I am extremely proud of my book. But it is so exciting to see its themes illustrated so powerfully, so visually. Powerful photographs; fantastic illustrations by Nam. And of course exceptionally good text. Buy it here, and also dive into the Lab, which has even more enticing shit stories.

I didn’t write the headline. I meant, modern piracy began as the bloodless kind. Now it is less so. Which is why I support the use of – properly legistated-for, licensed – armed security. Nothing else is working.

FOUR American yachters killed; a Danish family of five and two crew members kidnapped: these events in the space of a week early this year may finally fuel a consensus that something needs to be done about piracy in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. And something should be done: in addition to the yachters, nearly 700 sailors, mostly Filipino, Bangladeshi and Russian, are being held hostage. Often forced to operate their captured ships at gunpoint, with little food or water, some of them have been prisoners for months.

But maritime lawlessness isn’t confined to pirates. Thanks to a system of ship registration called “flags of convenience,” it is all too easy for unscrupulous ship owners to get away with criminal behavior. They have evaded prosecution for environmental damage like oil spills, as well as poor labor conditions, forcing crews to work like slaves without adequate pay or rest. But unlike piracy, which seems intractable, the appalling conditions on some merchant ships could be stopped.

Ships used to fly the flags of their nation. They were floating pieces of their home country on ungovernable seas, with all the advantages and disadvantages of government oversight: if things went wrong, seafarers were protected by their governments. If they did wrong, they could be punished.

But in the early 20th century, this began to change. Panama, seeking to attract American ships avoiding Prohibition laws, allowed non-Panamanians to fly its flag, for a fee. Liberia and other countries followed suit. Today these “open registries” are used by over 60 percent of shippers, up from 4 percent in the 1950s.

Under the flags of convenience system, registries have been divorced from government oversight. North Korea has a thriving registry, as does landlocked Mongolia. Liberia’s registry, the second-largest in the world, flourished even during a dozen years of civil war. Some registries allow ship owners to change the flags they’re registered under within 48 hours; some require little more than a signature or an online form from an owner. Many don’t require owners to disclose their identities at all.

Such easy anonymity is dangerous.

In 1999, a oil tanker called the Erika ran aground off Brittany and polluted 250 miles of French coastline. The French government could not penetrate a chain of shell companies in seven countries that stood between the ship and its owner. The owner eventually came forward voluntarily and, when questioned by the BBC about the complex ownership arrangements, said, “That is standard practice in shipping.”

It shouldn’t be.

Many state registries lack the capacity or will to monitor the safety and working conditions on ships, or to investigate accidents. Instead, ship safety certificates are given out by private classification societies. Owners are allowed to choose which society they want — and the worst predictably choose the least demanding. This self-policing has been compared to registering a car in Bali so you can drive it in Australia with faulty brakes.

The human cost of this system is unacceptably high. Long hours and punishing port schedules rarely provide sailors with enough time to rest; some international regulations permit 98-hour work weeks.

Salaries often go unpaid: the International Transport Workers’ Federation, which represents seafarers, recovered $30 million in unpaid wages last year. When the Most Sky, a Turkish ship registered in Panama, docked at a British port last November, its crew had not been paid for months. They had to pool together enough money to buy bread and there was no light or heat in their cabin; they had been using a kebab grill to keep warm.

There are plenty of ships run by decent owners. But delinquency is too easy with open registries, when owners can slip away, unpunished and unaccountable.

The world of merchant shipping is undeniably complex. Nearly half of all crews today are made up of four or more nationalities. On a container ship I sailed on for five weeks last summer, I sat in the officers’ mess next to a Burmese engineer, opposite a Romanian and a Moldovan. The men at the table behind us were Chinese, Filipino and Scottish. The crew mess next door was entirely Filipino. We had a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II on the wall. They had better cookies and a microwave with two settings: Ramen for One and Ramen for Two.

But globalization is no reason that states can’t take responsibility for the ships they register. On paper, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea specifies there should be a “genuine link” between the ship and its flag. But debate continues over what that link should be. At the least, it should involve a state’s being able to carry out effective inspections and monitoring of its ships, rather than tolerating online application forms and no questions asked. Even if the United Nations defined a link, though, it’s not clear that its members would be willing or able to enforce it when flags of convenience are so profitable for both states and ship owners, who stand to save millions of dollars a year in wages and taxes.

