Читать книгу The Eddie Stobart Story - Hunter Davies - Страница 6

INTRODUCTION

Edward Stobart is Cumbria’s greatest living Cumbrian. Not a great deal of competition, you might think, as Cumbria is a rural county, with only twenty settlements with a population greater than 2500. But our native sons do include Lord Bragg.

I used to say the greatest living Cumbrian was Alfred Wainwright, though he was a newcomer, who assumed Cumbrian nationality when he fell in love with Lakeland and then moved to Kendal. Wainwright, like Eddie Stobart, became a cult, acquiring an enormous following without ever really trying. In fact Wainwright discouraged fans, refusing to speak to other walkers when he met them, not allowing his photograph to appear on his guide books, never doing signing sessions. Yet he went on to sell millions of copies of his books.

Edward Stobart, the hero of this book, not to be confused with his father, Eddie Stobart, still lives in Cumbria and the world HQ of Eddie Stobart Limited is still in Carlisle. In the last ten years, it has become a household name all over the country, at least in households who have chanced to drive along one of our motorways, which means most of us. Today, the largest part of his business is now situated elsewhere in England, yet Edward remains close to his roots.

I am a fellow Cumbrian, so I boast, if not quite a genuine one as I was born in Scotland, only moving to Carlisle when I was aged four. But I know whence the Stobarts have come, know well their little Cumbrian home village, know many of their friends – and that to me is one of the many intriguing aspects of their rise. How did they get here, from there of all places?

I had met Edward, before beginning this book, at the House of Lords, guests of the late Lord Whitelaw. It was a reception for Ambassadors for Cumbria, a purely honorary title, dreamed up by some marketing whiz. I talked to Edward for a while, but didn’t get very far. He doesn’t go in for idle chat, doesn’t care for social occasions, doesn’t really like talking much, being hesitant with strangers, very reserved and private. Despite the firm’s present-day fame, I can’t remember seeing him interviewed on television, hearing him on the radio and I seldom see his face in the newspapers.

So this was another thought that struck me. Having got from there, that little village I used to know so well, how did Edward Stobart then become a national force, when he himself appears so unpushy, unfluent, undynamic?

The fact that he has risen to fame and fortune through lorries, creating the biggest private firm in Britain, is also interesting. It’s so unmodern, unglamorous. He’s now regularly on The Sunday Times list of the wealthiest people in Britain but, unlike so many of the other entries, he actually owns things. There is a concrete, physical presence to his fortune. The wealth of many of our present-day self-made millionaires is very often abstract, either on paper or out there on the ether; liable to fall and disappear in a puff of smoke or a blank screen.

Haulage is old technology; so old 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.