The Eddie Stobart Story Hunter Davies HarperCollins, 282pp, £14.99 ISBN 0007115970

At the end of the 1980s, a peculiar game began to occupy some of the millions of people who travel Britain's motorways. The musician Jools Holland first brought it to wider attention when he confessed that he passed his time on tour by "Stobart Spotting" - that is, identifying the lorries dressed in the distinctive green and red livery of a Cumbrian haulage firm called Eddie Stobart Ltd. He was not alone. "Thousands of families with children had been doing much the same," writes Hunter Davies in his brisk account of "the rise and rise of a lorry legend". Davies - himself a Cumbrian - has set out to celebrate the achievements of the man he calls the "greatest living Cumbrian" - not Eddie Stobart himself, but his son, Edward, who turned the firm into the international business that it is today.

Davies says he wanted to discover why so many "right-thinking persons" should have fallen in love with Eddie Stobart's lorries - "nasty, noisy, environmentally unfriendly, inanimate objects" that they are. He cannot adequately answer the question, because such obsessions defy logic, and he doesn't really try to. Instead, he uncovers a story that he relishes, an old-fashioned rags-to-riches tale of a local boy made good.

When E P Stobart first opened for business in 1957, it was a small agricultural firm, based in Hesket Newmarket, Cumbria; it sold fertiliser to local farmers, and acquired a handful of lorries in the process. Had Eddie Stobart remained in charge, the business would never have outgrown its humble beginnings - he was a lay preacher whose worldly ambitions were modest. But his third child, Edward, was a very different character: "from an early age, he was fascinated by money", writes Davies. Even as a schoolboy, Edward learnt to improve on his father's ways. Eddie Stobart had earned pocket money by chopping up wood to sell as kindling, but Edward attempted to industrialise the process - he bought a job lot of railway sleepers, chopped them up, and sold them by the sack-load to his teachers. By the age of 14, Edward was carrying around £200 in his pockets, "an enormous amount for a boy of 14 in 1968".

Such entrepreneurial zeal was not to be denied, and when Edward left school, he took over the haulage side of his father's business, and set about transforming it. In 1976, at the age of 22, he moved Eddie Stobart Ltd into new and bigger premises in Carlisle. For the next ten years, he worked without a break, running the office by day and driving lorries by night, snatching a few hours' sleep on a camp bed when he could. The firm grew rapidly. Edward's astute eye for property secured the business a base beyond its regional home. Edward's philosophy was simple: he aimed to provide a reliable service at prices his rivals could not match, and his insistence on order and discipline earned his company an enviable reputation. That Eddie Stobart was the first to insist that all its drivers wear uniforms - an innovation that many of its rivals have since adopted - was indicative of its approach. The Stobarts' lack of formal education proved no handicap in running their business. When William, Edward's younger brother, gave up driving and began to run the traffic desk in the office, he relied on a secretary to render his idiosyncratic spellings into standard English. "Tek a lord to Davtree," he would write (or "take a load to Daventry"). By the end of 2000 - a bad year for the haulage industry - Eddie Stobart Ltd was the largest privately owned haulage company in Britain, with a turnover of £135m, 950 vehicles and 27 depots, including three in Brussels.

Yet no one - least of all the reclusive Edward Stobart, who once told off one of his staff for introducing him to someone "when there was no need" - would have anticipated the birth of the Eddie Stobart Fan Club. It was set up in 1992, in response to public demand, and it has 25,000 members. Eddie Stobart merchandising - which includes toy lorries, tapestries, clothes, prints and teddy bears - is now worth £1.5m a year, but the prize possession of the true Stobart spotter is a copy of the fleet manual, which lists all current vehicles, their fleet number, registration number, make, livery and their given (female) name.

Davies's colloquial style often seems better suited to the short sprints of journalism than to the long haul of a book, but in this case it suits his subject well. The Eddie Stobart Story is an engaging, easy read - not one for the neutral, perhaps, but the many fans of Eddie Stobart will ensure it enjoys a decent readership.

Ed Platt's Leadville: a biography of the A40 (Picador) won the 2001 Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and a Somerset Maugham award. He is completing his first novel

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