As someone who grew up in a family of Steeplejacks (my father was third generation), I am always amazed and delighted by the amount of attention Dibnah got in his day in the UK and continues to get today via the internet. Here in the states, people would always just look at me like I had two heads when I told them what the family business was.
This is interesting and not at all how we would rig a smokestack (as we call them). I worked for the company in the early 90s but we were using rigging that was built by the company in the 60s or earlier. In relation to how we did it his solution seems to me to be overly complicated and perhaps a bit more dicey than what we were doing.
I can write something up if anyone is interested in how we did it.
I've spent more time on scaffolding and a roof ladder this summer than I hoped I'd ever do in my life, and i don't think you'd get me on any of Fred Dibnah's ladders at gunpoint. I still find it fascinating to see how it's done by people who've made it their trade.
if i may ask a question that betrays my lack of knowledge: why is it that permanent or semi-permanent ladders were not be affixed to some of the steeples? is it mostly aesthetics, or is it also a wear / durability concern?
i also suppose the ladder only gives you access to one portion of the chimney, and you may need to access enough different sections that the most effective method is to set up a ladder exactly where you need it while work is done?
You mentioned steeples first. That may have been a mistake, but I will answer anyway. You climb a steeple from the inside and exit from a door at the base of, or on, the spire. From there we would typically build a platform on which to erect our ladder to go as far up the spire as needed.
All the stacks I worked on, save one I can remember, had beacon lights that needed regular maintenance and all had ladders built in. The ladders did not go all the way to the ground/roof level. That was to keep unauthorized folks from climbing it.
I remember two stacks had permanent catwalks around the top. One of them was quite corroded and not a comfortable place to walk. Like a sibling comment mentioned, that difficulty in maintaining them is a reason why many stacks don't have ladders. Some stacks that don't have them once did, but they were removed due to corrosion.
As far as access, all of the stacks I worked on had only one ladder. If the job was small and there was work that needed to be completed on the other side we had two options.
1. If the repair was low enough we could attach the ropes from which we hung our bosun's chair at the top and swing around to the other side.
2. If the repair was too high to do that or too involved we would build a scaffold all the way around the stack.
I would guess there was no stainless or galvanisation available in the era they were built.
I wouldn’t trust permanently installed ladders that were completely exposed to the elements! Unlike the bigger iron structures, ladders have quite a high surface area/ volume ratio.
I wouldn’t climb up Fred’s ladders in a million years, but at least there was a quality feedback loop!
My understanding is that the stacks were built with a tower of scaffolding on the inside. So it may have been too inconvenient for them to add a ladder on the outside, while the heat on the inside meant it wouldn't have lasted?
There's anothing video of him setting up the ladder on a stack: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Keq-Lig-z74 while definitely sketchy it doesn't seem nearly as bad as the process to make the platforms, which he has to repeat over and over while knocking it down. So in that respect I'm not sure it would've saved him much time overall.
At 16:20 in that video, it shows the camera crew in a cherry picker filming at the same height as him. Ive always thought that Freds chimney days were pre technology like this. but why would he not just put the scaffold platform up in a cherry picker to start with instead of spending days fixing a gazillion ladders to the side of a chimney?
The very end of the video shows the Cherry picker and the size of it. I'd guess it wasn't normally used because of cost and possible limitations on weight carried.
Fred was creating the platform with 3-4 guys and basic tools. Probably a lot cheaper than hiring a specialised Cherry Picker for a day or two.
Imagine a 5/8"(16mm) cable running through 6"x6" (14cmx14cm) pressure treated blocks about 4 feet (1.2 meters) apart. The cable gets wrapped around the stack and connected to itself through a turnbuckle which is tightened to provide tension.
Now think of a steel right triangle with the legs being the vertical and horizontal aspect with the hypotenuse supporting the horizontal leg. The horizontal leg has a vertical tube welded where it meets the hypotenuse. The vertical leg as a hook curving down from the top away from the horizontal leg and a wooden pad at the bottom. We called these stackjacks but a Google search tells me that may have just been what we called them and not their actual name.
