Fred Dibnah Quotes


“Did you like that?”

Fred Dibnah after felling a chimney which nearly landed on himself. The childlike grin after felling a chimney – priceless. Love the horn too.

Fred Dibnah was born in Bolton, Lancashire. He made a living as a steeplejack – first mending chimneys and later, being responsible for dismantling them.

“I’ve never fell off a big chimney. You’d only fall off one of them once.”

The Bolton accent is wonderful. Fred Dibnah became a bit of a media celebrity perhaps because he was just an antidote to your average celebrity. His passion for his job and steam engines is quite something. I like the fact he talks about his preference for giving a chimney once last smoke. Rather than dynamite which has the job in five seconds, Fred believes his way of dismantling chimneys is more respectful to the human labour which went into building them.

There used to be a 1,000 chimney within short reach of Fred’s hometown in Bolton. But, now it’s a vanishing landscape and now only the odd large chimneys are only kept for heritage value.

Health and safety

“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’”.

(About Hard Hats) “These tin hats get in the way a bit” “I shouldn’t think for the life of me that if the whole thing came down it’d stop you getting a shorter neck”

For those brought up in a modern culture of risk assessment, health and safety directives, Fred Dibnah’s approach to running away from a pile of falling bricks is quite a shock to the system!

“If you make a mistake it’s half a day with the undertaker.

“It’s always been my ambition to have a wooden mind shaft in the garden.”

“I realise that steam engines aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. But they’re what made England great.”

“Teaching boys to bake cakes? That’s no way to maintain an industrial empire.”

“I’m proud to be working in honest toil”

 


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