Great Western Coffee Shop

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Eddie Stobart, the founder of the renowned haulage firm, has died at the age of 95.

The former boss of the Cumbria-based company, recognisable for its green and red fleet of lorries, died on 25 November.

Edward Pears Stobart was born in Cumbria in 1929 into a family of farmers.

He first started the operation as a small agricultural business in 1946, specialising in distributing fertiliser and completing contract work for local farmers.

In 1957, he secured the first Eddie Stobart lorry and the business continued to deliver fertiliser, but expanded after being offered a contract by Imperial Chemical Industries.

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The firm's growth accelerated in the 1970s and '80s after his second youngest child, Edward, took leadership of the group's logistics operations - taking the business's eight lorries to more than 2,700.

However, he died in 2011, aged 56, from a suspected heart attack, having run the business for more than 30 years.

Mr Stobart had stepped back significantly from the firm after selling most of his trading interests in 1980 to invest in an industrial warehouse near Carlisle, where he ended up retiring with his wife Nora Boyd.

The company is now branded as Stobart Group and was taken over by the Culina Group in 2021.

William Stobart, the fourth child of Eddie, is currently the deputy chief executive of Culina.