Men of Steel Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone

Really, up until the Victorian times,

we'd been basically an agricultural nation

and, of course, bit of war in trying to conquer half the world.

And then along came the Victorians and the...

unbelievable engineering abilities that they had, and they all had tons of self-confidence -

all these people like Brunel and Stephenson -

and, er, no doubt a great deal of faith in what they could do.

I mean, they... some of the things they built,

were, at the time, bordering on you know the limits of...

Well, nobody else in all the world had done such great things

as what we did in that period of our history.

Fred Dibnah's heroes were the great engineers of the Victorian age.

His interest in their work and his belief in the values of hard work

and enterprise that drove them on shone through in all that he did.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel. My hero, you know?

I think, today, in his honour,

I shall wear this tall hat while I have a look round his ship.

Really, if it had anything to do with engineering on a grand scale,

Mr Brunel were the man to have a go at it.

Perhaps every generation has to rediscover

its own heroes from the past.

And Fred's championing of the great engineers like Stephenson and Brunel

is part of helping us to rediscover those heroes.

And obviously that's worked - Brunel was voted one of the greatest

Britons that ever lived, quite recently, in a national contest.

Whilst he was constructing the Great Western Railway,

he got this grand vision to link New York with Bristol

and the Great Western Railway,

and this is the second of the three ships that he made -

the SS Great Britain -

which lies here now in the very dock that it were constructed in, in 1843.

He was able to spend his life among machines,

er, among the buildings of the Victorian age and he obviously

identified very much with that, erm,

and that's part of the charm of the attraction, I think.

Here in me garden, I've got this lovely little steam engine

which is almost identical to the one on the SS Great Britain.

It's a lot smaller, of course.

It'd be easier for me to explain

the engine of the SS Great Britain with this thing.

When Brunel first envisaged the SS Great Britain,

it were gonna be propelled by paddles, and, of course,

if you think about this,

if this shaft went transverse across the whole of the ship

with a paddle here and a paddle on the other side,

it would be a paddle ship engine, but he kept the same engine, I think,

and turned it round through 90 degrees

and on the SS Great Britain, this great wheel here ended up

as summat like a 20-odd foot diameter chain wheel

with a chain like a bicycle that went down to the bottom

and went round another sprocket in the bottom of the hole,

hence to the propeller shaft in the stern of the ship.

But it is exactly the same -

two cylinders down in the bowels of the ship

and the crank shaft practically sticking through the deck at the top.

I've never had it going, this one, but I will do, some day.

It's quite an interesting sort of piece of tackle.

I've not turned it round for a day or two. It's a bit stiff, you know?

He read pretty well every book that was available,

I think, on IK Brunel,

who was primarily a civil engineer, of course,

and became a ship builder

but, er, I think he, er...

The one thing he did which Fred had no intention of doing

was he worked himself into the ground.

I think he died at 59, didn't he, due to overwork?

But Fred didn't believe in overwork.

That's not to say he were... Don't get me wrong,

he wasn't lazy in any way,

er, but, er, if the job could be finished next week

rather than tomorrow it would get finished next week,

but by Jove, it would be right when it was done.

So, was Fred anything like any of the great Victorian engineers he admired so much?

The other engineers, the more craftsman-like ones -

the Stephensons, people like that -

I think were much more like Fred, you know, just down-to-earth people,

who were very knowledgeable in practical things

and it was that skill which allowed them

to become the important people they were.

It's Northumbria you gotta come to,

to discover the early days of the railways

and of course, great men like George Stephenson,

who were the pioneers of steam and iron.

Here, on the Pockerley Waggonway,

which is situated in the Beamish Open Air Museum,

up here in the north-east,

they've recreated what the railways of the period actually looked like.

This magnificent shed is a perfect replica

of the Timothy Hackworth's engine shed

at Shildon in County Durham, long demolished.

And, of course, Hackworth was the chief mechanical engineer

and engine foreman for the world's first passenger-carrying railway -

the Stockton to Darlington railway

and it were Hackworth's job to make sure all the locomotives kept going.

