The Eddie Stobart Story. Hunter Davies

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