A more immediate, if partial, solution would be for port authorities, which have the power to detain unsafe or abusive ships that dock in their harbors, to pay extra attention to ships registered under notoriously lax states, like the Comoros. To avoid this extra scrutiny and the possibility of detention fees, ships might pressure the registries to raise their standards.

Finally, public scrutiny can’t hurt. We boycott food produced by companies that mistreat their workers, but know little about the sometimes atrocious conditions on the ships that carry the food. A campaign called Save Our Seafarers, organized by unions and shippers to raise awareness about piracy, may also cast light on the industry’s own failings.

But the crew members on my ship, who lived in superior standards compared with many, didn’t have much hope. “No one cares about the merchant navy,” the captain said over dinner one night. “We are the scum of the earth. Always have been, always will be.” And with that, he returned to his soup.

–

The habit of spotting – planes, trains, lorries – rarely surfaces into public perception. Perhaps when foreign friends, seeing on the end of a station platform a loner with a notebook peering at their departing train, ask a question. Their British friends realise they cannot account for it, beyond it being a peculiarity of this isle, like bowler hats or Marmite, and the spotter is dismissed and forgotten. So the recent burst of spotting onto front pages has been unusual: Twelve British planespotters from aviation enthusiast travel agency Touchdown Tours, arrested at a Greek airfield, languished in murky jails for weeks while powerful men in suits tried to explain to other powerful men in suits why noting down aeroplane serial numbers was considered acceptable – almost cherished – behaviour here. Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou was typical in his diplomatic puzzlement – “this is a hobby that doesn’t exist in Greece.” Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain tried to explain matters, but the native African was probably as bemused as his Balkan counterparts.

British newspaper leaders, sympathetic to post 9/11 concerns, allowed that motley groups visiting secret airfields were a cause for alarm, but there the sympathy ended. Our military airfields still welcome them, build enclosures for them, even like them. “As long as we don’t pass the numbers on to Al-Qaida,” revealed aviation enthusiasts at RAF Waddington, they are allowed to note numbers, swap them with fellow enthusiasts, even listen in to radio traffic. The spotters, implied the leaders, were simply the latest manifestation of mild eccentricity, a benign flag borne by noble Britons down the ages.

In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill pronounced the “chief danger of our time” to be not child labour, nor endemic tuberculosis, nor the persistent massacring of ethnic majorities, but “that so few now dare to be eccentric.” Edith Sitwell proclaimed that, “Eccentricity exists particularly in the English and partly, I think, because of that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that is the hallmark and birthright of the British nation.”

Two great minds, enshrining the right of British men and women to savagely cut down all flowers (Sir Tatton Sykes), to build follies (Lord Berners), to be whipped by rouged women (Algernon Charles Swinburne), to pretend to be foreign princesses (Princess Caraboo). To visit secret airfields in times of world tension and cause Greek air officers apoplexy. Or to keep a notepad and pen handy on the dashboard, to collect sightings of Eddie Stobart, Express Road Haulage lorries, and to consider this a worthwhile pursuit.

The Eddie Stobart Story is selling well on the business lists. It can be read as the literary excavation of an entrepreneurial success story, of a family business run by Edward Stobart, whom Davies dubs the Greatest Living Cumbrian, that from humble and difficult beginnings has risen to be the largest independent haulage company in the country. All of interest in its own right. But the John Stuart Mill reading of the Eddie Stobart Story is more satisfying. Then, it becomes a hymn to eccentricity, firstly to the oddity of Edward himself, a stammering farm child who hated school and left without paper qualifications, who worked all hours to set up his haulage company, who spent weekends cleaning his lorries with an obsessiveness Hyacinth Bucket would be houseproud of, and whose Saturday nights were usually spent “in places like Beattock, eating egg and chips in a transport caff, having tipped a load at Motherwell.” Stobart hovers in the mid-forties on the Sunday Times Rich List (somewhere near Rod Stewart), isn’t keen on going abroad, “has no hobbies, doesn’t collect things and has no interest in sport of any form, despite sponsoring Carlisle United FC.” He has a Ferrari he doesn’t drive and a yacht he doesn’t sail. He relaxes on a mechanical digger. He is an unusual man.

