The founder of one of the Britain’s most renowned haulage firms has died at the age of 95.
Eddie Pears Stobart, who originally founded the family-named business Eddie Stobart in the 1940s, died on November 25.
He was born in 1929 in Cumbria and worked as a farmer before trying his arm in the business world.
Eddie set up a small agricultural business in 1946, focusing on distributing fertiliser and doing contract work for local farms as well as running a farm shop.
He doubted there was much money to be made in haulage, and saw his small fleet simply as ‘a tool for business’, which back then was distributing slag, the fertiliser by-product of industrial steelmaking.
But Eddie’s second-youngest child Edward – so-called to distinguish him from his father – took over the company in the 1970s and made it into a household name in the haulage sector with …