The Eddie Stobart Story. Hunter Davies
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.
But he still much preferred driving, always willing to drive anything, anywhere at any time. One evening in 1974, when he was just twenty, they got an urgent order to take a load down south, to Wisbech. Edward said he would do it, even though, at that stage, he had never driven further than Scotch Corner in a truck. He didn’t, of course, have an HGV licence, nor access to any heavy vehicle, so he went off in a small seven-and-a-half-ton truck which they used for delivering fertilizers on local farms. Just to complicate things, or give himself some company, he took with him his young brother William, then aged twelve.
Halfway down the A1, Edward realized he was running out of diesel fuel, with no service station in sight. A few miles later, his truck packed up completely. ‘I sat on the verge of the Al with my head in my hands in a state of panic. I didn’t know what to do next. It was now well after midnight – and I had a young boy to worry about as well as myself.
‘I got out and decided to hitch a lift for help. A furniture van picked me up and took me about ten miles to a transport caff where he said there might be some lorry drivers. As he drove into the caff, the top of his furniture van hit the filling station canopy outside the caff and tore bits off it. Oh no, I thought, all the damage I’m doing by having been so stupid. The driver dropped me off and reversed out quickly.
‘There were six international lorry drivers inside, all from the same firm, all driving Seddons and, by chance, they had a mechanic. They said when they’d finished their tea, they’d come and help. Luckily, they were going my way. It was about two o’clock by now. I’d left William on his own in the truck for about an hour-and-a-half.
‘The mechanic bled my engine for me, which you have to do when you run out of fuel. He then filled it up with enough diesel to get me to the next garage. I offered them money, but they refused. All they said was that one day I might pass one of their lorries, parked up, and it would then be my turn to help them …’
By the age of eighteen, Edward’s father was paying him £9 a week. He still kept his savings in his pocket, which meant that, by the time he had passed his driving test, he thought he had enough to buy himself his own car.
One day, after finishing off some lime-spreading on a farm just outside Carlisle, Edward was driving down Currock Road, Carlisle, in his tractor when he passed a garage. On the forecourt was parked a brand-new Mini Clubman. A loud notice shrieked its price, only £820.
Edward stopped his tractor and went into the garage. The proprietor was sitting at his desk in his office, smoking a cigar. ‘I w-w-w-want to buy that car, yon’un car out front,’ said Edward slowly, pronouncing his words as well as he could.
‘You need money to buy cars, lad,’ said the garage owner, swinging back and forth on his chair, without bothering to get up.
‘I’ve got some money,’ said Edward.
‘Can’t you read, lad?’ said the garage man. ‘That car costs £820. In money.’
Edward was wearing a filthy woolly hat, filthy working clothes, was covered with slag and lime and clearly didn’t look as if he had a penny. His youth and stammer did not improve the general impression. He looked very much to the garage man like a potter – a Carlisle expression that does not mean one who makes pots, but someone fairly scruffy, who might be a tramp or a dosser.
In his packed little pocket that day, Edward had £1000 – all in cash. His life savings from his short life so far. He pulled some of it out to demonstrate to the garage man that he was a person of some substance. The garage man immediately got up from behind his desk, put down his cigar and assumed his best customer-relations smile. After some discussion, Edward, by promising cash, all of which he said he had on him, got the price down to £780.
So Edward had wheels; a young man with transport, able to go into dances in Carlisle of a Saturday night, and able