The Eddie Stobart Story

скачать книгу бесплатно


‘They had, of course, nothing to spend it on. There was no drugs in those days and they didn’t live a wild life. So we knew Edward must have saved a bit of money. Even so, we didn’t know till that day quite how much he’d been carrying around with him. That was a surprise.’

Edward was taken to the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle. His leg was fractured in two places and it took the next seven-and-a-half weeks for him to recover. For the first week or so, he was in agony. Then he was in total frustration, wondering about what was happening back at the ranch.

‘All the drivers came in at the weekends to see me: Norman Bell, Norman Glendinning, Stan Monkhouse, Clive and Selwyn Richardson, John Graham, Gavin Clark. I used to quiz each one on what me dad was doing: “Is he keeping you working?” I’d say, “Who’s planning next week?”

‘I was so miserable, stuck there. It was the worst time in my whole life. Certainly the slowest – I just lay there, thinking about the trucks, night and day. I wasn’t spying on my dad, when I was asking the drivers about him. I just worried that the lorry side would collapse while I was away.’

Edward’s father was very pleased when, at last, Edward could return to work. ‘Oh, I wanted him back as quickly as possible as well. Edward had been doing all the planning for the trucks. And by then, he really had become daft about trucks ….’

EDWARD GOES TO TOWN (#ulink_75d8002f-9b1e-5591-ba37-4ec938351426)

Until 1970, Eddie Stobart had been trading simply as ‘E.P. Stobart, Hesket Newmarket’. But, as the business grew with more employees, more tax to pay, more financial responsibilities, more things to go wrong or be sued for, it was time to become a limited company. On 23 November 1970, a new company was formed: Eddie Stobart Ltd.

In the accounts for the second half of that year, under assets, eight assorted lorries are listed, including a new Scania wagon and trailer, bought at a cost of £9000. There was a reported loss of £409, but that was partly explained by the firm being reorganized and the expense of the Scania.

The new company had two shareholders. Eddie Stobart owned nine thousand of the ten thousand shares. His daughter, Anne, who reached the age of eighteen that year, was given the remaining one thousand shares. It was Eddie’s plan to give each of his four children, once they reached the age of eighteen, a thousand shares.

In 1971, when John reached eighteen, he declined the offer of the shares. He was not interested in lorries or machinery, or in business generally. He simply wanted to be a farmer, so he took his inheritance in cash and bought some sheep in order to get started.

Edward on reaching eighteen, in 1972, naturally took his shares. Working in his father’s firm, looking after the lorries and machinery, was exactly what he wanted to do. Anne, by now, was approaching her twenty-first birthday and was shortly getting married, becoming Mrs Anne Fearon. She was made a director of the firm that year, along with her father.

The accounts for 1972 show a huge increase in the firm’s turnover since becoming a limited company; it had reached almost a quarter of a million pounds, with profits of £17,153. It is noticeable that, on the official accounts, the business of Eddie Stobart Ltd is stated as being: ‘agricultural merchants and dealers in agricultural machinery, plant etc.’ The farm shop, where Anne and her husband, Ken, were working – and also Eddie for a lot of the time – was doing well, and so were their other agricultural activities. But the haulage part of the company was also proving a success, thanks to the hard work and enthusiasm of Edward for all things lorry-like. This is where the future lay, so Edward thought, this was where a lot more business was to be had.

Although Eddie himself much preferred the fertilizing and farming side of the business, he allowed Edward to build up the haulage side and was prepared to listen to ideas, opportunities or suggestions for further developments. In May 1973, Richard Woodcock, owner of the garage in Hesket, offered Eddie the chance to visit a proper haulage firm, to see how the big boys did it.

Richard Woodcock’s father, also called Richard, was the owner of the village shop in Hesket. He had sent young Richard to a public school, Ampleforth, but Richard had left with only one real ambition: to work with motor cars. After leaving school, Richard had become an apprentice fitter at the firm of Sutton and Sons of St Helen’s, a family firm in Lancashire. They were a very well known, national firm whose rise to eminence in the haulage business had been partly based on their connections and nearness to Pilkington’s of St Helens, the glass giants. As they had grown and expanded, so had Sutton and Sons and their lorries. In 1973, they had about two hundred lorries.