Visitors to Beamish can have the unbelievable experience

of travelling in carriages with no springs

behind George Stephenson's reproduction Locomotion Number One.

Hiya, you all right?

Yep.

The engine has four wheels and, of course, the tender's got four wheels as well.

The driver, his position when the thing's under way,

is up there, stood on the side, on a plank, which is rather precarious.

He works all the levers on the valve gear

that lets the steam into the cylinders.

And down here of course, the stoker,

he's gotta do his business with his coal shovel, well, coke actually,

and then, when he's got it going and a full head of steam, he's quite within his rights

to go on this plank on this side, but that's even more hairy cos there's nothing to hang on to.

I think we'll have a little trip down the line, maybe not quite a far

as Shildon to Stockton but nevertheless,

it'll be quite an experience.

Right my mate, are we ready?

Like all early locomotives,

it had no brakes, you know.

To stop the thing, the fireman actually had to jump off

and pin down the brakes on the...on the coal wagon.

You know, quite a hairy occupation.

I said to him on a few times, "You know, if you HAD been born

"50 years ago, you wouldn't have been interested in steam engines.

"You'd have been interested in horses!

"Before the days of steam," I said, "Steam engines...if you'd

"have been born when you think you'd like to have been born,

"they'd have represented modern technology

"and I don't think you'd have been interested in that!"

On the opening day, George Stephenson actually drove the locomotive

and his two bothers acted as firemen.

I mean, it must have been quite exciting, when you think about it.

I suppose the equivalent to being an airline pilot.

If Fred had been born in the 19th century, he'd have been

there chatting with Stephenson about his ideas and thoughts.

Stephenson was very much into the latest thing - not just railways.

He was into all sorts of different scientific and technological ideas.

And I think that would have appealed to Fred.

Fred raised the profile of the great engineers

in a very accessible way.

He took them out of the realms of the history books,

he took them away from the dry Open University academics

in the tweed suits, and he took them and made them alive.

You only have to look at a lot of the programmes that he made

to see that this man actually knew what he was talking about

as well as just going round doing the business.

He knew about these guys, their lives, and achievements.

Got lovely ball joints on it, so you know, there's no friction, really.

It'll all go about in its ponderous way

without rubbing on each corner of a straight bearing.

He thought they were fantastic.

He admired their ability to think on their feet, he admired their ability

to take risks and do things that they thought were unthinkable.

George Stephenson once said,

"I will do something that is going to astonish the whole world,"

and I think Fred would have agreed with that wholeheartedly.

This is a replica of the world-famous Stephenson's Rocket,

and they're going to let me have a go on it.

I'm really looking forward to it!

Now then, how you doing, mate?

I'm really looking forward to this.

Let's see if we can get the thing under way.

HE SOUNDS HIS HORN

Oh, we're off, Fred!

Hey, everything's OK, mate, yeah.

It's quite long-legged, Fred. You can imagine...to keep it going...

Yeah!

He seemed to like the idea of...

The wheels are 47-inch diameter.

Fred made it much easier to understand.

He - how shall we say?

He was one of us, as it were, he was a man off the street.

He was somebody born in Bolton, Lancashire,

he had no pretensions of going to college,

he was a straightforward, down-to-earth man.

-This is fantastic!

-We're just going over the crossing. I'll toot my hooter.

And he understood things on his level, and he had a great ability to communicate that understanding

in a way that the layman, person on the street,

a person watching his programmes,

could just communicate with and just see what he was talking about,

rather than get tangled up in academia.

-Oh, it's unbelievable.

-More stream, Fred. We're coming up to the buffers.

To stop it, you basically bang it in reverse.

Aye, don't try it with your Ford Fiesta, Fred.

Don't try it with a Ford Fiesta.

No, no, no, no. The world's first successful passenger engine.

Imagine what people would think when they saw it.

-Yeah.

-They were saying that your lungs would collapse with such speed.

