COPYRIGHT

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001

Copyright © Hunter Davies 2001

Hunter Davies asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007336616

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008226503

Version: 2016-10-11

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Illustrations

Introduction

Where it all Began …

The Stobarts

Young Edward

Edward Goes to Work

Edward Goes to Town

Haulage – the Long Haul

Hello Carlisle

Pink Elephants

A Wedding and a Warehouse

Motorways Cometh

Edward Faces a Dilemma

The New Management Men

Branching Out

What Edward Did Upstairs

The Birth of the Fan Club

Bad-Mouthing

Money Matters

Daventry

The Fan Club Today

The Fans

Spin-Offs

Up the Management Men

Problems, Problems

Up the Workers

The Firm Today – and its Future

Expert Witnesses

The Stobarts Today

Edward Today

Appendices

A Haulage Glossary

B The Stobarts: a Who’s Who

C Eddie Stobart Limited: Chronology

D Lorry Names

E Eddie Stobart Fan Club

F Eddie Stobart Depots

G Top Haulage Firms: 2000

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

ILLUSTRATIONS

Section One

1 John Stobart’s wedding

2 Young Eddie Stobart with his family

3 Caldbeck, Cumberland

4 Eddie and Nora’s wedding

5 Edward, Anne and John

6 Edward at primary school

7 Edward, Anne, William and John

8 The family: (sitting, left to right) William, Nora, Eddie, Anne (standing) Edward and John

9 The farm shop at Wigton

10 Eddie Stobart Ltd at the Cumberland show in the early Seventies

11 An early Scania lorry, drives through Hesket

12 Freshly washed lorries at Greystone Road

13 Edward with drivers Bob McKinnel and Neville Jackson

14 Edward at Greystone Road

15 The new Kingstown site, bought in 1980

16 William and Edward in the early Kingstown days

17 Edward’s wedding to Sylvia, in 1980

18 William with his truck

19 The first Stobart vehicle in Metal Box livery – 1987 (left to right) Colin Rutherford, Stuart Allan, Edward

Section Two

1 The Wurzels performing ‘I Want to be an Eddie Stobart Driver’

2 The Blackpool illuminations, featuring Eddie Stobart Ltd – 1995

3 Charity panto event

4 Eddie Stobart trucks setting off for Romania

5 The Kingstown depot

6 Princess Anne and Edward, at the opening of the Daventry site

7 The huge Daventry depot today

8 The beginning of 25-anniversary celebrations at the Dorchester

9 Edward celebrating with Jools Holland

10 Celebrating with the truck Twiggy

11 Barrie Thomas

12 David Jackson

13 Colin Rutherford

14 Norman Bell’s retirement in 1990

15 Linda Shore in the fan club shop

16 Truck driver Billy Dowell

17 Carlisle United Football Club – 1997

18 William today

19 Edward and Nora today

20 Edward with William Hague

21 Edward receiving the ‘Haulier of the Year’ award

22 Edward with Deborah Rodgers

INTRODUCTION

Edward Stobart is Cumbria’s greatest living Cumbrian. Not a great deal of competition, you might think, as Cumbria is a rural county, with only twenty settlements with a population greater than 2500. But our native sons do include Lord Bragg.

I used to say the greatest living Cumbrian was Alfred Wainwright, though he was a newcomer, who assumed Cumbrian nationality when he fell in love with Lakeland and then moved to Kendal. Wainwright, like Eddie Stobart, became a cult, acquiring an enormous following without ever really trying. In fact Wainwright discouraged fans, refusing to speak to other walkers when he met them, not allowing his photograph to appear on his guide books, never doing signing sessions. Yet he went on to sell millions of copies of his books.

Edward Stobart, the hero of this book, not to be confused with his father, Eddie Stobart, still lives in Cumbria and the world HQ of Eddie Stobart Limited is still in Carlisle. In the last ten years, it has become a household name all over the country, at least in households who have chanced to drive along one of our motorways, which means most of us. Today, the largest part of his business is now situated elsewhere in England, yet Edward remains close to his roots.

I am a fellow Cumbrian, so I boast, if not quite a genuine one as I was born in Scotland, only moving to Carlisle when I was aged four. But I know whence the Stobarts have come, know well their little Cumbrian home village, know many of their friends – and that to me is one of the many intriguing aspects of their rise. How did they get here, from there of all places?

I had met Edward, before beginning this book, at the House of Lords, guests of the late Lord Whitelaw. It was a reception for Ambassadors for Cumbria, a purely honorary title, dreamed up by some marketing whiz. I talked to Edward for a while, but didn’t get very far. He doesn’t go in for idle chat, doesn’t care for social occasions, doesn’t really like talking much, being hesitant with strangers, very reserved and private. Despite the firm’s present-day fame, I can’t remember seeing him interviewed on television, hearing him on the radio and I seldom see his face in the newspapers.

So this was another thought that struck me. Having got from there, that little village I used to know so well, how did Edward Stobart then become a national force, when he himself appears so unpushy, unfluent, undynamic?

The fact that he has risen to fame and fortune through lorries, creating the biggest private firm in Britain, is also interesting. It’s so unmodern, unglamorous. He’s now regularly on The Sunday Times list of the wealthiest people in Britain but, unlike so many of the other entries, he actually owns things. There is a concrete, physical presence to his fortune. The wealth of many of our present-day self-made millionaires is very often abstract, either on paper or out there on the ether; liable to fall and disappear in a puff of smoke or a blank screen.

Haulage is old technology; so old it’s practically prehistoric. Hauling stuff from A to B, real stuff as opposed to messages and information, has always been with us. And over the centuries it has sent out its own messages, giving us clues to the state of the economy, the state of the nation. By following the rise of our leading haulage firm over the last thirty years, since Eddie Stobart Limited was created in 1970, we should also be able to observe glimpses of the history of our times.

The cult of Eddie Stobart: that’s perhaps the most surprising aspect of all. How on earth has a lorry firm acquired a fan club of over 25,000 paid-up members? You expect it in films or football, in TV or the theatre, with people in the public eye, who have staff to push or polish their name and image. But lorries are just objects. They don’t sign autographs. Hard to get them to smile to the camera. Not many have been seen drunk or stoned in the Groucho Club. Some would say they are nasty, noisy, environmentally-unfriendly, inanimate objects – not the sort of thing you’d expect right-thinking persons to fall in love with.

I wanted to find out some of the answers to these questions, some sort of explanation or insight. I also wanted to celebrate my fellow Cumbrian. Hold tight then, here we go, full speed ahead, with possibly a few diversions along the way, for a ride on the inside with Eddie Stobart.

Hunter Davies

Loweswater, August 2001.

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN …

Caldbeck and Hesket Newmarket are two small neighbouring villages on the northern fringes of the Lake District in Cumbria, England. They are known as fell villages, being on the edges of the fells, or hills, where the laid out, captured fields and civilized hedges and obedient tarmac roads give way to unreconstructed, open countryside. A place where neatness and tidiness meet the rough and the unregimented. A bit like some of the people.

The first of the two most prominent local fells is High Pike, 2159 feet high, which looms over Caldbeck and Hesket, with Carrock Fell hovering round the side. Behind them, in the interior, there are further fells, unfolding in the distance, till you reach Skiddaw, 3053 feet high, Big Brother of the Northern Fells. A mere pimple compared with mountains in the Himalayas, but Skiddaw dominates the landscape and the minds of the natives who have always referred to themselves as living ‘Back O’ Skiddaw’.

Once you leave the fields, the little empty roads, and get on to the fell side, in half an hour you can be on your own, communing with nature. People think it can’t be done, that the whole of Lakeland is full, the kagouls rule, but this corner is always empty. My wife and I had a cottage at Caldbeck for ten years and we used to do fifteen-mile walks, up and across the Caldbeck Fells, round Skiddaw, down to Keswick and, in eight hours, meet only two or three other walkers. Then we got a taxi back, being cheats.

You see few people because this is not the glamorous, touristy Lake District. There are no local lakes. It’s hard to get to, especially if you are coming up from the South, as most of the hordes do. There used to be a lot of mining, so you still come across scarred valleys, jagged holes, dumps of debris. It’s an acquired taste, being rather barren and treeless, often windy and misty, colourless for much of the year, though, in the autumn, the fell slopes turn a paler shade of yellow.

At first sight, first impression, it’s not exactly a welcoming place. The people and the landscape tend to hide their delights away. Like the fells, friendships unfold. ‘They’ll winter you, summer you, winter you again,’ so we were told when we first moved to Caldbeck. ‘Then they might say hello.’

The nearest big town is Carlisle, some fifteen miles away, a historic city with a castle and cathedral, small as cities go, with only 70,000 citizens. It is, however, important as the capital of Cumbria, the second largest county in England – only in area, though; in population, Cumbria is one of the smallest, with only 400,000 people. Carlisle is in the far north-western corner of England, hidden away on the map and in the minds of many English people, who usually know the name but aren’t quite sure if it might be in Scotland or even Wales.

The region, it would seem at first glance, is an unlikely, unpromising setting to produce such a family as the Stobarts. At a second glance, when you look further into their two home villages, you find more colour, more depth, more riches hidden away.

Caldbeck is the bigger village of the two, population six hundred, and has a busy, semi-industrial past. The old mill buildings have now been nicely refurbished to provide smart homes or workshops. It still is a thriving village, a genuine, working village, as all the locals will tell you. It does not depend on tourists, trippers or second-homers. It’s got a very active Young Farmers Club, a tennis club, amateur dramatics. There are agricultural families who have been there for centuries, mixing well with a good sprinkling of newer, middle-class professionals who work in Carlisle.

Caldbeck’s claims to national fame lie in its graveyard. At the parish church is buried the body of John Peel, a local huntsman, commemorated in a song which is Cumbria’s national anthem and gets sung all round the English-speaking world. (Peel never heard it himself – the words were put to the present tune after his death.) Near him lies Mary Robinson, the Maid of Buttermere, a Lakeland beauty who was wronged by a rotter in 1802. He bigamously married her and was later hanged, a drama which thrilled the nation and became a London musical. More recently, it was turned into a successful novel by Melvyn Bragg. Lord Bragg, as he now is called, was brought up and educated at Wigton, a small town, about ten miles from Caldbeck. He is a great lover of the Caldbeck Fells and still has a country home locally at Ireby.

Caldbeck’s church is named after St Kentigern, known as St Mungo in Scotland, who was a bishop of Glasgow. He visited the Caldbeck area in 553 and did a spot of converting after he heard that, ‘many amongst the mountains were given to idolatory’. Much later, the early Quakers were very active in this corner of Cumbria, as were Methodist missionaries.

Hesket Newmarket, just over a mile away from Caldbeck, is very small, with only a few dozen houses. It is quieter, quainter than Caldbeck, a leftover hamlet from another age, one of the most attractive villages in all Cumbria and very popular with second-homers, many of whom live and work in the north-east. It’s basically one street which has some pretty eighteenth-century cottages lining a long, rolling village green. In the middle is the old Market Cross, admired by Pevsner for its ‘four round pillars carrying a pyramid roof with a ball finial.’ Until recently, it was used as the village’s garage.