Richard hadn’t expected that Edward, aged nineteen at the time, was coming with his dad on the day’s outing. ‘As we drove off, I was a bit surprised when Edward jumped in the car as well. On the way down, I told Eddie that if we met Alf Sutton himself, which was unlikely, I should warn him that Alf was a bit, well, the rough-and-ready type, who used strong industrial language. I knew that Eddie was a devout Methodist and might get upset. He said don’t worry, he’d met all sorts in the agricultural world.

‘We had a brilliant day out, toured all the premises, met some of my old friends. Eddie and Edward were both amazed by Sutton’s operation. They had their own garages and repair shops which were huge, with state-of-the-art equipment. In those days, haulage firms kept their lorries for many years, looking after them themselves.

‘We had lunch in their canteen and then, eventually, we did get to see Alf himself. It was a short chat, in his office. He was very helpful, giving the Stobarts some of his time and a bit of advice.’

Edward, today, can remember the advice very clearly. ‘He asked us how many lorries we had at our place. We told him we had six – that was all we had at that particular time. His advice was that we should give them all up. Haulage was too tough a business. Get rid of the lorries and the drivers, he said. We’d be better off using owner-drivers for our business. So that was pretty depressing …’

But they did have a most interesting day out, enjoyed by all. Richard had been aware that Mr Sutton had not been particularly encouraging, haulage-wise but, looking back, he thinks Alf’s words might have had a positive effect on young Edward. ‘In a way, it spurred him on to prove people wrong. I think he saw what a fantastic setup Alf Sutton had and thought he could do just as well, if not better.’

In 1975, on reaching the age of twenty-one, Edward became a director of Eddie Stobart Ltd, joining his father Eddie and sister Anne. It was another good year for the firm, judging by the annual accounts. The turnover, from sales of goods and work done, was £407,138, but costs had been high and their net profit was just £19,647.

By 1975, Edward was looking after the haulage side of the business almost completely on his own. The accounts for the end of the year show a number of vehicles being bought and sold during that year but, on average, they were running eight lorries, plus the same number of trailers and units.

Edward was determined to improve this side of the business, but was finding many problems. He lost one good driver who didn’t want to do any long-distance work and drive further than the county boundaries. Rural-based, local country drivers from Hesket and Caldbeck, the sort they had always employed, many of whom Edward had grown up with, did not like doing night work or long-distance work. They were not keen, either, on anything that might be deemed urgent, drop everything, do-it-now work.

Almost all the haulage work the firm undertook was sub-contracted. A bigger haulage firm, elsewhere in Cumbria, would have the main contract, but would pass on bits to smaller firms like Eddie Stobart Ltd if they couldn’t manage it all. By definition, these were very often last-minute jobs, emergencies or night work, which Edward was keen to accept, however inconvenient. It often meant he did these rotten jobs himself, for in 1975, aged twenty-one, he had passed his Heavy Goods Vehicle licence. He could now legally drive any of the bigger trucks. But he knew he was missing a lot of work by not having suitable, willing men always available. It was also a handicap being stuck in Hesket, out in the sticks, some fifteen miles from Carlisle.

In 1976, Edward came to a big decision. He felt it was time to go it alone, in two senses. He wanted to be personally running his own show, albeit still under his father’s wing as part of the firm, as it hadn’t entered his head not to be part of Eddie Stobart Ltd. Edward, however, also wanted a chance to be able to work without his father looking over his shoulder every day. He felt it was time for the haulage part of Eddie Stobart Ltd to be separated, literally and physically, from the agricultural and fertilizing sides. He wanted to be in Carlisle, to employ Carlisle-based drivers, to be on the spot, for a change, when jobs came up.

He’d done some sums in his head, worked out how much time and money was being wasted each time they drove the fifteen miles empty into Carlisle, just to pick up a load. ‘I was fed up being at Hesket Newmarket. We’d outgrown the site, couldn’t really expand any more. The fertilizing side was not really growing and we didn’t need many more vehicles or men for that side of things. But I was sure the haulage side had a better future.’