The hook hangs on the cable discussed above and the pad rests against the smokestack. 2 2"x12" (4cm x 29cm) walkboards are laid between these stackjacks. The vertical tube at the end accepts poles to which a railing is attached.
I don't know why Fred keeps getting posted to HN, but I love it. and I'm glad more people get to see his work.
Something that might not be immediately obvious from this clip is that all the sound effects you're hearing of the planks bouncing and scraping off the bricks, the iron dogs being hammered into the brickwork or wind blowing etc, is all recreated and recorded after the fact in some BBC sound studio. There's no sound guy up there with a boom mic or even a lapel mic recording, yet all the sound effects are perfectly audible. Even the ones around the other side of the chimney. If they didn't dub them in afterwards the video recording from the ground level would be quite boring!
Though there are a couple of other recordings of Fred with a one-man camera crew up at the top once he's got the platform fully setup.
Besides, I suspect if he was mic'd up there'd be quite a bit more swearing than you'd be able to get away with on the BBC!
He was a tinkerer, I guess it still counts as hacking when it's traction engines. I vaguely remember him getting in legal trouble for digging a coal mine in his garden.
I grew up a short walk from where he lived, in Bolton, and you'd often see him setting up all the gear, solo, at the base of one of the local chimneys. We'd pull over on our bikes and shout "Is it coming down Fred?". He never failed to stroll over and have a chat about what he was doing. A genuinely nice chap.
I used to live just down the road from Fred Dibnah's house when I was in my early 20's. It was quite an interesting old building with a fairly steeply sloping garden that led down to an old workshop packed with steam engines and similar mechanical bric a brac. Despite the layout you could easily see down to the bottom of the garden from the pavement as you passed by.
I had a sort of standing joke where I would wind my girlfriend up by pointing out that it was Fred Dibnah's place every time we walked past. I did this perhaps a little too often.
One day, she had had enough and told me in a very loud voice that 'she couldn't give a shit if it was Fred Dibnah's house'. That's when I saw his startled face peering up from behind a traction engine. Sorry Fred. I hope you can forgive me from that big old chimney in the sky.
Fred Dibnah videos are my goto for showing people heavy local English accents; it's rare you hear one that heavy any more, but they can be local down to only a few miles.
Huh ok, I'm curious where; I don't live that far from Bolton, and can't remember hearing anything that thick in many years.
(Last time was actually near Liverpool).
He once survived a near-fatal fall. In 1997, Dibnah was almost killed when a 2,500-ton concrete chimney on Canvey Island collapsed prematurely. He tripped while running from the falling structure, but luckily, the chimney corrected itself and fell in the opposite direction
Oddly, the Dibnah near-death experience I most remember giving me the willies was when he dropped his cap in a puddle just after scratching his bonce. Having wrung his cap out he put it straight back on. The water had a dead pigeon in it though and so he ended up catching a virus which started spreading through his head via the cap and the cut. It got quite serious out of nowhere.
I used to show a clip to new helpers/labourers of Fred taking down a chimney one brick at a time because it beautifully showed what a person can do if they just get at it and keep at it.
Impressive as Dibnah absolutely is, give a thought to cameraman who climbed that chimney with a 1980s film camera to record the footage from the top. :)
I think H&S would have thrown fits about the lack of safety equipment if he still did any of that nowadays. The good old days, not so much. Men often died doing this sort of work and still do to a lesser degree.
BCM Steeplejacks has great write ups and pictures of the jobs they do. Lots of modern equipment, but at the end of the day it’s still very high up and they rely on the strength of their own hands.
As someone who grew up in a family of Steeplejacks (my father was third generation), I am always amazed and delighted by the amount of attention Dibnah got in his day in the UK and continues to get today via the internet. Here in the states, people would always just look at me like I had two heads when I told them what the family business was.
This is interesting and not at all how we would rig a smokestack (as we call them). I worked for the company in the early 90s but we were using rigging that was built by the company in the 60s or earlier. In relation to how we did it his solution seems to me to be overly complicated and perhaps a bit more dicey than what we were doing.
I can write something up if anyone is interested in how we did it.
Count me interested!
