Eddie Stobart obituary
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Founder of the haulage business that carried his name and grew into a multimillion-pound concern. His was the name that adorned a thousand lorries, so familiar on the motorways of Britain that families would while away long journeys by counting them and recording their individual names – each was emblazoned with a woman’s name. Yet Eddie Stobart, who has died aged 95, owned just eight trucks when he handed over the Cumbria-based business in the 1970s to his son Edward to run, concentrating instead on his agricultural interests and his active religious faith.
![[The fleet of Eddie Stobart trucks numbered more than 2,000 at its peak.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/158d6f50ae2b74076b2cf7e31c6dff0cbe50191e/140_244_6345_3807/master/6345.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Edward would build Eddie Stobart Ltd into a trucking business that at one point had more than 2,000 lorries and was eventually sold for £280m. He insisted on having his father’s name (not his own) painted on the side of the vehicles as the company built up its reputation for well-maintained, high-quality vehicles, with uniformed drivers, and benefited from the huge growth in road haulage and moving goods by road rather than rail.
Eddie, however, continued with the range of agricultural activities (in a business renamed Eddie Stobart Trading) for which he had purchased his first lorry – distributing and spreading fertiliser and carrying out a range of other operations for local farmers. His vehicles had carried only a modest “E.P. Stobart” on the doors of their cabs. He would later explain that had he known how celebrated Eddie Stobart Ltd, the truck company, would become, he would never have agreed to the use of his name.