Eddie listened to the arguments, the rationale, and willingly agreed with Edward. He says he’d been thinking much the same anyway. Edward’s own memory is that his father had to be persuaded. He remembers that, when he found a suitable site in Carlisle with a rent of £3000 a year, his father initially told him that he was ‘crackers’.

‘My dad didn’t see how I was going to make enough money to pay such a big rent. It was a big step for us, but my dad did agree it was the best thing to do, for all concerned. I will say that – he didn’t try to stop me.’

‘Edward was always the one with ambition,’ says Eddie. ‘He had always been suggesting better ways to do most things. John never had any interest at all. William was too young. But Edward always had this burning ambition. He was desperate to go into haulage.’

Once the big decision was made and Eddie saw how the family firm was beginning to split, with different parts and people going in different directions, he began to arrange a way of making it all neat and tidy. Eddie Stobart Ltd, since its creation in 1970, had consisted of three main parts: fertilizers, the farm shop and haulage. Eddie and daughter Anne were much more interested in the first two. It was therefore decided to parcel it up under a new name: Eddie Stobart Trading Ltd, which they would look after.

This left Eddie Stobart Ltd to concentrate on haulage. The bold young Edward, aged twenty-two, left the family yard in deepest, rural Hesket Newmarket, and headed for the big city, new people, new problems, new excitements.

His experience of haulage had been somewhat limited until then, despite his keenness and enthusiasm to get more work. And his day trip to Sutton’s, to see how a real haulage firm operated, had not exactly been inspiring. It just seemed to Edward, without really working it all out, without looking around at the wider world of haulage, that the time was right for him to go into something new. New, perhaps, for Edward Stobart, but something very, very old as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

HAULAGE – THE LONG HAUL (#ulink_a95f5633-b0b1-58db-9db6-58e858cf63ab)

There were several reasons why Eddie Stobart had never really been interested in haulage. It was partly his temperament, partly that he was more interested in other things which appeared much more profitable, and partly the result of history.

At the time that Eddie first started up his own business in 1958, haulage was subject to various Acts of Parliament, endless Government rules, complicated amendments and changes, the issuing of special licences – all of which resulted in haulage becoming almost a closed shop. But it had always been like that. Politics, local or national, have usually managed to have a hand in transport, ever since transporting began.

They often say that prostitution is the oldest profession; lorry driving – or similar – must have also been one of the earliest trades. For the history of haulage is almost as old as the history of man. Ever since we stepped out of the caves, there has been a need for some sort of dragging, carrying, carting. Hunter-gatherers might have done their own hunting, but they quickly learned to get stronger people, or better sleds, to drag their spoils home.

The Romans built the first proper roads in Britain, and their military haulage system was constantly clattering up and down the country, bringing luxury goods such as shellfish to the middle of Hadrian’s Wall, as well as military equipment and supplies.

In medieval England, the establishment of local markets were both the cause and result of better haulage. All through history, transport has usually been at the heart of a nation’s economy – both rising and falling in tandem, each reflecting the state of the other, a gauge to what is really going on.

By the fifteenth century, most inhabitants of England were only ten miles from the nearest market, even if it was just a small one, like Hesket Newmarket. There was local transport, taking local goods to market, but also long-distance transport, humping items around the country, from market to market. Documents from as early as 1444 show that specialist carters were on the roads with their horses and carts, taking cloth from the Midlands and North to London, doing it on a regular, daily basis, although they packed up in winter when the roads, such as they were, became impassable.

In the seventeenth century, as roads improved, long-distance wagons grew heavier and quicker, capable of carrying fifty rather than twenty hundredweight of goods. This was when the authorities, local and national, first thought up the idea of getting money out of road users. In 1604, the Canterbury Quarter Sessions decided to charge carts over fifty hundredweight the sum of five shillings because, so it was said, their local roads were being damaged by the heavy traffic. Yes, traffic problems, in 1604.

When the turnpike system came in, another way of getting money out of drivers was introduced, a toll being charged on all users of the turnpikes. These were the better class of road, the motorways of their day. The tolls went towards the cost of keeping the turnpikes in good condition.

