Chains and Copper Fred Dibnah's Made in Britain

Fred Dibnah and his team have reached the Black Country,

on their grand tour of Britain's industrial past.

They parked their engine up at the Black Country Living Museum, here in Dudley, last night

and they're going to visit a chain maker here.

Where did that come from?

The journey has brought them here because this used to be the centre of chain making,

and chains form an important part of the engine.

Our engine's actually steered by chains.

We've come here to the Black Country Museum to see a gentleman making chains in exactly the same way

as this chain would have been made in 1912, without any fancy electric welding or anything like that.

Why is it called the Black Country?

Well, as well as making lots of chains and big anchors like these,

they dug a lot of coal for the furnaces,

but it weren't very far down, you know, and it was the pillar and store method

and, of course, they've left a lot of pillars of coal in that eventually set on fire,

and, of course, there were smoke coming out of the ground

and it were not a very nice place to live.

But all that's over with now - there's not so much of the Black Country black any more.

By the end of the 19th century, the Black Country

were world famous for the iron work that they made,

and, of course, chains were one of the main things,

but they made everything from chains for the Titanic - big links this thick -

to teeny little chains, you know, for tying your dog to the railings.

And Jeff over here, who I've known for quite a few years now...

In fact, he once had me make a link for a chain.

It weren't joined onto the chain, though. It was just a link!

-Ah, beautiful that, Jeff!

-How are you doing, all right?

-How many links have you made since I last come seeing you?

-I give up counting!

-I lost count.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah, I bet.

You know, I bought some modern chains the other day, they charged me £112,

I think £212, I think it were, for two pieces of chain about that long, that's all it amounted to,

you know and I never thought, I could have come here and got it for half the bloody price.

You'd have to have mild steel, rather than wrought iron.

-Yeah, but it doesn't matter.

-Oh, it still does the job.

-What's the biggest you can do?

The biggest I can work on is 15/16. The biggest I know on the big fires is a six-and-a-half inch diameter.

-Blimmin' heck. That's really big.

-That's swinging hammers like that.

Double heck! THEY LAUGH

-With two handles, yeah.

-That's it, two of them hammers, 28 pounds to 56 pounds.

Three of them hammers, about 140 pound.

Yeah, I once seen this archive film, making an anchor...

There must have been about seven of them with an hammer each

and a million sledge hammers all beating it

and it were going less and less and less and it were quite lop-sided.

I thought, "How are they going to get it back?"

And then, another bunch of lads appeared with lumps of two-inch bar, all sparking on the end,

and they each shoved them in and bang, bang,

and then another guy come and cut the end off and they beat it all in.

-And in excellent time. Superb.

-Yeah, all them men will be dead, won't they?

-Oh, yeah.

-Yeah.

-It's what this country was made on.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Time for a demonstration.

Alf and Jimmy are impressed.

-He's quick.

-He is quick.

I've no doubt there's a lot of skill in that.

It was all done this way at one time.

And women were involved in it, I believe, you know, like a little family business.

That's another done, quick.

We'll go and get the ale in, Jimmy, are you going to the chip shop?

Yeah, this is just the job, innit? Not too many customers.

He's gone for chips, he'll not be a minute I don't think.

-Aye, it's all right.

-Oh, he's here.

-Best fish 'n' chips in the country.

-You soon managed that, didn't you? Is these mine?

-Whichever.

Thank you. Hey, this is like the old-fashioned style, innit?

In a three-cornered bag made of newspaper.

-Smell good, don't they?

-Aye, they're lovely, these.

-Bloody hot.

-Good ale, fish and chips and a lovely place.

What the world's left behind, you know.

I bet half of them men in London, their fancy bloody suits on

and their fancy shirts and all that, they've longed for this really.

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

They longed for eating fish and chips with their fingers?

They've never had such pleasure.

-Can you play the piano, Jimmy?

-I can play a bit.

Playing the piano in a pub is a thing I've always wanted to do.

It's weird, like, me mam used to do it

and she always used to say, "Why don't you go and have piano lessons?"