There were five pubs here at one time. Now there’s only one, the Old Crown, well known in real beer circles as it brews its own beer. There used to be a local school, known as Howbeck, just outside the village, which all the Stobarts attended but it is now a private home. It was opened, along with Caldbeck’s village school (still going strong) in 1875 to ensure rural children received the same education as urban children. A School Inspector’s report for 14 May 1890, observed that: ‘a remarkable occurrence took place on Monday afternoon – viz, every child was present.’

Hesket Newmarket did have a market, established in 1751 for sheep and cattle, but it was discontinued by the middle of the nineteenth century. Hesket’s annual agricultural show, held since 1877, is still a big event, featuring Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, hound trails as well as agricultural exhibits. It draws crowds and entrants from all over the county.

William Wordsworth, plus sister Dorothy and Coleridge, stayed at Hesket on 14 August 1803. Dorothy recorded their visit in her journal: ‘Slept at Mr Young-husband’s publick house, Hesket Newmarket. In the evening walked to Caldbeck Fells.’

Coleridge described the inn’s little parlour. ‘The sanded stone floor with the spitting pot full of sand dust, two pictures of young Master and Miss, she with a rose in her hand … the whole room struck me as cleanliness quarrelling with tobacco ghosts.’

In September 1857, Charles Dickens and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins visited the village in order to climb Carrock Fell. They later wrote up their trip in The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. They managed to get to the top of Carrock Fell in the rain, moaning all the way, but coming down, Wilkie Collins sprained an ankle.

They, too, described the parlour in which they stayed, amazed by all the ‘little ornaments and nick-nacks … it was so very pleasant to see these things in such a lonesome by-place … what a wonder this room must be to the little children born in the gloomy village, what grand impressions of those who became wanderers over the earth, how at distant ends of the world some old voyagers would die, cherishing the belief that the finest apartment known to men was once in the Hesket Newmarket Inn, in rare old Cumberland …’

I’m sure the locals didn’t like the reference to their ‘gloomy’ village but it shows that Hesket, however hidden away, has attracted some eminent people over the centuries.

The present-day best-known resident of Hesket is Sir Chris Bonington, the mountaineer and writer: a Londoner by birth, but a Cumbrian by adoption. He bought a cottage at Nether Row, just outside Hesket, on the slopes of High Pike, in 1971 and has lived there full time since 1974. He is a co-owner of the Old Crown pub. It doesn’t quite put him on the level of a Scottish and Newcastle or Guinness director: the Old Crown is now a co-operative, with sixty local co-owners.

Chris has no intention of ever leaving the area. He likes the local climbing, either doing hair-raising rock stuff over in Borrowdale or brisk fell walks straight up High Pike from his own back garden. In summer, he can manage two days in one: a working day, writing inside, then an evening day, outside at play till at least ten o’clock, as the nights are so light. ‘I love the quietness up here,’ he says, ‘well away from the Lake District rush. I also think it’s beautiful. I like the rolling quality, the open fells merging with the countryside. In fact, my favourite view in all Lakeland is a local one: from the road up above Uldale, looking back towards Skiddaw.’

As a neighbour of the Stobart clan, Chris has watched their rise and rise, but doesn’t think you can make generalizations about them or their background: ‘What I will say, from my observations, is that the Cumbrian is shrewd.’

Chris is currently watching the rise of another local family business from a similar background: known, so far, only in the immediate area. The founder, George Steadman, was the village blacksmith in Caldbeck in the 1900s. His son built barns. In turn, his son, Brian the present Managing Director, moved on to roofing and cladding for industrial buildings. Over the last twenty years, Brian Steadman and his wife, Doreen, have been doubling their business every year. They now employ sixty people and last year turned over nine million pounds.

Visitors to the Caldbeck area driving back into Carlisle, down Warnell Fell, will notice the Steadmans’ new factory on the left-hand side. When I drive past, I always turn my head in admiration, taking care not to crash as it is a very steep hill. Their front lawns are so immaculate, their buildings all gleaming, yet it’s only a boring old factory, producing boring old roofing material.

‘We didn’t used to be so tidy when we were based in Caldbeck,’ says Brian. ‘It was partly the influence of Eddie Stobart Ltd. We did a big roofing job for them in Carlisle, big for us: £400,000 it was and they paid us on the dot, which very few firms do these days.

‘Anyway, while we were doing that job, I noticed how neat and tidy all his lorries were, and his premises, and how smart his staff were. We all know how successful Eddie Stobart Ltd has been. I thought we’d try to follow his lead.’

The Steadmans are following Eddie Stobart from the same local environment. Is this just by chance, perhaps, or do they think there are any connections, any generalizations to be made? ‘I think what it shows,’ says Doreen, ‘is that people who leave school early, such as Brian and the Stobarts, who are no good academically but are good with their hands, can still create good businesses.’

‘I think with us and the Stobarts,’ says Brian, ‘it’s been an advantage being country people. Country staff are loyal, reliable people. They stick with you, through thick and thin. You need that in the difficult times, which all firms go through.’

Perhaps, then, it’s not at all surprising for successful businesses to come out of a remote, rural area. Country folk are shrewd, says Bonington. Country folk are loyal, says Steadman.

Country folk can do it, as has been shown in the past. One of Cumbria’s all-time successful business families came from Sebergham, the very next village after Hesket. In 1874, the village stonemason, John Laing, moved into Carlisle and set himself up as a builder. Today, Laing’s are still building all over the civilized world. So much for nothing happening, nothing ever coming out of such a remote rural region.

THE STOBARTS

The Cumbrian branch of the Stobarts can trace their family back pretty clearly for around one hundred years, all of them humble farming folk in the Caldbeck Fells area. Before that, it gets a bit cloudy. Sometime early in the nineteenth century, so they think, the original Stobart is supposed to have come over to Cumberland from Northumberland, but that is just a family rumour. Originally, they could have been Scottish, or at least Border folk, as their surname is thought to have derived from ‘Stob’, an old Scottish word for a small wooden post or stump of a tree.

The founder of the present family was John Stobart, father of Eddie and grandfather of Edward. He was born at Howgill, Sebergham, in 1903 and worked at his father’s farm on leaving school. In 1930, he secured his own smallholding of some thirty-two acres at Bankdale Head, Hesket Newmarket. By this time he had got married to Adelaide, known as Addie, and they had a baby son, Edward Pears Stobart – always known as Eddie – who was born in 1929. Eddie was followed by a second son, Ronnie, in 1936.

On John’s smallholding, he kept eight cows, a bull, some horses and three hundred hens. Farming, and life in general, was hard at the end of the 1930s so, to bring in a bit more money and feed his young family, John managed to secure some work with the Cumberland County Council, hiring out himself plus his horse and cart, on occasional contract jobs.

John’s wife, Addie, died in 1942. John then married again, to Ruth Crame, whose family had come up from Hastings to Hesket Newmarket during the War to escape the bombing. He went on to have six other children by Ruth: Jim, Alan, Mary, Ruth, Dorothy and Isobel. Hence the reason why there are so many Stobarts in and around the Hesket area today.

Eddie has only happy memories of his step-mother. Until she came along, there had been what he calls ‘a sequence of housekeepers’, so he was pleased by the stability that Ruth brought into his father’s life.

After the war, in 1946, John bought his first tractor, which meant he could expand his contracting work, doing threshing and other agricultural jobs for farmers within a thirty-mile radius of Hesket.

The most important thing in John’s life was his Christian beliefs. He had become a Methodist lay preacher from the age of nineteen and travelled all over north Cumberland preaching at rural chapels. Every year, he took his family to Keswick for the annual Keswick Convention, joining thousands of other Christians, mainly evangelicals, from all over England.

Some of Eddie’s earliest memories are of being taken on the back of his father’s BSA motorbike as he went off preaching in Methodist chapels. He recalls that one church was full when they got there, and his father, when he stood up, was having trouble making himself heard. ‘Shout out, man,’ said a local farmer, putting his arm round John Stobart’s shoulder, ‘You are working for God, you know.’

Eddie left the local village school, Howbeck, just outside Hesket, when he was fourteen. ‘I was hardly there from the age of twelve. In those days, you got time off for seasonal agricultural work to help your parents. I quite enjoyed arithmetic, but my interest in history or geography or English was nil. I could never spell. I didn’t really like school. I was much more interested in catching rabbits.’

He went to work with his father, helping on the farm or with his contracting jobs. When the Cumberland Council wanted a horse and cart and one man for the day, paying a daily rate of 27s.6d., they often found the man was young Eddie.

From an early age, Eddie had been making some money in his spare time by chopping logs into kindling sticks or selling the rabbits he’d trapped. He took them into Carlisle’s covered market on Saturday mornings, near where farmers’ wives sold their eggs and hams and cheeses.

Aged fifteen, he had saved enough money to buy an unbroken horse for thirty-three guineas. He trained it to pull the cart and a variety of agricultural machinery and sold it after a year for sixty-six guineas. With this money, he bought his own hens and hen houses. At seventeen, he passed his driving test and was able to drive his father’s Morris 10.

While aged seventeen, on 16 November 1946, he attended a local Methodist chapel where a visiting preacher was in the middle of a three-week mission. Eddie was one of two people in the congregation that day who came forward and said they had been saved. From that day, he committed himself to God.

Some time later, he heard that there was a seventeen-year-old girl called Nora Boyd who had also recently been saved, and who lived only two miles away in Caldbeck. Sounded good – till Eddie discovered she had moved over the border to Lockerbie in Scotland, and was now working as a housekeeper. However, he discovered she still came home some weekends and he managed to get her address. Eddie wrote to her and said he’d heard about her conversion, adding that he too had recently been saved. He suggested perhaps they might meet next time she was home in Caldbeck.

A week later, she replied. She thanked him for his letter, saying she was pleased he was a Christian, and arranged to meet him the following Saturday at a Bible rally at the Hebron Hall in Carlisle.

For the next few Saturdays, Eddie drove into Carlisle in his father’s shiny new Morris 10 and met Nora at church. Just before Christmas, she gave him a present: a copy of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

What Eddie didn’t know about Nora Boyd when they first met was that she was an orphan and had never known her father. Her mother had died when she was aged four and she had been placed in two children’s homes before being fostered by a family called Lennon in Caldbeck.

‘At school in Caldbeck, I wasn’t very happy,’ says Nora today. ‘I would get blamed all the time. If things went missing, they would look at me – you know, look at me, because nobody knew where I was from …’

The Lennons of Caldbeck were a Methodist family but, on leaving Caldbeck aged fourteen, Nora decided she wasn’t going to believe in God any more. ‘I vowed I wasn’t going to church again. I blamed God for what had happened to me in my life so far.’

Three years later, aged seventeen, while Nora was staying with relations in Liverpool, she saw the light and became converted – the conversion that Eddie learned about. ‘I realized then that God could only do me good, not harm.’

