FRED DIBNAHFred Dibnah, who died on 6 November, 2004 aged 66, became an overnight television success when he was already into his forties.
Bornin Bolton,Lancashire, he was a boy who grew up with a passion for Victorian engineering - a boy who spent hours peering out of his bedroom window watching steam trains. A joiner by trade he shunned what he called 'new fangled tools and modern methods'.
He didn't blow up chimneys - he felled them. He never used dynamite, preferring to cut a mouth out at the bottom of the chimney, propping it open with telegraph poles and chocks of wood, then setting a fire which burned the wood away causing the chimney to fall to earth. Allied to his fascinating story - telling it made him a star.
Fred Dibnah was born in Bolton on 28 April, 1938.
It was a two-minute item on a local news programme that shot him to a wider audience and fame. The news clip showed Mr Dibnah swinging himself across chimney tops with ease on a rope and a small wooden platform, felling chimneys or attaching ladders to them and repairing the town hall clock in Bolton, 250 feet above the ground.
ATV producer involved Fred in eight, 30-minute documentaries; a new career and a new star was born.
The public instantly took to the bespectacled, burly, cloth capped and engaging character - and even began to understand some of his Lancastrian twang!
But though it was as a steeplejack that he caught television's eye, it was Betsy that took over.
Betsy was a steam roller and became the non-speaking star of Fred's television career.
But his love of Victorian engineers and their work paid a heavy price on his personal life. He was married three times. His first wife, Alison,mother of his three daughters, left him saying 'he is married to his engines'.
In the late 1990s Anthea Turner made a television programme with Mr Dibnah in which he argued that steam engines had been the backbone of the British Empire and its trade routes. It helped make him a popular pundit on industrial history.
Setting aside his love of machinery Fred Dibnah was a tireless charity worker and, latterly, a popular after dinner speaker.
He became ill making what was to be his last television series as he once more toured Britain for a 12- part BBC series with his steam traction engine.
He abandoned chemotherapy treatment for his kidney cancer and instead took to an 'orange and Guinness diet'.
He received an MBE for his services to heritage and broadcasting, heading for his Buckingham Palace moment aboard his green, black and gold eight ton Betsy steam engine. But he didn't attempt to drive it through the palace gates - obligingly he left it at the nearby barracks.
Survived by his six children he died in a Bolton hospice surrounded by friends and family.
Catherine Hall, production manager on his final shoot described him as 'a great bloke and unique character who will be sorely missed'.
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