The Eddie Stobart Story

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.’