Eddie and Nora spent the next five years courting, until one day in 1951, Eddie heard that an uncle of his had a house to rent at Brocklebank, outside Wigton, for 12s.6d. a week, the previous tenants having just moved out. It was this that prompted Eddie to suggest marriage to Nora. Not exactly romantic, but very sensible. Their marriage took place on Boxing Day 1951, at the Methodist chapel in Caldbeck, followed by a wedding reception at the Caldbeck village hall.

Eddie by now had acquired a threshing machine, paying for it by selling his hens and hen houses to his father. The threshing machine, a Ransome, was bought from a contractor who was giving up. It came with a Case tractor and a list of two hundred names of people who were, supposedly, regular customers. This was in the days before combine harvesters, when small farmers could not afford expensive machinery of their own. Local contractors like Eddie Stobart would thresh their corn for them and undertake other seasonal agricultural jobs which required a bit of machinery.

In 1953, Eddie and Nora bought their own house, a bungalow called Newlands Hill, just outside Hesket. The cost was £450. Eddie put down a deposit of £50 and got the rest on a mortgage from a building society.

They moved into Newlands Hill with their first two babies: Anne, born in 1952, and John, born in 1953. Their third child, Edward – never called Eddie in order to avoid confusion with his father – was born at home at Newlands Hill on 21 November 1954. There was then a slight gap before Eddie and Nora’s fourth and last child came along: William, born in 1961.

Until 1957, Eddie had still been officially working with his father, and with his brother Ronnie, all three of them running the family’s little agricultural business: threshing, ploughing, ditching, carting – whatever was required. John had also started to trade in hay and grain, helped mainly by Ronnie. Eddie was doing most of the agricultural contracting and had recently begun to spread fertilizers for the local farmers. He’d also begun to feel it was time to go it alone, to run his own little business.

In 1957, when Eddie was aged twenty-eight, he and his father and brother decided to divide up the family assets. After some discussion, it was agreed that Eddie’s share of the family firm would be: the threshing machine, which they valued at £150, a Fordson tractor worth £250, a Nuffield tractor worth £150, fuel tanks worth £50, and cash in hand of £100. These, then, were the net assets, valued in total at £700, of Eddie Stobart’s first firm, which opened for trading in 1957 as E.P. Stobart, Hesket Newmarket.

At the end of Eddie’s first year in business in 1958, the firm had added to its assets a spreader and sundry agricultural instruments. The wages during the year amounted to £424, which would appear to have been casual labour, plus what Eddie had paid himself. Turnover for the year was £2329 and the profit was declared as being £630.

The following year, turnover had almost doubled to £4063, and the profit was £1600. Eddie now had a third tractor, a second spreader and a Rotovator. Wages had risen to £834 as he had now taken on his first employee, Norman Bell. Norman drove a tractor and did general labouring, but was considered part of the family, eating his meals with Eddie and Nora in their kitchen.

Eddie’s main work was spreading fertilizer on fields, hence the need for two spreaders. Originally, he had simply delivered the cartloads of fertilizers from an agricultural merchants to various farmers. Then he undertook to do the spreading for the farmers, using his own machinery. Most of his fertilizer was in the form of slag, heavy in phosphate.

By 1960, business continued to do well, with turnover up to £7,893, though the profit had increased only marginally to £2,026. This was mainly due to a rather large capital expenditure that had occurred during 1960.

‘I got this call one day from the County Garage in Carlisle,’ remembers Nora, who was doing the books and answering the phone for her husband’s little business. ‘Someone wanted Eddie. I said he wasn’t here. A voice then asked if Eddie was still interested in the guy down at the garage. I said: “What guy? I didn’t know Eddie was going to take on someone else. What’s this guy’s name?” There was silence at the other end. Then the voice explained that it was a lorry called a Guy. Eddie was apparently interested in buying it.’

Which he did; Eddie’s very first lorry. Until then, he had pulled his farming machinery or had delivered loads by tractor. The lorry was a second hand Guy, a four-wheeler Guy Invincible, which he bought for £475. Ideal for carrying and tipping basic loads of slag.

Eddie decided to have the lorry painted; make it look a bit brighter. The colours he chose were Post Office red (roughly the colour of the panels on his threshing machine, which he’d always liked) and Brunswick green. On the cab door, in small but discreet lettering, he had painted the words: ‘E.P. Stobart, Caldbeck 206, Cumberland’.

And so the first Eddie Stobart lorry hit the road. But, alas, not for long. The Guy turned out to be a bad buy, a load of trouble, always going wrong. Eddie sold it a few months later for £420, thus losing £55 on the deal.

Instead, he bought a new Ford Thames lorry, which cost the large sum of £1,450. He financed it through a hire-purchase agreement, putting down a deposit of £135. A big commitment, but he hoped the fertilizing business was going to be profitable in the years to come.

At the same time, Eddie and Nora decided to enlarge their bungalow. It was proving too small to hold their family of four young children plus trying to run a business from the same premises.

Then, out of the blue, Harrison Irvinson, the local agricultural merchant who had been providing work spreading slag, went out of business. Eddie was left with a full order book of slag to be delivered and spread, a lot of expensive equipment, including a new lorry, but no slag. You needed a licence to be an agricultural merchant, which was not easy to get, and Eddie didn’t have one. You also needed capital to set up as a merchant and buy stock.

Eddie had a few sleepless nights but eventually managed to do a deal with a Carlisle firm of agricultural merchants, Oliver and Snowden. But, as well as spreading the fertilizer, Eddie Stobart now also had to go and collect it. Most of it came from ICI or other steel plants in Middlesbrough, Scunthorpe or Corby, a residue of the smelting process. So Eddie had to acquire more lorries and drivers.

This led one day to a visit from an ICI official who said that Eddie’s premises at Hesket were right in the middle of an area where the company wanted to expand their supply of slag for agricultural purposes. ICI was lacking a suitable slag store, a dump, where slag could be kept till needed. It offered to pay Eddie to go and collect the slag, and promised regular work, but he would have to build the slag store himself, and a weighbridge, and get the appropriate planning consents – all at his own expense.

Eddie worked out that the total cost would come to some £8000. Where could he get such a sum? And if he could, would it be worth it? Eventually, with the help of Penrith accountant, N.T. O’Reilly, he managed to borrow the money and the slag store was built.

In this way, Eddie’s business as an agricultural contractor continued to expand during the 1960s. He took on more lorries and drivers and acquired more customers amongst the farming community. By 1969, he had three lorries, three tractors, three spreaders and a JCB. His turnover that year was £79,700, his profit £4687 and his wage bill £6992.

He even survived what could have been an extremely serious setback when the agricultural fertilizer department of ICI was taken over by Fisons, who then decided they didn’t need the use of Eddie’s slag store any more. They gave him a month’s notice, then pulled out of the agreement.

Once again, Eddie and Nora slept badly for a few weeks and did a lot of heavy praying. In the end, it led to them purchasing slag in their own right, rather than just collecting and distributing it for others.

During all these developments in the 1950s and 1960s, throughout the setbacks and excitements, Eddie and Nora remember doing a lot of praying. They continued to be devout Christians but were moving towards the more evangelical wing. Eddie was a lay preacher, and he and Nora became involved in the Cumbrian branch of the Gideon movement, helping to distribute Bibles to schools, hospitals and prisons. They both attended Christian meetings all over the county and were continually putting up visiting preachers at their home in Hesket.

Eddie never worked at all over the weekends, whatever the drama might be. Sunday was devoted to God; Saturdays to their young family. Business was not the most important thing in their life; it was just what they did during the week.

YOUNG EDWARD

The Stobart children were all very blonde when young, but then most native Cumbrian children are born fair-haired. You see them ‘up street’ in Carlisle on Saturday mornings, in from the country and shopping with their mums and dads, being dragged around, little boys and girls, so fresh-faced and fair, like little angels. It’s the Scandinavian in them coming out, leftovers from the Viking Norse raiders.

The Norse influence can also be seen in the rural place names: ‘beck’, meaning stream, ‘how’, meaning small hill, ‘pike’, for sharp summit, ‘thwaite’, meaning clearing. ‘Howbeck’, the name of the little village school in Hesket, is a perfect example, combining two Norse words. This was the school that all the young Stobarts attended, just as Eddie himself had done.

Young Edward, the Stobarts’ third child, started at Howbeck at five years old, and was taken there each day by his sister Anne, aged seven. They walked the one-and-a-half miles to get there, along with their six-year-old brother, John. Edward has no memory of his mother taking him to school; his memory of her during his childhood was that she was ill and very often in bed all day. ‘I don’t even remember her making my breakfast,’ he says now. During her thirties, Nora did have a sequence of illness, such as gallstone problems which confined her to her bed, but she was later to recover her health.

Edward has a clear memory of what he thought about his first day at Howbeck school: ‘I hated it. It was a nightmare from day one. I remember thinking: “How am I going to get through it, so that I can go home and play?”’

By playing, Edward meant watching his father’s machinery in the yard, tipping and loading, or going to his grandfather’s farm and playing with the animals there. His little job each day was to go to his grandfather’s to pick up a can of milk for their family.

Edward’s father had remained at Howbeck all his school life, such as it was, as in those days pupils could stay there until they were fourteen. By the time young Edward attended, Howbeck had become a primary school, which meant that, at eleven years old, you had to move on elsewhere. There were just two classes in the school: Class One, for those aged five to eight, and Class Two, for those aged eight to eleven. Edward reminisces: ‘I remember a Miss Allcorn taking Class One – and what I remember about her was that she had a bubble car. Miss Ashbridge took Class Two and she was the headmistress.’ Kathleen Ashbridge always retained pleasant memories of the Stobart boys. They were not great scholars, but she had no trouble from them.

‘If I was naughty at school,’ says Edward, ‘I did it behind the scenes. But I wasn’t a troublemaker. All I got told off for by Miss Ashbridge was for not doing well. She’d then put me in the corner with my face to the wall. I quite liked sums, that was about all. Nothing else. I spent a lot of time just sitting, drawing cars and lorries.’

According to Nora, Edward was always the most adventurous of her four children, and the one who usually got injured. ‘He had accidents all the time. One of the earliest was when he was rushing into Mrs Jardine’s field to feed her hens. He was in such a hurry that he ran straight into a barbed-wire fence. He cut his whole face; the blood was awful. But that was typical. He was always falling off things or stumbling over things.

‘But he was also very sensitive and generous, would do anything for people. He was always quite quiet; all the boys were quiet, really. Anne was the talker in the family; she was the clever one.’

Anne was the only person to pass the eleven-plus in her year at Howbeck. ‘In fact,’ she says, ‘I was told I was the only one to have passed it for seventeen years – the last one being my Uncle Ronnie.’ She went to Wigton Nelson Tomlinson grammar school at Wigton – alma mater of Melvyn Bragg.

When it was time for Edward to sit his eleven-plus, he had no expectations. ‘I never thought for one moment I would pass,’ he says. ‘I was useless at all school work. In the exam, I couldn’t answer a single question. I just sat there, drawing tractors. I felt pretty disgusted with myself. I don’t remember any one else in my year passing, so we all went to the secondary modern together.’

