Masters of Their Trade Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone

While we've been going about on our travels we've met a lot of craftsmen

of all sorts - wallpaperers, plasterers, lead men, everything.

You know, stonemasons.

It's really good to know that there's still craftsmen and craft ladies around who, when given the right

amount of time, are still capable of doing work that's just as good

a quality as what they did in the olden days.

Fred served his apprenticeship as a joiner and he always had

a great appreciation for the skills of the carpenters,

wood carvers and stonemasons who built Britain's great castles, cathedrals and country houses.

This love of fine craftsmanship led us to a greater appreciation of the skills of the craftsmen

of the past and of the work of craftsmen and women today who carry on the traditions.

At junior school, as a small boy, I were always top of the class in woodwork.

I don't even think they have woodwork lessons now at schools. It's a bit sad that really.

But nevertheless, when I became 15 years old I started to serve my time as a joiner.

I stuck to it till I was 21 years old which meant I was a fully time-served

joiner and I got my City and Guilds at night school and all of that.

Of course, I've always had a great interest in wooden structures of any sort, you know, like ships

and buildings and especially like the period in Tudor times when they built

really the biggest wooden structures that were ever knocked up in a way.

Here behind me this is little Moreton Hall in Cheshire,

a fine example of Tudor woodwork and heavy carpentry.

They basically set off with a plinth of stone or brick and then made these frames.

They weren't very big, they only did one story at once and stuck them up

on the edge of the stonework and then interlaced them with all sorts of bracing pieces, as you can see.

Then they infilled it all with lath and plaster and that's where,

you know, this famous half-timbered building saying comes from.

One of the things that makes little Moreton stand out is

the fact that there's all this lovely stuff in between the framing which, of course, is all made of wood.

The beautiful four leaf clovers are called quatrefoils.

They're sawn out of one solid lump of wood to that shape.

In the olden days it was designated that the more

fancy work you had on your half timbered house, the richer you were.

So the Moreton's must have been quite well to do.

The man who did the job, Richard Dale, left his mark behind here, here on this window frame.

It says Richard Dale carpenter made this window by the grace of God.

It's like an early bit of advertising for window frame making.

Considering the amount of acreage of land that the Moreton's owned, they mustn't have been short of a

few oak trees when they started building this place, you know.

How many sort of workmen Mr Dale had is another matter.

I don't really know but I know summat,

when they were boring all these hundreds of holes for the pegs that

hold the whole thing together, when they hit a knot, there'd have been a lot of head scratching and swearing.

It wouldn't have been very pleasant at all having done a bit of hole boring in fairly hard wood,

but I should imagine that the timber would arrive here still in the round and would be split with iron wedges

and then cleaned up with an ads and then the mortises and the tenons worked on the ends of each piece.

I suppose that when the framing were

more or less completed the men would move in to fill in all the voids with the wattle and daub.

Make it sort of weatherproof in a way.

I think it's sometimes very easy to think that handcraft skills are no longer necessary in the 21st century

but Fred shows us that these are still living crafts.

When he takes us, say to the Globe Theatre, and shows us the timber frame construction and talks to the

men and women who were involved in building this place from scratch, he shows us that there are ways of

building, ways of ornamenting our lives that perhaps we should reconsider and use more often.

It is a timber frame structure and we know that certainly the Globe

and the other theatres were timber frame structures.

It's the way the timer framing was done.

I mean, this is something that we've really, perhaps in the last 15 or 20 years, really come to understand

through reconstructing them at open air museums.

There what one does is carefully dismantles an old building.

You then do archaeological analysis of the joints, the tool marks and the techniques.

That gives you a chance to look inside

the joints and see exactly how they drilled out the joints.

Fred's passion for everything old because it was craftsman made.

It was handmade, it wasn't made by a machine.

It was actually a man's hands which made the items

and so everything which was handmade Fred had an interest for because it had been actually made.

Fred always enjoyed meeting craftsmen like Peter McCurd

who built the timber frame for the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe.

For his next series he went to visit his workshop in Berkshire where they

were making a new crook beam roof for a barn near Glastonbury.

So you see these are the main collars and these are the upper, upper crook, second tier of crooks.

