Quotes
Some words of wisdom from Fred. If you have any more classic ‘Dibnahnisms’ please post them below and they will be added.
‘I often feel a failure, 1 feel sometimes as though everything is going wrong for me, when things don’t go quite right. Like this old chimney, in all my career we’ve only had three of them. Why haven’t I been asked to deal with more? I suppose in a way it’s like being in a race and coming second— “The Seven Keys of Charisma” by Joanna Kozubska Page 50
A man who says he feels no fear is either a fool or a liar.
After the usual chimney drop, I get all sorts of folk approach me, each carrying a red-hot brick for me to sign my autograph on
Anybody who destroys anything made of stone should be prosecuted. It is not all beautiful, but it took a man all day to make one stone.
Aye, well – nobody’s been killed, but it’s bloody knackered up their fancy day tomorrow, like. Fell down a day early! (after a chimney that he was preparing for demolition fell down spontaneously a day too soon)
By ‘eck it were grand.
Did yer like that!?
Engines aren’t the same any more. You only get the oiled, greasy feeling with old engines.
Fred also previously received two honorary doctorates ….. They were both given by the relevant engineering faculties, but Fred always told people that they were for “back street mechanicing
Fred commenced his chimney demolition career by applying what he called, “the science of back’ards construction”
Height gives you a wonderful feeling of grandeur. You’re the king of the castle up here.
I have a wash more now than I used to y’know… I have a shower every night.
I prefer the past to the present. Because life today, with all its modern technology, isn’t very good, is it? And the future looks even worse.
I realise that steam engines aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But they’re what made England great.
I set out as a steeplejack in my youth to preserve chimneys. I’ve finished by knocking most of them down.
I sometimes get characters coming out of the crowd following a drop and ask me if I ever worry. I usually tell them that I always worry until the thing is safely on the deck, and it’d take a bloody brave man to tackle a large chimney with a box o’matches and not worry!
If you make one mistake, it’s half a day out with the undertaker.
Its not everyone who has a coalmine in their back garden
It’s a funny thing, this celebrity. If you don’t wave back you’re a miserable bugger, if you do wave back you’re a big-headed bugger. I don’t know.
I’m just a bum who climbs chimneys.
I’ve never fell off a big chimney. You’d only fall off one of them once, like.
Mmmm. Aye. Oh aye. Y’know?
Once the fire is lit, it’s out of your hands; it’s in the hands of ‘The Man in the Sky’
Steam engines don’t answer back. You can belt them with a hammer and they say nowt.
Steeplejacking’s a bit of a spasmodic job, so you can play with your steam engine instead. It’s a bit like being very rich.
Teaching boys to bake cakes? That’s no way to maintain an industrial empire.
That’s Bolton’s biggest chimney that… and I climbed it for a ten bob wager. Never did get the ten bob though.
The modern world stinks.
The thing is nowadays, you’ll have 20 men working, yet 60 men telling them ‘You can’t do that, you ain’t got a tin hat on’
Them fancy London types don’t know the pleasure of eating chips with fingers.
We’ve become a nation of con men, living by selling double-glazing to each other.
You’ve always got the twenty minutes of dry-throated inaction until the thing feels the action of the fire