Changing the Landscape Fred Dibnah's World of Steam, Steel and Stone

This rather sad-looking railway viaduct behind me,

it means a lot to me, you know,

because right from being a very small boy,

I used to go climbing in the iron girders when I were about eight years old,

and when a locomotive came along with a load of coal wagons on,

the whole lot used to shake about.

As Fred Dibnah was growing up in Bolton,

he was surrounded by canals, railway lines, bridges and tunnels.

He was always fascinated by great civil engineering projects like this,

and by the lives of the men who changed the landscape of Britain forever.

But the navvies who built the canals and the railways

were not the first engineers to leave their mark on our landscape.

This is one of the oldest megalithic monuments in Europe, it's even older than Stonehenge.

It were developed, so they say,

somewhere round about 2500 to 2200 BC, and that's a long time ago.

The whole site covers a vast area, you know,

I mean, you can actually see some of the earliest examples of building and construction work

in all of Great Britain,

and this great trench covers three quarters of a mile and 15 feet deep and dug with antlers.

He wasn't the only person doing the sort of thing he was doing,

but he was looking at

a whole range of things.

I think that's what's impressive about him, he wasn't simply looking

at the things which he himself had dealt with over many years,

but he understood such a range of structures

of engineering enterprises and what had brought them about.

Its one heck of an achievement, innit, for 4,500 years old, eh?

Its tremendous size and the depth of the ditch...

Yeah, and it'll have lost a bit of depth, really, won't it,

when you think of all the years and the erosion,

and the washing of the stuff back down the hole, as you might say.

We know from early excavations, we're only looking at the top third,

the rest is filled with material that's slumped in over the centuries.

Now, then, how did they do it? That's the thing, so long ago.

Well, simple tools, Fred, but well-organised labour, I think, I mean, what have we got here?

-Yeah.

-The most important tool that survives is the red deer antler pick.

Of course, they could have had other tools -

of wood and basketry and so on, that wouldn't survive to us,

but this is the one that is so widely found on these early prehistoric sites.

-It's important, Fred, not to think of it as a pickaxe.

-Yeah, right, like that, yeah.

It hasn't got the weight. Don't think of it the way we use a pickaxe.

On prehistoric antlers, very often,

the back of what's called the coronet,

where the antler joins the skull, that's it,

is heavily battered on worn examples,

which suggests they use something like a maul or a mallet

and drove the point in and then used it as a levering tool.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

-Then, of course, for shovelling,

these ox shoulder blades are sometimes found on these sites,

and they've always been cited as the equivalent of a shovel.

It's actually a little questionable whether they would really shift

enough material, and whether you have enough leverage.

Yeah, these stones, they were very similar material to Stonehenge.

They are exactly the same - sarsen stone, it's called - as the outer trilithons at Stonehenge.

How many stones do you think there were in the whole circle, altogether?

We think there were 98 stones, 98 or 99 in the outer circle,

and of course there are the smaller features of the two inner circles inside.

I think Fred made a lot of people keener to visit the past,

because he had a particularly accessible way of talking about things.

Yeah, they wouldn't have been too hot on surveying in them days, would they?

He didn't come to it from the point of view of an academic,

or any other sort of middle class approach really.

I mean, he is seen as sort of the common man,

and I think that helped to make it more accessible.

Fred made connections between early engineering and the way Britain's landscape changed,

and he did it in the voice of a man who knew all about the construction industry.

When the Romans came to Britain, they brought with them far more sophisticated building techniques

than what we'd ever had before.

Hadrian's Wall, here, is the biggest monument that the Roman Empire left behind for us.

Work started in the year of 122 AD, and it took six years to build, you know.

I mean, they worked bloody hard, it's an amazing piece of work, you know.

And for 300 years, it was the Roman Empire's northwest frontier.

Its purpose was to stop the marauding Scotsmen getting across the border,

or as Hadrian put it, to stop the barbarians getting towards the Romans.

Of all the forts along Hadrian's Wall,

Housesteads is one of the best preserved.

You can see the remains of the governor's house,

and a magnificent...drainage system that works its way all do the side of the hill.

The bathhouse and the latrines or the toilets, you know,

it's all here and, you know, it's been like nicely uncovered,

as you might say, so everybody can see just really what it were like.

