Читать книгу The Eddie Stobart Story - Hunter Davies - Страница 9

THE STOBARTS

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 into Carlisle’s covered market on Saturday mornings, near where farmers’ wives sold their eggs and hams and cheeses.

Aged fifteen, he had saved enough money to buy an unbroken horse for thirty-three guineas. He trained it to pull the cart and a variety of agricultural machinery and sold it after a year for sixty-six guineas. With this money, he bought his own hens and hen houses. At seventeen, he passed his driving test and was able to drive his father’s Morris 10.

While aged seventeen, on 16 November 1946, he attended a local Methodist chapel where a visiting preacher was in the middle of a three-week mission. Eddie was one of two people in the congregation that day who came forward and said they had been saved. From that day, he committed himself to God.

Some time later, he heard that there was a seventeen-year-old girl called Nora Boyd who had also recently been saved, and who lived only two miles away in Caldbeck. Sounded good – till Eddie discovered she had moved over the border to Lockerbie in Scotland, and was now working as a housekeeper. However, he discovered she still came home some weekends and he managed to get her address. Eddie wrote to her and said he’d heard about her conversion, adding that he too had recently been saved. He suggested perhaps they might meet next time she was home in Caldbeck.

A week later, she replied. She thanked him for his letter, saying she was pleased he was a Christian, and arranged to meet him the following Saturday at a Bible rally at the Hebron Hall in Carlisle.

For the next few Saturdays, Eddie drove into Carlisle in his father’s shiny new Morris 10 and met Nora at church. Just before Christmas, she gave him a present: a copy of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

What Eddie didn’t know about Nora Boyd when they first met was that she was an orphan and had never known her father. Her mother had died when she was aged four and she had been placed in two children’s homes before being fostered by a family called Lennon in Caldbeck.

‘At school in Caldbeck, I wasn’t very happy,’ says Nora today. ‘I would get blamed all the time. If things went missing, they would look at me – you know, look at me, because nobody knew where I was from …’

The Lennons of Caldbeck were a Methodist family but, on leaving Caldbeck aged fourteen, Nora decided she wasn’t going to believe in God any more. ‘I vowed I wasn’t going to church again. I blamed God for what had happened to me in my life so far.’

Three years later, aged seventeen, while Nora was staying with relations in Liverpool, she saw the light and became converted – the conversion that Eddie learned about. ‘I realized then that God could only do me good, not harm.’

Eddie and Nora spent the next five years courting, until one day in 1951, Eddie heard that an uncle of his had a house to rent at Brocklebank, outside Wigton, for 12s.6d. a week, the previous tenants having just moved out. It was this that prompted Eddie to suggest marriage to Nora. Not exactly romantic, but very sensible. Their marriage took place on Boxing Day 1951, at the Methodist chapel in Caldbeck, followed by a wedding reception at the Caldbeck village hall.

Eddie by now had acquired a threshing machine, paying for it by selling his hens and hen houses to his father. The threshing machine, a Ransome, was bought from a contractor who was giving up. It came with a Case tractor and a list of two hundred names of people who were, supposedly, regular customers. This was in the days before combine harvesters, when small farmers could not afford expensive machinery of their own. Local contractors like Eddie Stobart would thresh their corn for them and undertake other seasonal agricultural jobs which required a bit of machinery.

In 1953, Eddie and Nora bought their own house, a bungalow called Newlands Hill, just outside Hesket. The cost was £450. Eddie put down a deposit of £50 and got the rest on a mortgage from a building society.

They moved into Newlands Hill with their first two babies: Anne, born in 1952, and John, born in 1953. Their third child, Edward – never called Eddie in order to avoid confusion with his father – was born at home at Newlands Hill on 21 November 1954. There was then a slight gap before Eddie and Nora’s fourth and last child came along: William, born in 1961.

Until 1957, Eddie had still been officially working with his father, and with his brother Ronnie, all three of them running the family’s little agricultural business: threshing, ploughing, ditching, carting – whatever was required. John had also started to trade in hay and grain, helped mainly by Ronnie. Eddie was doing most of the agricultural contracting and had recently begun to spread fertilizers for the local farmers. He’d also begun to feel it was time to go it alone, to run his own little business.

In 1957, when Eddie was aged twenty-eight, he and his father and brother decided to divide up the family assets. After some discussion, it was agreed that Eddie’s share of the family firm would be: the threshing machine, which they valued at £150, a Fordson tractor worth £250, a Nuffield tractor worth £150, fuel tanks worth £50, and cash in hand of £100. These, then, were the net assets, valued in total at £700, of Eddie Stobart’s first firm, which opened for trading in 1957 as E.P. Stobart, Hesket Newmarket.

At the end of Eddie’s first year in business in 1958, the firm had added to its assets a spreader and sundry agricultural instruments. The wages during the year amounted to £424, which would appear to have been casual labour, plus what Eddie had paid himself. Turnover for the year was £2329 and the profit was declared as being £630.