Never did. When me mam died,

we get bloody ten quid for the piano, you know, it were a right beautiful thing.

She polished it every day.

Jeff, the chain maker, though, the speed which his hands work, I mean, it's really fast..

I think, everywhere we've been has been interesting, hasn't it? Every single place.

What have you learned, Fred? Nothing?

-You've seen it all before.

-Oh, no, I have, I've learned bits of things, you know.

I'm trying to think what I've learned...

You always seem to be telling these other people how to do their jobs.

Yeah, well, it's, you know...

The guy at the Severn Valley Railway, he didn't know about bananas, did he?

I was just going to say... What you laughing at?

Bananas in boiler making are a very important bit.

If you put grease on it starts corrosion off, you know,

and then the boiler maker, he said, "Daub it all round the tube plate."

When you're banging it in, they don't pick up, you know, like, it's as though you put grease on.

Maybe Mr Brunel, if he'd have known about bananas,

he might have got the Great Eastern in the water a bit quicker!

Yeah. You never know.

Copper was used in great abundance for the manufacturing

of locomotives and all sorts of other types of steam engines.

The high-pressure steam pipes are all made from copper

and the bearings and the fancy bits, the name plates and such as that,

are made from an alloy of copper and tin and lead mixed together -

non-ferrous metal for making such things.

And on the next stage of their grand tour,

Fred and his team are going to see a mine where a lot of the copper

for a traction engine like this would have come from.

It means there's a long journey ahead,

as they travel from Dudley in the West Midlands

right across North Wales to Amlwch on the Isle of Anglesey.

Before the Industrial Revolution, Wales was a rural country with a population of only half a million.

But slate quarrying, lead mining and copper mining transformed Wales

into the great industrial nation that it became in the Victorian era.

The Isle of Anglesey became famous because of the Parys Mountain,

which, at one time, was the largest copper mine in all of the world.

But it's slow progress, so Roger's decided it's quicker to walk.

Go on, go straight up, Fred.

Yeah, right, what we'll do now, we'll take the van off,

shove it down that hole there, we'll go exploring the mountains with the light engine.

-Just with the engine.

-Yeah. We might end up somewhere where we can't turn it round.

They reckon you can chuck your car in there and it disintegrates.

-Disintegrates?

-Aye, yeah.

Look at that down there.

We'll leave the engine here and go and have a look over the edge.

Blimmin' heck! That's a fair hole, innit?

They've shifted a ton or two out of there.

It's a bloody big hole, innit? You can see an old tunnel there at the front of it.

You wonder if, well, obviously they've open casted it, but...

I believe partly collapsed and partly open cast.

-Yeah, well sides are felling, yeah.

-Sides are felling, yeah.

-Look at all the different colours.

-It's like a lunar landscape, innit?

-Mmm.

-Yeah, yeah. Let's go and see if we can find an engine...

There's an engine house somewhere. I've seen it from down below. Come on, we'll go and have a look.

Come on, Roger!

-Good afternoon.

-You all right?

-Fine, Fred, nice to meet you.

-I've come to have a look at your pumping house.

-It's one of the oldest in Wales.

Yeah. At least the masonry's still here, innit?

Yeah, it's, er... It's holding down now.

Since they did the work with the Welsh Mines Preservation Trust,

it's really consolidated it, it can't deteriorate any more.

They left the holding-down bolts.

That's right. It'd be nice to get the engine back again, but...

It'll have been made into knives and forks about 27 times, you know.

How long have they been mining on this site?

Well, we're going back almost 4,000 years to start with.

-As you know of.

-As we know of.

We've discovered stone tools, artefacts underground,

and we dated that from the timber and charcoal that we found

and then the main start of the mining operations here were 1768,

that's when the great discovery came about. And the story goes

that, er, March 2nd 1768, after four years of searching on the mountain...

-Six weeks before they were due to give up.

-Yeah..

-That's right...

-Lots of good tales about mining like that!

-Just before they were giving up.

