The Victorian Gentleman Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone

A magnificent town hall like this one here at Bolton is a grand example of Victorian civic pride.

The success and prosperity the industrial revolution

brought to towns like this left us with some magnificent buildings.

Just look at the fancy work on there.

They loved to have everything ornate and quite beautiful to look at, you know, pleasing to the eye.

The actual ornamentation were almost as important as the building itself.

It definitely was the great age of Victorian splendour.

Fred Dibnah was by his own admission a man born out of his time.

He always said he should have been born in the Victorian age.

It's the age he admired, the time he would like to have lived and worked.

His appreciation of the architectural

and decorative skills of the age went back to his first job.

I first became interested in buildings when I were about

15 years old, and of course I lived here in this small terraced house.

This wall is one of the first things I ever built.

The thing is me mother and father wanted me to be an undertaker

and I didn't fancy that, you know, so I got on me bicycle and I pedalled

off to the youth employment bureau where they fixed me up with a job as a joiner.

Me work as a joiner got me into some of the splendid

mansions that the cotton mill and bleach works owners have built.

This actual house were built by a bleach works owner.

The thing is I couldn't help but notice, I mean, coming from an house that hadn't got any skirting boards,

the quality of the woodwork and the height of the skirting boards,

18 inches up the walls, and the beautiful panel doors and architraves

and best of all the fancy plastered ceilings, made me wonder however did they do it.

Of course it's a pub now so really everybody can enjoy it.

He did have Victorian values.

I think the biggest emphasis on what he appreciated

about Victorian values was the quality.

Everything was made to a very high standard, most things were made by hand

and that is what he appreciated the most, everything looked the part and everything was built to last.

Everything had a job and it did it for generations.

What you see in here, though, you know, it really all done just to be looked at.

Things like the smallest details had to be beautiful.

I mean, even if it were a great big thing like a civil engineering piece, they still made a fuss of it.

But in houses, the minute detail right down to things like window catches were always quite beautiful.

For Fred it was these high standards that made Britain lead the world.

Fred was proud to be British and he was proud of the achievements of

Great Britain and I think that really this country has gone through

huge changes, two devastating world wars

which bankrupted the country and the loss of empire.

There's an awful lot of psychological adjustment necessary to build the new Britain that we all live in now

and I think that maybe people were abashed to talk about those great days when Britain was so confident

and really was the premier power in the whole world.

It's good that Fred was able to say that and not only say it but to say it with pride and enthusiasm.

And associate with the Victorian age in everything he did.

Nowhere can this be seen better than in his own house in Bolton.

John Gorley was Fred's boiler inspector and in

the course of his work he became a regular visitor to the house.

He was a great admirer of Victorian architecture

and he liked to look at it and talk to people about it.

He was very good at that type of brickwork, obviously it's an extension of chimney repairing.

But even his house, the extension to it, he got the bricks from demolished terraced houses

that were in Bolton of the same vintage as the rest of his house and he did a lot of extra stonework

on that house which is quite beautiful to behold, so yes, he had quite an interest in architecture.

It's this that I like about the Victorian era, you know.

That's why I've got so much of this sort of stuff here in me house,

I mean this wonderful bit here came off the front of a shop somewhere and you couldn't see it for the paint,

the detail, so I boiled it up in caustic and all the paint come off revealing all this lovely fancy work.

It's made of pot actually, terracotta.

And then like the wonderful age of Victorian gas lighting

like this magnificent thing here which...

The trouble that they went to, you know, and of course you can swing the thing about,

there must have been lots of gas leaks from all the various joints and taps.

Some of them I've seen were three arms on so you could more or less move the thing anywhere you wanted.

If you look at Fred's house, there was a lot of Victoriana about.

You know, like the old way of doing things.

He was very much a perfectionist in everything that he did

and I think all of us that play with steam engines we all live in

the past a bit but Fred, everything to do with the Victorian era, he was interested in,

all handmade by craftsmen and nothing was machine made, and that's why he liked it so much.

It is an age, the Victorian age, when engineers and mechanics were looked up to a bit.