This was Caldew School, Dalston, opened in 1959, so still quite new when Edward arrived in 1965. It became a comprehensive in 1968, while Edward was still there. There were five hundred pupils, both boys and girls, and lots of playing fields and space, being in a semi-rural situation. Dalston itself is a rather affluent dormitory village, just five miles from Carlisle, facing towards the Caldbeck Fell. Each day, Edward went on his bike into Hesket then caught the school bus for the ten-mile journey to Dalston.

Edward remembers, ‘I was put in the dunces’ class from the beginning, in Mrs Carlisle’s class. William got put in the same class when he arrived. We were both big dunces all the way through our school lives. They called it the Progress Class. But we all knew what it meant.

‘I was never good at writing. If I concentrated really hard, I might just make six spelling mistakes on a page. But usually I got every word wrong. I could never see the point in writing. I didn’t feel thick; I was just a dunce at lessons. I felt older than the others in many ways. At twelve, I felt about twenty. I knew about general things, about how things worked, which they didn’t. I wasn’t street-wise – I never watched television at home, ever, so when the other lads spent hours talking about TV programmes, I didn’t know what they were on about. But all the same, I felt mature compared with all of them.

‘I’m not sure what they thought of me. A bit strange perhaps, eccentric. I was a bit of a loner – I never wanted to be in anyone’s gang and I didn’t have a best friend. At playtime, I’d often go and help the school gardener. Even during lessons, I’d try to get off and go with him. I always wanted to use his lawnmower – one of the big ones, you know, that you can sit on and drive. I thought it was a brilliant machine. But he’d never let me. Instead, he’d let me help on the hedge cutting. I enjoyed it better than any lessons.

‘But I had some good laughs at school, got up to mischief now and again. I once locked a teacher in the store cupboard. The deputy headmaster was Mr Mount. We called him Bouncer – I suppose because he was small and fat and bounced along.

‘I got caught once for smoking by Bouncer. It was me and John behind the gym wall. It was reported to our parents. My dad wasn’t very worried: “Did it make you sick?” he asked me. I said yes. “Same as me,” he said. He was very laid-back, my dad. He gave us a lot of rope.’

Nora worried about Edward’s bad school reports, but always told him that all he could do was his best. ‘The trouble was, Edward never did his best. So I used to tell him that at least he must always be honest.’

Kenneth Mount, now retired but still living in Carlisle, remembers the Stobart boys well. He taught at Caldew School from its 1959 opening until 1986, when he retired. He became deputy headmaster and was indeed known as Bouncer – but not for his appearance, so he says. ‘I was called Bouncer because I bounced them out of school. Oh yes, I could be very tough on them.’

He confirms that Edward went into the remedial form on his arrival at the school. ‘We would have had reports from his primary and knew that he wasn’t very good at reading and writing. No, he wasn’t ESN [educationally subnormal]. We had special schools for those sort at the time in Carlisle. If he’d been really bad, he would have gone there. He was just, how shall I put this as I have no wish to be derogatory? A slow learner. William was even slower. Academically, neither was exactly successful.

‘But you have to understand that they were typical of many country lads. School was an irrelevance to them. They would be up early morning doing jobs on the farm, then working in the evening when they got home. School was just what they did during the day. And if you think about it, it was more interesting for a certain sort of boy to be at home, surrounded by machines and animals, than sitting at a desk in school. But Edward’s character was excellent, and his behaviour. I knew the family; I knew he came from a good Christian home.’

On Sundays, Edward went to Sunday School and to church with his brothers and sister. Given a choice at the time, he would not have gone as he didn’t enjoy it. It was just something he was forced to do, although he did believe in God.

There was some slight social demarcation at school amongst the rural children, between the various farmers’ sons. Many of these were hard up, especially if their fathers were small-holders in rented farms, or if they were farm labourers or farm contractors. Some farmers were, by contrast, quite well off, or appeared well off, especially if they owned several vehicles, as the Stobarts did.

‘I knew my father was a contractor, with about four or five people working for him but, no, I never felt well off,’ says Edward. ‘We did have a car, a Morris Oxford, but I never had a new bike. I always had a second-hand one. We did have a summer holiday, but never abroad. We usually went to a guest house in Cornwall or Devon.

‘The pipes once got frozen at school and we were all told to bring our own drinks to school. I took a bottle of water. Some people brought bottles of lemonade. I remember thinking, well, they must be well off …’

Edward was fascinated by money from an early age and was always looking for jobs that would earn him something. From about the age of eleven, he did what his father had done as a boy, chopping up wood to sell as kindling sticks. He seems to have had it better organized than his dad, making an attempt at mass production. Edward got his dad to order a load of old railway sleepers, which he paid for, then had them sawn up into lengths. He chopped them into sticks and bagged them in old animal-feed bags he got from his Uncle Ronnie’s cattle-feed mill. Each day, he would take two bags of sticks on the school bus to Dalston, thereby getting free transport, where he sold them to teachers at three shillings a bag.

Very soon, Edward’s earnings mounted up. He always kept his money in cash, in his pocket, and when the coins grew too bulky, he changed them into notes. By the age of fourteen, he was carrying around with him £200 in notes: an enormous amount for a boy of fourteen in 1968. Today, of course, we would immediately suspect a schoolboy with such a sum of selling drugs. Not Edward, though, from his God-fearing family, in rural Cumbria.

Edward isn’t sure why he didn’t put the money in a bank or the post office, to make it earn a little bit of interest: ‘I don’t know – I just liked the feel of it. I always kept it in this trouser pocket, at the front, all the time – even when I was at school.’ Nor is Edward sure why he didn’t leave the money at home, if only under the bed. ‘Perhaps I worried about burglars,’ he muses. ‘It just seemed safe, always having it on me.’

Edward didn’t, however, leave the money in his pocket when he changed at school for PE or games. ‘Oh, I took it out of my pocket then. I’d hide it in a secret place: in my satchel …’ That must have fooled everyone. Yet Edward insists that he didn’t even half-want people to know, to be aware that he was a boy of means. ‘I never told people. I didn’t go around boasting at school. My parents didn’t know either. I can’t really explain it, except to say I just liked the feeling of having my money on me.

‘But it wasn’t the money itself that was so important. It was the sign that I’d achieved something. I was always like that, setting myself little aims, to sell so many bags in a week, make so many pounds in a month. I liked beating my own targets which I’d set for myself. No one else knew.

‘My older brother, John, also did jobs around the place; he wasn’t lazy, but he was never at all interested in money. Not like me: I’d agree to wash my dad’s car for a certain price and try to do it in a certain time.

‘It felt good, to watch it mount up. I didn’t spend it, well, not much of it. Perhaps some clothes as I got a bit older. As it got bigger, I told myself I was saving to buy my own car but, really, I was mainly saving the money because I liked seeing it mount up.

‘I suppose you could say I was insecure, which I probably was. Having money made me feel a bit more secure. But, then again, nobody ever knew what I’d saved, so how did I gain by that?’

There is one other explanation why Edward got such secret satisfaction out of salting his little earnings away; why having a stash in his pocket, on his person, made him feel good, perhaps even better than most others. It happened when he was aged seven. At that time, work was being done on the house and the family was living in a caravan on the site. ‘One day,’ says Nora, ‘Edward decided to climb up on the roof. I’ve no idea why. That was the sort of thing he was always doing – to see how the slates fitted, I should think. Anyway, he fell off and was badly hurt. And that was when it all began. The shock of it brought on his stammer.’

Edward clearly remembers the day of his fall. ‘It wasn’t the house roof. It was the roof of an outside toilet. The builders had left stuff lying around, so I just decided, for no reason, to climb up on some oil drums they’d left; take a look at the roof. It was a slate roof with a big hole in it where they were repairing it. And I just fell right through. I wasn’t seriously hurt, not that I can remember. But, in about a day, I realized I’d developed a stutter. Fear, you might say. That’s what caused it suddenly to happen like that.’

Nora took Edward to a speech therapist in Wigton for several years but it didn’t seem to help that much. It didn’t help William either. ‘Oh yes,’ says Nora, ‘the same sort of thing happened a bit later to William. So I was then taking both of them. It was bad throughout all their childhood and youth.’

Around 1.2 per cent of children (about 109,000) in England and Wales between the ages of five and sixteen develop a stammer each year. No one has ever conclusively explained the causes or the triggers or why, over the decades, the figures have stayed roughly the same. It occurs throughout the world, across all cultures, all social groups. And everywhere it shows the same remarkable characteristic: four times as many boys are afflicted as girls. Hard luck on the Stobarts, having it happen to two of their number.

Edward’s own theory is that it’s all to do with trying to speak too quickly: ‘That’s when I always have trouble, when I want to say too much, all at the same time. I start one sentence before I’ve finished another, so it comes out as a stutter. I’m thinking too far ahead, that’s it. Same with eating: I eat far too fast. Always have done. I used to bolt all my meals – in fact, really, I didn’t like eating. What used to happen was that I couldn’t really taste what was in my mouth, so I was rushing to the next bite, to see if that tasted better. I used to say I wished they would invent pills that would save the bother of sitting down and eating.’

Edward doesn’t recall his stutter being a particular handicap at school. ‘It was just embarrassing, that was it really. I don’t think it got me down, not that I can remember. There were certain words and sentences I couldn’t say. When you see them coming, you try and say something else. Which means you often don’t say what you want to say.

There was one word I couldn’t say: Stobart. I always hesitated on that. It’s better now, because most people down South pronounce it “Stow-bart”, not “Stob-burt”. I find “Stow-bart” easier – it probably is the proper way. Having a stutter does make you try to speak properly. If anyone ever did try to tease me at school, then I tried to get in first. Take the mickey out of myself before they could.’

Nora says Edward’s stutter has greatly improved over the years, though she notices it can still be bad if he gets overexcited. ‘Perhaps it will go in the end, now he has much more confidence. After all, Eddie conquered his.’

Eddie, too, had a stammer, although to hear him today, there is no trace of it. He so clearly loves talking, telling stories, anecdotes and moral tales. This is in contrast to Edward who, even today, clearly doesn’t like talking, especially about himself. ‘My stammer arrived when I was about ten years old,’ says Eddie. ‘It happened in much the same ways as Edward’s – after an accident. I caught my thumb in a door and the shock made me stammer from then on. But it left me at the age of seventeen. And I’ll tell you exactly how. It was the first day I was ever asked to stand up in chapel and talk. I didn’t want to. I was scared to, because of my stammer. But God took me by the hand. God helped me to cure it.’

During the years he had his stammer, Eddie can’t remember being worried by it. ‘A stammer can be useful, you know. When I was queuing up for sausage and chips, I would say s-s-s-sausages and ch-ch-ch-chips p-p-p-p-please, and I would always get given two more sausages than the others!