Then it became of the biggest in the world, or the biggest!

-That's right, that's right...

-There's 85 shafts.

-Really?!

-3,000 people employed here.

-Mm-hm.

Amlwch was the biggest town in Wales at the time

and they had fires all over the mountain as they were smelting them.

You can see all the red, red stuff everywhere.

-Yeah, that's the remains of the smelters.

-Yeah.

It was very successful and it was run by a man called Thomas Williams

from the other side of Anglesey, who became

a major entrepreneur in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution

and he not only mined here.

He got the smelters as well and when he smelted the copper

he made it into sheet, or he made it into blanks,

and he delivered it to people who needed it.

He ran a whole concern all the way from

primary production to sale, almost to the end user.

He became known as the copper king and this was his copper kingdom.

The copper from Parys Mountain was made into sheets

and would then go to a copper spinners like this.

There are not many of them left, but Fred found one when he was in the East Midlands,

-a bit earlier on his grand tour.

-Here we are.

We've come to witness the ancient art of metal spinning at Mr Hopkins's.

In the olden days, they used to make everything metal spun,

like pots and pans and all that sort of thing and lamp shades and all

and here, they do traction engine chimney tops and cones for spitfires.

I bet there's not a great demand for them really.

-Morning, Geoffrey.

-Morning, Fred, how are you?

I'm all right, mate, I'm all right.

We've come to have a look at your wonderful metal spinning operation.

-Oh, yes, yes.

-I've done a little bit of metal spinning myself

and I got this book, Do It Yourself Metal Spinning.

I got a pile of disasters and, in the end, I actually gave up

and went seeing a proper metal spinner and he made it look so easy, you know.

When we've learnt young lads, it's three to five years before

they're proficient at doing most of the work that comes in.

A few days on one particular job and you've learnt it - that's it.

But then, the next job is another challenge and the next job after that.

As I say, at the moment we've got a job on.

So if you want to have a look, he's going to start spinning it.

We put soap on, put oil on, and then gently moved the metal.

You can't force the metal, it just wrinkles up.

You've literally got to move the metal along and sort of stroke it along

and it's got to be a fairly gentle action,

because if you get too hard you open the grain in the metal and tear through it.

He makes it look so easy.

Well, yes, he's made a lot of them over the years.

You just get used to it.

-Does he have to use a lot of pressure?

-Yes. I think that's one of the difficulties.

I think, when you're learning, particularly on hot days,

you really put some pressure on the side of your body.

Just trimming the edge through, any surface metal, just trimming that off.

-That's where I were going wrong when I were playing at it at home.

-Yeah.

-Good that, innit?

-Aye.

It isn't hot at all, it just warms, you get a little bit of heat on it.

Done a lovely job, hasn't he?

-Lovely job there, mate.

-Got to saw the bottom off.

-Yeah.

We produce the top piece and the two halves are joined together and we roll one over the other.

-So that's that one, if you want to come and have a go.

-Yeah, I'll try - have a bit of a go!

Yeah, but a smaller one than that one.

Yes, a bit smaller. On a steel tool it'll make it a bit easier.

-Hang onto the peg, Fred, hang onto the peg, that's it.

-Yeah, yeah.

Off you go. Not too hard, keep it stroking, keep stroking out.

Yeah, we're getting better, aren't we?

You're getting better now, Fred.

You'll get an order for these at the rate we're going.

It's a good job it's not a candlestick, candle would be like that!

Just put a bit of soap on. Take that edge over now.

If you want to move your hand another...

And just take the edge over now.

That's it, job done.

-Who can we give that to?

-And that's it.

-We've got the chimney. Now to make the rest of the engine.

-Yeah!

Aye, by tea time, we should have mastered it.

It's a good one.

-We'll have a go in the shed when we get home.

-That's lovely that, innit?

-First class, that, Fred.

-Aye, do you like that?

-Knock us a set of candlesticks up.

LAUGHTER Yeah, all right.

And there it is - finely spun copper.

