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Edward’s father had remained at Howbeck all his school life, such as it was, as in those days pupils could stay there until they were fourteen. By the time young Edward attended, Howbeck had become a primary school, which meant that, at eleven years old, you had to move on elsewhere. There were just two classes in the school: Class One, for those aged five to eight, and Class Two, for those aged eight to eleven. Edward reminisces: ‘I remember a Miss Allcorn taking Class One – and what I remember about her was that she had a bubble car. Miss Ashbridge took Class Two and she was the headmistress.’ Kathleen Ashbridge always retained pleasant memories of the Stobart boys. They were not great scholars, but she had no trouble from them.
‘If I was naughty at school,’ says Edward, ‘I did it behind the scenes. But I wasn’t a troublemaker. All I got told off for by Miss Ashbridge was for not doing well. She’d then put me in the corner with my face to the wall. I quite liked sums, that was about all. Nothing else. I spent a lot of time just sitting, drawing cars and lorries.’
According to Nora, Edward was always the most adventurous of her four children, and the one who usually got injured. ‘He had accidents all the time. One of the earliest was when he was rushing into Mrs Jardine’s field to feed her hens. He was in such a hurry that he ran straight into a barbed-wire fence. He cut his whole face; the blood was awful. But that was typical. He was always falling off things or stumbling over things.
‘But he was also very sensitive and generous, would do anything for people. He was always quite quiet; all the boys were quiet, really. Anne was the talker in the family; she was the clever one.’
Anne was the only person to pass the eleven-plus in her year at Howbeck. ‘In fact,’ she says, ‘I was told I was the only one to have passed it for seventeen years – the last one being my Uncle Ronnie.’ She went to Wigton Nelson Tomlinson grammar school at Wigton – alma mater of Melvyn Bragg.
When it was time for Edward to sit his eleven-plus, he had no expectations. ‘I never thought for one moment I would pass,’ he says. ‘I was useless at all school work. In the exam, I couldn’t answer a single question. I just sat there, drawing tractors. I felt pretty disgusted with myself. I don’t remember any one else in my year passing, so we all went to the secondary modern together.’
This was Caldew School, Dalston, opened in 1959, so still quite new when Edward arrived in 1965. It became a comprehensive in 1968, while Edward was still there. There were five hundred pupils, both boys and girls, and lots of playing fields and space, being in a semi-rural situation. Dalston itself is a rather affluent dormitory village, just five miles from Carlisle, facing towards the Caldbeck Fell. Each day, Edward went on his bike into Hesket then caught the school bus for the ten-mile journey to Dalston.
Edward remembers, ‘I was put in the dunces’ class from the beginning, in Mrs Carlisle’s class. William got put in the same class when he arrived. We were both big dunces all the way through our school lives. They called it the Progress Class. But we all knew what it meant.
‘I was never good at writing. If I concentrated really hard, I might just make six spelling mistakes on a page. But usually I got every word wrong. I could never see the point in writing. I didn’t feel thick; I was just a dunce at lessons. I felt older than the others in many ways. At twelve, I felt about twenty. I knew about general things, about how things worked, which they didn’t. I wasn’t street-wise – I never watched television at home, ever, so when the other lads spent hours talking about TV programmes, 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 and Wales between the ages of five and sixteen develop a stammer each year. No one has ever conclusively explained the causes or the triggers or why, over the decades, the figures have stayed roughly the same. It occurs throughout the world, across all cultures, all social groups. And everywhere it shows the same remarkable characteristic: four times as many boys are afflicted as girls. Hard luck on the Stobarts, having it happen to two of their number.
Edward’s own theory is that it’s all to do with trying to speak too quickly: ‘That’s when I always have trouble, when I want to say too much, all at the same time. I start one sentence before I’ve finished another, so it comes out as a stutter. I’m thinking too far ahead, that’s it. Same with eating: I eat far too fast. Always have done. I used to bolt all my meals – in fact, really, I didn’t like eating. What used to happen was that I couldn’t really taste what was in my mouth, so I was rushing to the next bite, to see if that tasted better. I used to say I wished they would invent pills that would save the bother of sitting down and eating.’
