A Good Day's Work Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone

Well, of all the people that I've met,

like the lads who really do it for a living proper,

like the other day the steam hammer men in Sheffield,

no talking, you know.

I could see... Perfectly rehearsed in every move, you know.

When they were placing the...

punch in the middle of the billet of white-hot iron.

Like the hammer man, he can get it that way, so he's happy,

the hammer driver can get it the other way.

And he were, like, signalling to him just like that, you know.

Just a bit further, and then when it were right - boom.

Fred Dibnah's real heroes were the ordinary workers and labourers,

the people like him who got their hands dirty -

from the labourers and stonemasons who built medieval castles

and cathedrals to 20th century coalminers, mill workers and steel workers.

He will always be remembered for the respect he had for all those

people who earned their living from making things.

Wherever Fred went, it was always the workers that he related to.

This is really my period, you know - the beauty and splendour of it all, you know.

Like, if there'd been a maintenance man here,

it must have been very pleasurable coming to work every morning and fettling bits of furniture up.

-Now then. I believe you've got a squeaky castor somewhere.

-Ah, Dibnah,

-remove your cap, please!

-Ooh, yes.

-Thank you.

Would you have a look at this?

-I think there's something wrong with the castor.

-I'll have a go.

Excuse me, Mr Churchill, while I sort this chair leg out.

Well, he were a comedian, he were a comic.

You saw this diminutive flat-capped character,

a working man, who typified the Northern mill towns,

whether it be Lancashire or the West Riding, up to a short time ago.

Best fish and chips in the country.

'You had members of your family like him.

'You had friends like him.

'You went into the local, the local pub, sort of 25 year ago and there's always a guy like Fred

'in the corner - flat cap on, probably a dirty face.

'Fred were the epitome of

'that true grittiness of the North.'

They must be the best fish and chips in England!

Pretty blunt, down to earth, and you knew - what you saw was what you got.

Bet half of them men in London in fancy bloody suits on

and the fancy shirts and all that, they long for this really, you know.

They might make a lot of money but the bloody stress of it all must be terrible.

Fred kept reminding us of the importance of manufacturing industry

and of the hard graft of ordinary working people.

Innit funny how everybody who does forging, when they've actually used

the bloody tool, they just drop it on t'floor.

He's like that. He never puts nowt back where it should go.

Yeah, yeah, I'm like that! Where's it gone, you know?

"Where's the tongs? It's disappeared."

If you put it away, you know where it is next time.

How long have you been here, like?

-You know. Have you been here a long time?

-Well, about 28 year, me.

Yeah, yeah.

-Been in t'industry all my life. I'm 64 now.

-Yeah, yeah, I know.

When we were talking about it before, you said you've been

made redundant three times, but no problem getting another job, like.

Last time I got made redundant here in 1999.

-They closed it down altogether - no work for it.

-Right, yeah.

Our managing director bought it, sent for us back, me and Paul.

We've been here... Four years?

It's all these bloody third-rate nations, innit, who cock everything up for us.

Same with everything, innit, you know?

In my opinion for every man in England trying to earn a decent living,

there's three men who are paid by the government bloody God knows how much a week

and have a car, to say you cannot do this this way, you can't do it that way, you know.

Them buggers in foreign countries, it don't matter about.

This job used to be a good job years ago, weren't it?

It used to be a good paid job and it's crap now.

-I'm not kidding.

-Yeah, well.

-What we get...

Yeah, hanging onto your job really.

-It is. Rubbish money.

-I know what you mean.

-For what we do.

-Yeah, it's a highly skilled bloody job.

Somehow or other I've always been attracted to dangerous, dirty things, you know.

Like if a thing's heavy or dirty or dangerous.

Women! THEY ALL LAUGH

I mean it must be dead scary, well, coming to a place like that, you know.

There seems to have been a problem with people

who'd actually worked in an industry being

valued for the work that they did.

They never sort of felt

happy to talk about their work or that sort of thing.

And I think it's one of Fred's biggest plusses is that he made it

OK for the normal worker to value his place in society.

That used to be 32 hammers, you know, from five hundredweight up, like.

-There were 2,000 men worked here.

-I bet it were bedlam then,

when they were all banging away! All t'ground were shaking.