The engine is full of shining copper and brass work,

all made in this way and all mined from places like Parys Mountain.

Back in Anglesey, it's time for a chat about the mining.

Right, Fred, these are the photographs I was talking about earlier up on the mine.

Just a few here. Bryan, my colleague here,

has got a terrific number of photographs,

and has really spent years and years researching up there.

So this shows you the main drainage mine level that we've got.

-Some fair stalactites and stalagmites.

-That's right.

These ladders that we're using underground

are the ladders from around 1840 and they're still in good nick.

-You can still climb them?

-Yes, we use those every night we go down.

We'll be going down tonight, to use the same ladders.

It's amazing when you think of these miners, walking two miles to the mine

and going down almost 1,000 feet, you know, doing eight-hour day,

then coming up again 1,000 feet and then back home again.

And then working a small holding, perhaps, or going fishing.

The ladies there, the copper ladies, they worked a 12-hour day,

so kneeling in front of a knock stone, breaking the... breaking the ore.

Well, Alf was saying that he's been a coal miner,

and out of all the mining activity he's seen, he'd still prefer that.

-It was an easier job than any of these lads had.

-Yeah.

It was preferable to be working where you could see roof just above your head,

than looking up from one of them levels

and you can't see nothing, it's so high.

It's a bit frightening that, to me anyway.

You don't know what's gonna come flying out of the sky.

-You only need a little bit falling a long way.

-They had men on ladders, with hammers - tin, tin, tin.

That's the other thing - looking at the sky.

At one place we went in, there was 40 foot ladders still in there,

with a plank strung across, and they'd be working on them

with drilling machines, hammers, you name it.

So, no, I prefer coal mining every day.

It's a bit more time in getting squashed!

Michael Faraday came there.

Of course, most of the intelligentsia, I suppose,

came to Amlwch to have a look at the mines and he was taken underground.

And they had him kitted out in flannel clothes to absorb the sweat and the wet,

because going down the shafts, the pumps were going,

and they were all leaking, so he'd be sprayed every fathom down.

And anyway, he got into one of the great stopes

and he could see these little lights flickering like little fairies everywhere,

and anyway, he sat down and he was given a barrel to sit on

and he plonked his candle down on this and he realised it was a gunpowder barrel.

Miners didn't seem to care a great deal.

-It would have been a quick way up out of the mine.

-Yeah. Shot out like a canyon!

THEY LAUGH

What really fascinated me were the bloody beautiful colours

of all the top of the hill, you know, bloody orange, purple, yellow, red,

every colour you can think of. Really lovely.

A lady comes from Greece every year and she collects samples

of all the colours and takes them back and paints with them.

-Yeah.

-She just grinds them up and uses them as a paint medium.

The time to go there is the setting sun just after rain.

-The colours are so vivid, beautiful.

-I should imagine.

-NARRATOR:

-As well as copper, North Wales was also the centre of the slate industry.

From Anglesey, Fred is heading for the Welsh Slate Museum at Llanberis to see the workshops there.

But first, he's got to find somewhere to park the engine.

So he's making a little detour to the Ffestiniog Railway,

which was built to transport slate from Ffestiniog to the sea at Porthmadog.

Looking well today, Jack.

This is a nice one, innit? 1891.

-Hello, Fred, welcome to the Ffestiniog Railway.

-Hello.

How are you, mate, all right?

-Very well, yes, very well.

-Yes, I wonder how much of the engine is like original?

Well, that's always an interesting question.

-We think the boiler is.

-Yeah, yeah.

-We think that's 113 years old.

Does that make it the oldest one in Britain?

I reckon it's getting a bit that way.

No doubt it will have had a bit of treatment,

but most of it, the boiler barrel will be original, maybe.

Well, this ended up in Surrey in the late 1960s, some chap bought it, a guy called Bernard Latham

and he took it and put it in his back garden in Surrey and goodness knows what the neighbours thought.

But he brought it here in the early nineties and since then we've been looking after it.

