The Eddie Stobart Story

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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