This really is one of the highlights of the whole fort, you know,

the communal bath tub and the communal toilets,

and it's got a rather ingenious water course system.

They didn't have toilet paper then, they had sponges.

When you were sat chatting with your mate on the old thunderbox,

you reached over with your sponge and washed it in the groove, which, of course, is round here.

This is the groove here that... it sort of ran,

the overflow water ran and dripped into here and ran round here,

it went all the way down there, round the end and back along here,

and then into the main flow of water that - God knows where that come from -

but it took all the effluent away, downhill, down there,

round the corner, and back down, and down that tunnel there,

that mysteriously disappears underneath the fields.

But I suppose it all ran out down the hill there, where the sheep are,

and it must have been a bit stinky down there in them days,

you know, it's all the... it's amazing how it's all survived.

Stretching right across the country, Hadrian's Wall was a great feat of civil engineering.

But it was not until the first canals were built, in the 18th century,

that anything else on quite the same scale was attempted.

The canals were like the arteries of the Industrial Revolution.

They helped to provide cheaper goods and raw materials.

They also cut the travelling time down from London to Birmingham to a speedy four or five days,

and it all started off round here at Worsley, near where I live.

Some say the Duke of Bridgewater was thwarted in love,

so he channelled all his energies into a grand plan to build the canal from Worsley to Manchester

to get coal there for all the spinning mills that were being built at the time,

and of course, he engaged the services of a very clever engineer called James Brindley.

This is Worsley Canal Basin, and 250 years ago,

it were a hive of activity round here.

Little boats - like that one over there -

came through the remains of this here sluice gate here,

and of course, out of this tunnel over here, loaded with coal,

and when they got it in the basin, they offloaded it into bigger canal boats, and off it went to Manchester.

This tunnel behind me here is the entrance to a labyrinth of 52 miles of underground canal workings,

which of course, connected the Duke of Bridgewater's coal workings to the Bridgewater Canal.

Fred makes the past accessible,

and he does that through a very personal journey

through objects and places.

He constantly refers to his own experience,

which means that we can then enjoy it through his eyes,

and we want to experience it alongside him.

When I were a lad, me dad used to say, "Come on today, while we're out,

"we'll go and look at the Eighth Wonder of the World, Barton Bridge."

We used to bike all the way from Bolton to here just to watch it.

In them days, it were quite busy, it moved with monotonous regularity.

When the canal were first being built, WG Armstrong and Company got the contract for all the hydraulics,

which all along the canal from Liverpool to Manchester, worked all the locks and the, the bridges,

the swing bridges at Warrington, and all that, but this bit here is the most impressive bit...

where 800 tons of water down there supported on a central pivot,

and it's a slice of the Bridgewater Canal, which of course, also goes to Manchester,

from the Duke of Bridgewater's mines, when he had any.

The thing is, shortly, it's going to, it's going to turn through 90 degrees,

and we'll see another boat sail across the top, and the Manchester Ship Canal.

Fred's enthusiasm for the canal network,

and the way that he was able to talk about it,

and explain how things were built,

and go to places, which are very inspiring places,

and people seeing those on film,

it did make people want to go out and know more about the canal network.

It's not uncommon for someone to say, "I saw this on television".

Often, it will be from one of Fred's programmes.

I mean, really, I suppose the credit goes to the guys that actually built all of this, you know.

The main canals they got people working that they called navvies or navigators,

-cos they were building a...

-Water.

A waterway...and I suspect that when it came to the tunnels,

they got the same guys maybe doing the actual mining work,

but the actual construction and the brick work and the arches and everything in the tunnel,

they probably got more skilled labour in to do that.

Modern canal boats have got engines, but of course, in the olden days they had horses.

What did they do with the horse when they come to a tunnel?

Well, it was quite simple, really.

They used to either let the horse wander over the top of the hill itself,

or one of the boat crew would lead it over, one of the kids maybe,

and then they'd have to use manpower to get the boat.

What, 70 ton of tackle!

Yeah, there'd probably be about 30 ton of goods in the boat,

the boat would probably weigh about 10-15 tons.

-Yeah, yeah.