‘I’ll tell you a little story about a man with a stammer. He was a Bible seller, going round the doors, selling Bibles. And he was a great success, this Bible seller, the best Bible seller in the region. Naturally enough, all the other Bible sellers wanted to know the secret of his success, how he could possibly manage with his stammer. “It’s really very easy,” he said. “When they open the door, I say to them ‘Would you like to b-b-b-buy a Bible, or shall I r-r-r-read it to you …’”’

Eddie laughs and laughs at his own story, eyes twinkling, as merry as the little gnomes in his garden. This, again, is a contrast to his son Edward. Even as a young man, Edward was always the serious one, devoted to hard work rather than God, to getting on; determined to beat his own targets, whatever they might turn out to be.

EDWARD GOES TO WORK

There was never any doubt about where Edward would be employed after he left school. He always knew exactly what he was going to do: carry on as before. He would work with his father full time, without the inconvenience of having to go to school during the day and thus waste so many precious working hours.

No other career ever entered his mind, not even something which, in an ideal world, he would like to do if things had been different. The only childhood fantasy career that ever tempted Edward was to drive cars like Stirling Moss. In a fantasy world, yes, it might have been nice to be a racing driver.

But, of course, Edward always inhabited a very real world. By his own admission, he’d hardly been a childish child or a soppy teenager, feeling grown-up from the age of twelve. From that age onwards, he’d been doing man’s work for his father, driving tractors and diggers or any other bits of machinery his father was using. At the age of fourteen, he was even driving a JCB – illegally of course. ‘The JCB driver had left,’ Edward recollects, ‘and my father had a contract through Brown’s of Thursby for some work on the new M6 between Junctions 42 and 43. It was the long summer holidays from school, so I took over the JCB and did the work.

‘My job was to dig holes for the new signposts being put up along the motorway and the slip roads. You don’t realize how many signs there are on the motorway: hundreds of them. When I’m driving on the M6 today, I always look out for the ones I put up. They’re very deep, you know. They can be ten feet in the air, but they probably go ten feet into the ground as well.

‘I worked with an Irish gang. I dug the holes with my JCB, the Irish lads put the signs in. They didn’t know how young I was, or anything about me. I never told anyone at school, never boasted I was driving a JCB. I loved it – loved every minute.’

Edward estimates he did that job for six months, despite the fact that his school summer holidays were only six weeks long. ‘In the whole of my last year, I probably only spent three months of it at school.’

Some grammar schools at that time, in the big metropolis of Carlisle and even in smaller towns like Wigton, taught the classics and had modern-language groups and science sets. Instead of this, Caldew School, a newly emerging comprehensive serving a rural community, tried to specialize and suit its pupils to their future careers by creating an agricultural course for those about to leave. Edward took this course in his fourth and final year at school. He enjoyed it, as it mainly meant visits to farms and places of agricultural interest.

Edward finally left school in the summer of 1970, aged fifteen. His leaving report, signed by his form tutor, Mr Monaghan, and his headmaster, Mr Douglas, indicates that Edward’s frequent absence made a true assessment of him difficult. The leaving report does, however, manage to praise his ‘natural flair for repairing machinery’ and how on ‘numerous occasions [he has] shown good organizing ability in practical tasks connected with his agricultural studies’. The mention of some sort of organizing ability is interesting, though it appears to refer to organizing himself rather than others in practical tasks. The report makes it pretty clear that he had made ‘limited academic progress’, but that he should prove to be ‘an excellent employee’.

On leaving school for good, Edward just carried on working for his father. His next contract was with a firm called Sidac at Wigton that was building a new factory. Edward’s job was to dig the foundations. His wage, paid by his father, was £5 a week. When that contract came to an end, Edward returned to helping his father at home in the yard, working on the fertilizing side of the business.

For the next two years, till the age of seventeen, this was Edward’s main occupation: spreading lime on farmers’ fields. This business was expanding all the time, as Edward’s father had now built the slag store and was both collecting and delivering as well as spreading lime.

Edward worked all hours and weekends if necessary, as ever setting himself little targets, aiming to get so many fields spread in an hour, so many farms in a week, aiming to do more than all the other Stobart workers. His father was pleased that Edward worked so hard, but thought the weekend work was a bit unnecessary.

By this time, Eddie had half-a-dozen drivers and half-a-dozen assorted vehicles. There was still little demarcation between the employees and the Stobart family; everyone mucked in, did what jobs had to be done.

By the time he was seventeen, Edward was beginning to think that perhaps his father’s attitude to business was, well, perhaps a bit laid back. No words were exchanged. No arguments took place. Edward did everything asked of him, and a great deal more besides. It was just that, in his head, young Edward could see ways, so he thought, of doing things differently, doing things more efficiently.

‘Norman Bell, my dad’s original driver, would go home on Friday evening often not knowing what his job was going to be on Monday. I always thought this was terrible. Or my dad would let a lorry drive empty all the way to Scunthorpe to pick up slag without bothering to try and get some sort of load to take there. I thought this was all wrong. Sometimes my dad would wake up on a Monday morning with no plans made for the week: terrible.’

Edward began to suggest his own ideas to his father. ‘Well, we never fell out, let’s say that. But as I got older, I might point out he had no Plan B. Plan A would be to spread lime on Monday morning. Now we all knew that always couldn’t be done; you need a dry day for lime-spreading, no wind and that. So, if the weather turned out not right, you couldn’t do it. Fair enough – but my father never seemed to have Plan B lined up. That meant the driver and vehicle were often standing around, doing nothing.

‘Spreading fertilizer is seasonal work anyway. It’s vital to have other contracts, such as quarry work, to keep the men and vehicles occupied. My father never seemed to me to think far enough ahead. That did upset me.

‘He thought I was a good worker. He’d often say he wished all his workers were like me. But he also thought I was crackers. Especially when I spent my Saturdays and Sundays getting filthy black, washing all the vehicles after the drivers had all gone home.’

Mr Stobart, Senior, admits that he and young Edward did not always see eye-to-eye on how the work was planned, but then he wasn’t too bothered. That was just Edward’s opinion, how he saw it. Eddie had a different attitude to work and the business, which was anyway doing very well – especially in a time of inflation.

As Eddie was well aware, and perhaps young Edward did not quite appreciate, if the weather was bad and the lime could not be spread, this was not necessarily bad news or bad business. While the lime lay there in Eddie’s slag store, the chances were that, by the time it was spread, the prices might have gone up. Because Eddie now owned the slag, which he paid for and collected then sold on in due course to farmers, it often paid him to be laid-back, not rushing things.

But, of course, the basic difference between father and son was not in business acumen or business economics but in their different philosophy to work as a whole. Eddie wouldn’t break his own rule about weekends, keeping Saturdays for his wife and family, to have a run into the Lake District, a trip to the coast at Silloth or into Carlisle to go shopping. Sundays were always sacred. Mondays, well, they could look after themselves.

As the years had gone by, and Eddie’s business had expanded, he had also grown to like parts of it better than other parts. He was never much interested in lorries; couldn’t quite see their potential or the point in maximizing their use. ‘I saw my lorries as a tool for my main business, not as a way to make a return on the capital I had invested in them. My profits were in buying and selling the fertilizers. I knew where I was with them. I knew what my return would be the moment I bought them. There wasn’t a lot of risk or a lot of bother – and the profits were quite good, until the margins in fertilizers started to go down.’

The part of his business that gave Eddie a lot of fun and pleasure was a farm shop, which he had bought and created in Wigton. A diversification in a way, but still part of his general agricultural business. He much preferred this to lorries. ‘I didn’t want the hassles of trying to find work for all the drivers, planning where they had to go, what they had to do and when. So that’s why I started to let Edward look after that side of things. He was the one always interested in making the most of the lorries.’

Edward began to divide his day between sitting in the house planning loads, organizing the work, the drivers’ routes and timetables, and driving the vehicles himself. One moment he would be on a tipper in the yard, unloading slag, and the next, he’d be rushing to answer the telephone.

Despite having been so useless and disinterested at school when it came to reading and writing, he was now being forced to write things down, keep records, work out itineraries. A lot of it he kept in his head; Edward had always been very good at mental arithmetic and at money matters.

But he still much preferred driving, always willing to drive anything, anywhere at any time. One evening in 1974, when he was just twenty, they got an urgent order to take a load down south, to Wisbech. Edward said he would do it, even though, at that stage, he had never driven further than Scotch Corner in a truck. He didn’t, of course, have an HGV licence, nor access to any heavy vehicle, so he went off in a small seven-and-a-half-ton truck which they used for delivering fertilizers on local farms. Just to complicate things, or give himself some company, he took with him his young brother William, then aged twelve.

Halfway down the A1, Edward realized he was running out of diesel fuel, with no service station in sight. A few miles later, his truck packed up completely. ‘I sat on the verge of the Al with my head in my hands in a state of panic. I didn’t know what to do next. It was now well after midnight – and I had a young boy to worry about as well as myself.

‘I got out and decided to hitch a lift for help. A furniture van picked me up and took me about ten miles to a transport caff where he said there might be some lorry drivers. As he drove into the caff, the top of his furniture van hit the filling station canopy outside the caff and tore bits off it. Oh no, I thought, all the damage I’m doing by having been so stupid. The driver dropped me off and reversed out quickly.

‘There were six international lorry drivers inside, all from the same firm, all driving Seddons and, by chance, they had a mechanic. They said when they’d finished their tea, they’d come and help. Luckily, they were going my way. It was about two o’clock by now. I’d left William on his own in the truck for about an hour-and-a-half.

‘The mechanic bled my engine for me, which you have to do when you run out of fuel. He then filled it up with enough diesel to get me to the next garage. I offered them money, but they refused. All they said was that one day I might pass one of their lorries, parked up, and it would then be my turn to help them …’

By the age of eighteen, Edward’s father was paying him £9 a week. He still kept his savings in his pocket, which meant that, by the time he had passed his driving test, he thought he had enough to buy himself his own car.

One day, after finishing off some lime-spreading on a farm just outside Carlisle, Edward was driving down Currock Road, Carlisle, in his tractor when he passed a garage. On the forecourt was parked a brand-new Mini Clubman. A loud notice shrieked its price, only £820.

Edward stopped his tractor and went into the garage. The proprietor was sitting at his desk in his office, smoking a cigar. ‘I w-w-w-want to buy that car, yon’un car out front,’ said Edward slowly, pronouncing his words as well as he could.

‘You need money to buy cars, lad,’ said the garage owner, swinging back and forth on his chair, without bothering to get up.

‘I’ve got some money,’ said Edward.

‘Can’t you read, lad?’ said the garage man. ‘That car costs £820. In money.’

Edward was wearing a filthy woolly hat, filthy working clothes, was covered with slag and lime and clearly didn’t look as if he had a penny. His youth and stammer did not improve the general impression. He looked very much to the garage man like a potter – a Carlisle expression that does not mean one who makes pots, but someone fairly scruffy, who might be a tramp or a dosser.

In his packed little pocket that day, Edward had £1000 – all in cash. His life savings from his short life so far. He pulled some of it out to demonstrate to the garage man that he was a person of some substance. The garage man immediately got up from behind his desk, put down his cigar and assumed his best customer-relations smile. After some discussion, Edward, by promising cash, all of which he said he had on him, got the price down to £780.