Edward doesn’t recall his stutter being a particular handicap at school. ‘It was just embarrassing, that was it really. I don’t think it got me down, not that I can remember. There were certain words and sentences I couldn’t say. When you see them coming, you try and say something else. Which means you often don’t say what you want to say.
There was one word I couldn’t say: Stobart. I always hesitated on that. It’s better now, because most people down South pronounce it “Stow-bart”, not “Stob-burt”. I find “Stow-bart” easier – it probably is the proper way. Having a stutter does make you try to speak properly. If anyone ever did try to tease me at school, then I tried to get in first. Take the mickey out of myself before they could.’
Nora says Edward’s stutter has greatly improved over the years, though she notices it can still be bad if he gets overexcited. ‘Perhaps it will go in the end, now he has much more confidence. After all, Eddie conquered his.’
Eddie, too, had a stammer, although to hear him today, there is no trace of it. He so clearly loves talking, telling stories, anecdotes and moral tales. This is in contrast to Edward who, even today, clearly doesn’t like talking, especially about himself. ‘My stammer arrived when I was about ten years old,’ says Eddie. ‘It happened in much the same ways as Edward’s – after an accident. I caught my thumb in a door and the shock made me stammer from then on. But it left me at the age of seventeen. And I’ll tell you exactly how. It was the first day I was ever asked to stand up in chapel and talk. I didn’t want to. I was scared to, because of my stammer. But God took me by the hand. God helped me to cure it.’
During the years he had his stammer, Eddie can’t remember being worried by it. ‘A stammer can be useful, you know. When I was queuing up for sausage and chips, I would say s-s-s-sausages and ch-ch-ch-chips p-p-p-p-please, and I would always get given two more sausages than the others!
‘I’ll tell you a little story about a man with a stammer. He was a Bible seller, going round the doors, selling Bibles. And he was a great success, this Bible seller, the best Bible seller in the region. Naturally enough, all the other Bible sellers wanted to know the secret of his success, how he could possibly manage with his stammer. “It’s really very easy,” he said. “When they open the door, I say to them ‘Would you like to b-b-b-buy a Bible, or shall I r-r-r-read it to you …’”’
Eddie laughs and laughs at his own story, eyes twinkling, as merry as the little gnomes in his garden. This, again, is a contrast to his son Edward. Even as a young man, Edward was always the serious one, devoted to hard work rather than God, to getting on; determined to beat his own targets, whatever they might turn out to be.
EDWARD GOES TO WORK (#ulink_7bd24da4-feb8-550f-af62-c4d87d206346)
There was never any doubt about where Edward would be employed after he left school. He always knew exactly what he was going to do: carry on as before. He would work with his father full time, without the inconvenience of having to go to school during the day and thus waste so many precious working hours.
No other career ever entered his mind, not even something which, in an ideal world, he would like to do if things had been different. The only childhood fantasy career that ever tempted Edward was to drive cars like Stirling Moss. In a fantasy world, yes, it might have been nice to be a racing driver.
But, of course, Edward always inhabited a very real world. By his own admission, he’d hardly been a childish child or a soppy teenager, feeling grown-up from the age of twelve. From that age onwards, he’d been doing man’s work for his father, driving tractors and diggers or any other bits of machinery his father was using. At the age of fourteen, he was even driving a JCB – illegally of course. ‘The JCB driver had left,’ Edward recollects, ‘and my father had a contract through Brown’s of Thursby for some work on the new M6 between Junctions 42 and 43. It was the long summer holidays from school, so I took over the JCB and did the work.
‘My job was to dig holes for the new signposts being put up along the motorway and the slip roads. You don’t realize how many signs there are on the motorway: hundreds of them. When I’m driving on the M6 today, I always look out for the ones I put up. They’re very deep, you know. They can be ten feet in the air, but they probably go ten feet into the ground as well.