-One method was to use a boat shaft and push on the roof of the tunnel,

but that used to wear the bricks away, as you see here.

Yeah, I noticed lot of pointing in the middle.

That's it, so the canal company owners preferred them to use the art of legging.

You could hire professional leggers to do the job.

Back in the 1700s, it would have cost you one and sixpence to get your boat through the tunnel,

-and it would take about four hours to get a loaded boat through.

-Blooming heck.

And they'd work seven days a week, including Christmas Day, for boats waiting to pass.

Does anybody ever do that now?

Oh, yeah, all the visitors come along, and things have changed a bit.

People used to get paid to do the legging, now people pay us to let them do the legging.

Do you want to have a go?

-Aye. If you want, yes.

-Right, we've got a legging board here.

Put the legging board across the middle of the boat, and this is where we have to get friendly, Fred.

-Yes, right.

-So we've got to lie flat on this, with our bottoms near the edge.

-Yeah, our backs, yeah.

Feet up on the wall. If we're tall enough, though you and I might not be able to do it,

put our heads on each other's shoulders and just walk along the tunnel.

-We'll have a go.

-So...

How is that?

Right.

I'm going to enjoy this.

-OK.

-Yeah.

-Drop down flat.

-Ooh, like that, yeah. Right.

-OK.

Which way are we going? Towards the...?

Push your feet towards the stern of the boat, towards the cabin.

-Are you all right?

-Yeah, I'm fine.

-You see why I get the visitors to do it, though.

-Yeah!

I don't fancy it for about two mile, though!

-So, you don't want to do it for a living, then?

-No, no, sooner be a traction engine driver.

-Yeah, yeah.

-You got to have bloody super legs.

I think me cap's falling off.

You're not doing bad though, Fred.

No, no, no.

Pity you can't use your steam engine.

Either you or me losing some money there.

They had to dig the construction shafts down, and they had to go in two directions,

met up with a team digging from another construction site.

Yeah, same as the railway jobs.

Light at the end of the tunnel!

Fred has shown us the importance of the everyday,

of the history all around us,

of the history on our doorstep,

that history isn't only something

that you sort of pay to go and see

in special heritage hotspots, it's something that's everywhere,

and it's a way of looking at where you are.

Well...we're now about to go over

Mr Telford's famous aqueduct.

I've read a lot about it, and seen it on postcards and all.

Sorry I can't pay more attention, I'm steering the ship,

and the sides are very thin, made of cast iron,

and number one - it probably would be better if I got it lined up right.

-You're OK, yeah, yeah.

-No doubt it has had a bash or two in its time, has it?

-There we go, it has, yeah.

-Yeah, yeah.

Right, we're just going on now.

How much space have we got on each side?

When the boat's on it, you got about three inches. Three or four inches.

Yeah. Yeah, well, we're going to bump into the side here.

Are all the bolts, the nuts and bolts on the flanges outside?

Yeah, they got plates with the nuts and bolts on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They did reckon that they used the ox blood and that when they did the...

Oh, yeah, in the Welsh flannel and red lead.

I wonder what the other set, these other holes were for, in top.

Don't know, it never had a rail, as far as we know.

How long, roughly, did it take them to build the thing?

It was ten years, started in 1795.

-Fair amount of time. They didn't do it in a hurry, did they?

-Oh no, no.

-How high is it here?

-126 feet at the highest point.

Well, this is an interesting bit. Is this about the middle?

Ah, we're roughly getting on for the middle now, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's a change of direction in the slabs, ain't there? Yeah.

And it carries the Shropshire Union Canal over the waters in the River Dee.

Some winters, very hard winters...

-Oh aye, frost.

-You have to break the ice on it, push the sides out and they do break the ice on it.

Aye, that is an important thing, isn't it, that?

-Yes.

-That if it did freeze, it'd not do it any good.

-No, well, we have had times when it's been a foot thick of ice.

-Yeah.

-On top.

How, how deep is it?

It's about five foot in the middle of the trough there.

-So, you'd get an old-fashioned canal boat...

-Oh, yeah.

Load of coal on, it'd come over easy, wouldn't it?

So long as it's a 6'10" wide boat, you're OK.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now then, this bridge, this aqueduct, has a strange name that I can't pronounce,

so I'm going to let you do it...