Well, there were all terraced houses then.

-No-one could sleep when t'big hammers were on nights!

-Aye. Aye.

It's weird, that, cos I were born next to a marshalling yard, you know, a shunting yard,

and all night long it were like - when I were little, you know - bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang...

Woof, woof, woof, woof...

You just got used to it, you know.

-It's like somebody living at the side of a railway, innit?

-Yeah.

A lot of people really don't realise the amount of

effort that goes into making something out of iron, you know.

I had a fella in here who owns an engineering works the other day.

Come in a fancy suit and a tie on and his own personalised registration number on his car.

The thing is, he looked at the tank outside and he said "Have you made that?" I said "Aye, I have."

And he said, "A lot of people would look at that and they would just not

"appreciate the amount of effort that's actually gone into making it." You know.

It's a very complex piece of ironwork really, if you study it.

All them lovely curves and bends, you know, like. We've lost all that now.

The modern way would be a butt joint, like they build ships, and a great

knobbly welded seam down the bloody corner, you know, sort of thing.

I can't be doing with that myself, you know.

Fred believed in going out working desperately hard,

in earning a decent amount - "Addling a certain amount of brass for it" as he would put it.

He weren't bothered about working nights, weren't bothered about working weekends.

Saturday or Sunday were the same.

He'd work a seven day week if he had to.

We've got the... Behind you is the big mill.

That's where we do the Network Rail, all the railway lines.

If he got onto a site of a mill or an iron foundry, or whatever,

he could soon get involved.

He could soon do a job.

And they'd let him have a do, and he'd do an absolute superb job of it.

And there was nobody better than Fred at talking to ordinary

working people, like the retired steelworkers he met at Workington.

In the old days, of course, they had to manhandle the pieces...

Oh, aye. Yeah.

-..with a fork about 12 foot long.

-Aye, I know.

Yeah. Bloody hot!

-And there were... Before the mill was electrified, it was steam driven.

-Yeah.

And the finishing row, sometimes they were three high.

And there was one particular job where there was a lift driven by hydraulics.

There was only two, three fellas could do it.

One was a fella called Bob Jeffries, and if he slept in or owt,

they used to have to send for him, to come out, like.

Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, cos getting it up to that bloody second gap up...

In Walmsley's forge in Bolton we had, like,

a chain hanging down off a girder with a big hook on, you know.

A big long handle, just as it were coming out, under about

t'last five foot of it, and then the machine kept shoving it,

and then it shoved it out of plumb, the chain.

Then it come back on its own, like... Bang! You know.

And as the tail end came out, these lads with tongs used to grab it

and whip it into the next pass, and away it went.

Yeah. I tell you summat, they made it look dead easy.

But then they'd give you the tongs and have a go.

Bloody hell, it weren't that easy!

They had bloody couches and easy chairs!

When they'd done so many passes they all flopped into them.

..She's in this mill they were at!

-They were high knives, you know.

-They'd be asleep by now!

-I know!

And they had a propeller off an aeroplane driven with a belt, going round and round, keeping them cool.

There were a fan in there but it were on t'other side of rollers.

It were quite frightening, if you watch it.

You know, if you realised what could happen to you, you know, if owt went wrong.

Well, I was one of a group who was injured in 1962

when this ladle of iron fell.

This shackle had been used which wasn't really supposed to be used.

It was a bit like the straw that broke the camels back.

After several times it broke and the ladle was up...

It was only a small emergency ladle with four ton in, but of course

it came down.

Oddly enough, I was in charge of the job at the time.

I got knocked down in the rush.

I put my hands out to save myself and,

even though I was a junior manager, if you like,

I'd never been frightened to use a shovel and I'd fairly horny hands.

And I remember the skin started peeling off like blotting paper,

and I'd only had my first car about three weeks before.

I thought "Christ, I'm not going to be able to drive me car!"

Aye, I'll tell you what. Most of this world has,

you know, normal people, they never burn themself.

They never do owt like that. But it bloody hurts, you know.

It soon takes t'bloody skin off, like.

He had a very happy knack of asking the right questions,

the sort of things you would want to ask, and above all

there was that extraordinary respect he had for the people and what they were doing.

