The Eddie Stobart Story

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.