‘I worked with an Irish gang. I dug the holes with my JCB, the Irish lads put the signs in. They didn’t know how young I was, or anything about me. I never told anyone at school, never boasted I was driving a JCB. I loved it – loved every minute.’
Edward estimates he did that job for six months, despite the fact that his school summer holidays were only six weeks long. ‘In the whole of my last year, I probably only spent three months of it at school.’
Some grammar schools at that time, in the big metropolis of Carlisle and even in smaller towns like Wigton, taught the classics and had modern-language groups and science sets. Instead of this, Caldew School, a newly emerging comprehensive serving a rural community, tried to specialize and suit its pupils to their future careers by creating an agricultural course for those about to leave. Edward took this course in his fourth and final year at school. He enjoyed it, as it mainly meant visits to farms and places of agricultural interest.
Edward finally left school in the summer of 1970, aged fifteen. His leaving report, signed by his form tutor, Mr Monaghan, and his headmaster, Mr Douglas, indicates that Edward’s frequent absence made a true assessment of him difficult. The leaving report does, however, manage to praise his ‘natural flair for repairing machinery’ and how on ‘numerous occasions [he has] shown good organizing ability in practical tasks connected with his agricultural studies’. The mention of some sort of organizing ability is interesting, though it appears to refer to organizing himself rather than others in practical tasks. The report makes it pretty clear that he had made ‘limited academic progress’, but that he should prove to be ‘an excellent employee’.
On leaving school for good, Edward just carried on working for his father. His next contract was with a firm called Sidac at Wigton that was building a new factory. Edward’s job was to dig the foundations. His wage, paid by his father, was £5 a week. When that contract came to an end, Edward returned to helping his father at home in the yard, working on the fertilizing side of the business.
For the next two years, till the age of seventeen, this was Edward’s main occupation: spreading lime on farmers’ fields. This business was expanding all the time, as Edward’s father had now built the slag store and was both collecting and delivering as well as spreading lime.
Edward worked all hours and weekends if necessary, as ever setting himself little targets, aiming to get so many fields spread in an hour, so many farms in a week, aiming to do more than all the other Stobart workers. His father was pleased that Edward worked so hard, but thought the weekend work was a bit unnecessary.
By this time, Eddie had half-a-dozen drivers and half-a-dozen assorted vehicles. There was still little demarcation between the employees and the Stobart family; everyone mucked in, did what jobs had to be done.
By the time he was seventeen, Edward was beginning to think that perhaps his father’s attitude to business was, well, perhaps a bit laid back. No words were exchanged. 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 to offer lifts home to young ladies, which he did, but only now and again, as he was working so awfully hard at weekends.
He got his Mini Clubman and most of his subsequent cars serviced in Hesket, in the village garage owned by Richard Woodcock, which stood right in the middle of the village, in what was the ancient market cross. In 1972, Richard’s sixteen-year-old sister, Anne Woodcock, came to work for Eddie in his office, typing letters and invoices; her first job after leaving school.
Anne Stobart, Edward’s big sister, the clever one who had gone to grammar school, had been working with her father as his secretary until then. She moved over to work in the farm shop in Wigton once young Anne Woodcock had settled into her job.
‘My mother had just died,’ says Anne Woodcock, ‘and Eddie and Nora were really kind to me, giving me the job, looking after me. I was with them for two years. My wage was about £15 a week and I think at the time they had ten vehicles altogether. It was mainly agricultural work, lime-spreading and slag, but they did do quite a bit of haulage. I remember when they secured some sub-contract haulage work from Barnett and Graham: that was a big event.
‘I knew the family were strong Methodists; Eddie and Nora and Anne. Every year at Keswick Convention time, they would talk about it, perhaps hoping I might go with them. I’m Catholic by birth, so it wasn’t really my thing. But they were very tolerant really. Other members of their family were much stricter.’