One result of the popularity and efficiency of the turnpikes was a growth of coaching inns, catering for travellers. There were some 2000 of these by the early seventeenth century. It also led to the development of special horses, short-legged draught horses, like the Suffolk Punch, strong enough to pull the heaviest loads. As with the stagecoaches, fleets of horses for the goods wagons were kept at staging posts. It was estimated that each horse needed five acres of hay and oats a year to keep it going; development in transport has always had an overspill effect, bringing about ancillary changes.

In the middle of the eighteenth century came the canals. Bad news for road hauliers, not because canals were all that much quicker but because they were very much cheaper. A ton load from Manchester to Birmingham, which cost £4 by road, cost only £1 by canal. Smart carriers such as Pickfords, already established by 1766, who were operating horse wagons between Manchester and London, quickly got themselves some canal boats while still running their horse wagons.

Alas for the canals: just when they thought they were the state-of-the-art technology, about to lord it over road haulage for centuries, along came the railways. Canal use was killed off almost overnight. This seems to be the nature of the history of transport; new forms have always come along, to either replace or reduce the old forms. (It makes one wonder how on earth motor transport has lasted so long. After a hundred years, it must be time for some new form of transport to finish off the internal combustion engine.)

In 1838, when the first railways were running, there were 22,000 miles of turnpike roads in England. Within ten years, their income from tolls had dropped by a quarter and the condition of the roads had greatly deteriorated. But, once again, established companies like Pickfords adapted. They used railway wagons for long-distance jobs and local roads for local horse-drawn traffic. These local roads became busier if they led to or from a railway station. In 1846, Pickfords had 850 horses; by 1878, this had increased to 2000.

Railways created suburbs, commuters and markets with fresh produce available daily. The population grew. Industry arrived. Railways might have become the preferred way of travelling, for both people and goods, but transport in general continued to expand.

Road transport came into its own again with the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the 1890s. Motor cars were the new glamorous inventions, but goods vehicles were also being made, almost from the beginning, at places like Leyland in Lancashire. In 1904, there were 4000 goods vehicles on Britain’s roads. By the beginning of the First World War, this figure had risen to 82,000.

Just as the seventeenth-century growth in transport had created tolls, the result this time was taxes. The Budget of 1909 imposed a graduated tax on all vehicles, starting at £2 for light cars of 6h.p., rising to £32 for heavy vehicles of between 40–60h.p. There was also a tax imposed on petrol of 3d a gallon. Ostensibly, the rationale was the same as the turnpike toll: to raise money to maintain and improve roads and bridges, taking the burden off the local parishes. It was soon apparent, however, that not many new roads were actually being built, despite the sums being raised by the new road taxes.

What happened, of course, was that the Government quickly realized, as any Government would, that it had hit upon a brilliant wheeze for raising huge sums, which increased all the time without its having to do very much, except collect them.

The First World War stopped all transport growth but, afterwards, there was rapid expansion again. A new haulage industry, very much as we see it today, came into being. The initial spark occurred in 1920, when the Government decided to sell off cheaply some 20,000 vehicles which had been used during the war, mainly to carry munitions. It enabled many ex-service men, with little or no capital, to set themselves up as owner-drivers, or ‘tramp drivers’ as they were called.

The result was fairly chaotic, causing a Wild West-like stampede of unregulated, cut-throat, highly competitive, not to say dodgy and dangerous, lorries and lorry drivers. These flooded the roads and were soon fighting each other for business. Road taxes had to be paid, of course, but no licence was needed to operate; anyone could have a go.

At the top end of haulage, business continued to be good for some well-established, well-run firms with large fleets of lorries, such as Pickfords or Sutton and Sons, but they were not best pleased by the hordes of new owner-drivers. Very soon, this new breed made up some eighty per cent of the haulage industry, giving it a bad name and, even worse, forcing down prices. The railways were also not happy at being undercut by one-man lorry firms.