Then we've got in between them these intermediate principles which have also got a little collar.

These are the arcade plates which, of course, run the whole length of the building.

Now we're just marking in these pearlings, ones that run along

this way and we're also marking in all these small curbed wind braces.

And how long will it be before it's finished?

We're gonna start putting this up on site in about ten days time.

We're gonna work through till probably the beginning of February with the frame.

Then the tiles will go on.

Before the snow comes.

Well, we hope it will wait until March for that.

The real problem today is that we have a government and all they want to do is put people into university.

They don't realise that to be a good skilled worker you need a high level of intelligence, so we should

be going back to the time when we only had 15/20% of our intelligent people going into universities.

The rest of them should be going into practical work, going through technical colleges, going through

craft apprenticeships and realising that the skilled worker,

you really have to be highly intelligent to do a skilled job.

Of course, you find all sorts of different

sizes of pegs depending on the size of timber and the size of joints

Here's a little one from the top of a pair of rafters

and then here we've got a much, much bigger one.

This is the sort of size of pegs we're gonna be using on the barn here from Pilton

and even bigger in fact than that.

-Bigger diameter.

-Certainly bigger diameter, yeah, yeah.

So we can have a look and see how the pegs are made, if you like?

Might even get you to make one.

Oh, I'll have a go.

Well, you know, we start off by spitting them out of the log.

To spit out the individual squares we use a tool like this which is called a frow.

I've never seen one of them before.

-Well, it's not really an edge tool, it doesn't cut the timber.

-No, no.

It's just splitting effect, yeah.

That's right. Once we've split out a square, or a rough square, which we know is, at one end at

-least, it's the correct size.

-Size for the finished article.

That's right. Then we use this little shaving horse.

-It's called an adrornay.

-You have to wittle it down to size.

That's right, yeah. Would you like to have a go?

Yeah, now that I know you want 'em octagonal shape and not round, I'll be all right.

Right.

It's a bit bent, innit for starters?

Ummm ahh,

umm ha ha.

Cut!

Some aspects of Fred, and the fact he was sort of a craftsman

in many ways. I'd call a craftsman someone who just naturally has a feel for the things he works with.

Getting nearer.

In that respect he was

a little out of his time but also at the forefront.

I think we're now changing and

more and more people are giving up their sort of office jobs and wanting to go back to

the craft techniques that Fred used because you just get so much more out of them.

They're so much more satisfying

in terms of what the end result is.

There's nothing better than seeing something finished

rather than a piece of paper that you pass on to someone else.

-I'm getting a bit old for this. Now then, John.

-How are you doing?

There's no roofs like this where I come from, they're all made of slate.

What really stops the rain coming in, you know, cos I've been inside and there's no under felt is there?

No, no. It's really just the angle.

The way the straw is laying on the roof.

Yeah, yeah. When you're up here amongst it you can see why.

-Yeah.

-It'll hit every individual straw before it gets anywhere near through it, won't it?

We've got a thickness of about two foot.

We've got an undercoat, then we've got a top coat, so even if it goes

through this top coat, it'll still come out in the undercoat.

What stops it all slurring off?

It's all sparred on to the base coat with hazel spars.

They're pushed in through into the base coat.

And really it's the angle of the roof, the angle of the straws.

Water just drips off each one.

What keeps the other on, like the base coat, you know?

The base coat is tied to the rafters, then we spar on top of that.

Right up at the ridge there's that lovely crisscross design,

is that designed to keep it together at the top?

Well, at the very top we just bend the straw over the top to keep it waterproof.

That's the simplest sort of ridge that it would have had hundreds of years ago that were doing on there.

-It's not ornamental.

-You see some with a double thickness.

-Yeah, yeah. That's very ornamental but that wouldn't have been like that 150 years ago.

-No, no, no.

We're trying to keep it plain and simple.

-Yeah, yeah.

-As it would've been.

They did this in Roman times, weren't they?

That's right and before that.

Almost the same.

Going back to the Iron Age really.

-Yeah, yeah.

-The old thatching around it is like that.

I've noticed at the far end it's gone all darker colour, hasn't it?

Yeah, well we've been here three months.

