The Eddie Stobart Story. Hunter Davies
I didn’t know what they were on about. But all the same, I felt mature compared with all of them.
‘I’m not sure what they thought of me. A bit strange perhaps, eccentric. I was a bit of a loner – I never wanted to be in anyone’s gang and I didn’t have a best friend. At playtime, I’d often go and help the school gardener. Even during lessons, I’d try to get off and go with him. I always wanted to use his lawnmower – one of the big ones, you know, that you can sit on and drive. I thought it was a brilliant machine. But he’d never let me. Instead, he’d let me help on the hedge cutting. I enjoyed it better than any lessons.
‘But I had some good laughs at school, got up to mischief now and again. I once locked a teacher in the store cupboard. The deputy headmaster was Mr Mount. We called him Bouncer – I suppose because he was small and fat and bounced along.
‘I got caught once for smoking by Bouncer. It was me and John behind the gym wall. It was reported to our parents. My dad wasn’t very worried: “Did it make you sick?” he asked me. I said yes. “Same as me,” he said. He was very laid-back, my dad. He gave us a lot of rope.’
Nora worried about Edward’s bad school reports, but always told him that all he could do was his best. ‘The trouble was, Edward never did his best. So I used to tell him that at least he must always be honest.’
Kenneth Mount, now retired but still living in Carlisle, remembers the Stobart boys well. He taught at Caldew School from its 1959 opening until 1986, when he retired. He became deputy headmaster and was indeed known as Bouncer – but not for his appearance, so he says. ‘I was called Bouncer because I bounced them out of school. Oh yes, I could be very tough on them.’
He confirms that Edward went into the remedial form on his arrival at the school. ‘We would have had reports from his primary and knew that he wasn’t very good at reading and writing. No, he wasn’t ESN [educationally subnormal]. We had special schools for those sort at the time in Carlisle. If he’d been really bad, he would have gone there. He was just, how shall I put this as I have no wish to be derogatory? A slow learner. William was even slower. Academically, neither was exactly successful.
‘But you have to understand that they were typical of many country lads. School was an irrelevance to them. They would be up early morning doing jobs on the farm, then working in the evening when they got home. School was just what they did during the day. And if you think about it, it was more interesting for a certain sort of boy to be at home, surrounded by machines and animals, than sitting at a desk in school. But Edward’s character was excellent, and his behaviour. I knew the family; I knew he came from a good Christian home.’
On Sundays, Edward went to Sunday School and to church with his brothers and sister. Given a choice at the time, he would not have gone as he didn’t enjoy it. It was just something he was forced to do, although he did believe in God.
There was some slight social demarcation at school amongst the rural children, between the various farmers’ sons. Many of these were hard up, especially if their fathers were small-holders in rented farms, or if they were farm labourers or farm contractors. Some farmers were, by contrast, quite well off, or appeared well off, especially if they owned several vehicles, as the Stobarts did.
‘I knew my father was a contractor, with about four or five people working for him but, no, I never felt well off,’ says Edward. ‘We did have a car, a Morris Oxford, but I never had a new bike. I always had a second-hand one. We did have a summer holiday, but never abroad. We usually went to a guest house in Cornwall or Devon.
‘The pipes once got frozen at school and we were all told to bring our own drinks to school. I took a bottle of water. Some people brought bottles of lemonade. I remember thinking, well, they must be well off …’
Edward was fascinated by money from an early age and was always looking for jobs that would earn him something. From about the age of eleven, he did what his father had done as a boy, chopping up wood to sell as kindling sticks. He seems to have had it better organized than his dad, making an attempt at mass production. Edward got his dad to order a load of old railway sleepers, which he paid for, then had them sawn up into lengths. He chopped them into sticks and bagged them in old animal-feed bags he got from his Uncle Ronnie’s cattle-feed mill. Each day, he would take two bags of sticks on the school bus to Dalston, thereby getting free transport, where he sold them to teachers at three shillings a bag.
Very soon, Edward’s earnings mounted up. He always kept his money in cash, in his pocket, and when the coins grew too bulky, he changed them into notes. By the age of fourteen, he was carrying around with him £200 in notes: an enormous amount for a boy of fourteen in 1968. Today, of course, we would immediately suspect a schoolboy with such a sum of selling drugs. Not Edward, though, from his God-fearing family, in rural Cumbria.
Edward isn’t sure why he didn’t put the money in a bank or the post office, to make it earn a little bit of interest: ‘I don’t know – I just liked the feel of it. I always kept it in this trouser pocket, at the front, all the time – even when I was at school.’ Nor is Edward sure why he didn’t leave the money at home, if only under the bed. ‘Perhaps I worried about burglars,’ he muses. ‘It just seemed safe, always having it on me.’
Edward didn’t, however, leave the money in his pocket when he changed at school for PE or games. ‘Oh, I took it out of my pocket then. I’d hide it in a secret place: in my satchel …’ That must have fooled everyone. Yet Edward insists that he didn’t even half-want people to know, to be aware that he was a boy of means. ‘I never told people. I didn’t go around boasting at school. My parents didn’t know either. I can’t really explain it, except to say I just liked the feeling of having my money on me.
‘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