Secondly, it is a celebration of a strange modern pursuit and its practitioners. They make a formidable force: The fan club has an annual turnover of £1.5 million, more than the core business of many companies. Its members visit the Stobart merchandising shop in Carlisle, take regular guided tours of its two dozen haulage depots, get married in lorries, and have propelled Eddie Stobart toy trucks to the biggest-selling position in the Corgi range. The two tales of eccentricity rarely meet – Edward is bemused by the cult, though cunning enough to quietly use it (he has just signed a deal for animated videos chronicling the adventures of Steady Eddie, Oliver Overdrive, Jock the Tanker and Loretta the Lorry). But they do have a whiff of obscurity in common. Industry rivals have long looked on Eddie Stobart with a “colder, beadier stare,” than the layperson’s “rather amateur, affectionate and at times, soppy and romantic eye.” Alan Cole, former C.E.O. of massive hauliers TDG is typical. “When we heard about their growth, and then the existence of their own fan-club, it seemed totally bizarre. It was a mystery to the rest of us how they had done it.” Especially when Stobart has no advertising budget, and must be the only company with a £100 million-plus turnover that refuses to employ Estuary English-voiced women in double-barrelled public relations companies. Yet such is its spell, European Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock has an Eddie Stobart toy lorry in his office.

A psychologist said recently that spotting was a symptom of obsessive-compulsive behaviour, a comfort mechanism like filling in graph squares on paper. In his attempt to demystify the Stobart success, Davies fills in all the squares on God’s earth. We trundle slowly through the birth and marriage of Stobart grandfather John, delving deep into father Eddie’s business beginnings (lime spreading, if you must know). We learn how many Saturdays – precisely – young Edward spent spreading slag and how much cash – precisely – he liked to keep in his pocket and how much profit – precisely – Eddie Stobart Ltd made in its first year. 253 pages could amply tell the story of a Churchill or Picasso, but Davies is determined to fill them with Cumbrian grit and padding. The first use of the word juggernaut was not just used in the Sunday Times in the 1970s, but in “the Sunday Times under Harold Evans”. There are four pages on the business history of fellow Carlisle firm Metal Box, when one would have been too much. Such biographic indulgence of non-celebrities can be charming in an age of PR obsession, but only up to a point.

Deborah Rodgers is Edward’s personal assistant. Her importance to the story in this capacity is arguable, though her task of answering fan letters beefs up her role. But neither of these justify the size of the spotlight she is given: “Deborah comes from Carlisle and joined the firm in 1987, when she was twenty-three. She’d had dealings with Colin Rutherford in his old job working at Hazard Haulage, and he had rung her up when he heard she was looking to move. He asked her if she wanted a job at Eddie Stobart Ltd and she was interviewed and taken on.” The lack of narrative discipline sits uneasily with the no-nonsense of Stobart, a man who loathes “fancy jargon” and prefers the word “haulage” to poncy “logistics.” “I was being asked all the time what my Total Quality Statement was. I’d say “To run clean lorries, with smart drivers, who arrive on time at your factory.” What more is there to say?”

The plain-speaking workaholic Stobart is hard to dislike, even if this cute recluse hosing down lorries is the same man who sacks drivers for not wearing a tie, and who was accused of failing to support driver Richard Hudson, imprisoned by Macedonian authorities while delivering on a Stobart contract for NATO (this gets no mention in the book). But the biographer often doesn’t suit the man. Stobart is “our very own Edward Stobart.” And the final flourish – “keep on trucking” – is hard to forgive. Though the jacket blurbs of the story’s “quintessential quirkiness,” often the compelling impression is of being thrust into one of those framed photographs of tidy men with sandy moustaches and nondescript ties that hang in offices everywhere, and of proceeding to the end of the book with a muted wonder that you have been compelled to read a history of companies called Metal Box, and induced to care about the retirement plans of men called Colin and Kevin.