So obviously the fresh stuff we put on has now quite dark.

-Yeah, it's like dye.

-It will darken down.

In six months this will be quite a dark colour with the sun and the rain.

-And all the bits that are blowing about, do they sort of break off and blow away?

-They will do in time.

That's how the actual roof wears.

I mean, we'll lose about a quarter of an inch of that

every year and that's what gives the roof its life really.

Or that's what takes away cos that gives it its lifespan.

Yeah, so

how thin has it got to have got down to before...?

Well, it's got about six inches to come off before it gets down to the fixings.

That's really the life the roof.

-And then you've got to do it again?

-Yes.

Long straw like this will probably last 15 years.

It's the shortest lasting material.

-It seems to me as though you could take this top layer off and still use the stuff underneath.

-You could.

The next time this is thatched we'll just take this top layer off and then we'll thatch

over, well take the bottom part out and thatch over the top again.

Probably take about five or six inches of this old stuff off then.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Well, it'll be old then.

He just enjoyed craftsmanship of any standard, of any type.

As long as it was really good he could appreciate the work that had gone into it.

Are you going to let me have a go?

-Yeah, help yourself.

-I'm gonna have a do at this.

Wait a minute, I'll do it proper, how's that?

Now then, we're here.

What's the first move?

Just take a double handful off there.

A double handful.

-Yeah. That's plenty, yeah.

-About that much?

Yep.

I mean, I'm only an apprentice so I don't

want too much.

Right, what do I do next?

-Lay it on there.

-Yeah.

That's it.

-Spread it out.

-Spread it out, what like that?

That's it. Then take a little bond of straw.

-Yeah.

-And if you take some of those spars on your left there, keep one of those like a staple. That's it.

-Pump it in again?

-Yep.

-How's that?

-That's all right.

Looking good, innit?

That'll keep the water out for another hundred years.

Where does it come from this stuff?

-Well, this has all come from Poland, actually.

-Yeah, yeah, I wonder why?

Well, the reason is we don't have the old

varieties of straw in England and to the length that this has grown.

This is a rye straw which grows very long.

Yeah, yeah. How many thatchers are there left now in England?

Too many, too many, about...

When somebody says to me about steeplejacking...

How many steeplejacks, you must be the only one?

And there's bloody hundreds of them!

There's about 1,500 all together, so there's quite a lot really.

-Oh, aye, there's a fair bit of stiff competition there?

-Yeah.

Yeah, I noticed them wetting it down there

before they winded it all up into bundles.

Yeah, the idea of that is so it packs together tighter

and doesn't slip about so much and when it's dry it's very slippery.

-It's very waxy as you can see.

-Yeah.

-You have to keep it damp to keep it nice and tight.

-Bit like your haircut job.

That's it, yeah, the old Brylcreem, yeah.

Yeah, but there can't be many thatched roofs as big as this.

It's almost like a cathedral, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean it's an old tithe barn.

There's not that many tithe barns about, not as big as this certainly.

No, I've never seen a thatched roof this big.

One of the places I most remember going to on location, and realising just how much skill Fred had

and he could turn his hand to anything,

was when we went to the Welsh slate mining museum in North Wales.

The boys there, the gang of men that were working there and had done for

many years, would make it look so easy the way they cleaved the slate.

I thought to myself, well Fred's not going to be able to do this although

as ever he's enthusiastic about doing what he's going to do next.

And he sat there and he took the piece of iron and chop, chop, chop.

I think everybody there, it's fair to say, were amazed that he'd managed to do that because according

to one of the men, I think the apprenticeship was something like five years or something

like that before you're allowed to do that and Fred had just done it.

It was like watching a little bit of magic.

In fact one of the programmes where he has a joyous look on his face

because he's actually, wow, I can do this. It's fabulous, very good.

We'll get you another lot by dinnertime.

You'd be lucky if we'd done six.

I think Fred will have opened the eyes of

lots of people to the...

joy of craftsmanship and to the small scale perfection that people put into things.

The fact that they're not just making things work,

they're making things work well and they're making things look good as they do their jobs.

And looking good was certainly one of the main criteria in the design of the house of Dun near Montrose.