And in turn he was respected by them, and you had

a really good interchange when he visited somewhere,

and you felt you were really learning what was going on.

I done a few weaving sheds when...

You know, on t'chimneys. I used to go in and think "God, the noise!"

-You know, sort of thing.

-Yeah, very noisy.

-All day long.

-Yeah. Yeah.

When you first started, how many did you...?

-I know each weaver looked after so many.

-Well, I had two.

-Yeah.

Two loom, and then I got four, then I got five and then I got six.

-Bloomin' heck.

-Then I finished up running eight.

Eight? Bloody hell! One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

It's halfway down, innit?!

Yeah. We used to start at seven and finish at half past five.

Yeah. And how long for lunch?

-An hour. Half an hour for breakfast, an hour for lunch, and we used to work Saturday mornings.

-Yeah.

Seven o'clock till half past eleven.

-Yeah.

-I thought they were happy days.

Well, people go on about the bad old days and all that.

Well, personally I don't know why.

You'd to work but, like I say, hard work don't kill nobody, does it?

I don't think so.

-Most of England have never seen one of these things running.

-No. No.

When you do see it going, and the speed things go at, and how it shakes about!

-Oh, yeah.

-The maintenance levels on it must have been, you know, quite frightening.

Would they only have one man in here, running up and down

looking after them all, or would there be a few?

-Oh, no, there were a tackler to every set.

-Yeah. Oh, well...

They might have about 60 or 70 loom.

When I were a weaver help, I had 80 loom to look to.

How long did it take you to learn when you first came, you know?

-Eight week, and I were gormless.

-Is that it? And you were...?

One day she shoved me to end of t'alley.

-She said, "You're gormless!"

-You're gormless!

Anyway, t'manager come, and after you'd learnt to weave,

you went to help a man to run six loom.

And then you got looms of your own.

-Yeah, yeah.

-Well, time went on and t'years went on,

-and I started learning people myself.

-Yeah.

Her what learnt me said, "Evelyn, I never thought I'd have

"seen t'day when you were learning somebody to weave,

-"cos you were a gormless little devil!"

-Yeah.

-I used to come home every night and I used to be heartbroke.

-Yeah. Yeah.

And I were brought up with my Grandma.

She said, "You can cry. You're going. You're going!"

When you didn't want to go t'work again.

Anyway, I couldn't take ends up - these are ends through here.

I could set a loom on pull back, pull a piece up, but I couldn't take t'ends up.

And all at once t'penny dropped, and when I got used to it, I loved it.

-Yeah.

-She said, "Well, do you want to give over?"

I said "No, do I heck, Grandma." And I earned good money.

I think for Fred the most important people in history

have always been the ordinary men and women,

and he also remembers that it wasn't just the adults,

but there were children as well who were often involved in industrial production,

and he recognises their input as much as the great achievements of their parents.

This is where the kids worked.

-Yeah. Yeah.

-So you got...

It's a nice day to come here today cos you get a proper, authentic feeling of it!

Did they never have a roof?

-No. No, no.

-How many of them would there be here on this,

like, spot, actually working?

Maybe 30, 40 - something like that.

-So if you and I were kids, which we're not, but if we were...

-Yeah.

..what we've got to do is tip the stuff onto here.

-There we go.

-Yeah.

-And then what?

-Now, then, you and I have got to work, all right?

We've got to wash this stuff here.

-Yeah.

-Have a rake. What would you call that?

-A garden hoe.

-No, a coal rake, they call that.

-Oh, right.

-Coal rake. So...

-And the idea is?

-Wash it across in the water.

That's it. Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, and all the muck disappears down there.

-So you can see what you've got in here, can't you?

-Yeah.

I tell you what - this is poor stuff.

There's not many shiny bits!

He did stand at the fort.

You know, he did work with trowel and hammer and chisel.

So he wasn't just talking about it, saying, "Wasn't it a wonderful era?"

He knew the era well enough, with warts and all.

So it wasn't just saying, you know, some romanticised sense of the past.

He knew how difficult the past was because he largely lived there.

-Now you smash up your bits with your bucker.

-Yeah.

-Like that.

Yeah. How old would they be when they were actually doing that?

You'd start work here when you're maybe nine, maybe ten years old.

