Wind, Water and Steam Fred Dibnah's Industrial Age

Me great interest in the mechanics of the past stems from when I were like our Jack - quite a small boy -

going along the canal from Bolton to Bury,

and seeing the remains of old coal mines and cotton mill engine houses. Some were still working.

That's really why I've created all this lot here in me back yard.

It's sort of a vain attempt to hang onto childhood memories, I suppose.

This is the Bancroft Mill Engine Trust,

and up until 1978, there was a big weaving shed out the back.

This is all that remains of it -

the engine, the chimney and the boiler.

And it's situated at Barnoldswick, on the Lancashire and Yorkshire border.

They've turned it now into an industrial heritage centre where everybody can come

and see the original mill engine in steam.

There used to be loads of engines like this, where I come from.

Every coal mine and spinning mill had one. Alas, they've all gone now.

This is the Bolton to Bury canal,

and, as a small boy, I used to come along here with me father on me bicycle.

And, to me, it were quite an exciting world, you know.

There were coal mines and cotton mills, and wonderful things like inclined railways.

Really interesting stuff, if you like industrial archaeology.

Like this crane. The first time I saw it, it were almost complete,

and now, of course, there's hardly anything left of it.

The boats used to pull up here and they had boxes in, full of coal.

And the crane used to lift one out and swing round and drop it down into the paper mill.

Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution,

and although machinery like this is now sadly decaying,

for more than 200 years, we led the world in harnessing the power of coal, water and steam,

to drive the heavy machinery that made mass production possible.

It's an era that I only saw the end of, but I wish I'd have seen more of it.

It's only within the last 40-odd years

that our great industries have disappeared.

In the '60s, the skylines of Lancashire mill towns

still bristled with chimneys.

And the view of Sheffield by night

was something like Dante's Inferno,

with the glow of the furnaces lighting the sky

and rivers of glowing white-hot molten steel flowing through the smoke.

As the mines, the mills, the factories and the steelworks

and the engineering works closed, the demolition men moved in,

and machinery that had made Britain the workshop of the world came under the wrecker's hammer.

Scrap merchants became wealthy, as they stripped brass, etc, from the engines.

Most people didn't care about what was going on,

but a few realised that if something wasn't done about it,

there'd be nothing left to show for an important part of our history.

People started to restore old engines, and steam locomotive preservation societies appeared.

30mph. Ha-ha!

Thanks to the interest and dedication of these people,

a small part of our industrial story has been preserved for future generations.

I'm off now on a tour of Britain, in search of our industrial past,

and the people who've restored a great deal of it,

to save it from the scrap man.

And so future generations can see what a wonderful race Britain was in the engineering field.

My interest is mainly in steam,

but the earliest form of power is one that's still with us.

I went to Shropshire to meet a man

who's taken on a job in his garden, bigger than anything in mine.

-It was in a sad way. No machinery left.

-No.

That had fallen down, some years ago, and been sold for scrap.

Peter Lewis has spent the last 16 years restoring this windmill, round the back of his house.

The windmill that Peter's restoring is a tower mill.

The sails are attached to the cap at the top.

-This bit makes it face into the wind?

-24 hours a day it goes round.

-Keeps it facing the wind.

-Really carpentry on a grand scale, this.

Great lumps a foot square and two foot square...

I believe you can disconnect it here and make it go round by hand.

-That's right.

-In case of disaster.

-You need a means of coping if the fan goes wrong.

-High technology(!)

-Well, it works.

-Necessity is the mother of invention.

-Put the handle on...

-And off we go.

-Roundabout job.

Free tour.

You can see the jolly miller up here in his smock.

-Thunder and lightning and a force 10 gale.

-Aye. Yeah.

Tower mills aren't the only kind of windmill.

My travels took me to East Anglia where I found the post mill.

If you wanna see a good example of a post mill

East Suffolk is the place to come.

East Suffolk post mills were said to be amongst the best in the world.

