The Eddie Stobart Story

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.