I bet it never thought it'd end up back... back in its old hunting grounds.

-And moving slate wagons around as well.

-Yeah.

They're interesting in themself, aren't they?

When you think of thousands and thousands of tons of slate that them have moved...

-Over the years.

-..to the rooftops of the world.

Would you like to come down to our works and see where we restore them?

-It would be a pleasure.

-Right, on you pop.

WHISTLE BLOWS

It runs nice, don't it?

-Nice and sweet.

-Yeah, it's not bad.

The wheel profile, the profiles of the wheels,

are starting to get a bit old and worn, so we need to have a go at that this winter as well.

-This is my Mrs.

-And the new offspring!

-Yeah, she's only three weeks old.

-FRED LAUGHS

Hello!

-Having fun?

-Oh, aye, yes, easier than working - messing about, you know.

All right then, Fred, I've got the token.

Right, what shall I do with this?

As long as we don't lose it, we're all right!

She doesn't roll very well even though we're going down hill.

The bearings need sorted.

-How many miles long is your railway?

-13½ miles this one, yeah.

-Yeah.

But it's a bit ironic, it takes a good hour to do it each way.

Just coming down now towards the one-mile-long embankment, right across the estuary.

-Is that a new place or is it...?

-No, that was built in 1836.

It's how the railway started, transporting stuff across there.

-What it did, it cut the sea off from the land behind it and it's created more farming land.

-Yeah.

So in a place like North Wales, where farming land's at a premium,

then it paid the chap who built it quite a bit of money.

You can see there the old cliffs there - they've got trees growing on them now.

-We're coming to a tunnel.

-This is a replacement bridge that was built in the 1960s.

-Yeah.

WHISTLE BLOWS

Thanks, Bob.

The Ffestiniog Railway was an industrial railway built to transport slate.

Today it's a tourist attraction carrying holiday makers through the Snowdonia National Park.

And the restoration and maintenance of the engines is done here at the Boston Lodge Works.

Of course, this is one of the Ffestiniog Railways' single-fairlie locomotives.

-Like half a one.

-Yeah, it's half a one.

You can see the bogey there on the front is powered and the one at the back is unpowered.

Very smooth, very smooth engine, very smooth riding.

It was built in the 1870s and by 1930

it was completely worn out and they scrapped it,

so all that was left was the chimney and the reversing lever.

-And you started from that?

-Started from that.

This is our newest engine, but round the corner here is Prince,

which is the oldest working steam engine in the world.

It dates back to 1863 and, when the railway closed in 1946,

there was a new boiler for this one in the workshops,

so when the revivalists came along to reopen the line,

here was a new boiler just waiting to go,

so this was the first engine running.

Because of that, it has a very special place in Ffestiniog Railway history.

Last year, we were opening a new section of our Welsh Highland Railway,

from Waunfawr up to Rhyd Ddu on the south side of Snowdon

and we took this engine over there to open that new section

and Prince Charles came along and actually drove this engine and it made his day,

-having a drive with it.

-Royal connections, then.

-Yeah, absolutely.

And now, there's some work to be done.

And a chance for Fred to do some driving.

So then, Fred, we said it was all about moving slate about and here you are -

an authentic Ffestiniog Railway slate train. It's all yours, my friend.

Are the wagons full?

Aye, they are.

Now you've got a speedometer up there, Fred.

Anywhere between 10 and 15 is fine. Modern luxury, eh?

-A speedometer!

-Yeah.

Well, I don't know about you, Fred, but I reckon that's one of the finest views you can get.

Yeah, beautiful, yeah. Like Lawrence of Arabia, you know.

Do I slow down at the bend or just leave it?

Well, it's a 15 mph limit on the bend.

We're only doing 14, so we're fine.

I'm enjoying this!

Whenever you see a W sign, you know what to do, don't you?

-No, I don't, no!

-Blow the whistle.

-Oh, right.

You can see a red light, we're just going onto a track circuit.

When that detects us it'll set the station up for us,

and it'll give us a green light, so it should change at any minute.

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