The Eddie Stobart Story. Hunter Davies

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