A Government Commission was set up to investigate the situation, and the result was the 1933 Road and Rail Transport Act. Amongst other things, it created a regulating system for hauliers, based on different grades of licences. You needed, for example, an A-licence to carry goods over a long distance for other people – or hire and reward, as it was called. A B-licence was for shorter distances and, if you were carrying only your own goods, then all you needed was a C-licence. The existing big boys all got A-licences but new, smaller firms found it very hard to get one.

After the Second World War and the arrival of a Labour Government, the Transport Act of 1947 brought in nationalization to road haulage. Most of the big boys, with the A-licences, were bought over and British Road Services, BRS, began. Smaller, local firms were able to stay private, with a B-licence limiting them to a distance of twenty-five miles from their base. Those with C-licences, transporting only their own goods, were also left free. There were more changes and minor messings around when the Conservatives got back into power in 1953, with partial denationalization. But a system of A-, B- and C-licences still remained in 1958 when Eddie Stobart set himself up in business.

‘As I remember it,’ says Eddie, ‘an A-licence meant you could carry goods for anyone, anywhere, over any distance. Robsons in Carlisle, for example, always had an A-licence, but they were huge. I think the only firm in our area who had an A-licence was Tysons of Caldbeck.

‘You had to go to a Ministry of Transport tribunal if you wanted to get that sort of licence. You had to prove a need for it, that there was local demand, and also that the railways couldn’t do it. The railways could object, which they did, and stop you getting an A-licence.

‘What I had was a B-licence. I could transport other people’s goods locally, or my own over any distance. I was doing roughly half and half. When we went to ICI at Middlesbrough to pick up slag, I was transporting my own goods because I’d bought it. A C-licence meant you could only transport your own goods.’

By the time Edward fell in love with lorries and decided to move into Carlisle, the laws had changed again. In 1968, the Labour Government’s Transport Bill did away with thirty-five years of restrictions. A- and B-licences were scrapped; all hauliers, of any size, were suddenly free to transport goods over any distance.

Without realizing it, Edward was fortunate to come into the haulage business at the time he did. Ten years earlier and he would have found it very much harder. On the other hand, there were immediately hordes of little lorry firms again.

In 1976, some 900,000 lorries were trundling around Britain, a great many of them owned by small-time, agricultural contractors and part-time hauliers such as the Stobarts. All were competing for business, all hoping to grow and expand.

HELLO CARLISLE (#ulink_4e06b112-2488-57b6-8a18-e9ab62494c88)

The premises Edward moved into in Carlisle in 1976 were in Greystone Road, quite near the middle of the city, not far from Brunton Park, world-famous home of Carlisle United FC. It was the time when, back in the 1974–75 season, CUFC surprised, nay amazed, everyone by getting into the First Division. On 24 August 1974, they beat Tottenham Hotspur at Brunton Park, 1–0, before a crowd of 18,426 and, after three games, they zoomed to the top of the league. A perilous position, from which they soon grew dizzy and fell fast. They lasted only one season in the top flight, before dropping back to the Second Division.

But it did mean that, on match days in 1976, there were still quite reasonable crowds coming to watch Carlisle – some of whom took advantage of temporary, match-day-only parking spaces in the rather tatty, rather limited new premises of Eddie Stobart Ltd in Greystone Road. It made Edward and his staff a few bob, which went into the joint kitty to pay for cornflakes, milk, chips and other necessities of life.

The yard staff consisted of only two people when the premises first opened, both of whom Edward brought with him from Hesket. There was Stan Monkhouse, then aged thirty-five, who had been working with Edward’s father since 1960. He was born and brought up on a farm not far from Hesket and had been a farm worker till joining Eddie, aged eighteen, as a tractor driver. At the age of twenty-one, he had graduated to lorry driver, which he did for the next ten years, going back and forth from Hesket to places like Scunthorpe and Corby, carrying loads of slag.

He’d got married, had children and a home in Hesket, and was becoming a bit fed up with being away so much. Therefore, in 1973, when Edward offered him the chance to be the lorry maintenance man at Newlands rather than a lorry driver, he jumped at it.

‘I’d been off for six months at the time,’ recollects Stan. ‘I broke my arm, falling off a trailer. When I got back, Eddie was having problems with his maintenance man, and asked me if I was interested in the job. I said yis, aye, I’ll give it a go.’