I think I'd like to have lived then when we made things like this.

The modern equivalent wouldn't be as beautiful as this.

I can imagine going to work every morning and making these, it would have been quite a pleasurable do.

I suppose they got a bit sick, but I think I'd sooner make these than hinges for car doors or something

on that score, you know, you don't even know which bloody car

they're going on.

Something about it when in the great age of steam

we led the world and made all the beautiful bits for these things.

I think he was very good because although we now think

it's a the good thing we don't have an empire

and going round the world telling everybody what to do, but the other side of that was a very great

generosity by the Victorians, a sense of civic pride which Fred always brought out,

whether he was looking at the town hall or a park, all those things the Victorians gave us.

As well as town halls, he talked about mechanics institutes but they gave us

the swimming baths, the libraries, the public open spaces,

the things we're letting go again and he was good at emphasising that.

And Fred never missed an opportunity to show us the glories of the Victorian age.

So when he went to visit the Lloyds Building in London he made sure

he showed us the beautiful Victorian market next to it.

Right in the shadow of this great stainless steel and glass and concrete construction

there's a Victorian market, Leadenhall Market, all made of cast iron and timber and what have you.

The Victorians went to great lengths to make things very beautiful as well as functional.

The whole place is an iron founder's dream, all the beautiful columns and the ornamental corbels

and the flowery bits bowled me over and inside, behind where nobody

can see, there'll be big rectangular-shaped holes,

joining the ends together there'll be millions of nuts and bolt holes,

and the whole thing will be held together with nuts and bolts.

It's quite a wonderful thing, really, when you think about it.

All these lovely wrought iron bars would once have had sides of beef

hanging down and all of that.

Must have been an interesting place then, I rather think.

I think he would have done very well in the Victorian age, he had that absolutely Victorian mixture

of being very keen on progress, very keen on getting things done, very keen on thinking through problems

and at the same time this complete fascination with the past and great sympathy with the past

and the Victorians were always looking to the Middle Ages, building new buildings in the Gothic style.

But, as Fred showed, all full of cast iron,

all full of the latest technology, and I think his enthusiasm,

his ingenuity, his way of thinking things through would have made him a very successful Victorian.

Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire was built for the first Earl Somers

in the first half of the 19th century.

Its architect, Robert Smirke, designed it to look like a great medieval castle.

When Fred visited it, he was able to show us this marriage of Gothic style and modern technology

as he raised the questions we all want to ask when we visit a great building like this.

How could they make the archways so big?

How could they vault such a large cavernous space like this

without using massive structural timbers?

I could think of several television presenters who would go

and visit somewhere like Eastnor Castle

because it's a large posh country house, but Fred's the only one

who'd go and look in the roof space because it had some of the earliest large cast iron

roof trusses which are fantastically interesting and of course

he's right, they're the most important thing about that house but it would take Fred to see that.

So Fred, this is the biggest cast iron beam we've got in the house and this was fitted in 1818 just as

the castle was being topped out and you can imagine in a much older building

there'd have been a huge stone vault to support the super structure.

We do know who the people were who reckon they did the job, Mr Penn and Mr Worth, the joiners,

and it's amazing there's only two of them, they must have been fantastic men.

Yeah, they'd be the ones who were literate, maybe.

There'd be a big army of labourers as well!

Mr Smirke made clever use of cast iron, not only in the structure

or for structural purposes but the ornamental side of it.

If you look at this staircase it looks as though it's made of wood, but in actual fact

if you look more closely you can see this that looks like carved wood is actually cast iron

and the way that they would do this is to make a wooden pattern

and bury that in the sand in a moulding box and then pour in the molten iron.

The great beam that we looked at up in the rafters would be made in the same way but on a mightier scale.

When you think about it, when you're having building work done,

the plasterers and the tillers and the joiners are as important as the men who actually built the place.

Once Eastnor Castle has been built, they proceeded with the interior work and it was all pretty lavish.