Anne enjoyed working with the two Stobart boys around, as John and Edward were just a few years older than herself. ‘Edward and John were just normal farm boys. Like most of the others in Caldbeck and Hesket, they’d go for a drink on a Saturday night in Hesket or Caldbeck, or into Carlisle to the dance at the Cosmo – the Cosmo was where all the country boys went. I went there as well.
‘At work. I have to say, I wasn’t aware of Edward running anything, of being in charge in any way. He did most things in the business, but Eddie the father seemed to me definitely the boss.
‘I was impressed by how Edward coped with his stutter. William’s was far worse, so much so that often he couldn’t talk at all, but Edward never let his get him down. He was determined to carry on as normal. Edward didn’t lack confidence, I’ll say that, but I have to say I had no idea he would go further than he’d got to already. When I worked with the Stobarts, it was just a small family business. And it seemed as if it always would be like that.’
During the two years Anne worked with the Stobarts, Edward had a rather nasty accident. Aged eighteen, he was working as usual one Saturday morning, up at six to start lime-spreading. Having finished, he came back to the yard in the late afternoon where he met Clive Richardson, one of their drivers, who had come into the yard to pick up something.
Edward asked Clive if he had got the message about his Monday job, one which Edward had personally fixed up for him on Friday. He’d given all the details to his father, to pass on to Clive.
‘Oh he cancelled it,’ said Clive. ‘I’m not working Monday.’
‘Why not?’ asked Edward.
‘I’d forgotten my wagon needs four new tyres. So I’m going to do that on Monday instead.’
Edward went straight to the phone and rang Barnett and Graham, the firm through which the job had come. He cancelled the cancellation, saying a Stobart truck would be there after all to do the job, and not to worry.
Edward then searched around the yard and eventually found four half-reasonably tyred wheels, which he thought were good enough to go on the truck, an Atkinson 240.
‘My dad wasn’t around, of course; he never was on a Saturday. I think that day he’d gone to Wigton to see how the shop was doing. Clive, the driver, was a bit disgruntled at first, as he was in a hurry to get home, but he agreed to help me get the old wheels off.’
They were very heavy wheels and the last one was proving difficult to get off. At last they managed it but, in doing so, the wheel somehow did a bounce and crashed into Edward. He was fit enough, with all the physical labour he had been doing since the age of twelve, but he was never very tall, just five feet, six inches high and, at eighteen, he was only eight stone in weight. The impact of the large bouncing wheel knocked Edward over. He fell down in a heap, breaking his leg.
Clive rang for an ambulance, then rang to tell Mr Stobart, Senior, what had happened. Meanwhile, Edward was in agony, lying on the ground, unable to move. He was also starting to shiver, as it was a very cold afternoon.
‘The ambulance men arrived first, before my dad. They got out this blow-up bag thing and put my left leg in a splint, then they laid me on the stretcher. They were about to give me a pain-killing injection, which probably would have knocked me out, when at last my dad arrived.
‘With a great struggle, I managed somehow to lean over on my side, get me hand in me front pocket, and I drew out my money. It was about £600 or £700. I didn’t want to go into hospital, did I, carrying all that with me? At hospital, they’d take my clothes off, put me into hospital pyjamas and that. I might never see the money again. So the last thing I remember doing, before the ambulance took me away, was handing it over. But, by then, I knew the truck was OK and the job would be done on Monday.’
Eddie remembers the incident well, and the precise words which Edward used: ‘Tek hod o’ this, Dad,’ Eddie wasn’t totally surprised; he and Nora always knew Edward kept his money on him. Many a time, Nora had ruined some of his pound notes in the washing machine when he’d forgotten to take them out of his trouser pocket.
‘When I’d been Edward’s age,’ says Eddie, ‘my father had never given me a wage when I’d worked with him. So I always made sure that Edward and then William, when they worked with me, got a wage, just like the other workers.
