“Champion Lancastrians” extract
Fred Dibnah: 1938-2004
A reputation built on felling chimneys
Famous for his oily overalls, flat cap and climbing tall chimneys it isn’t often that someone achieves stardom for destroying things.
Fred Dibnah was born on 29 April 1938 in Bolton. He began work as a joiner, making coffins, and spent two years in the army as a chef during his National Service, but from being a small child he had been fascinated by the machinery of the Industrial Revolution.
He also had a fascination with steeplejacks and soon began working in this area. He enjoyed repairing and renovating buildings, but he also gained a reputation for felling chimneys, and thousands of people would gather to watch one of Fred’s chimneys fall. Fred never used dynamite to bring chimneys down, preferring the method of removing part of the base of the chimney and propping it up with telegraph poles, then lighting a fire at the base. As the wood burnt away the chimney would become unstable and topple – almost always exactly in the place that Fred had planned.
In 1978, whilst he was working at the top of the town hall in Bolton, the local BBC news filmed a short item about him. This resulted in a request from television producer, Don Haworth. to make a half-hour programme about Fred’s work as a steeplejack for a series about people with unusual occupations. However, the result became an hour long, award-winning, documentary called Fred Dibnah -Steeplejack which was shown in 1979.
This was just the start of Fred’s career in the media and he went on to make many documentary programmes that were shown on the BBC including Fred Dibnah’s Industrial Age (1999), Fred Dibnah’s Magnificent Monuments (2000), Fred Dibnah’s Buildings of Britain (2002) and Fred Dibnah’s The Age of Steam (2003).
People were fascinated, not only by his work but by his blunt northern charm, his unpolished Bolton accent and his ability to talk endlessly on the subjects that enthralled him. And many people who met him said that with Fred what you saw was the real thing; he was just the same, whether on television or in person.
The fame had its repercussions on his personal life though and he was divorced from two of his wives before marrying for the last time in 1998. Sheila, his third wife was twenty years his junior and a former Blackpool showgirl; perhaps a surprising choice for a man who always seemed to be coated in grease and either up a chimney or deep in an engine. But as his television fame proved, Fred was never short of charm.
But Fred’s real passion was steam engines. He’d long had an ambition to restore a steam engine and, when a friend found one in a Welsh barn, Fred paid £170 for it and towed it home. The engine was originally owned by Flintshire County Council in North Wales and had been in use until the 1960s when it was sold for scrap. He named the engine Betsy after his mother and it took him twenty-five years to restore it using traditional methods to make the spare parts for rebuilding.
Fred was diagnosed with cancer in 2001. He was later given chemotherapy but after his first course of treatment made him fee! so ill he couldn’t work, he stopped it. He was determined to finish the twelve-part series Made In Britain that he was filming for the BBC. which featured him travelling around the country on his restored steam engine Betsy. Shown in the spring of 2005, after his death, the programmes showed Fred investigating Britain’s industrial heritage and his smiles and jokes belied his serious illness.
The programmes were a great tribute to his determination to highlight the importance of the country’s industrial heritage and his determination not to let his illness stop him doing what he was so passionate about.
The programmes also featured him receiving his MBE, for services to heritage and broadcasting, at Buckingham Palace. He had taken Betsy along too, as well as his wife Sheila and his sons Jack and Roger. He had threatened to buy a new cap for the ceremony, but accepted the award in a morning suit.
Extract taken from “Champion Lancastrians”
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