This is the Gothic drawing room, which was redecorated in 1849,

and for me this is the height of Victorian splendour and embellishment

and it's a very fine example of how good they were at decorating places back in them days.

The man responsible for the roof was the architect and designer Augustus Welby Pugin.

I think the great impression you get from Fred's programmes

is his enthusiasm

and that was a very strong Victorian idea that if you put enough energy

into something, if you really worked hard at it, if you really loved it, then you would succeed.

And I think that there's a great sense nowadays that you can do things without a lot of effort,

and he knew that it did take effort to produce these amazing machines and buildings that he loved so much.

What Fred tells us about Pugin is not just to look at the outside of the building but to

look on the inside of the building, that it is a complete design space.

Pugin was having to deal with very new technologies in many ways.

I mean, how do you make a gas fitting, how do you make

a whole suite of tables for example.

You know, 100 tables all in different designs, how do you deal

with these design problems but yet keep them within a consistent style, so he's asking questions

about how do you apply style to function and I think this is the key to Victorian architecture,

it's not just about the ornament on the outside, it's about what holds it up, what it's used for.

Nowhere can this be seen better than at one of our greatest monuments of the Victorian age, Tower Bridge.

Inside that great castle-like exterior there's a great big steel

frame that were constructed by the same men who built the Forth Bridge.

It took eight years to build and five different major contracting companies and the relentless labour of 500 men.

And there's about 11,000 tonnes of steel in the towers and the walkways and the roadways.

On the completion of the steelwork, it was clad in Cornish granite

and Portland stone to protect the iron work and give it the beautiful appearance it has now.

When you come inside one of the towers, you can see its great steel skeleton, that's all riveted

together, the whole thing would stand up really without the fancy stonework or the beautification on the outside.

It's a wonderful bit of ironwork really, you know.

Let's do some riveting you know, brrrr!

Fred was very good at looking at things which were very famous.

He'd look at Tower Bridge and make you feel you'd never seen it before.

People have heard of Pugin, of the Palace of Westminster and he showed us the House of Lords

but for most people Pugin is just a name, a name associated with some very expensive wallpaper recently,

but because he went off and he looked at Eastnor Castle, he looked St Giles Cheadle.

St Giles Cheadle is a wonderful church but it's in a small

town in Staffordshire and a lot of people don't realise that

they might have a world-class work of art in their own town just round the corner, 20 minutes drive away,

and that kind of programme makes people feel that they can go and see these things.

Pugin called St Giles his gem, the finest church he ever designed,

and I'm inclined to agree with him in some ways, because he's really gone to town with the fancy work,

something about artists and designers like him, you know, you can't get away from the same

squiggly bits that keep cropping up everywhere in the House of Commons,

Eastnor Castle, everywhere.

These beautiful tiles, even the same designs transferred over into the central heating grating,

and when you look behind me, this lovely screen and its fan vaulting reminds me of the wood holding

the lantern up at Ely Cathedral and sort of...

Everywhere there's all this wonderful Gothic ornamentation.

Even up on the roof, you know, the ridge tiles are made of cast iron

and they're almost identical to the ones on the Houses of Parliament.

It's as though he's constantly going back to the Middle Ages.

I'm always astonished at the way in which he moves from the very grand scale of buildings

or engineering projects, right down to the small scale of the details of the decoration.

And what he shows us is that these are all part of the same system that the Victorians had set up,

so they were interested in getting things to work wonderfully smoothly

but they also wanted them to be beautiful.

And Fred shows us through a number of things that he's got

in his own collection, something like a lavatory cistern bracket,

that's a small scale object, it's nothing fancy but it's something that somebody took some care about.

Even these humble brackets, started life off holding the cistern up in a toilet in the spinning mill,

and I've just remembered there's another pair there. I think I'll go back for them.

Cos they're rather elegant, aren't they, beautifully made, cast iron.

They don't seem nowadays, reproduction cast iron

never seems as nice and fine as when the Victorians did it.

And it's this idea of wanting to put effort again into

what you're making, what you're doing, making it special, making it individual, making it personal.

And I think that that is the key to...

