value: objects rescued, identified and their importance recognised; documents saved, preserved and republished.”

Barnes is survived by both his wife and brother.

John Barnes, film historian and museum owner, was born on June 28, 1920. He died of cancer on June 1 2008, aged 87