The Eddie Stobart Story. Hunter Davies
described the parlour in which they stayed, amazed by all the ‘little ornaments and nick-nacks … it was so very pleasant to see these things in such a lonesome by-place … what a wonder this room must be to the little children born in the gloomy village, what grand impressions of those who became wanderers over the earth, how at distant ends of the world some old voyagers would die, cherishing the belief that the finest apartment known to men was once in the Hesket Newmarket Inn, in rare old Cumberland …’
I’m sure the locals didn’t like the reference to their ‘gloomy’ village but it shows that Hesket, however hidden away, has attracted some eminent people over the centuries.
The present-day best-known resident of Hesket is Sir Chris Bonington, the mountaineer and writer: a Londoner by birth, but a Cumbrian by adoption. He bought a cottage at Nether Row, just outside Hesket, on the slopes of High Pike, in 1971 and has lived there full time since 1974. He is a co-owner of the Old Crown pub. It doesn’t quite put him on the level of a Scottish and Newcastle or Guinness director: the Old Crown is now a co-operative, with sixty local co-owners.
Chris has no intention of ever leaving the area. He likes the local climbing, either doing hair-raising rock stuff over in Borrowdale or brisk fell walks straight up High Pike from his own back garden. In summer, he can manage two days in one: a working day, writing inside, then an evening day, outside at play till at least ten o’clock, as the nights are so light. ‘I love the quietness up here,’ he says, ‘well away from the Lake District rush. I also think it’s beautiful. I like the rolling quality, the open fells merging with the countryside. In fact, my favourite view in all Lakeland is a local one: from the road up above Uldale, looking back towards Skiddaw.’
As a neighbour of the Stobart clan, Chris has watched their rise and rise, but doesn’t think you can make generalizations about them or their background: ‘What I will say, from my observations, is that the Cumbrian is shrewd.’
Chris is currently watching the rise of another local family business from a similar background: known, so far, only in the immediate area. The founder, George Steadman, was the village blacksmith in Caldbeck in the 1900s. His son built barns. In turn, his son, Brian the present Managing Director, moved on to roofing and cladding for industrial buildings. Over the last twenty years, Brian Steadman and his wife, Doreen, have been doubling their business every year. They now employ sixty people and last year turned over nine million pounds.
Visitors to the Caldbeck area driving back into Carlisle, down Warnell Fell, will notice the Steadmans’ new factory on the left-hand side. When I drive past, I always turn my head in admiration, taking care not to crash as it is a very steep hill. Their front lawns are so immaculate, their buildings all gleaming, yet it’s only a boring old factory, producing boring old roofing material.
‘We didn’t used to be so tidy when we were based in Caldbeck,’ says Brian. ‘It was partly the influence of Eddie Stobart Ltd. We did a big roofing job for them in Carlisle, big for us: £400,000 it was and they paid us on the dot, which very few firms do these days.
‘Anyway, while we were doing that job, I noticed how neat and tidy all his lorries were, and his premises, and how smart his staff were. We all know how successful Eddie Stobart Ltd has been. I thought we’d try to follow his lead.’
The Steadmans are following Eddie Stobart from the same local environment. Is this just by chance, perhaps, or do they think there are any connections, any generalizations to be made? ‘I think what it shows,’ says Doreen, ‘is that people who leave school early, such as Brian and the Stobarts, who are no good academically but are good with their hands, can still create good businesses.’
‘I think with us and the Stobarts,’ says Brian, ‘it’s been an advantage being country people. Country staff are loyal, reliable people. They stick with you, through thick and thin. You need that in the difficult times, which all firms go through.’
Perhaps, then, it’s not at all surprising for successful businesses to come out of a remote, rural area. Country folk are shrewd, says Bonington. Country folk are loyal, says Steadman.
Country folk can do it, as has been shown in the past. One of Cumbria’s all-time successful business families came from Sebergham, the very next village after Hesket. In 1874, the village stonemason, John Laing, moved into Carlisle and set himself up as a builder. Today, Laing’s are still building all over the civilized world. So much for nothing happening, nothing ever coming out of such a remote rural region.
The Cumbrian branch of the Stobarts can trace their family back pretty clearly for around one hundred years, all of them humble farming folk in the Caldbeck Fells area. Before that, it gets a bit cloudy. Sometime early in the nineteenth century, so they think, the original Stobart is supposed to have come over to Cumberland from Northumberland, but that is just a family rumour. Originally, they could have been Scottish, or at least Border folk, as their surname is thought to have derived from ‘Stob’, an old Scottish word for a small wooden post or stump of a tree.
The founder of the present family was John Stobart, father of Eddie and grandfather of Edward. He was born at Howgill, Sebergham, in 1903 and worked at his father’s farm on leaving school. In 1930, he secured his own smallholding of some thirty-two acres at Bankdale Head, Hesket Newmarket. By this time he had got married to Adelaide, known as Addie, and they had a baby son, Edward Pears Stobart – always known as Eddie – who was born in 1929. Eddie was followed by a second son, Ronnie, in 1936.
On John’s smallholding, he kept eight cows, a bull, some horses and three hundred hens. Farming, and life in general, was hard at the end of the 1930s so, to bring in a bit more money and feed his young family, John managed to secure some work with the Cumberland County Council, hiring out himself plus his horse and cart, on occasional contract jobs.
John’s wife, Addie, died in 1942. John then married again, to Ruth Crame, whose family had come up from Hastings to Hesket Newmarket during the War to escape the bombing. He went on to have six other children by Ruth: Jim, Alan, Mary, Ruth, Dorothy and Isobel. Hence the reason why there are so many Stobarts in and around the Hesket area today.
Eddie has only happy memories of his step-mother. Until she came along, there had been what he calls ‘a sequence of housekeepers’, so he was pleased by the stability that Ruth brought into his father’s life.
After the war, in 1946, John bought his first tractor, which meant he could expand his contracting work, doing threshing and other agricultural jobs for farmers within a thirty-mile radius of Hesket.
The most important thing in John’s life was his Christian beliefs. He had become a Methodist lay preacher from the age of nineteen and travelled all over north Cumberland preaching at rural chapels. Every year, he took his family to Keswick for the annual Keswick Convention, joining thousands of other Christians, mainly evangelicals, from all over England.
Some of Eddie’s earliest memories are of being taken on the back of his father’s BSA motorbike as he went off preaching in Methodist chapels. He recalls that one church was full when they got there, and his father, when he stood up, was having trouble making himself heard. ‘Shout out, man,’ said a local farmer, putting his arm round John Stobart’s shoulder, ‘You are working for God, you know.’
Eddie left the local village school, Howbeck, just outside Hesket, when he was fourteen. ‘I was hardly there from the age of twelve. In those days, you got time off for seasonal agricultural work to help your parents. I quite enjoyed arithmetic, but my interest in history or geography or English was nil. I could never spell. I didn’t really like school. I was much more interested in catching rabbits.’
He went to work with his father, helping on the farm or with his contracting jobs. When the Cumberland Council wanted a horse and cart and one man for the day, paying a daily rate of 27s.6d., they often found the man was young Eddie.
From an early age, Eddie had been making some money in his spare time by chopping logs into kindling sticks or selling the rabbits he’d trapped. He took them