So thank heaven for the Eddie Stobart Fan-Club Story, whose roots are obscure, even to the determined digging of Davies. Perhaps it began on the day Edward Stobart became the first haulier to impose a jacket and tie uniform on his drivers. Or when he realised the bar on the back of the truck obscured the company logo, and was the first to modify his vehicles accordingly. Or when, with uncharacteristic humour, he pioneered the practice of giving his trucks female names, therefore enabling cringing puns throughout the years (“Eddie Stobart drivers really do go out with their vehicles.”) Twiggy, Joan Doreen, Excilie Elizabeth: They began as an amusement, but became a mark of distinction for bored motorway drivers on family schleps, or sales reps sick of Radio 4, who began to collect sightings of the “giants of the road”.

Musician Jools Holland was the first to give voice to the craze, after his band enlivened a UK tour in 1991 with spotting Stobart lorries. His personal assistant wrote to ask for a calendar, and was sent one by return of post by slightly bemused Stobart staff in Carlisle – only slightly bemused, because fans had been writing occasional letters over the years, always answered in case they were future customers. Holland explained his game in a newspaper article:

Whenever you see a Stobart lorry you shout “Stobart!” Your sighting then has to be confirmed by one of the other people in the car and you can then claim a pound. When you go past a depot there might be 20 Stobarts there and some people try to claim £20 but that is obviously fraudulent and I make up the rules.

Holland hoped that his motorway pastime would become a national game. But it already was: Hundreds of fans came out of their Stobart closet after the article, enough to establish the fan club in 1992. It now gets 500 new members a month, and with this book will no doubt get more. They receive the Stobart Fleet Manual and Spotter Guide, which lists all the lorries with their ladies’ names, followed by a handy box to tick after a sighting. And they can buy Eddie Stobart fleeces, teddy bears and boxer-shorts decorated with tiny trucks. There’s an Eddie Stobart tapestry, and Eddie Stobart tea “specially blended for express refreshment.” It seems a lot of sidelines for a man who hates publicity, and for a company whose employees don’t understand the fuss. Driver Billy Dowell:

Some people knock the fan club. When they see the spotters hanging round the depot, they say, “get a life.” I don’t. I’m interested in trucks myself, so I can understand them. They’re doing no harm.

But what are they doing, exactly? The word “spotter” first came into use in the Second World War – first because of spotter-aircraft, and then because of books carrying plentiful illustrations of Messerschmitts etc, all the better to easily identify the plane that is about to bomb your house. Trainspotting books appeared in the early 1940s that listed locomotives, names and serial numbers. The hobby of spotting was born, and with it the mania of collecting serial numbers of various types of machinery, the motives for which no one has ever satisfactorily explained.

There are theories, of course: Spotting is a comfort activity, an obsessive-compulsive way of controlling events in a limited sphere of activity, a way to compensate for an inadequate childhood/lack of love/general dysfunction. Or it arises from innate human competitiveness, whereby lying in wait for a hairy mammal has mutated into keeping an eye out for a truck called Emily. Perhaps it concerns visual psychology: Humans didn’t evolve to read text, which shimmers on the eye, and are naturally happier looking at spatially defined objects, like trees, or moving trucks. The most prosaic truth – that Stobart-spotting breaks up motorway tedium – doesn’t explain the fans who drive thousands of extra miles a year for sightings. In fact, no psychologist can explain spotting, or cigarette card collections, or the storing of stuffed animals. Consequently, though they are treated with amused indulgence, spotters are still a breed apart. When contestant Emma Lewis was asked for her hobbies on the TV show Weakest Link recently, she replied, “collecting Eddie Stobart lorries.” And what, said Anne Robinson, do you do with them? “Nothing,” said Emma. This exchange, wrote Guardian writer Simon Hoggart, was “unbearably sad.”