I've spent more time on scaffolding and a roof ladder this summer than I hoped I'd ever do in my life, and i don't think you'd get me on any of Fred Dibnah's ladders at gunpoint. I still find it fascinating to see how it's done by people who've made it their trade.
if i may ask a question that betrays my lack of knowledge: why is it that permanent or semi-permanent ladders were not be affixed to some of the steeples? is it mostly aesthetics, or is it also a wear / durability concern?
i also suppose the ladder only gives you access to one portion of the chimney, and you may need to access enough different sections that the most effective method is to set up a ladder exactly where you need it while work is done?
You mentioned steeples first. That may have been a mistake, but I will answer anyway. You climb a steeple from the inside and exit from a door at the base of, or on, the spire. From there we would typically build a platform on which to erect our ladder to go as far up the spire as needed.
All the stacks I worked on, save one I can remember, had beacon lights that needed regular maintenance and all had ladders built in. The ladders did not go all the way to the ground/roof level. That was to keep unauthorized folks from climbing it.
I remember two stacks had permanent catwalks around the top. One of them was quite corroded and not a comfortable place to walk. Like a sibling comment mentioned, that difficulty in maintaining them is a reason why many stacks don't have ladders. Some stacks that don't have them once did, but they were removed due to corrosion.
As far as access, all of the stacks I worked on had only one ladder. If the job was small and there was work that needed to be completed on the other side we had two options.
1. If the repair was low enough we could attach the ropes from which we hung our bosun's chair at the top and swing around to the other side.
2. If the repair was too high to do that or too involved we would build a scaffold all the way around the stack.
I would guess there was no stainless or galvanisation available in the era they were built.
I wouldn’t trust permanently installed ladders that were completely exposed to the elements! Unlike the bigger iron structures, ladders have quite a high surface area/ volume ratio.
I wouldn’t climb up Fred’s ladders in a million years, but at least there was a quality feedback loop!
My understanding is that the stacks were built with a tower of scaffolding on the inside. So it may have been too inconvenient for them to add a ladder on the outside, while the heat on the inside meant it wouldn't have lasted?
There's anothing video of him setting up the ladder on a stack: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Keq-Lig-z74 while definitely sketchy it doesn't seem nearly as bad as the process to make the platforms, which he has to repeat over and over while knocking it down. So in that respect I'm not sure it would've saved him much time overall.
> There's anothing video of him setting up the ladder on a stack: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Keq-Lig-z74
At 16:20 in that video, it shows the camera crew in a cherry picker filming at the same height as him. Ive always thought that Freds chimney days were pre technology like this. but why would he not just put the scaffold platform up in a cherry picker to start with instead of spending days fixing a gazillion ladders to the side of a chimney?
The very end of the video shows the Cherry picker and the size of it. I'd guess it wasn't normally used because of cost and possible limitations on weight carried.
Fred was creating the platform with 3-4 guys and basic tools. Probably a lot cheaper than hiring a specialised Cherry Picker for a day or two.
Imagine a 5/8"(16mm) cable running through 6"x6" (14cmx14cm) pressure treated blocks about 4 feet (1.2 meters) apart. The cable gets wrapped around the stack and connected to itself through a turnbuckle which is tightened to provide tension.
Now think of a steel right triangle with the legs being the vertical and horizontal aspect with the hypotenuse supporting the horizontal leg. The horizontal leg has a vertical tube welded where it meets the hypotenuse. The vertical leg as a hook curving down from the top away from the horizontal leg and a wooden pad at the bottom. We called these stackjacks but a Google search tells me that may have just been what we called them and not their actual name.
The hook hangs on the cable discussed above and the pad rests against the smokestack. 2 2"x12" (4cm x 29cm) walkboards are laid between these stackjacks. The vertical tube at the end accepts poles to which a railing is attached.
TLDR look at these photos of a company that does it exactly how we did. https://apexchimney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/exteriori... https://apexchimney.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/IMGP40400...
Yes, please. I’d really like to read that.
I don't know why Fred keeps getting posted to HN, but I love it. and I'm glad more people get to see his work.