Saxtead Green has a wonderful example of one.

The fan tail on the post mill is much lower

because it's not just the top that turns to face the sails into the wind, but the whole windmill.

So you can turn the building round.

If you've no wind, the corn grinding comes to a halt.

-Hello, Jonathan.

-Hello, Fred. Nice to see you.

What operation are you performing?

-The old mill has got tail-winded.

-Yeah.

-Which it very rarely does.

-That means it wasn't facing the wind properly.

-Yeah.

-So we give it a helping hand.

-To get it into the wind.

-Yeah. How many tonnes are you turning?

-About 18 tonnes.

There's about 6 tonnes of sails and 2 tonnes of stones in the superstructure.

-D'you want to have a go?

-Yeah.

It's quite easy, innit?

Oh, yes. Yes.

We'll be all right when we get to the next parish.

You'd never get 10mph out it.

This has gotta be, really, one of the finest examples

of corn grinding windmill technology.

But, of course, for windmills you need wind.

Water was a more reliable power source.

You can see plenty of examples of working watermills around the country.

Muncaster mill is near Ravenglass.

The miller's wife, Pam, gave me a tour. It has a 13 foot overshot water wheel -

one where the water comes in over the top.

It's connected to cogs in the mill which drive the milling machinery.

-It's amazing how nice and quiet it is.

-Because of the wooden cogs.

This is the pit wheel that's attached to the water wheel.

-But the wooden cogs are there so that there won't be any sparks from any metal bits.

-Cause fires.

The cogs that drive the millstones are connected to the floor above

where we're actually grinding corn at the moment.

The grain goes in a hopper and that falls into the wooden piece underneath that moves about - a shoe.

-This is the boat-shaped thing underneath.

-Yeah.

The grain is slowly drizzled into the centre of the stone, the eye,

by the spindle that's splayed out of it. It's called the damsel.

-Anything that goes down is gravity. Anything that comes up, we need mechanical help.

-I know.

-This is the rope from the sack hoist.

-Does it work?

-It certainly does. Give it a pull. See the sack hoist?

..There it goes.

-Oh.

-See it coming up through the trap door?

-Yeah, yeah.

Everything you see in a watermill like this is similar to what you find in a windmill.

Up until the 18th century, all we had were these things,

water wheels and windmills.

And then...

this came along.

HORN BLASTS

< Crack a light, Fred!

Not exactly steam railways - they came a bit later.

But the Ravenglass and Eskdale railway runs right past Muncaster mill.

I wasn't gonna let this beautiful little steam train go past without having a ride on it.

..You can keep dry in this engine.

How old is this one?

-Seventy-five this year.

-Seventy-five?

ENGINE DROWNS CONVERSATION

Got all the W & J Kirkham's magical lubricators on, that is.

-Made in Bolton, them. Where are they?

-Well, they've gone now, but the works is still there.

-Well, there we are, then.

-Yes.

-I really enjoyed that.

-Good.

-Thank you very much.

A lot smoother than a steamroller, that, I can tell you!

The very first steam engines weren't very smooth, either!

They weren't polished, shiny things like this, and didn't go anywhere.

They were much more primitive at first than this.

This wonderful thing behind us

is a working example of the world's first steam engine.

And this is Ian, who is the curator of the Black Country museum,

-who is going to tell me how it works. You are, aren't you?

-Yeah.

It's the world's very first recorded steam engine,

built by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, though he didn't build this one.

-He built the original in Dudley. We built this replica 15 years ago to see whether it worked.

-Yes.

The original worked for nearly 60 years. We've had this about 15 and it works most of the time.

-This was called a "fire engine" because it doesn't actually use steam pressure.

-No.

-It uses vacuum.

So you put the steam in the cylinder,

put in the cold water - it creates a vacuum - sucks the piston down.

Get to the bottom, let the steam back in...up and down she goes, pumping water from the coal mines.

