Hunter Davies - The Eddie Stobart Story

‘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.