Something that might not be immediately obvious from this clip is that all the sound effects you're hearing of the planks bouncing and scraping off the bricks, the iron dogs being hammered into the brickwork or wind blowing etc, is all recreated and recorded after the fact in some BBC sound studio. There's no sound guy up there with a boom mic or even a lapel mic recording, yet all the sound effects are perfectly audible. Even the ones around the other side of the chimney. If they didn't dub them in afterwards the video recording from the ground level would be quite boring!
Though there are a couple of other recordings of Fred with a one-man camera crew up at the top once he's got the platform fully setup.
Besides, I suspect if he was mic'd up there'd be quite a bit more swearing than you'd be able to get away with on the BBC!
He was a tinkerer, I guess it still counts as hacking when it's traction engines. I vaguely remember him getting in legal trouble for digging a coal mine in his garden.
[dead]
I grew up a short walk from where he lived, in Bolton, and you'd often see him setting up all the gear, solo, at the base of one of the local chimneys. We'd pull over on our bikes and shout "Is it coming down Fred?". He never failed to stroll over and have a chat about what he was doing. A genuinely nice chap.
I lived real close to Fred's house for a while. Loved it. Bolton was way cool back then.
I used to live just down the road from Fred Dibnah's house when I was in my early 20's. It was quite an interesting old building with a fairly steeply sloping garden that led down to an old workshop packed with steam engines and similar mechanical bric a brac. Despite the layout you could easily see down to the bottom of the garden from the pavement as you passed by.
I had a sort of standing joke where I would wind my girlfriend up by pointing out that it was Fred Dibnah's place every time we walked past. I did this perhaps a little too often.
One day, she had had enough and told me in a very loud voice that 'she couldn't give a shit if it was Fred Dibnah's house'. That's when I saw his startled face peering up from behind a traction engine. Sorry Fred. I hope you can forgive me from that big old chimney in the sky.
Fred Dibnah videos are my goto for showing people heavy local English accents; it's rare you hear one that heavy any more, but they can be local down to only a few miles.
> it's rare you hear one that heavy any more
With respect, this is nonsense.
Huh ok, I'm curious where; I don't live that far from Bolton, and can't remember hearing anything that thick in many years. (Last time was actually near Liverpool).
He once survived a near-fatal fall. In 1997, Dibnah was almost killed when a 2,500-ton concrete chimney on Canvey Island collapsed prematurely. He tripped while running from the falling structure, but luckily, the chimney corrected itself and fell in the opposite direction
His wikipedia page is worth reading for that, and other details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Dibnah
Definitely one of a kind.
Oddly, the Dibnah near-death experience I most remember giving me the willies was when he dropped his cap in a puddle just after scratching his bonce. Having wrung his cap out he put it straight back on. The water had a dead pigeon in it though and so he ended up catching a virus which started spreading through his head via the cap and the cut. It got quite serious out of nowhere.
How do you not notice a dead pigeon in your cap?
Here’s the tale, told by the man himself:
https://www.tiktok.com/@uandyesterday/video/7349637646760561...
Chimneys feared him
This one makes my palms sweaty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3-YwDZrzg
And it's just a ladder really.
> The U.S had the space programme, the U.K had Fred Dibnah and an infinite supply of ladders.
Had some funny comments that video.
I like how he describes the mood or feeling of the chimneys he’s climbed. Villainous or friendly.
I used to show a clip to new helpers/labourers of Fred taking down a chimney one brick at a time because it beautifully showed what a person can do if they just get at it and keep at it.
Impressive as Dibnah absolutely is, give a thought to cameraman who climbed that chimney with a 1980s film camera to record the footage from the top. :)
A man out of his time somehow. I enjoyed his shows as a boy.
I think H&S would have thrown fits about the lack of safety equipment if he still did any of that nowadays. The good old days, not so much. Men often died doing this sort of work and still do to a lesser degree.
If you want to understand the UK, Dibnah is where to start. I named my cat after him.
Worth watching to the end if you want a great sensation of vertigo.
BCM Steeplejacks has great write ups and pictures of the jobs they do. Lots of modern equipment, but at the end of the day it’s still very high up and they rely on the strength of their own hands.
https://steeplejacks.scot/lots-of-jobs-and-pictures/
Very much enjoyed that. Thanks