It was built for the Dudley estates, to drain water from the mine. Horses and wind power weren't good enough.

The trouble was that the first engines weren't very efficient.

After Mr Newcomen's atmospheric engine, which was basically made of wood,

it weren't until 1765 when a famous Scottish engineer, James Watt, came along,

and did a lot of important things.

He invented the parallel motion at the other end of the beam,

and then he stuck the crank on the other end of the connecting rod

and made a wheel go round. That were the prototype for all the steam engines up till 1860.

The beam engine was the workhorse of the Industrial Revolution.

In its most crude form, it pumped water from mines.

It developed into a reciprocating steam engine,

to power ironworks, textile mills and any sort of factory that needed power.

These days, the only steam engines you come across that actually work

are the ones that have been preserved for posterity to look at.

And here at Llyn Cwellyn near Caernarfon in North Wales,

there's a beautiful steam engine built in 1854.

I initially came here to do up the chimney stack.

And it was such a sad sight - the buildings here. The chimney covered in ivy like a Cornish tin mine.

Holes in the roof, trees growing through windows...

And the steam engine were in a really sad state.

I managed to secure the contract for doing up the steam engine.

I spent roughly 18 months, with two other lads, hard at it.

When I first come through that door, somewhere around 1988, and looked at this thing,

it were in a terrible state - rusted solid.

And it had been vandalised - all the brass bits were gone.

I took it all back home to Bolton and took a shaving off everything and brought it back to reassemble.

This shiny bit here -

we made the fly wheel go round by using an oil engine borrowed from the agricultural college.

And we took a shaving off here. And I shined the big... The crank here.

I don't really know how I did that now! It were like corrugated iron!

And, of course, THIS was the problem, like, the Cornish boiler.

Part of the contract was to jack the thing up and have a look at the bottom.

You could have put your boot through the bottom!

Lovely old thing made in 1854 by Mr D Winton at Caernarfon,

and no doubt brought up the road on horses and cart, back in 1850.

Er... No good.

And down the pub where we stayed, there were a fine body of lads who worked for the Coastguard.

And one of them said, "I know where there's a boiler,

"belonging to Mr Roberts, a pork pie manufacturer."

And to cut a long story short, he gave us the boiler - or gave it to Caernarfon Council,

and we got it up here and tested it and installed it next door.

It's a vertical, cross-tube boiler with 12 cross-tubes, so it's a good steamer.

It's a bit like being on top of a 200-foot chimney up here - the Dorothea quarry in North Wales.

When I came here, a gentleman said,

"I'll show you a wonderful place with all sorts of things waiting to be restored."

Just down there, there's a beautiful Cornish beam engine,

and a shaft 700 feet deep

that pumped the water out of this big hole behind me.

There were once 500 men working down that hole.

In this area alone, up and down the valley, within a mile or so, 2,000 and odd people worked.

Now there's nothing. Just lovely, ruined buildings.

This is the beam engine here that's been here since 1906.

Made by Holman Brothers, Cornwall - a famous engineering company.

It was made initially to pump the water out of the quarry next door, which is 600 feet deep.

It gave up, finally, in 1956, and was replaced by two electric pumps,

which did the job for a quarter of the price.

And now it's patiently waiting for restoration money

to perhaps make it go again some day.

When it's fully restored and working, a beam engine like this is a magnificent sight.

In the days of Queen Victoria, as well as providing industrial power,

these engines started to bring improvements to domestic life.

As the Industrial Revolution progressed and the population grew, the demand for clean water grew too.

Because it was so efficient at pumping water,

the beam engine became the basic working machine of the water industry.

With the building of pumping stations in the 19th century, beam engine technology reached its peak.

Tees Cottage pumping station is on the River Tees at Darlington.

My little balancing act demonstrates the smoothness of the precision engineering.

-Superglue. A bit of kidology.

-I don't think it's stuck on!

-No?

-There you go!

-The thing is, getting it back on! Here goes...