So Edward had wheels; a young man with transport, able to go into dances in Carlisle of a Saturday night, and able to offer lifts home to young ladies, which he did, but only now and again, as he was working so awfully hard at weekends.

He got his Mini Clubman and most of his subsequent cars serviced in Hesket, in the village garage owned by Richard Woodcock, which stood right in the middle of the village, in what was the ancient market cross. In 1972, Richard’s sixteen-year-old sister, Anne Woodcock, came to work for Eddie in his office, typing letters and invoices; her first job after leaving school.

Anne Stobart, Edward’s big sister, the clever one who had gone to grammar school, had been working with her father as his secretary until then. She moved over to work in the farm shop in Wigton once young Anne Woodcock had settled into her job.

‘My mother had just died,’ says Anne Woodcock, ‘and Eddie and Nora were really kind to me, giving me the job, looking after me. I was with them for two years. My wage was about £15 a week and I think at the time they had ten vehicles altogether. It was mainly agricultural work, lime-spreading and slag, but they did do quite a bit of haulage. I remember when they secured some sub-contract haulage work from Barnett and Graham: that was a big event.

‘I knew the family were strong Methodists; Eddie and Nora and Anne. Every year at Keswick Convention time, they would talk about it, perhaps hoping I might go with them. I’m Catholic by birth, so it wasn’t really my thing. But they were very tolerant really. Other members of their family were much stricter.’

Anne enjoyed working with the two Stobart boys around, as John and Edward were just a few years older than herself. ‘Edward and John were just normal farm boys. Like most of the others in Caldbeck and Hesket, they’d go for a drink on a Saturday night in Hesket or Caldbeck, or into Carlisle to the dance at the Cosmo – the Cosmo was where all the country boys went. I went there as well.

‘At work. I have to say, I wasn’t aware of Edward running anything, of being in charge in any way. He did most things in the business, but Eddie the father seemed to me definitely the boss.

‘I was impressed by how Edward coped with his stutter. William’s was far worse, so much so that often he couldn’t talk at all, but Edward never let his get him down. He was determined to carry on as normal. Edward didn’t lack confidence, I’ll say that, but I have to say I had no idea he would go further than he’d got to already. When I worked with the Stobarts, it was just a small family business. And it seemed as if it always would be like that.’

During the two years Anne worked with the Stobarts, Edward had a rather nasty accident. Aged eighteen, he was working as usual one Saturday morning, up at six to start lime-spreading. Having finished, he came back to the yard in the late afternoon where he met Clive Richardson, one of their drivers, who had come into the yard to pick up something.

Edward asked Clive if he had got the message about his Monday job, one which Edward had personally fixed up for him on Friday. He’d given all the details to his father, to pass on to Clive.

‘Oh he cancelled it,’ said Clive. ‘I’m not working Monday.’

‘Why not?’ asked Edward.

‘I’d forgotten my wagon needs four new tyres. So I’m going to do that on Monday instead.’

Edward went straight to the phone and rang Barnett and Graham, the firm through which the job had come. He cancelled the cancellation, saying a Stobart truck would be there after all to do the job, and not to worry.

Edward then searched around the yard and eventually found four half-reasonably tyred wheels, which he thought were good enough to go on the truck, an Atkinson 240.

‘My dad wasn’t around, of course; he never was on a Saturday. I think that day he’d gone to Wigton to see how the shop was doing. Clive, the driver, was a bit disgruntled at first, as he was in a hurry to get home, but he agreed to help me get the old wheels off.’

They were very heavy wheels and the last one was proving difficult to get off. At last they managed it but, in doing so, the wheel somehow did a bounce and crashed into Edward. He was fit enough, with all the physical labour he had been doing since the age of twelve, but he was never very tall, just five feet, six inches high and, at eighteen, he was only eight stone in weight. The impact of the large bouncing wheel knocked Edward over. He fell down in a heap, breaking his leg.

Clive rang for an ambulance, then rang to tell Mr Stobart, Senior, what had happened. Meanwhile, Edward was in agony, lying on the ground, unable to move. He was also starting to shiver, as it was a very cold afternoon.

‘The ambulance men arrived first, before my dad. They got out this blow-up bag thing and put my left leg in a splint, then they laid me on the stretcher. They were about to give me a pain-killing injection, which probably would have knocked me out, when at last my dad arrived.

‘With a great struggle, I managed somehow to lean over on my side, get me hand in me front pocket, and I drew out my money. It was about £600 or £700. I didn’t want to go into hospital, did I, carrying all that with me? At hospital, they’d take my clothes off, put me into hospital pyjamas and that. I might never see the money again. So the last thing I remember doing, before the ambulance took me away, was handing it over. But, by then, I knew the truck was OK and the job would be done on Monday.’

Eddie remembers the incident well, and the precise words which Edward used: ‘Tek hod o’ this, Dad,’ Eddie wasn’t totally surprised; he and Nora always knew Edward kept his money on him. Many a time, Nora had ruined some of his pound notes in the washing machine when he’d forgotten to take them out of his trouser pocket.

‘When I’d been Edward’s age,’ says Eddie, ‘my father had never given me a wage when I’d worked with him. So I always made sure that Edward and then William, when they worked with me, got a wage, just like the other workers.

‘They had, of course, nothing to spend it on. There was no drugs in those days and they didn’t live a wild life. So we knew Edward must have saved a bit of money. Even so, we didn’t know till that day quite how much he’d been carrying around with him. That was a surprise.’

Edward was taken to the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle. His leg was fractured in two places and it took the next seven-and-a-half weeks for him to recover. For the first week or so, he was in agony. Then he was in total frustration, wondering about what was happening back at the ranch.

‘All the drivers came in at the weekends to see me: Norman Bell, Norman Glendinning, Stan Monkhouse, Clive and Selwyn Richardson, John Graham, Gavin Clark. I used to quiz each one on what me dad was doing: “Is he keeping you working?” I’d say, “Who’s planning next week?”

‘I was so miserable, stuck there. It was the worst time in my whole life. Certainly the slowest – I just lay there, thinking about the trucks, night and day. I wasn’t spying on my dad, when I was asking the drivers about him. I just worried that the lorry side would collapse while I was away.’

Edward’s father was very pleased when, at last, Edward could return to work. ‘Oh, I wanted him back as quickly as possible as well. Edward had been doing all the planning for the trucks. And by then, he really had become daft about trucks ….’

EDWARD GOES TO TOWN

Until 1970, Eddie Stobart had been trading simply as ‘E.P. Stobart, Hesket Newmarket’. But, as the business grew with more employees, more tax to pay, more financial responsibilities, more things to go wrong or be sued for, it was time to become a limited company. On 23 November 1970, a new company was formed: Eddie Stobart Ltd.

In the accounts for the second half of that year, under assets, eight assorted lorries are listed, including a new Scania wagon and trailer, bought at a cost of £9000. There was a reported loss of £409, but that was partly explained by the firm being reorganized and the expense of the Scania.

The new company had two shareholders. Eddie Stobart owned nine thousand of the ten thousand shares. His daughter, Anne, who reached the age of eighteen that year, was given the remaining one thousand shares. It was Eddie’s plan to give each of his four children, once they reached the age of eighteen, a thousand shares.

In 1971, when John reached eighteen, he declined the offer of the shares. He was not interested in lorries or machinery, or in business generally. He simply wanted to be a farmer, so he took his inheritance in cash and bought some sheep in order to get started.

Edward on reaching eighteen, in 1972, naturally took his shares. Working in his father’s firm, looking after the lorries and machinery, was exactly what he wanted to do. Anne, by now, was approaching her twenty-first birthday and was shortly getting married, becoming Mrs Anne Fearon. She was made a director of the firm that year, along with her father.

The accounts for 1972 show a huge increase in the firm’s turnover since becoming a limited company; it had reached almost a quarter of a million pounds, with profits of £17,153. It is noticeable that, on the official accounts, the business of Eddie Stobart Ltd is stated as being: ‘agricultural merchants and dealers in agricultural machinery, plant etc.’ The farm shop, where Anne and her husband, Ken, were working – and also Eddie for a lot of the time – was doing well, and so were their other agricultural activities. But the haulage part of the company was also proving a success, thanks to the hard work and enthusiasm of Edward for all things lorry-like. This is where the future lay, so Edward thought, this was where a lot more business was to be had.

Although Eddie himself much preferred the fertilizing and farming side of the business, he allowed Edward to build up the haulage side and was prepared to listen to ideas, opportunities or suggestions for further developments. In May 1973, Richard Woodcock, owner of the garage in Hesket, offered Eddie the chance to visit a proper haulage firm, to see how the big boys did it.

Richard Woodcock’s father, also called Richard, was the owner of the village shop in Hesket. He had sent young Richard to a public school, Ampleforth, but Richard had left with only one real ambition: to work with motor cars. After leaving school, Richard had become an apprentice fitter at the firm of Sutton and Sons of St Helen’s, a family firm in Lancashire. They were a very well known, national firm whose rise to eminence in the haulage business had been partly based on their connections and nearness to Pilkington’s of St Helens, the glass giants. As they had grown and expanded, so had Sutton and Sons and their lorries. In 1973, they had about two hundred lorries.

Richard hadn’t expected that Edward, aged nineteen at the time, was coming with his dad on the day’s outing. ‘As we drove off, I was a bit surprised when Edward jumped in the car as well. On the way down, I told Eddie that if we met Alf Sutton himself, which was unlikely, I should warn him that Alf was a bit, well, the rough-and-ready type, who used strong industrial language. I knew that Eddie was a devout Methodist and might get upset. He said don’t worry, he’d met all sorts in the agricultural world.

‘We had a brilliant day out, toured all the premises, met some of my old friends. Eddie and Edward were both amazed by Sutton’s operation. They had their own garages and repair shops which were huge, with state-of-the-art equipment. In those days, haulage firms kept their lorries for many years, looking after them themselves.

‘We had lunch in their canteen and then, eventually, we did get to see Alf himself. It was a short chat, in his office. He was very helpful, giving the Stobarts some of his time and a bit of advice.’

Edward, today, can remember the advice very clearly. ‘He asked us how many lorries we had at our place. We told him we had six – that was all we had at that particular time. His advice was that we should give them all up. Haulage was too tough a business. Get rid of the lorries and the drivers, he said. We’d be better off using owner-drivers for our business. So that was pretty depressing …’

But they did have a most interesting day out, enjoyed by all. Richard had been aware that Mr Sutton had not been particularly encouraging, haulage-wise but, looking back, he thinks Alf’s words might have had a positive effect on young Edward. ‘In a way, it spurred him on to prove people wrong. I think he saw what a fantastic setup Alf Sutton had and thought he could do just as well, if not better.’

In 1975, on reaching the age of twenty-one, Edward became a director of Eddie Stobart Ltd, joining his father Eddie and sister Anne. It was another good year for the firm, judging by the annual accounts. The turnover, from sales of goods and work done, was £407,138, but costs had been high and their net profit was just £19,647.