In fact, the man, one man who actually drove this thing,

I've read in a history book somewhere that he got so uptight about it

he asked to be taken off the job, you know?

It went too fast at 35mph!

Here inside the museum, they have a full-size cutaway replica

of the Rocket, and you can actually see how the features of it...

Even in the most modern locomotive, steam locomotive,

all the main features have never, ever altered,

like, this is the exhaust pipe or the blast pipe.

There's one on each side which makes the locomotive woof-woof-woof.

When Fred talks about people like Brunel and Stephenson,

he's excited by them

because they don't just work with their head, they could work with their hands

and they knew how machines operated, they knew what it took to make them run smoothly.

He knew that they were excited about the mechanics - the insides of machines.

This engine here behind me

is the only long-boilered tender main-line engine in existence,

and it's a design that were done by Robert Stephenson in the 1830s.

I mean, this were made quite a lot later,

but it's the basic shape of it -

inside cylinders and six wheels - had been around since 1830.

When you really look at it and you compare it with the Rocket,

which were 1829, rapid advances were made in a very short time, you know,

so a thing as big as this from something like Stephenson's Rocket,

which is only half the size of it.

Robert Stephenson and his company, of course,

didn't just build locomotives, they built the lines

and the bridges and all the engineering works

involved in the construction of a full-sized railway.

Newcastle's high-level bridge was designed by Robert Stephenson

and opened in 1849 by Queen Victoria

and it's rather an interesting structure, really, when you think.

Of course, it's basically made of cast iron arches

with wrought-iron tie rods stiffening it all up,

and it stands on five sandstone pillars.

But the interesting bit is the railway's on the top

and the roadway is underneath and when you think, really,

it's a credit to Mr Stephenson - it's still here today

and still functioning quite well,

and when you think of the weight of all the stuff that goes over it,

railway trains are much heavier now than they were 1849,

motor cars have replaced horses and carriages, which, of course, are heavier...and motor wagons.

And it's still going strong.

It's a credit to him, really.

He's very comfortable with things the Victorians had made.

He liked their technology, er, he liked the way

they expressed themselves. I think he liked their confidence.

I think if you went back to Victorian times,

you'd have found a lot of people like Fred.

And this is the sort of place they might have worked -

Robert Stephenson's locomotive works in Newcastle.

This is the visitors' staircase, where people like Brunel

and Daniel Gooch would come when they were doing deals.

It leads up to Mr Stephenson's private office up there near the drawing office.

Yeah! This is Mr Stephenson's personal office.

How sad, eh? A bit of cornice left and half a fireplace.

And these lovely windows with beautiful, narrow sash bars, you know?

Even the shutters still work.

It's all really good-quality joinery in this, you know,

and I know, living in a house that were built

in the 1850s, that this is right for that period,

and all. Yeah.

I do hope they can raise enough money and restore it to its past glory.

Next door, here, through in this drawing office,

you can imagine them all scratching away,

drawing four-wheeled locomotives for the world market, as you might say.

Undoubtedly, the great British engineers

who built the Empire...

You know, Fred was not

a great man for political correctness

and would talk about "The Colonies", referring to America

and other parts of the world that we, you know...

We built the world's railways, if you like, and Fred

would talk endlessly about that, and I think they were

the sort of people who he really admired.

They were his heroes from boyhood days, I would imagine.

This, of course, was the drawing office, you know,

where I suppose all the early locomotives of England,

most of them, were possibly designed here and of course,

all that lot there were all filled in with windows,

and down below, the assembly shop.

They've got to have it blocked in because the muck would come up,

and I suppose there would be a constant supply up these stairs,

of people wanting to know measurements

and different dimensions for the bits they were machining downstairs.

Down here, this is where the locomotives were actually assembled.

I like places like this -

you can imagine, in 1836 or something like that,

they'd be really going hammer and tongs in here, all the beautiful shiny brass and copper.