-Hurray!

-First time! How about that, then?

At Tees Cottage you can see the beginning of the demise of the beam engine

because just next door there's a gas pumping engine that worked alongside the beam engine

from 1914, before replacing it completely in 1926.

-Quite a rare engine.

-I must say I've never seen a gas engine as big as this!

-One of the bigger ones in the country.

-Yeah...

-We got this running 10-12 years ago.

-Yeah?

-Quite a risky business.

-We thought we'd put everyone's gas heating out!

-All cooking their turkeys?

-And no gas in the cookers!

In spite of new types of engines like this one being introduced, the steam engine didn't just disappear.

Smaller engines were used for the manufacture of all sorts of domestic products.

I found an interesting example on a restoration job near Penrith.

This is Wetheriggs Country Pottery in Cumbria

and this wonderful thing is a blunger!

I thought they were kidding me when they mentioned, like, "blunger"!

Believe it or not, this is the last steam-driven one in existence.

And when I came here five years ago it was ready to fall into the pit.

Its function is... Over the road there were a big clay pit, in the olden days.

The clay contained a lot of pebbles, and they put it in this pit, added water,

and the machinery stirred it up

till it were like milk chocolate and the stones fell to the bottom.

then they pumped the liquid clay off the top into a lagoon over the back here.

And when the clay settled on the bottom and the water became fairly clear,

they pumped the water up the top, back up the hill again.

When the clay had set, they dug it out in big blocks, and brought it up here to make pots out of it.

Really, it's like a big cake mixer,

all driven by a little steam engine in this engine house.

-HISSING

-This is Josephine, the engine that drives the blunger outside.

And it took me and my assistants

about six months, seven months, to restore it. We took it to bits...

carted it back to Bolton, restored it all and brought it back here,

and here it is, driving all the machinery in the pottery!

That noise next door is the boiler. They've put a bit too much coal on and it's blowing off!

As far as we know, this is the only example of a steam-driven potter's wheel in existence.

In some industries, steam power never replaced water power.

Wheal Martyn China Clay Heritage Centre is in St Austell.

Here at Wheal Martyn, this really is one of the best examples

of a water wheel moving things around on an industrial site.

-I mean, how long has it been here, Terry, doing this?

-This 18-foot wheel has been here since 1902,

and it was pumping slurry around the site right up until 1962.

It picked up slurry from the pit, and using those pumps down there,

pumped slurry to where it was required.

This is it! Technology from a long time ago.

-This is the core of the business here.

-Yeah.

-The tail-end of that waterwheel power supply.

It gives a bit of a shudder when it goes into reverse!

The thing to remember is that none of these sources of power

have ever really gone away.

Take water. We still use it to generate electricity.

Here at Ffestiniog hydroelectric power station,

this lake is 1,000 foot deep, a 14-foot diameter shaft under that building there.

When they pull the plug out, down goes the water and works a water turbine

1,000 feet down the mountain.

This thing down here is the main sort of bowel

that holds back the pressure 1,000 feet up the mountain.

A nifty piece of engineering.

I don't know what they do when they want to change a washer!

When it opens, the water comes down, through to the water turbine, and generates electricity.

All very clean and environmentally friendly.

We've come full circle - these wonderful windmills, looking like aeroplane propellers.

Somehow or other, I don't think they'll ever beat the steam turbine.

This lot here - it all works. You could drill a 2.5-inch hole for an iron bar.

You could forge a big lump of iron two inches square, or saw a piece of stone in half, a foot thick.

So I don't think I've done so bad with all the junk that would have gone to scrap yards, but for me.

This weird and wonderful machine is for making iron bands to go around factory chimneys.

All the bands at Barnoldswick were made with this machine.

In fact, really, everything here works with the power of steam.

All the work on my engines, both at Caernarfon and Wetheriggs Pottery,

has all been done here with this steam-driven machinery.

Even renovating my tractor. It's all been done by steam power.