-Yeah, yeah.

-And, yeah, you'd graduate.

When you were about 18, you'd graduate to down the mine.

City & Guilds apprenticeship for lead-ore crushing!

-This is your main weapon.

-Yeah.

-For separating stuff.

It's a pretty, er...

And how did a little lad manage to get hold of the end?

-Well, you can kind of jump up and get a hold of it.

-Yeah. Yeah.

-This thing's called a hotching tub.

-Is it?

-Yeah.

You've got a sieve suspended in a tub of water like that,

and you put all your broken bits in the sieve.

-Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

-And then you jiggle that up and down at the end of this arm here.

Yeah, yeah. It looks a bit painful, doesn't it?

-Do you want to give it a go?

-Yeah, I will, I'll pretend that...

-Pretend you're about eleven year old.

-Yeah, yeah.

That's really harder than the...

Than the other action, yeah.

You'd be absolutely goosed after t'end of the day.

-Poor little kids, hey?

-Yeah, yeah.

-Doesn't bear thinking about really.

I think everybody knew he was very much one of the people

who understood industrial England, and all the engineering wonders.

But then he was able to transpose that backwards

and to get an understanding of so many of those anonymous medieval craftsmen who were building castles,

who worked brilliantly with stone and with timber

to create amazing structures which are still with us.

This side of the castle, without a doubt,

is the best side to show the various stages of construction of it.

I mean, it's very obvious if you look at the main wall,

you can see at the bottom of it, it's quite rough stonework, you know.

Obviously, possibly, done by the soldiers while still under attack.

Later on, when they had more time and a bit of protection from the bottom wall,

they completed the top 25 or 30 feet in a much better fashion, you know,

better stonemasonry and everything.

And then, of course, last but not least, the outer curtain wall or the outer wall

would be built later on when they could disappear inside if the enemy were approaching.

Leave the mortar and the trowels behind!

He's interested in the practical side of historic buildings,

and that's important because scholars write about

the theory of architecture or engineering.

Fred was interested in how the ordinary artisans

built the buildings, and that's what's really interesting.

When James of St George and the King built these castles,

spirit levels hadn't been invented, you know.

And of course if you go round and look at the moat,

and look at the bed joints and the masonry,

they're perfect - perfectly level with the water. Of course,

water finds its own level.

The thing is that there wouldn't be any water, of course, in the moat

when they built the place, and the only things they had were like this.

Basically a stick, a piece of string with a lead weight on the end,

and, of course, a nice hole that received the lead weight.

And a line drawn up the middle.

Of course when you put it on the wall like that, if the wall is plumb,

the lead weight will hang perfectly central in the hole, you see.

If it leans, of course, the wall, the ball's in the wrong shop,

and that's how they got everything vertical.

I mean, you can actually compare it with a modern spirit level.

Of course, it's bang on, you see.

It's perfect. We've not improved that much, really, have we?

He was always very good at acknowledging people who had names but also those who didn't.

The extraordinary, the medieval craftsman whose work we now see,

who achieved miracles, really, with very simple techniques

and very modest use of tools and primitive working conditions.

And I think he himself, and he'd come from a background

where hard work was what you did and how you understood it,

and he was able to couple that basic business of the day's work

with the vision and enterprise of much greater things,

and I think he had a very happy knack of putting those two together.

If you look closely at the wall, you can see two rows of holes.

One going up and one coming down,

and they would have had the puck locks in which are, in other words,

the scaffolding supports, and there'd be an incline plane up one side and one down the other.

And I rather think that would have been done that way

instead of having a single way up and same way down,

to sort of facilitate the work to go smoother, because the materials

would go one side and the men, after they've unloaded them on the top

on the wall, would come down the other side

with the sledges and the boxes and the bits of rope and tackle.

This, of course, would save a lot of bother with it.

There would always some Charlie who'd start an argument, "You got in my way,"

and shove the other guy off or sommat.

So, really the work would run very smoothly

with a system like that, I think anyway.

And he could put himself in the shoes of the craftsman,

of the people actually making this thing,

rather than the way that most historians would tackle it,

which would be to put themselves in the shoes of the monks who had commissioned it,

or of the rich people who were paying for it.