Over here, there were great, big, long, flat-belt driven lathes

and some smaller ones at the end

which possibly were used for doing the finer bits of brackets and bits and pieces.

Somewhere very nearby, in a building similar to this,

they would have had the foundry, where the wheels, the cylinders

and small sort of brackets that were nearly always under compression

that would be cast and then, of course,

they'd come here to be machined over there against that wall

and then be assembled

on the locomotive that were being constructed.

Victorian engineers and men of that ilk,

miners and workers in factories,

anybody with any degree of skill was somebody in Fred's mind

that deserved recognition, because they didn't mind getting their hands dirty.

They suffered, you know?

There was great toil in the old days and suffering,

and Fred, he had an empathy with that, really.

Here, at the Victorian iron foundry at Ironbridge Gorge Museum, you can actually see how they would

have cast a locomotive wheel in the mid-Victorian period.

In fact, all the bits of steam locomotive that were

made of cast iron, like the funnel, the brake blocks, the blast pipe

you know, there were a heck of a lot of cast iron in a locomotive.

But the wheel is the main thing, really.

It went very well that, very smoothly, you know,

and you see how the molten metal ran from the pouring hole

and all the way around and then into the centre,

and then how it sunk in the middle.

They do that and got to keep putting a bit on in the middle.

I think I'd better move on because me trousers are nearly on fire!

Bloody hell! Hot, that!

It was these people who made Britain great,

and I think that was, for many years, forgotten.

There's been this recent revitalisation in the idea that

it's OK to say Britain was industrially mighty.

It's not politically incorrect to say that any more,

and I think there was certainly a phase we saw,

where we felt guilty about our empire

and our aspirations for world domination.

People like Brunel, Hackworth...

certainly, you know, the Stephensons,

we've kind of reinterpreted their importance and their roles,

and all of these people contributed to that kind of industrial knowledge

that people like Fred would recreate in their garden.

Right.

Right, really the equipment that they had or would have had

in Robert Stephenson's place, up in Newcastle-on-Tyne

wouldn't have been a great deal different than this,

and it would be definitely driven from a line shaft via a steam engine.

I mean, even the drills, they'd be almost identical apart from maybe

the gears would be exposed, you know,

make even more row than this!

I mean, when you think about it, it does a superb job.

Very slow, though, compared with modern equipment.

I mean, they'd have used this for boring all the brackets

and bits and pieces for the motion of a locomotive.

I mean, they'd have had bigger versions

for, you know, drilling holes in ends of cranks and things like that.

Fred's main interest is steam

and all the machines that he uses and loves are driven by steam.

Steam is the driving medium of the Victorian age,

so I think he sees himself

as a contemporary of the likes of Stephenson,

Hackworth, Brunel, in the big steam age.

He's raised their awareness tremendously.

I mean, he mentions them in all his programmes.

They're obviously his heroes of the past

and they would be forgotten if it wasn't for people like Fred

who remind us of the contribution

that they made to our industrial heritage.

I think he brought the whole story

of Britain's great industrial development to people's awareness,

and particularly, through some of the famous people involved,

the Stephensons, the Hackworths etc, but it probably too came over

that there were a lot of people like him in the Victorian era,

who through their graft and through their work,

got Britain to be where it was as a leading industrial nation.

And one of them was the great Victorian industrialist, Sir William Armstrong.

William Armstrong, really, were actually a lawyer.

He studied the law, you know, but he had this other

interest in science and technology

and of course, one of his great things were hydraulics.

It's an astonishing fact that Armstrong never had any formal training in engineering, you know.

Everything he knew, he taught himself,

and at the beginning of his company

for the first 15 years, he never had a holiday, you know.

He were a bit like me, really,

and of course like Brunel, he, like, were dedicated to the job.

If there were a great problem wanted solving, you know,

he didn't even go home, he would sleep on the job.

There have been a number of biographies of Brunel.

He is much the most famous engineer in history -

perhaps TOO famous, some would say.

There's been one biography of George and Robert Stephenson

and one of Robert Stephenson.

