Hunter Davies - The Eddie Stobart Story

‘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.