The great glory of the interior of the house of Dunn is this magnificent saloon with its wonderful plastering

which was done by a man called Joseph Ensor.

Believe it or not, for all this magnificent ornamentation he only got 216 quid, you know.

It sounds unbelievable, doesn't it?

That weren't just for plastering this one single room, it were for doing the whole house.

When we go into a place like the house of Dun it's not always easy to understand how it

was constructed, how it was made but he takes it apart bit by bit.

He looks at details like the ornamental plaster work, he shows

us how craftsmen and craftswomen contributed each in their own way to creating a masterpiece.

Most people coming into a room like this would have little idea as to how they went about doing it.

Going back to my days at art school, they had an ornamental plastering class where everything nearly were

made on the benches and then screwed and wired in secret ways to the walls and then touched up afterwards.

I mean, in here there's quite a lot of interesting stuff, you know.

Up there there's a basket and rumour has it that they actually

used a real basket and dipped it in liquid plaster and then, of course, carefully fitted it to the wall.

There's a violin that's reputed to be real underneath the layer of plaster and then up there there's sea shells

that, you know, they're too perfect to have been homemade, as you might say.

But the whole lot has been made on benches and then stuck to the wall.

The main thing we've got to do is preparation before we mix the plaster.

If not everything's ready, the plaster will set on us.

-Oh, yeah.

-This will be some hessium.

We're going to reinforce the panels of this ceiling.

-If we pre-cut it, it will save some time.

-Yeah.

I have some wooden laths which we'll prepare as well.

-Yeah, yeah, like reinforcing bars.

-That's it.

If we need to screw it to the ceiling, it acts as a washer.

-If you'd like to just prepare yours the same.

-Yeah.

This will just snap quite easy.

-Can I do that?

-Yeah, carry on.

It's very rarely today that we can make anything better than we could in the past.

We can make it faster, we can make it cheaper but it's rare that we can actually make anything better

than we could have done you know 150/200 years ago.

The lumps are disappearing now, aren't they?

Just pour a small amount that we're gonna brush in.

Yeah.

-Lovely, that's it.

-All right.

Put the plaster down.

Right, if we just brush this all over.

Yeah.

That's it.

-That looks wonderful and using our turts head brushes...

-Yeah.

One for you.

-We'll actually splash.

-Yeah.

Just get a nice liberal amount of plaster and then we actually splash

into the mould to get a good thickness and it also...

-This is a bit messy this, isn't it?

-Oh, it's a lovely messy job.

Right.

Right, with the scrim,

just lay this over the top. Lovely.

That's it. Pile that on the back, make sure the laths and it's all rubbed down below the surface.

-Yeah.

-So that will...

when we come to strike off.

-Yeah.

-That's looking, should be OK.

Then just strike off over the top.

I can see you've used plaster before.

Well, concrete.

20 years ago apprenticeships started to die.

The gold standard is to get A-levels and go to university.

We no longer value journeyman tradesman who used

to spend five years learning their trade to make things.

We've seen somewhat of a resurgence of that over the last five years or so

through the Government's modern apprenticeship programme.

I think Fred was very keen to support those sort of things for

people who would rather work with their hands

than necessarily follow higher education.

I saw you notice one of the rather nice ceiling roses on the way in so I thought we'd err...

Yeah. Is that part of it?

I thought we'd make some leaves. This is the rose. I thought we'd make some leaves to go on it.

So again, with this you just pour a generous amount in.

That should be fine.

Listen, just push it down on the top.

Starting from the back,

pushing down.

Any of the excess plaster can just spill out,

collect the holes on the top.

Just give it a good generous push.

That's wonderful. There we go.

We'll come back in ten minutes, see what they look like.

The craft skills are always under threat.

We have a real shortage of them at the moment.

We need more crafts people who can get out there and help restore the buildings,

otherwise the costs of restoration shoots through the roof.

Fred was very useful in showing these people were out there, that they were working hard to preserve our heritage

and how central they are towards keeping it as a living heritage.

-See how our leaves are doing.

-Yeah.

Oh.

-That's it.

-Yeah.

This is the frightening bit. Bend it away.

That should help release the,

help release the leaf.