Yeah, it's called the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.

-The Pont...

-Pontcysyllte.

-Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.

-Yes.

-Told you I'd get it right.

-Bit of practice.

-Yeah.

He was always pointing out the history of how the canal system had developed,

and how it had been influenced by the railways and the roads beyond,

so I think he was very effective at being able to tell the story of transport development in the UK.

The aqueduct isn't the only great engineering feat of Thomas Telford that can be seen in North Wales.

This historic suspension bridge near Conwy Castle was designed by Telford

for the great highway from Chester to Holyhead.

It was built at the same time as the one he built at the Menai Straits, and was opened in 1826.

The first suspension bridge in Europe had been built over the River Tees in 1741,

and it was revolutionary because it used chains,

and the idea soon caught on all over Europe, you know.

It was Telford and Captain Samuel Brown who perfected the manufacturing of wrought iron chains like these,

and it enabled them to build this one and the one over the Menai Straits.

Telford surveyed quite a few places round Conwy for his bridge,

but he selected this place here near the castle, because the rock for the anchors,

the anchor chambers, was superior to anywhere else, and there were plenty of it.

It started in 1822, when the first stones were laid,

and then they got the chains across in rather an unconventional way.

They built a rope, ordinary rope bridge first, and started from each end, advancing towards the centre.

It must have been a bit nervy with all that tonnage resting on ordinary ropes,

and then finally the middle pin went in and the things, once they'd got the chains across,

it were quite a simple job putting the vertical bolts or bars down to the road surface,

building the road on it, and in all, it took a little more than four years, I think, to construct.

All the ironwork was made in a workshop in Shrewsbury,

and basically, each chain consists of five bars about ten feet long,

by about four by about an inch and a quarter thick, with an eye forged on each end,

and they're all held together by fish plates that are spaced in between them,

and then two great bolts slammed through the lot, about three inches in diameter.

There's certainly a good bit of drilling and fixing, it's sort of... stood the test of time.

Once Telford had got the great chains across, the rest of it were pretty simple, you know,

the vertical tie rods and the deck, and by 1826, it were finished and open to traffic.

And in 1849, Robert Stephenson came along and built this thing here,

which were his railway to Holyhead,

and of course, basically, it's just a great big iron box riveted together.

I suppose there's more to it than that, really,

but that's what, you know, it looks like to most people.

Another great feat of railway bridge building.

Before Queen Victoria came to the throne, Great Britain had been still a largely agricultural land,

even though the development of the steam engine, and the improvement in iron-making

had fuelled the Industrial Revolution.

A Georgian farmer looking out of his bedroom window

would have seen a scene similar to that over there, even as late as 1820.

The coming of the railways put the Industrial Revolution into top gear,

and it completely changed the face of the country,

and it made transport all over the show possible,

moving much heavier weights than had been done before,

and up till these things, you know,

we were horse and carts on dirt roads and sinking in the mud in the winter.

With the application of the new technology to transport,

and the development of the world's first successful railway,

from the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign to the end of it,

she saw England change dramatically.

Not only did she see the country covered by a vast network of railways,

she saw sail give way to steam on the oceans,

the great spread of industry and chimneys and pollution,

and the first electric trams, and even the motor car.

TRAM BELL RINGS

I think he opened people's eyes to this history all around them,

particularly in industrial areas,

and after all, the Industrial Revolution changed every town in this country.

Every town in this country suddenly got, you know, a railway,

it suddenly got water, it suddenly got, later on, gas and then electricity,

and so on, all of which was a sort of all-pervading change,

and people haven't tended to recognise just how significant that change was.

During the early part of Queen Victoria's reign,

most towns were quite small, you know,

and the fact that we had this great wealth of coal and iron ore changed all that, you know.

It turned us into a vast industrial society, the great empire, and we half ruled the world.

The rise in manufacturing and mining and trade and industry brought us,

of course, great wealth, and it completely changed the face of the countryside.

Pit headgears and pit villages, like this one here at Beamish, began to appear all over the country,

to fuel the great industrial expansion of the time.