Davies would never treat the fans with such pomposity, but he’s not above a touch of light mockery. “I prefer the Volvos to the Scanias,” says Ena Poulton of Gloucester, who has eight hundred photographs of Stobart lorries. “You can’t see the name on the Scanias, that’s why. I’m always having terrible trouble whenever it’s a Scania.” But his portraits are mostly affectionate, such as the even more fanatical Alf Cooper, a 77 year-old retired bank officer from Essex, drove 25,000 miles one year lorry-spotting, has spotted nearly all the thousand Eddie lorries, and has only 15 left. The Poultons and Alf are secure in the sanity of their hobby, as secure as Bram Stoker’s Renfield eating flies in an asylum. But Edward Stobart still doesn’t get it:

I remember the first time I was told that a fan had arrived at the depot at Kingstown. It was a Saturday morning, and I was in the office. Someone said that a bloke had driven up all the way from the Midlands with his family to look at our lorries. He was asking to see me. I didn’t want to go out – I didn’t want to meet some stranger. I couldn’t believe it anyway, thinking the bloke might be a bit, you know, funny, or it might be some old driver with a tattoo and a CB radio. Anyway, I got talked into going out and saying hello to him – and he turned out to be a bank manager! He was a perfectly respectable, normal person – not at all what I had imagined.

John Martin founded the lorryspotting.com website, which lists lorry details for 30 independent hauliers, and requires eight separate phone lines to deal with 3000 subscribers. He is quick to point out that MPs, brain surgeons and vicars are subscribers to his website, and the subscriber list is growing rapidly. Davies also stresses that respectable and normal people – vicars, surgeons – make up a surprising proportion of the Stobart fan club. On the other hand, the fans couldn’t give a fig for respectability. Ena and John Poulton, who drive 400 miles on a Sunday lorryspotting, say “most people probably think we’re quite mad, but we find it good fun.” “Don’t worry,” writes James Henley on the lorryspotting.com forum, when Emma Lewis rightfully objects to being called unbearably sad. “I understand. They can only see it through their eyes. At least you had the bottle to say it on telly in the first place.”

It’s unlikely that if Emma Lewis had been outed as a trainspotter, she would have received such patronising scorn. Trains are indisputably romantic (or were, pre- Railtrack). Planes can be glamorous – all those F16s and Mirages and Antonovs. But neither train nor planespotters can account for the attraction of trucks. One trainspotter I know – who doesn’t own a single anorak – says, “you can understand trainspotting. There’s fresh air, you’re outside. It’s not about the numbers, they’re just an excuse to look at the trains. But people who go bus and lorry spotting, they’re just weird.”

Martin tries to explain the attraction, but fails. “It’s all very strange. There’s something in human nature which means if you give certain people a list, they will immediately start ticking items off. I don’t know why, they just do. They probably can’t explain it themselves.”

Even so, the spotters of lorries are growing. Stobart-spotting, and lorryspotting in general, is proving the most accessible of all the spotting disciplines. Unlike the stereotypical trainspotter, Stobart fans are evenly split down the gender divide. This spotting is a more communal, genial sort, an activity done in company. For purely practical reasons, as noting down serial numbers with both hands on the wheel is inadvisable, and singing the Eddie Stobart song (it takes the tune of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus) loses something in solitude.


And the lorryspotters are on the march. There are only a thousand Stobart lorries, but there are thousands more on the continent, where the giant French hauliers Norbert Dentressangle (2,800 trucks) do battle with Willie Bertz (3,800). An informal competition, enshrined in a spotting game called Nobbie (Dentressangle) v. Stobbie (Stobart) will be solidified, after sustained lobbying by lorryspotting.com has pushed Dentressangle to form a fan-club next year. Such news may make our very own Edward Stobart a happier man. Though he goes gamely along with it, and makes money from it, he remains the Howard Hughes of haulage. It’s difficult to imagine him enjoying this book, or even reading it. “I find being recognised anywhere very embarrassing. I’m not a pop star or a TV star. If the Eddie Stobart fans enjoy being Eddie Stobart fans, spotting the lorries, then that’s fine. I’m pleased they’re enjoying themselves. It’s just a shame it’s my name that has become public property. It makes me feel as if I’ve lost my freedom.”

Up and down the country, the doors to public toilets are being banged shut, to little protest.

Councils can close toilets because they are under no statutory obligation to provide them. People adapt too, using cafes, pubs or museums instead. But it might also be to do with the lack of protest, because the fit and healthy among us use McDonald’s, or slink into a pub, while old people, who suffer most, often stay confined to their homes, terrified of not being able to find a facility – a condition known as the “bladder leash”. In one Help the Aged survey, 52% of people said fear of not finding a toilet kept them at home.