There hasn't yet been a proper biography

of Sir William Armstrong at all.

They're names which are known to - WERE known to -

maybe, in the order of 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 people,

but after Fred's programmes, their names were known

to several million people,

which is a huge contribution in public education,

if you think about it.

By 1847, Armstrong had given up practising law.

He opened his Elswick works on the banks of the river Tyne,

where he manufactured the hydraulic cranes

and all sorts of other engineering equipment

like lathes and steam engines and steam pumps.

The business was a huge success,

and went on to provide engines and hydraulic machinery

for some of the greatest

civil engineering projects of the Victorian age,

including Tower Bridge and the Manchester Ship Canal.

By 1867, the Armstrong company had begun to build iron warships,

and in the first 15 years, they built 20.

And in the last quarter of the last century,

they became like world leaders in armaments and warship building.

By this time, he'd become a lord

and he'd also become a great landowner,

and this here is his parlour.

Very beautiful - he must have made a lot of money.

And here he entertained foreign envoys and princes

who'd all come down to have a look at his big guns.

And at first, he was very patriotic.

He only sold them to the British government,

but they terminated his contract

and then he threw patriotism through the window

and started selling them to everybody all over the world,

and became the greatest armaments supplier of the time.

What Fred grasped is that you don't have to throw out

the whole of Victorian culture and deride all of its achievements

simply because there are some aspects of it which -

perhaps for good reasons - we find politically incorrect

or unpleasant or difficult to deal with now.

I mean, I think he grasped that it was

one of the most creative cultures that there has ever been

and I think he grasped that that was a unique historical achievement

that Victorian Britain produced,

and that if there are nasty sides to it along the way -

appalling poverty in the cities -

that actually, the industrial revolution wouldn't have happened without them,

and it doesn't mean that it wasn't a great achievement.

By the 1890s, the manufacture of arms and battleships

had become one of our major industries.

Armstrong had turned a brilliantly successful engineering works

into a symbol of imperial might, here at this spot.

Down there, they made all the battleships and up there

kept extending and extending, all the way to the Scott's woodworks.

In fact, at home, in me shed, I've got a riveting hammer

that says, "Sir WG Armstrong, Scott's Woodworks, Newcastle-on-Tyne"

so I know they made riveting hammers up there!

What an empire it must have been.

It's lovely to think of the Victorian age as a heroic age.

Erm, it wasn't always a heroic age for the people involved,

and he understood that, made it clear

that there was real hardship in running a steam engine,

sort of, perfectly, and for hour upon hour,

or being on the locomotive going up to Scotland, you know,

with hardly any protection at all, and having to spot every signal,

come rain, come shine, you know?

These were very demanding jobs that people had,

and I think he understood that.

Fred has a very strong understanding of the traditions

of the Victorian industrial revolution,

and one of the great underpinnings of that was the idea of self-help

that you could, if you worked hard enough,

you would be able to achieve anything that you wanted.

It wasn't always easy. There were sacrifices to be made,

but he knew that a good day's work for a good day's pay

was the best way in which you could live your life.

I think Fred's contribution

to understanding the great engineers is, in a sense, overshadowed

by his ability that he's got people to understand the unknown engineers, you know,

the riveters and the blacksmiths and the people who really did it.

And there was this sense that yeah, the Victorians,

they saw things going wrong in their world

but they also felt that they were working towards a new era

of peace and prosperity, and somehow all the things that were wrong,

like slums or illness or whatever,

would ultimately be swept away by material advancement,

and that sense of optimism which we've so lost...

We now know that imperialism has all these problems,

that industrialisation brings global warming and pollution.

And he was looking back to that world

where people believed in what they were doing passionately

and were trying, and believed they were making things better.

I think, really, I'd have been a happy man then,

putting all the poverty and, you know,

awful things that there were in the Victorian period aside.

I think if you were of mechanical bent, you could survive then.

I reckon I'd have been all right.

I don't think I'd have been out of work.

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