Three years later, when young Edward asked Stan to come into Carlisle to look after the maintenance of his lorries, he said ‘yis, aye’, again. He could still come home every evening and thought it might be interesting, being part of a new venture.

‘They were very different,’ says Stan, ‘Edward and his father. I’d always got on with Eddie, he’d been very good to me, a perfect boss, but I just fancied a change.

‘I think Eddie was a bit reluctant about the move, but Edward had outgrown Hesket. We’d had one or two orders from Metal Box in Carlisle, in 1973 I think it was, which meant going into Carlisle to load up, bringing them back to Hesket, leaving them overnight, then delivering next day. Edward could see that being so far from Carlisle was a handicap and lost us time and money.

‘Eddie liked being a bit of a wheeler-dealer, going to agricultural auctions, buying and selling produce and fertilizers, mixing with the farmers, having a crack. Edward didn’t like any of that side of things. I could see Edward had a vision, though I didn’t know where it would lead.’

The other member of staff at Greystone Road was Stan’s apprentice, seventeen-year-old David Jackson, a very cheerful, sunny-natured lad who came from a farming family at Shap. He had been working with the Stobarts for seven months, running errands, sweeping the floor, going into Carlisle to pick up parts. He was four years younger than Edward but they became close friends, both having been poor scholars at school, both preferring to work with their hands rather than sitting at desks.

There was parking space for fifteen vehicles when they arrived at Greystone Road, though in that first year they had no more than eight. ‘It was all very basic when we arrived,’ says David. ‘There was no pit. It meant you had to lie flat on your back on the ground to work under the vehicles. It was very hard work; we all had to knuckle down.

‘Stan and Edward did most of the driving, till Edward started hiring local drivers. I was quite relieved: I didn’t have a class-one licence at the time, but I was so tired after each day in the garage, I couldn’t have taken a lorry out at night.

‘I once went to Glasgow with Edward overnight. I think he just took me with him as company, to keep him awake. We got back at four in the morning, too late for either of us to go home. There were some old shelves in what we called the bait cabin, where we ate our sandwiches. Edward cleared the shelves and we slept on them – as if they were bunk beds. Oh, I didn’t mind. I did the job for love, not for money. It was exciting.’

David smiles as he recollects the excitement of the early days. ‘I can’t put it into words: it just was. It felt good, being part of it. And we did have some good laughs. Edward in those days quite liked playing practical jokes.’ Edward himself, when pressed, also remembers having water fights with the hose pipes, after the end of a long day’s work.

Nora Stobart remembers David and Edward both larking around in those early years at Greystone Road. The drivers would be out all day on a job, leaving Stan and David in the yard, working on repairs and maintenance. Edward would be in his little office, trying to drum up work, unless he was out on an emergency job. No one could have told the difference between the three of them, as they were all in boiler suits, all pretty scruffy.

‘There was a rep they didn’t like who started calling, asking to see Mr Stobart,’ says Nora. ‘They didn’t want to see him so, next time he came, Edward and David climbed on a roof and pretended to be crackers, pulling faces. When asked if Mr Stobart was in, they both said “Who?” He went away and never came back.’

Edward, in fact, frequently pretended not to be who he was, even when he wasn’t well known. He says now, ‘If customers saw I was driving the lorries myself, they might think what sort of firm is this, why is he behind the wheel not at his desk?’

In the evenings, after work, Edward and David went out for a meal now and again, chased girls together, now and again, and, in the summer, they usually went on their week’s holiday together. One year they went to Newquay, along with two other country lads. But, mainly, it was long hours and hard work.

‘If I ever did manage to get a girlfriend,’ says Edward, ‘work always came first. I’d cancel a date if a job came up. The way I lived, I didn’t meet many girls anyway. My fingernails were always dirty and my hands oily. Most of my Saturday nights were spent at places like Beattock, eating egg and chips in a transport caff, having tipped a load at Motherwell.’

Edward did drink and smoke at the time, so he was not totally without pleasures or vices. David remembers him going through a packet of twenty cigarettes, one after the other, but then he wouldn’t have another one for days. He also had long hair, like most lads in the Seventies.