How did it come to this? George Jennings set in motion the golden age of the public toilet at the 1851 Great Exhibition, where, despite initial outrage, 850,000 people spent a penny to use his facilities.

But he wasn’t the first: the idea that providing toilets for general use is vital to civilisation occurred to ancient Romans, whose marble-decorated very public toilets had no doors, so the elite could talk business while doing their business. Henry VIII had a House of Easement, in Hampton Court Palace. 19th century Scots had Public Necessaries, a far more appropriate name than “convenience”. Maybe when we stopped calling them necessaries is when the rot set in. It’s ridiculous that we will loudly object to the removal of one form of waste disposal – bin collections – while mutely accepting the mass destruction of another, more vital waste disposal service.

Yet there is nowhere like the public toilet. A properly cared for place, with an attendant, can be a safe refuge for all sorts. I interviewed a toilet attendant in Dewsbury who had watched gin bottles roll under stalls; cared for small children; helped sickly people; raised money for charity by selling jam and soft toys in one of her sinks. “I’m not a toilet attendant,” she said, “I’m a social worker.”

She was paid less than a street sweeper, but she saved the council money: attended toilets are less vandalised. Councils defend cuts by saying that people don’t like using public toilets; but they do when they are well tended and attended, and they don’t necessarily mind pay-per-use peeing. “I’d rather pay 20p and them be clean and manned,” said a respondent in the Help the Aged survey, “than they be dirty and free.”

But this economic calculation seems to be too complicated for cash-strapped councils to consider. We should value our public toilets because they meet an unavoidable and universal biological necessity; because they can be architectural marvels, like Rothesay‘s, or the ones in Leith police station, as described to me by a detective on a train, that had copper piping and glass cisterns for goldfish to swim in. And because they can earn money: small towns dependent on tourism can get 20 car-loads more visitors a day if they have a public toilet, according to one calculation. Public necessaries say something about what we consider to be civilised. There is vandalism being done to toilets, but not with a spray can.

Best’s husband had been in the British merchant navy, but neither he nor she would recognise the industry today. It has always been multinational: there was a west African seafarers house in London in 1858. But the number of Britons who live by the sea has dropped, and continues to drop. There were 104,000 people in the British merchant navy in the late 1960s, and now the figure is near a quarter of that. Most of the world’s seafarers come from poor countries. A quarter are Filipino. We are surrounded by sea, but remarkably detached from it, though ships still bring us much of what we consume. Eighty per cent of our oil and gas comes by sea, and half of our food. When the Icelandic volcano disrupted air travel, ships were the reason supermarket shelves stayed filled.

We have always used the sea for transport. But shipping has changed dramatically in half a century, and not always for the better. With containerisation, the days of romantic shore leave are long gone. In the dizzying pace of a highly competitive industry, a vast container ship can be loaded and unloaded in 24 hours. Before, an officer told me, he would wonder whether he had time for dinner. Now he doesn’t know if he has time to get a newspaper. Add this to the long months of isolation at sea, where things that most of us take for granted – internet, Skype, mobile phone access – are out of reach for 90% of seafarers. Births and birthdays are regularly missed.

With that much isolation, and the essentially offshore status of ships, exploitation is easy. Last year the International Transport Federation recovered £30m in unpaid wages. Seafarers’ welfare associations such as the Sailors’ Society and the Mission to Seafarers run hundreds of centres worldwide that are vital ports of call. Legal advice, internet connection, Cadbury’s chocolate, all are welcome and needed. Although seafaring can pay well – crews call it “dollars for homesickness” – it is an isolating and risky life. I can’t imagine any other transport industry, for example, tolerating 700 of its workers being held hostage. 700 bus drivers? 700 plane captains? But piracy continues, mostly with impunity, and I don’t see much furore about it.

So however daft it seems, next week I will wear a woolly hat, and may even knit one. Because it is a small dose of kindness in austere times, to strangers who help to clothe, heat and power us. And a maroon bonnet can go a long way: I watched one seafarer leap off his ship and race towards a chaplain at Felixstowe docks, who was bearing hats. “Hamburg next,” he said, and thanked the chaplain, with some force.