Both to the Victorians in many ways but also to how Fred talks to us.

And what he related to best was the sort of small-scale domestic architecture like all the Victorian

features here in the houses of Beamish Open Air Museum.

Good morning.

-Rather a splendid parlour you've got here, eh?

-It's very nice.

Yeah, it's like a cut above the others, isn't it, with the semi-circular arches and the...

-I've got a fireplace like that in one of my bedrooms.

-Aren't you lucky?

Yeah, it's about 1850, I would think, that that thing were made.

and the lovely sash windows with the panelling and the shutters and everything.

-This is quite posh, isn't it?

-Yes, it is.

-Bit, er, bit...

-Rather superior residence.

-Yeah.

I see there's not even any gas lamps, is there?

-No.

-Only like oil lamps, still on the oil, you know.

No, no, they're... A bit old-fashioned, we are.

And the splendid ceiling rose there,

yeah, very beautiful.

Me mother wanted me to learn to play the piano, but I never got round to going.

Me brother went, and the pianoforte teacher used to say to me, "Why don't you come instead?

"You'd be better at it than he is."

Aye, good morning, this is a bit like home from home for me.

Really, the Victorian cast iron fire grates were the centre of the household.

Everything happened here, the bread were baked and all

the boiling water come out and it dried all the clothes on the rail here, quite a fascinating thing.

He was Victorian through and through, Fred and he had

certain ideas that he would expect his wife to behave and respond.

Say for instance if his meal wasn't on the table at a certain time, he'd be quite cross.

Or he might expect that you should have the house spotless and even bake bread.

But of course there's only so many hours in a day that you can do, and he'd go out and moan to people that

"I've not had me bloody tea yet, like."

Do you do this often?

-Once a week.

-Once a week.

I've actually got one at home that's a bit older than this, and I've mastered a way of doing the black

lead in with an electric drill with a mop on the end, makes life a bit easier.

It's quite a technical one, this, isn't it? It's got all these lovely...

Are these for working the dampers and things?

-Yes.

-Yeah, yeah, it's very interesting, yeah.

Mr Moffatt Brothers, Gateshead.

-Yes, it's a local one.

-Gateshead on Tyne.

Yeah, you have a few labour-saving devices in here, haven't you?

-That's for cleaning knives?

-Yes, they were steel then.

-I've got one but it's not in as good a nick as yours.

I remember him talking about how you could see the letters "Co-op"

on any high street at one point in the 19th century, and that's

the kind of thing people will have seen on their own high street and walked past it a million times.

And when you've seen Fred's programme you walk past and think "That's what he was talking about!"

He made sense, I think, of a lot of the built environment that people have got very used to.

The original Co-op business started off in Rochdale in 1844, sort of mushroomed

into an England-wide organisation, that in the end they had their own

architects and their own builders and the beautiful structures that they did, you know, they always stood out.

Like in Lancashire, in a poor mill neighbourhood, there were always

this beautiful building, the Co-op, and they always had a beautiful plaque on, "the Farnworth and

"Kearsley Co-operative Society" or "the Bolton Co-operative Society".

And it went on until it got that big I don't think they could manage it.

And of course the architecture, these lovely...

They were like the inside of a big wooden box, they were all the same

with lovely T&G boarding with lovely beadings down edge.

Ooh, good morning.

-Morning.

-Yeah, this is the Co-op.

It reminds me of when I were little all this lot in here,

when I went to the Co-op just round the corner from where we lived.

Only one difference, there's some white cloth bags hanging out of the ceiling, what the flour company...

They've got same thing but it's in a tin box in corner, I've noticed.

And the, um...

They even had one of these for cutting black twist in half,

like a guillotine, you know,

health and safety job, I don't know what they'd say about that.

Aye.

Now then, Malcolm, I know what you're doing but these lot at other end of here don't, do they?

Yeah, well, I'm going to send the money by using a system

which will take the ball and lift it up onto the track which will then be

forced down by gravity and it runs into the cash office.

There were a similar contraption to this in the Co-op in Bolton when

I were a little lad, but it worked off either a vacuum or compressed air, but it did the same thing.