‘I was looked upon as the first Stobart rebel,’ recollects Edward. ‘I wasn’t really, of course, but my father and grandfather had always been strictly religious. My father did once catch me drinking. He made out it was the end of the world, that I’d done something really bad. I’d made it worse by taking William with me. He was only eleven at the time …’

On the business side of matters, the new drivers the firm hired from Carlisle didn’t always turn out to be as good as they would have liked. ‘One of them blew an engine,’ says David, ‘totally ruined a new lorry, just by being inexperienced. Another time, I came in one morning to find our best lorry had been turned over by a new driver in the night. It had rolled over and the cab was all bashed in. Edward looked at it and said to Stan and me: “Tha’s got to have that’un on the road by tonight.” We couldn’t believe he was serious. It was in such a terrible state. But Stan and me set to, using about four jacks to support it, stop it falling to pieces while we worked on it, welding it together. We got it roadworthy in eight hours, working non-stop.’

David got the odd ear-bashing from Edward if he did something wrong, but says Edward never held it against him. ‘All the drivers respected him. They could see he was doing the same work as they were – and a lot more.

‘When we heard him saying: “No problem” on the telephone, we knew there were going to be problems. Edward would accept any work, anywhere, even if all the drivers were out, even if it meant dumping loaded goods in our garage in order to go off and pick up another load. There was nothing illegal about this. Stuff always got delivered on time, as promised. But we wouldn’t have liked, say, someone from Metal Box to arrive and find their goods piled up on our garage floor.

‘Edward, from the beginning, always wanted his lorries clean. We had to do them every weekend. Even on Christmas Eve, Edward always insisted that all wagons had to be washed and parked up before Stan and me went home, even if it was eight o’clock and we’d been working hard all day. He wanted everything left spick and span. It was as if it was the lorries’ Christmas Eve as well ….’

Edward says he could never get to sleep on a Sunday or over any bank-holiday period if he thought any of his lorries had been left dirty. ‘I’d never call myself a trucker. Still don’t; I’m not the sort who’s in love with lorries, who would go spotting. I look upon lorries as tools, there to do a job. And as with all tools, you should look after them as best you can. Lorries are a bit like ladies, aren’t they? If they look good, you’re on the right track ….’ A metaphor which probably should not be explored too closely.

In its first year, Edward’s firm expanded from eight to twelve trucks, but was then hit by a steel strike. ‘The whole haulage industry had a terrible time,’ says David. ‘Edward didn’t want to lay off any of the drivers, so what he did was take the tax off six vehicles. That saved him some money. He then put our twelve drivers on one week on, one week off, till work came in again.’

After a couple of years at Greystone Road, Edward acquired an old Portakabin which gave him more space. He used this as his office, and also as his sleeping quarters, if he came back too late after an emergency driving job, up to Glasgow, or down to Birmingham. It meant that, for days at a time, often for a whole week, he would not go home to Hesket and his own bed.

He became obsessed by sending out his lorries each day as cleanly as possible, even if it meant that he was the one to stay late the night before in order to wash them. ‘I didn’t ask the drivers to do it,’ Edward explains. ‘They were paid to drive, not wash. So if I wanted them all clean, I had to do it.

‘What I was trying to do was move up-market. And that, mainly, meant trying to get cleaner work. Doing tipper work, carrying slag and fertilizers, or quarry work, as we’d been doing at Hesket, was the bottom end of the market, the dirty end. I wanted to move into food and drink, the clean end. You didn’t need tippers for this. You needed flat-bed trailers, where the pallets could be laid.

‘I persuaded my dad we needed two flat-bed trailers, Crane Fruehauf flat-bed trailers they were, which we bought from Grahams of Bass Lake. They cost £1750 each.’

Not content with moving up to flat-bed trailers, Edward wanted them to be the very latest versions. Most hauliers of the time had open-sided, flat-bedded lorries, as opposed to tippers, and piled the pallets or the goods on the back, covered them with a bit of canvas to keep them dry, then secured them with ropes. This often led to ungainly, dangerous loads, exposed to the elements.