The following year, turnover had almost doubled to £4063, and the profit was £1600. Eddie now had a third tractor, a second spreader and a Rotovator. Wages had risen to £834 as he had now taken on his first employee, Norman Bell. Norman drove a tractor and did general labouring, but was considered part of the family, eating his meals with Eddie and Nora in their kitchen.

Eddie’s main work was spreading fertilizer on fields, hence the need for two spreaders. Originally, he had simply delivered the cartloads of fertilizers from an agricultural merchants to various farmers. Then he undertook to do the spreading for the farmers, using his own machinery. Most of his fertilizer was in the form of slag, heavy in phosphate.

By 1960, business continued to do well, with turnover up to £7,893, though the profit had increased only marginally to £2,026. This was mainly due to a rather large capital expenditure that had occurred during 1960.

‘I got this call one day from the County Garage in Carlisle,’ remembers Nora, who was doing the books and answering the phone for her husband’s little business. ‘Someone wanted Eddie. I said he wasn’t here. A voice then asked if Eddie was still interested in the guy down at the garage. I said: “What guy? I didn’t know Eddie was going to take on someone else. What’s this guy’s name?” There was silence at the other end. Then the voice explained that it was a lorry called a Guy. Eddie was apparently interested in buying it.’

Which he did; Eddie’s very first lorry. Until then, he had pulled his farming machinery or had delivered loads by tractor. The lorry was a second hand Guy, a four-wheeler Guy Invincible, which he bought for £475. Ideal for carrying and tipping basic loads of slag.

Eddie decided to have the lorry painted; make it look a bit brighter. The colours he chose were Post Office red (roughly the colour of the panels on his threshing machine, which he’d always liked) and Brunswick green. On the cab door, in small but discreet lettering, he had painted the words: ‘E.P. Stobart, Caldbeck 206, Cumberland’.

And so the first Eddie Stobart lorry hit the road. But, alas, not for long. The Guy turned out to be a bad buy, a load of trouble, always going wrong. Eddie sold it a few months later for £420, thus losing £55 on the deal.

Instead, he bought a new Ford Thames lorry, which cost the large sum of £1,450. He financed it through a hire-purchase agreement, putting down a deposit of £135. A big commitment, but he hoped the fertilizing business was going to be profitable in the years to come.

At the same time, Eddie and Nora decided to enlarge their bungalow. It was proving too small to hold their family of four young children plus trying to run a business from the same premises.

Then, out of the blue, Harrison Irvinson, the local agricultural merchant who had been providing work spreading slag, went out of business. Eddie was left with a full order book of slag to be delivered and spread, a lot of expensive equipment, including a new lorry, but no slag. You needed a licence to be an agricultural merchant, which was not easy to get, and Eddie didn’t have one. You also needed capital to set up as a merchant and buy stock.

Eddie had a few sleepless nights but eventually managed to do a deal with a Carlisle firm of agricultural merchants, Oliver and Snowden. But, as well as spreading the fertilizer, Eddie Stobart now also had to go and collect it. Most of it came from ICI or other steel plants in Middlesbrough, Scunthorpe or Corby, a residue of the smelting process. So Eddie had to acquire more lorries and drivers.

This led one day to a visit from an ICI official who said that Eddie’s premises at Hesket were right in the middle of an area where the company wanted to expand their supply of slag for agricultural purposes. ICI was lacking a suitable slag store, a dump, where slag could be kept till needed. It offered to pay Eddie to go and collect the slag, and promised regular work, but he would have to build the slag store himself, and a weighbridge, and get the appropriate planning consents – all at his own expense.

Eddie worked out that the total cost would come to some £8000. Where could he get such a sum? And if he could, would it be worth it? Eventually, with the help of Penrith accountant, N.T. O’Reilly, he managed to borrow the money and the slag store was built.

In this way, Eddie’s business as an agricultural contractor continued to expand during the 1960s. He took on more lorries and drivers and acquired more customers amongst the farming community. By 1969, he had three lorries, three tractors, three spreaders and a JCB. His turnover that year was £79,700, his profit £4687 and his wage bill £6992.

He even survived what could have been an extremely serious setback when the agricultural fertilizer department of ICI was taken over by Fisons, who then decided they didn’t need the use of Eddie’s slag store any more. They gave him a month’s notice, then pulled out of the agreement.

Once again, Eddie and Nora slept badly for a few weeks and did a lot of heavy praying. In the end, it led to them purchasing slag in their own right, rather than just collecting and distributing it for others.

During all these developments in the 1950s and 1960s, throughout the setbacks and excitements, Eddie and Nora remember doing a lot of praying. They continued to be devout Christians but were moving towards the more evangelical wing. Eddie was a lay preacher, and he and Nora became involved in the Cumbrian branch of the Gideon movement, helping to distribute Bibles to schools, hospitals and prisons. They both attended Christian meetings all over the county and were continually putting up visiting preachers at their home in Hesket.

Eddie never worked at all over the weekends, whatever the drama might be. Sunday was devoted to God; Saturdays to their young family. Business was not the most important thing in their life; it was just what they did during the week.