It made life a lot easier for the guy behind the counter.

Here you've got interesting stuff in here, haven't you?

-Cater for the mining men, didn't you?

-Yes, we have our miners shovels...

-Yeah, yeah, big flat...

Also you have the picks. The men had to buy their own equipment.

They were on good wages then, contrary to what a lot of people think, you know.

-Yeah, it's a little bit different.

-Yeah.

It were a funny occupation, really, it varied so much depending on the price of coal and who...

In this area, it was all mines and the coal was actually king at the time so it was dependent on how much

the coal was selling for, miners would get paid.

He looked a Victorian, gold watch chain, waistcoat and so on.

But also in his views of the world he believed in the work ethic,

he believed that money should be only be made by hard labour, basically,

and he wasn't too keen on the way money is made these days which is not always directly through work.

His contribution to how we lived, I think, was a particular

understanding of how the industrial working classes lived and what was

expected of them because he was just old enough

to have heard old people talking about the age before the welfare state,

the age before a real caring about housing equality and I think in his odd little asides

he is making clear that the good old days weren't always good but they were heroic.

At Beamish they've recreated a complete pit village with the winding

engine, the head gear, the washeries, the engine sheds, the village school,

the Methodist chapel - that means no drinking.

Last but not least a beautiful row of cottages, pit man's cottages, just like they used to be.

Considering like this is a pit man's cottage, you know, it's very small.

But they've made very good use of the space, sort of thing.

I mean that in there is the parlour with the beautiful elliptical table

and just round corner there's a double bed.

You had to be ill before you moved the bed into parlour

in Lancashire, but it must have been common round here to have the bed

and the parlour all in same thing and of course the kids were upstairs you know, up in the roof space.

And in here this is the kitchen, and this is Denise who is doing this wonderful peg rug.

Well, peg rug to you but a proggy mat to us.

Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah.

-I remember me mam doing things like that after the war when times were hard.

-That's right.

That of course is the fireplace with the oven

and that round oven is particularly noted for its locality, you know,

you only ever see 'em in north east of England, never anywhere else.

Everywhere else they're all square or rectangular-shaped.

I've got one, something similar with same sort of handle but a square door.

A lot of people still use the word Victorian as a term of abuse.

It's pejorative, you know, we blame the Victorians for so many

of society's ills today, you know. The way we live in our cities,

the things we've done to our countryside, the way our factory systems work.

We seem to think that the Victorians should have been more far-sighted,

they should have been more politically correct, I suppose.

And I think that Fred, by drawing attention to their great

achievements, makes us realise that it wasn't all dark satanic mills.

I do think that there can sometimes be a problem in the programmes

that it is very celebratory of the past

and very subjective in the way that he talks about the past, and I think there are

times when you look at a worker's cottage in Beamish and it's all spick and span and you think,

actually what would it be like when somebody comes back from

the coal mine and they are grubby and they've got six kids and they've got to feed them.

You do slightly wonder whether it is a bit rose-tinted and that the reality

of working in a mine or working in a factory even though you are

surrounded by beautiful machinery which is all highly decorated,

it might have been rather less pleasant

than some of these programmes give you the idea about.

He didn't want to preserve the fact that folks

were living on a pittance in houses

with no modern facilities.

It wasn't that that he wanted to preserve, it was just purely

the craftsman side of the job, the way things were designed and built.

Fred shows his love of the Victorian age a great deal

through his appreciation of what he could see.

He looked at pumping engines being a thing of great beauty, for example, with water supply,

and he can look at the aesthetics of a piece of Victorian engineering when things were made where

form and function went hand-in-hand, whereas we are now a sort of throwaway society where something

is made to do a job and not much thought has gone towards what it looks like.

The Victorians had that sense of aesthetics and I think that appealed to Fred a great deal

and he was able to show the public, through his programmes, that appeal as well and to see that,

you know, these things didn't only look well, they performed well and they lasted a very long time.

I wonder if they'll us have a go at playing with the handles.

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