Just pull these out.

-There we go.

-Oh, that's better.

-This is

just the flash.

Yeah, it's beautiful that, innit?

-A small fettle.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Stick it to our base and we have

one of the leaves of our rose.

Yeah, very nice.

Sometimes it's hard to know exactly how a thing is made. It can appear

to us so simple because it works so beautifully but what Fred does is he really takes it apart for us and

shows us how much skill goes in to each element say of plasterwork or a stone carving.

When he goes to York Minster and he talks to the stonemasons there, these are things that it's really

very difficult to see from the ground but they are incredibly complex and very beautiful objects.

And it's the stonemasons who have worked hard over many years to have the best bits of the past and also

be re-working it so that it's there for the future.

Well, Fred, now we're in the carver's shop.

Very nice indeed in here.

And we've got Martin here, carving one of the arc stones for the South West doorway.

The stone's been masoned at the masonry shop, as you saw, the geometric work.

And now you can see areas of the stone which have been left for the foliage.

Yeah, that's quite beautiful that leaf with all that hollowed out at back, innit?

Yes, it's delicate work.

Shall we go round the corner and have a word with Martin?

Now then, good afternoon, Martin.

-Hello, Fred.

-Howdy.

Yeah, I can see now the three stages of making them beautiful leaves that are on this side.

Must take a long time. How long does it take you to do like three leaves?

Well, it's probably about another week's work left, probably a couple of weeks in all.

Yeah, when people walk by York Minster they don't appreciate all that great effort.

How do you go about making these holes down the back?

heck of a tricky operation with such delicacy, isn't it really?

I suppose once the leaf is established...

-Yeah, like down here but a bit nearer than what that one is like?

-Yeah, you see the form.

You can actually begin to drill through behind and pierce through with smaller chisels.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, when you've finished one of them, just getting it

up there, you know, like the thought of damaging it must be terrific.

I'd be scared stiff of taking it out.

You only need a little knock, don't you, and a big lump off corner and...

-Once it goes out of here we forget it ever existed.

-You start on next block. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I always wished I could do something of that nature myself.

You can have a go, there you go.

Yes. I don't think so really.

I'm better on big lumps. They let me have a go on a big lump next door.

I'm OK on big lumps.

Well, I think the fact there has been this rise in interest in

conservation means that there are people around.

I think, the craftsmen had a very narrow brush with extinction, if you like, because there was

a time when no-one could see any point in doing anything by hand.

But just in time, as people did get more interested in conserving buildings, there was enough interest

and still enough people left who could teach, because that's the other

thing about craftsmanship, it is traditional and it's very difficult to pass it on once it's died out.

But there are now schools of stonemasons, letter cutters, hand printers.

Not very many but enough to keep it going.

How long have you actually been doing it?

I've been doing it about 15 years now.

I've been actually at the Minster ten years.

When you first started did you drop any clangers?

Umm very, very difficult at first. Very very hard.

Did you ever get disillusioned with your efforts, you know?

I still do.

Yeah. I don't know, to me that looks as good as owt Michelangelo ever did.

On them leaves when they're finished, you know,

it's like, I'm getting a better idea now.

We're looking at how you form that and then this one's partially done.

Then the pencil marks on just that radius where, you know, the obvious next thing is to...

You've already done the groove there, haven't you?

..is to make that nice raised bit.

To get the right depth in.

What grabs me is how do you get all these bits all exactly the same which you have done very well?

Well, from the cast we actually take a slab of clay actually onto the building and take an impression of

the old stonework, bring it down here and make a plastercast.

Then with callipers you can transfer the measurements onto the stone.

Yeah, cross the width from sort of one extremity to the other of that,

you do with a pair of callipers, then you know exactly where you're going.

Yeah. The space is all important as well.

This is the top, of course, isn't it?

And that's the bottom and that's the curve of the arch that it fits in.

-That will go on the left hand side of the arch.

-Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, when people wander about out there they don't realise that just one stone took so long. No wonder

it took them 250 years.

-It's very labour intensive.

-Yeah.

Yeah, men must have started and died without doing owt else.

Yeah, I don't want to depress you like but keep going anyway.

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