By 1975, Edward was looking after the haulage side of the business almost completely on his own. The accounts for the end of the year show a number of vehicles being bought and sold during that year but, on average, they were running eight lorries, plus the same number of trailers and units.

Edward was determined to improve this side of the business, but was finding many problems. He lost one good driver who didn’t want to do any long-distance work and drive further than the county boundaries. Rural-based, local country drivers from Hesket and Caldbeck, the sort they had always employed, many of whom Edward had grown up with, did not like doing night work or long-distance work. They were not keen, either, on anything that might be deemed urgent, drop everything, do-it-now work.

Almost all the haulage work the firm undertook was sub-contracted. A bigger haulage firm, elsewhere in Cumbria, would have the main contract, but would pass on bits to smaller firms like Eddie Stobart Ltd if they couldn’t manage it all. By definition, these were very often last-minute jobs, emergencies or night work, which Edward was keen to accept, however inconvenient. It often meant he did these rotten jobs himself, for in 1975, aged twenty-one, he had passed his Heavy Goods Vehicle licence. He could now legally drive any of the bigger trucks. But he knew he was missing a lot of work by not having suitable, willing men always available. It was also a handicap being stuck in Hesket, out in the sticks, some fifteen miles from Carlisle.

In 1976, Edward came to a big decision. He felt it was time to go it alone, in two senses. He wanted to be personally running his own show, albeit still under his father’s wing as part of the firm, as it hadn’t entered his head not to be part of Eddie Stobart Ltd. Edward, however, also wanted a chance to be able to work without his father looking over his shoulder every day. He felt it was time for the haulage part of Eddie Stobart Ltd to be separated, literally and physically, from the agricultural and fertilizing sides. He wanted to be in Carlisle, to employ Carlisle-based drivers, to be on the spot, for a change, when jobs came up.

He’d done some sums in his head, worked out how much time and money was being wasted each time they drove the fifteen miles empty into Carlisle, just to pick up a load. ‘I was fed up being at Hesket Newmarket. We’d outgrown the site, couldn’t really expand any more. The fertilizing side was not really growing and we didn’t need many more vehicles or men for that side of things. But I was sure the haulage side had a better future.’

Eddie listened to the arguments, the rationale, and willingly agreed with Edward. He says he’d been thinking much the same anyway. Edward’s own memory is that his father had to be persuaded. He remembers that, when he found a suitable site in Carlisle with a rent of £3000 a year, his father initially told him that he was ‘crackers’.

‘My dad didn’t see how I was going to make enough money to pay such a big rent. It was a big step for us, but my dad did agree it was the best thing to do, for all concerned. I will say that – he didn’t try to stop me.’

‘Edward was always the one with ambition,’ says Eddie. ‘He had always been suggesting better ways to do most things. John never had any interest at all. William was too young. But Edward always had this burning ambition. He was desperate to go into haulage.’

Once the big decision was made and Eddie saw how the family firm was beginning to split, with different parts and people going in different directions, he began to arrange a way of making it all neat and tidy. Eddie Stobart Ltd, since its creation in 1970, had consisted of three main parts: fertilizers, the farm shop and haulage. Eddie and daughter Anne were much more interested in the first two. It was therefore decided to parcel it up under a new name: Eddie Stobart Trading Ltd, which they would look after.

This left Eddie Stobart Ltd to concentrate on haulage. The bold young Edward, aged twenty-two, left the family yard in deepest, rural Hesket Newmarket, and headed for the big city, new people, new problems, new excitements.

His experience of haulage had been somewhat limited until then, despite his keenness and enthusiasm to get more work. And his day trip to Sutton’s, to see how a real haulage firm operated, had not exactly been inspiring. It just seemed to Edward, without really working it all out, without looking around at the wider world of haulage, that the time was right for him to go into something new. New, perhaps, for Edward Stobart, but something very, very old as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

HAULAGE – THE LONG HAUL

There were several reasons why Eddie Stobart had never really been interested in haulage. It was partly his temperament, partly that he was more interested in other things which appeared much more profitable, and partly the result of history.

At the time that Eddie first started up his own business in 1958, haulage was subject to various Acts of Parliament, endless Government rules, complicated amendments and changes, the issuing of special licences – all of which resulted in haulage becoming almost a closed shop. But it had always been like that. Politics, local or national, have usually managed to have a hand in transport, ever since transporting began.

They often say that prostitution is the oldest profession; lorry driving – or similar – must have also been one of the earliest trades. For the history of haulage is almost as old as the history of man. Ever since we stepped out of the caves, there has been a need for some sort of dragging, carrying, carting. Hunter-gatherers might have done their own hunting, but they quickly learned to get stronger people, or better sleds, to drag their spoils home.

The Romans built the first proper roads in Britain, and their military haulage system was constantly clattering up and down the country, bringing luxury goods such as shellfish to the middle of Hadrian’s Wall, as well as military equipment and supplies.

In medieval England, the establishment of local markets were both the cause and result of better haulage. All through history, transport has usually been at the heart of a nation’s economy – both rising and falling in tandem, each reflecting the state of the other, a gauge to what is really going on.

By the fifteenth century, most inhabitants of England were only ten miles from the nearest market, even if it was just a small one, like Hesket Newmarket. There was local transport, taking local goods to market, but also long-distance transport, humping items around the country, from market to market. Documents from as early as 1444 show that specialist carters were on the roads with their horses and carts, taking cloth from the Midlands and North to London, doing it on a regular, daily basis, although they packed up in winter when the roads, such as they were, became impassable.

In the seventeenth century, as roads improved, long-distance wagons grew heavier and quicker, capable of carrying fifty rather than twenty hundredweight of goods. This was when the authorities, local and national, first thought up the idea of getting money out of road users. In 1604, the Canterbury Quarter Sessions decided to charge carts over fifty hundredweight the sum of five shillings because, so it was said, their local roads were being damaged by the heavy traffic. Yes, traffic problems, in 1604.

When the turnpike system came in, another way of getting money out of drivers was introduced, a toll being charged on all users of the turnpikes. These were the better class of road, the motorways of their day. The tolls went towards the cost of keeping the turnpikes in good condition.

One result of the popularity and efficiency of the turnpikes was a growth of coaching inns, catering for travellers. There were some 2000 of these by the early seventeenth century. It also led to the development of special horses, short-legged draught horses, like the Suffolk Punch, strong enough to pull the heaviest loads. As with the stagecoaches, fleets of horses for the goods wagons were kept at staging posts. It was estimated that each horse needed five acres of hay and oats a year to keep it going; development in transport has always had an overspill effect, bringing about ancillary changes.

In the middle of the eighteenth century came the canals. Bad news for road hauliers, not because canals were all that much quicker but because they were very much cheaper. A ton load from Manchester to Birmingham, which cost £4 by road, cost only £1 by canal. Smart carriers such as Pickfords, already established by 1766, who were operating horse wagons between Manchester and London, quickly got themselves some canal boats while still running their horse wagons.

Alas for the canals: just when they thought they were the state-of-the-art technology, about to lord it over road haulage for centuries, along came the railways. Canal use was killed off almost overnight. This seems to be the nature of the history of transport; new forms have always come along, to either replace or reduce the old forms. (It makes one wonder how on earth motor transport has lasted so long. After a hundred years, it must be time for some new form of transport to finish off the internal combustion engine.)

In 1838, when the first railways were running, there were 22,000 miles of turnpike roads in England. Within ten years, their income from tolls had dropped by a quarter and the condition of the roads had greatly deteriorated. But, once again, established companies like Pickfords adapted. They used railway wagons for long-distance jobs and local roads for local horse-drawn traffic. These local roads became busier if they led to or from a railway station. In 1846, Pickfords had 850 horses; by 1878, this had increased to 2000.

Railways created suburbs, commuters and markets with fresh produce available daily. The population grew. Industry arrived. Railways might have become the preferred way of travelling, for both people and goods, but transport in general continued to expand.

Road transport came into its own again with the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the 1890s. Motor cars were the new glamorous inventions, but goods vehicles were also being made, almost from the beginning, at places like Leyland in Lancashire. In 1904, there were 4000 goods vehicles on Britain’s roads. By the beginning of the First World War, this figure had risen to 82,000.

Just as the seventeenth-century growth in transport had created tolls, the result this time was taxes. The Budget of 1909 imposed a graduated tax on all vehicles, starting at £2 for light cars of 6h.p., rising to £32 for heavy vehicles of between 40–60h.p. There was also a tax imposed on petrol of 3d a gallon. Ostensibly, the rationale was the same as the turnpike toll: to raise money to maintain and improve roads and bridges, taking the burden off the local parishes. It was soon apparent, however, that not many new roads were actually being built, despite the sums being raised by the new road taxes.

What happened, of course, was that the Government quickly realized, as any Government would, that it had hit upon a brilliant wheeze for raising huge sums, which increased all the time without its having to do very much, except collect them.

The First World War stopped all transport growth but, afterwards, there was rapid expansion again. A new haulage industry, very much as we see it today, came into being. The initial spark occurred in 1920, when the Government decided to sell off cheaply some 20,000 vehicles which had been used during the war, mainly to carry munitions. It enabled many ex-service men, with little or no capital, to set themselves up as owner-drivers, or ‘tramp drivers’ as they were called.

The result was fairly chaotic, causing a Wild West-like stampede of unregulated, cut-throat, highly competitive, not to say dodgy and dangerous, lorries and lorry drivers. These flooded the roads and were soon fighting each other for business. Road taxes had to be paid, of course, but no licence was needed to operate; anyone could have a go.

At the top end of haulage, business continued to be good for some well-established, well-run firms with large fleets of lorries, such as Pickfords or Sutton and Sons, but they were not best pleased by the hordes of new owner-drivers. Very soon, this new breed made up some eighty per cent of the haulage industry, giving it a bad name and, even worse, forcing down prices. The railways were also not happy at being undercut by one-man lorry firms.

A Government Commission was set up to investigate the situation, and the result was the 1933 Road and Rail Transport Act. Amongst other things, it created a regulating system for hauliers, based on different grades of licences. You needed, for example, an A-licence to carry goods over a long distance for other people – or hire and reward, as it was called. A B-licence was for shorter distances and, if you were carrying only your own goods, then all you needed was a C-licence. The existing big boys all got A-licences but new, smaller firms found it very hard to get one.

After the Second World War and the arrival of a Labour Government, the Transport Act of 1947 brought in nationalization to road haulage. Most of the big boys, with the A-licences, were bought over and British Road Services, BRS, began. Smaller, local firms were able to stay private, with a B-licence limiting them to a distance of twenty-five miles from their base. Those with C-licences, transporting only their own goods, were also left free. There were more changes and minor messings around when the Conservatives got back into power in 1953, with partial denationalization. But a system of A-, B- and C-licences still remained in 1958 when Eddie Stobart set himself up in business.

‘As I remember it,’ says Eddie, ‘an A-licence meant you could carry goods for anyone, anywhere, over any distance. Robsons in Carlisle, for example, always had an A-licence, but they were huge. I think the only firm in our area who had an A-licence was Tysons of Caldbeck.