Fred has been able to explain what motivated these people

and really, on the level of knowledge and understanding

which existed at the time, what gigantic leaps they were taking

in transforming what was really an agricultural or an agrarian economy into an industrial economy,

introducing new technologies and building new infrastructure for their nation.

Railways became a great symbol of our industrial might and ingenuity,

and of course, it were very important to us, I suppose, in early Victorian times I mean,

this wonderful bridge behind me actually copied off a Roman viaduct somewhere in Spain,

you know, so really, the technical stuff of the early days of railway building,

they copied off the Romans.

Getting into his real passion,

in the 19th century,

of the extraordinary endeavours

of engineers who are still much less well known than they ought to be,

both for their world achievement and what their vision was,

how they managed to carry things through, and I think bringing that out,

and putting to an audience who are quite unaccustomed to that sort of thing, was brilliant.

It's made a lot of people think a great deal more about the bridges they go across,

and the great structures they pass.

By the end of Queen Victoria's reign, they were spanning much greater spans than this,

like the Forth Bridge, and the bridge at Saltash.

Really, our engineers and our civil engineers,

what made them heroes in the eyes of the Victorians, I think,

were the way that they covered England, in a matter of a few years,

with the biggest railway network in the world.

A bit like motorways today, but there were twice as many railways.

For Fred, the greatest of the Victorian engineers was Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

His papers are kept at Bristol University Library.

He was obviously a man of great ambition and drive.

I mean, he spent lots of time away from home and his family and all that,

but he did keep in touch, he wrote back home from time to time.

There's a lovely letter here to his wife Mary,

that shows what sort of a guy he were really, you know.

He says "I have walked today 18 miles from Bathford Bridge and I'm not really tired", you know.

It goes a bit further on and says that if he'd have got there a bit earlier,

he'd have caught the train down to London and come back on the goods train early in the morning.

What a fella, you know? It's harder than climbing chimneys, that.

And here's a lovely letter from Stephenson to Brunel, and it says,

"Dear Brunel, on the 11th, I shall be going down to Conwy and the Straits,

"and I shall be delighted if you will come with me and give the aid of your thoughts about these tubes."

There were big tubes on the bridge.

"Both as to the riveting and hoisting, I think you will be pleased,"

"and we could then discuss not only a mode of punching..." -

that must have been like punching the rivet holes through the metal plates -

but lots of other things. It's really nice.

While Stephenson were building his railway from London to Birmingham, and his line to Holyhead,

Brunel were down here, doing his Great Western Railway,

and of course, from London to Chippenham, it were quite flat,

but when he got here, in between Chippenham and Bath,

there were this great lump called Box Hill,

and he decided that he would drive a tunnel straight through it.

It involved, of course, a lot of deep cuttings,

and of course, the Box Tunnel here behind me,

which is over two miles long,

and at the time of its building, was the longest railway tunnel ever attempted.

It was a huge undertaking, apart from the steam pumps to keep back the water,

the black powder for blasting the rock,

literally hundreds of men and horses, and the whole proceedings lit by candle power.

I mean, when you think about it, what an achievement, you know.

Often, we take engineering

or industry for granted.

We just pass through the great tunnels,

across the great bridges of our railway systems,

without really thinking about how they were made,

and the sacrifices and the innovations that went into that,

and when he shows us something like the Forth Bridge,

suddenly it makes it clear that this is a huge undertaking,

and something that we should still be proud of,

that this is part of our heritage.

Really, this is the principle of the cantilever bridge,

very similar to the Forth Bridge.

As you can see, I mean, it's supporting the whole weight of my wife here,

with not, you know, not too much effort.

I mean if I were replaced by a girder, or one up and one down,

it would be with struts supporting in the middle,

it would be quite successful, you know, and it's creaking a bit, but it's holding the weight.

Basically, this is the principle of the cantilever bridge, and it's rather a clever idea.

This bit here in me sort of left hand is the cantilever,

and of course, this other bit is the counterbalance,

that you know, actually stops the thing from falling over.

The bit in the middle is, on the Forth Bridge,

I think it's about 200 and odd foot above the surface of the Forth,

you know, its an interesting piece of iron work.

But we've actually proved and, you know, shown you how it can actually be done,

with a few sticks, and two chairs, and some big lumps of rock.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media 2006

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