The Eddie Stobart Story. Hunter Davies
it’s practically prehistoric. Hauling stuff from A to B, real stuff as opposed to messages and information, has always been with us. And over the centuries it has sent out its own messages, giving us clues to the state of the economy, the state of the nation. By following the rise of our leading haulage firm over the last thirty years, since Eddie Stobart Limited was created in 1970, we should also be able to observe glimpses of the history of our times.
The cult of Eddie Stobart: that’s perhaps the most surprising aspect of all. How on earth has a lorry firm acquired a fan club of over 25,000 paid-up members? You expect it in films or football, in TV or the theatre, with people in the public eye, who have staff to push or polish their name and image. But lorries are just objects. They don’t sign autographs. Hard to get them to smile to the camera. Not many have been seen drunk or stoned in the Groucho Club. Some would say they are nasty, noisy, environmentally-unfriendly, inanimate objects – not the sort of thing you’d expect right-thinking persons to fall in love with.
I wanted to find out some of the answers to these questions, some sort of explanation or insight. I also wanted to celebrate my fellow Cumbrian. Hold tight then, here we go, full speed ahead, with possibly a few diversions along the way, for a ride on the inside with Eddie Stobart.
Hunter Davies
Loweswater, August 2001.
Caldbeck and Hesket Newmarket are two small neighbouring villages on the northern fringes of the Lake District in Cumbria, England. They are known as fell villages, being on the edges of the fells, or hills, where the laid out, captured fields and civilized hedges and obedient tarmac roads give way to unreconstructed, open countryside. A place where neatness and tidiness meet the rough and the unregimented. A bit like some of the people.
The first of the two most prominent local fells is High Pike, 2159 feet high, which looms over Caldbeck and Hesket, with Carrock Fell hovering round the side. Behind them, in the interior, there are further fells, unfolding in the distance, till you reach Skiddaw, 3053 feet high, Big Brother of the Northern Fells. A mere pimple compared with mountains in the Himalayas, but Skiddaw dominates the landscape and the minds of the natives who have always referred to themselves as living ‘Back O’ Skiddaw’.
Once you leave the fields, the little empty roads, and get on to the fell side, in half an hour you can be on your own, communing with nature. People think it can’t be done, that the whole of Lakeland is full, the kagouls rule, but this corner is always empty. My wife and I had a cottage at Caldbeck for ten years and we used to do fifteen-mile walks, up and across the Caldbeck Fells, round Skiddaw, down to Keswick and, in eight hours, meet only two or three other walkers. Then we got a taxi back, being cheats.
You see few people because this is not the glamorous, touristy Lake District. There are no local lakes. It’s hard to get to, especially if you are coming up from the South, as most of the hordes do. There used to be a lot of mining, so you still come across scarred valleys, jagged holes, dumps of debris. It’s an acquired taste, being rather barren and treeless, often windy and misty, colourless for much of the year, though, in the autumn, the fell slopes turn a paler shade of yellow.
At first sight, first impression, it’s not exactly a welcoming place. The people and the landscape tend to hide their delights away. Like the fells, friendships unfold. ‘They’ll winter you, summer you, winter you again,’ so we were told when we first moved to Caldbeck. ‘Then they might say hello.’
The nearest big town is Carlisle, some fifteen miles away, a historic city with a castle and cathedral, small as cities go, with only 70,000 citizens. It is, however, important as the capital of Cumbria, the second largest county in England – only in area, though; in population, Cumbria is one of the smallest, with only 400,000 people. Carlisle is in the far north-western corner of England, hidden away on the map and in the minds of many English people, who usually know the name but aren’t quite sure if it might be in Scotland or even Wales.
The region, it would seem at first glance, is an unlikely, unpromising setting to produce such a family as the Stobarts. At a second glance, when you look further into their two home villages, you find more colour, more depth, more riches hidden away.
Caldbeck is the bigger village of the two, population six hundred, and has a busy, semi-industrial past. The old mill buildings have now been nicely refurbished to provide smart homes or workshops. It still is a thriving village, a genuine, working village, as all the locals will tell you. It does not depend on tourists, trippers or second-homers. It’s got a very active Young Farmers Club, a tennis club, amateur dramatics. There are agricultural families who have been there for centuries, mixing well with a good sprinkling of newer, middle-class professionals who work in Carlisle.
Caldbeck’s claims to national fame lie in its graveyard. At the parish church is buried the body of John Peel, a local huntsman, commemorated in a song which is Cumbria’s national anthem and gets sung all round the English-speaking world. (Peel never heard it himself – the words were put to the present tune after his death.) Near him lies Mary Robinson, the Maid of Buttermere, a Lakeland beauty who was wronged by a rotter in 1802. He bigamously married her and was later hanged, a drama which thrilled the nation and became a London musical. More recently, it was turned into a successful novel by Melvyn Bragg. Lord Bragg, as he now is called, was brought up and educated at Wigton, a small town, about ten miles from Caldbeck. He is a great lover of the Caldbeck Fells and still has a country home locally at Ireby.
Caldbeck’s church is named after St Kentigern, known as St Mungo in Scotland, who was a bishop of Glasgow. He visited the Caldbeck area in 553 and did a spot of converting after he heard that, ‘many amongst the mountains were given to idolatory’. Much later, the early Quakers were very active in this corner of Cumbria, as were Methodist missionaries.
Hesket Newmarket, just over a mile away from Caldbeck, is very small, with only a few dozen houses. It is quieter, quainter than Caldbeck, a leftover hamlet from another age, one of the most attractive villages in all Cumbria and very popular with second-homers, many of whom live and work in the north-east. It’s basically one street which has some pretty eighteenth-century cottages lining a long, rolling village green. In the middle is the old Market Cross, admired by Pevsner for its ‘four round pillars carrying a pyramid roof with a ball finial.’ Until recently, it was used as the village’s garage.
There were five pubs here at one time. Now there’s only one, the Old Crown, well known in real beer circles as it brews its own beer. There used to be a local school, known as Howbeck, just outside the village, which all the Stobarts attended but it is now a private home. It was opened, along with Caldbeck’s village school (still going strong) in 1875 to ensure rural children received the same education as urban children. A School Inspector’s report for 14 May 1890, observed that: ‘a remarkable occurrence took place on Monday afternoon – viz, every child was present.’
Hesket Newmarket did have a market, established in 1751 for sheep and cattle, but it was discontinued by the middle of the nineteenth century. Hesket’s annual agricultural show, held since 1877, is still a big event, featuring Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling, hound trails as well as agricultural exhibits. It draws crowds and entrants from all over the county.
William Wordsworth, plus sister Dorothy and Coleridge, stayed at Hesket on 14 August 1803. Dorothy recorded their visit in her journal: ‘Slept at Mr Young-husband’s publick house, Hesket Newmarket. In the evening walked to Caldbeck Fells.’
Coleridge described the inn’s little parlour. ‘The sanded stone floor with the spitting pot full of sand dust, two pictures of young Master and Miss, she with a rose in her hand … the whole room struck me as cleanliness quarrelling with tobacco ghosts.’
In September 1857, Charles Dickens and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins visited the village in order to climb Carrock Fell. They later wrote up their trip in The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices. They managed to get to the top of Carrock Fell in the rain, moaning