‘You had to go to a Ministry of Transport tribunal if you wanted to get that sort of licence. You had to prove a need for it, that there was local demand, and also that the railways couldn’t do it. The railways could object, which they did, and stop you getting an A-licence.

‘What I had was a B-licence. I could transport other people’s goods locally, or my own over any distance. I was doing roughly half and half. When we went to ICI at Middlesbrough to pick up slag, I was transporting my own goods because I’d bought it. A C-licence meant you could only transport your own goods.’

By the time Edward fell in love with lorries and decided to move into Carlisle, the laws had changed again. In 1968, the Labour Government’s Transport Bill did away with thirty-five years of restrictions. A- and B-licences were scrapped; all hauliers, of any size, were suddenly free to transport goods over any distance.

Without realizing it, Edward was fortunate to come into the haulage business at the time he did. Ten years earlier and he would have found it very much harder. On the other hand, there were immediately hordes of little lorry firms again.

In 1976, some 900,000 lorries were trundling around Britain, a great many of them owned by small-time, agricultural contractors and part-time hauliers such as the Stobarts. All were competing for business, all hoping to grow and expand.

HELLO CARLISLE

The premises Edward moved into in Carlisle in 1976 were in Greystone Road, quite near the middle of the city, not far from Brunton Park, world-famous home of Carlisle United FC. It was the time when, back in the 1974–75 season, CUFC surprised, nay amazed, everyone by getting into the First Division. On 24 August 1974, they beat Tottenham Hotspur at Brunton Park, 1–0, before a crowd of 18,426 and, after three games, they zoomed to the top of the league. A perilous position, from which they soon grew dizzy and fell fast. They lasted only one season in the top flight, before dropping back to the Second Division.

But it did mean that, on match days in 1976, there were still quite reasonable crowds coming to watch Carlisle – some of whom took advantage of temporary, match-day-only parking spaces in the rather tatty, rather limited new premises of Eddie Stobart Ltd in Greystone Road. It made Edward and his staff a few bob, which went into the joint kitty to pay for cornflakes, milk, chips and other necessities of life.

The yard staff consisted of only two people when the premises first opened, both of whom Edward brought with him from Hesket. There was Stan Monkhouse, then aged thirty-five, who had been working with Edward’s father since 1960. He was born and brought up on a farm not far from Hesket and had been a farm worker till joining Eddie, aged eighteen, as a tractor driver. At the age of twenty-one, he had graduated to lorry driver, which he did for the next ten years, going back and forth from Hesket to places like Scunthorpe and Corby, carrying loads of slag.

He’d got married, had children and a home in Hesket, and was becoming a bit fed up with being away so much. Therefore, in 1973, when Edward offered him the chance to be the lorry maintenance man at Newlands rather than a lorry driver, he jumped at it.

‘I’d been off for six months at the time,’ recollects Stan. ‘I broke my arm, falling off a trailer. When I got back, Eddie was having problems with his maintenance man, and asked me if I was interested in the job. I said yis, aye, I’ll give it a go.’

Three years later, when young Edward asked Stan to come into Carlisle to look after the maintenance of his lorries, he said ‘yis, aye’, again. He could still come home every evening and thought it might be interesting, being part of a new venture.

‘They were very different,’ says Stan, ‘Edward and his father. I’d always got on with Eddie, he’d been very good to me, a perfect boss, but I just fancied a change.

‘I think Eddie was a bit reluctant about the move, but Edward had outgrown Hesket. We’d had one or two orders from Metal Box in Carlisle, in 1973 I think it was, which meant going into Carlisle to load up, bringing them back to Hesket, leaving them overnight, then delivering next day. Edward could see that being so far from Carlisle was a handicap and lost us time and money.

‘Eddie liked being a bit of a wheeler-dealer, going to agricultural auctions, buying and selling produce and fertilizers, mixing with the farmers, having a crack. Edward didn’t like any of that side of things. I could see Edward had a vision, though I didn’t know where it would lead.’

The other member of staff at Greystone Road was Stan’s apprentice, seventeen-year-old David Jackson, a very cheerful, sunny-natured lad who came from a farming family at Shap. He had been working with the Stobarts for seven months, running errands, sweeping the floor, going into Carlisle to pick up parts. He was four years younger than Edward but they became close friends, both having been poor scholars at school, both preferring to work with their hands rather than sitting at desks.

There was parking space for fifteen vehicles when they arrived at Greystone Road, though in that first year they had no more than eight. ‘It was all very basic when we arrived,’ says David. ‘There was no pit. It meant you had to lie flat on your back on the ground to work under the vehicles. It was very hard work; we all had to knuckle down.

‘Stan and Edward did most of the driving, till Edward started hiring local drivers. I was quite relieved: I didn’t have a class-one licence at the time, but I was so tired after each day in the garage, I couldn’t have taken a lorry out at night.

‘I once went to Glasgow with Edward overnight. I think he just took me with him as company, to keep him awake. We got back at four in the morning, too late for either of us to go home. There were some old shelves in what we called the bait cabin, where we ate our sandwiches. Edward cleared the shelves and we slept on them – as if they were bunk beds. Oh, I didn’t mind. I did the job for love, not for money. It was exciting.’

David smiles as he recollects the excitement of the early days. ‘I can’t put it into words: it just was. It felt good, being part of it. And we did have some good laughs. Edward in those days quite liked playing practical jokes.’ Edward himself, when pressed, also remembers having water fights with the hose pipes, after the end of a long day’s work.

Nora Stobart remembers David and Edward both larking around in those early years at Greystone Road. The drivers would be out all day on a job, leaving Stan and David in the yard, working on repairs and maintenance. Edward would be in his little office, trying to drum up work, unless he was out on an emergency job. No one could have told the difference between the three of them, as they were all in boiler suits, all pretty scruffy.

‘There was a rep they didn’t like who started calling, asking to see Mr Stobart,’ says Nora. ‘They didn’t want to see him so, next time he came, Edward and David climbed on a roof and pretended to be crackers, pulling faces. When asked if Mr Stobart was in, they both said “Who?” He went away and never came back.’

Edward, in fact, frequently pretended not to be who he was, even when he wasn’t well known. He says now, ‘If customers saw I was driving the lorries myself, they might think what sort of firm is this, why is he behind the wheel not at his desk?’

In the evenings, after work, Edward and David went out for a meal now and again, chased girls together, now and again, and, in the summer, they usually went on their week’s holiday together. One year they went to Newquay, along with two other country lads. But, mainly, it was long hours and hard work.

‘If I ever did manage to get a girlfriend,’ says Edward, ‘work always came first. I’d cancel a date if a job came up. The way I lived, I didn’t meet many girls anyway. My fingernails were always dirty and my hands oily. Most of my Saturday nights were spent at places like Beattock, eating egg and chips in a transport caff, having tipped a load at Motherwell.’

Edward did drink and smoke at the time, so he was not totally without pleasures or vices. David remembers him going through a packet of twenty cigarettes, one after the other, but then he wouldn’t have another one for days. He also had long hair, like most lads in the Seventies.

‘I was looked upon as the first Stobart rebel,’ recollects Edward. ‘I wasn’t really, of course, but my father and grandfather had always been strictly religious. My father did once catch me drinking. He made out it was the end of the world, that I’d done something really bad. I’d made it worse by taking William with me. He was only eleven at the time …’

On the business side of matters, the new drivers the firm hired from Carlisle didn’t always turn out to be as good as they would have liked. ‘One of them blew an engine,’ says David, ‘totally ruined a new lorry, just by being inexperienced. Another time, I came in one morning to find our best lorry had been turned over by a new driver in the night. It had rolled over and the cab was all bashed in. Edward looked at it and said to Stan and me: “Tha’s got to have that’un on the road by tonight.” We couldn’t believe he was serious. It was in such a terrible state. But Stan and me set to, using about four jacks to support it, stop it falling to pieces while we worked on it, welding it together. We got it roadworthy in eight hours, working non-stop.’

David got the odd ear-bashing from Edward if he did something wrong, but says Edward never held it against him. ‘All the drivers respected him. They could see he was doing the same work as they were – and a lot more.

‘When we heard him saying: “No problem” on the telephone, we knew there were going to be problems. Edward would accept any work, anywhere, even if all the drivers were out, even if it meant dumping loaded goods in our garage in order to go off and pick up another load. There was nothing illegal about this. Stuff always got delivered on time, as promised. But we wouldn’t have liked, say, someone from Metal Box to arrive and find their goods piled up on our garage floor.

‘Edward, from the beginning, always wanted his lorries clean. We had to do them every weekend. Even on Christmas Eve, Edward always insisted that all wagons had to be washed and parked up before Stan and me went home, even if it was eight o’clock and we’d been working hard all day. He wanted everything left spick and span. It was as if it was the lorries’ Christmas Eve as well ….’

Edward says he could never get to sleep on a Sunday or over any bank-holiday period if he thought any of his lorries had been left dirty. ‘I’d never call myself a trucker. Still don’t; I’m not the sort who’s in love with lorries, who would go spotting. I look upon lorries as tools, there to do a job. And as with all tools, you should look after them as best you can. Lorries are a bit like ladies, aren’t they? If they look good, you’re on the right track ….’ A metaphor which probably should not be explored too closely.

In its first year, Edward’s firm expanded from eight to twelve trucks, but was then hit by a steel strike. ‘The whole haulage industry had a terrible time,’ says David. ‘Edward didn’t want to lay off any of the drivers, so what he did was take the tax off six vehicles. That saved him some money. He then put our twelve drivers on one week on, one week off, till work came in again.’

After a couple of years at Greystone Road, Edward acquired an old Portakabin which gave him more space. He used this as his office, and also as his sleeping quarters, if he came back too late after an emergency driving job, up to Glasgow, or down to Birmingham. It meant that, for days at a time, often for a whole week, he would not go home to Hesket and his own bed.

He became obsessed by sending out his lorries each day as cleanly as possible, even if it meant that he was the one to stay late the night before in order to wash them. ‘I didn’t ask the drivers to do it,’ Edward explains. ‘They were paid to drive, not wash. So if I wanted them all clean, I had to do it.

‘What I was trying to do was move up-market. And that, mainly, meant trying to get cleaner work. Doing tipper work, carrying slag and fertilizers, or quarry work, as we’d been doing at Hesket, was the bottom end of the market, the dirty end. I wanted to move into food and drink, the clean end. You didn’t need tippers for this. You needed flat-bed trailers, where the pallets could be laid.

‘I persuaded my dad we needed two flat-bed trailers, Crane Fruehauf flat-bed trailers they were, which we bought from Grahams of Bass Lake. They cost £1750 each.’

Not content with moving up to flat-bed trailers, Edward wanted them to be the very latest versions. Most hauliers of the time had open-sided, flat-bedded lorries, as opposed to tippers, and piled the pallets or the goods on the back, covered them with a bit of canvas to keep them dry, then secured them with ropes. This often led to ungainly, dangerous loads, exposed to the elements.

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