He was actually there in the shoes of the person putting it up,

up there on the scaffold and wondering,

"Is this damn thing going to fit?" Great.

When most people think of cathedrals, they think of stonemasons, but there's a bit more to it than that.

There were many joiners I would rather think of as stonemasons,

and they would come into various categories.

The guys who carved the beautiful wooden mullions on the lantern,

and of course stonemasons who did all the lovely tracery for the windows.

And then the other branch would be the rough guys who did the infill in the walls.

And of course down here on this grass at that time,

it would be a hive of industry.

They would have built themselves a few wooden shacks to shelter under during the winter months,

and I suppose a greater part of the work on the walls would be done

in the summer because of the sunshine and the good weather.

It's really quite a magnificent thing when you look at it,

and you can see just by observation that it must have took them a long time.

And not to mention the plumbers.

Also the lead roof and all the downspouts, all of them would be

made more or less on site with the lead burners.

The magic art of burning lead together, like soldering in a way.

There's lots of modern examples of that all over this place if you're an observer and look around.

Fred was showing the history of the common man.

He was showing what people achieved in their everyday lives

and bringing it to the forefront of our knowledge, which is great.

At Culzean Castle, Fred looked at the work of the stonemasons.

When this place were being built, it would be a hive of activity,

and there'd be literally dozens of stonemasons.

The thing is, this is a wonderful wall to depict different styles

of workmanship on producing the squared-off blocks of stone.

It's obvious that the same man made this here,

these door jarms, each side, it's the same style of chiselling.

Of course, they dropped a bit of a clanger here.

There were going to be another nitch like that but they obviously changed their mind and bunged it up.

Here there's a wonderfully detailed one here

that obviously the guy who made that would only do one,

and the bloke who made this one would more than likely do three,

cos it's pretty rough, or he were in a hurry

to go home for his tea or something of that nature.

But it is certainly a good example of showing

masons' different styles of using the punch and the mallet

and the various fancy chisels that they had.

We want to cut of piece of stone for that wall.

-We've got to sort it.

-Yeah.

We've got to put a new face on it, and also alter the shape

and the finish on the top and bottom bed and the joints.

I'll try not to hit my hand,

cos that's always a bonus.

'Never ever stop learning.

'You can have a bad teacher, a bad workman who is suffering,

'or a good 'un and you'll learn a lot.

'And you can learn a lot more from an artist or an engineer

'if you're working with him than you can reading a book, believe me.'

I learned how to do all this by being shown by another man stood at side of me.

You've got to read books to get the basic gist of it, but you can't really do it from the book.

Can I have a go?

You certainly can have a go.

Just spin it round and you can work from that side.

One of the most important things about Fred is that he didn't

come across as some enthusiast, just going on about some engine,

whereas you tend to say,

"You wouldn't say that if you had to work with them

"and clean them out," cos he did work with them and he really did know.

He really was a hands-on guy.

And his sense of empathy in connection with Victorian workers

and engineers was so important because it's easy to say, yes, but they had short,

nasty lives and they all got TB or died of asbestos or whatever,

but the point is he understood that their work

still had an immense pride in it.

That people might have been tired and working long hours,

but they still put beauty and quality into what they were doing.

And it was that sense that he connected with.

He was good on crafts because we tend to think

of the working class in the 19th century as being always in a mill

or in a factory, down the mine, and it was a lot of work.

But there was a very big artisan class of people,

very like Fred, who were highly skilled, quite independent minded, some of them had training,

some of them like Pugin who he talked about

had no particular education and were largely self-taught,

and they had to learn how to solve problems and evolve their own kind of standards and ideas.

They're not people who leave behind written records.

They weren't the book writing and letter writing classes.

But I think he really brought to life again

their spirit when he looked in detail at the way in which the things they'd made had been made.

I think really that I'd have been all right in the Victorian period,

putting aside all the poverty and the awful things that there were then. Hardly any money.

Anybody can say that the money business, the wages come into it.

They couldn't have made wonderful things like they did

if they hadn't have liked it, I don't think.

People are on a lot more money now but the unhappiness is rife, innit?

All this stress at the office and things like that, you know.

I don't think they have time to be stressed, them men.

They were always busy, weren't they?

I think I'd have been all right in the Victorian era.

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