1979: Steeplejack FRED DIBNAH takes down a MASSIVE chimney BRICK by BRICK | BBC Archive

It's not so nice on a Monday morning when it's cold and the wind is blowing and you look up, you know, and you think, oh God, you know, I'm sorry this year, it's been windy almost every day, I don't think we've ever had it around. from a month where the weather has been really decent, it's been blowing force 9 or raining or, you know, snowing or really cold, um, so you suffered some days, it can be terrible on the ground, you know? and then you climbed the ladder. And uh, go through the fog and it's like being on a plane, you can see all the

chimney

s, the towers, the church staples and the hills outside the city sticking out through all these clouds and the sun shining down on the beautiful um , my camera has never worked. true, however, when it's over, you know and you can see when the rain is coming, you know, half an hour before it comes, it's on its way, you can see, you know, miles and miles, the best thing about summer was the sun, you know , and everyone below is sweating. far in and you were up there in the nice cool breeze blowing, you know, beautiful, it's a strange thing once you start, you get addicted to it, you just live it, you know, like day and night, think about it, He talks about it some days.

I don't want to go, do you know how the hell I started this job? You know, but once you start to break down, I always feel like you know when I'm really putting a big pile of staging on the top of the fireplace and it's okay when I get it all ready you know it's a work of art you know a masterpiece this particular job I have the contract for seven thousand pounds to knock it down a

brick

at a time to the bottom when I first arrived at Luke Bitter Coal Mall with the wind howling from the mountains, you know, and I thought, look, Do you know how they always send for me in the middle of winter?

Anyway, it's okay for all the powers that lie and everything I want. seven thousand pounds you say um and I didn't think I'd get the job, you know anyway it turned out that they honored me by giving it to me um which means the other guys wanted a hell of a lot more reason for the price if I really didn't want the job, like there was been a repair job, which, you know, on average

takes

a month, five weeks, it's not that bad, but when it comes to months and months, you see it's a bit. It's different, too, when there's only one of you, uh, and such a gigantic pile of

brick

s, you know you must have a great art to take it on on your own.

The heather here, there are too many buildings that you know you have to let down. something like or blow it up like some people do, the chief justice won't let them blow it up so I have to take you down and cover it up once you don't think about how long it's going to take. You know you have to keep criticizing some. I've been here too long already. You know, about three months and I've done that. In my opinion, I'm pretty upset, but the weather hasn't been weird, you know, and no, we. We have the opportunity to do something.

We have everything working fine. Oh, it should work like the ducts on the bottom work fine, so you can have a lot of problems with them if you don't place the plates correctly. They keep getting discouraged and you're always waiting for the block at the bottom to remove the bricks and you have to make sure it's out of the way because if you drop one and it goes off and it's in my bucket neck, it's dead on the top like if you were alone, you feel a little lonely lying or usually there are only birds and, from time to time, I have a friend who comes to see me lying down when he has a raised shin and we have a little chat like I should do something, you know, I feel better when I do it, you know, I can come home at tea time and demolish a big bumper and a big plate of chips and something, if you're fucking around. about pointing around someone's window frames, uh, stuff like that, they'll get sick of it, you know, I know it's exciting, you know, there's nothing to fight with, you're really playing dice with death with an old lid rotten in the

chimney

, you know there are Many men have died playing with those things.

I have never fallen out of a big chimney. You know, you only fall off one of them once. About one day, I fell down some steps in a girl's bedroom and landed on a drilling machine. and I'm not unconscious and I don't remember much about it, but the next morning I couldn't get out of bed and I'll be there for three weeks until I fell off the purist steps and you know that's the only injury I have. I've ever done it myself, Donald, uh, my labyrinth and he's like a very important man, you say, yeah, you have to have a man who has a reasonable amount of gray matter like here, this noise of these fanatics making It's impossible to shout at 200 feet since there's no way they can talk to each other uh, it sort of happens a little bit, the thing is you know he's got a good brain, which is really what you need, see, you get to a young man like him uh his art may be in the right place but if he sees a girl in the office he walks away and when you need him you know you look down and he's gone in the past like he had many workers, you know, some drank a lot.

It kind of alienated me a little bit, you know, um, Donald, he's a hardcore tea, so in a lot of ways he's a good ambassador for me, he throws me out of the pool, he's coming out of all our other times, geez, again, I don't think we will. I'll get a yard deal, not just for June, holding a little bit of luck, you know, you know well, more bell towers, I know, people come and say, uh, you're always drunk when he came up, you know? I'm not saying I've ever done it drunk, but if you were hitting with a big hammer all day, some spots you know don't do any harm, you know it kind of kills the pain, there's no doubt about that, you know, um .

I've sort of had characters working for me who in the morning, at nine o'clock, like they've got the shakes and a real struggle to get up, but after they've had about five pints at dinnertime, you know. They were quite full of beans in 20 years. I have only had two calamities, one was when a brick lord fell on top of a blacksmith shop and completely demolished it and I thought this is the end of my career as a staple thief. I can laugh. now, but I didn't then, you know, when I calmed down, I was shaking in the pub for a moment, but, Mr Court, it all decided that what I had smashed up wasn't worth keeping anywhere, so there was only one very A small claim from the insurance people you see and then, on another occasion, for a rather large and dirty top of a new car that was parked really with inside my piece of rope that I put around the bottom of the chimney.

It's not really my fault, you see, I picked up two bricks and the wind blew away a nice three-quarter-inch-thick bed of fairly stiff mortar whose light moved like an altar gyro in the wind and you know, right there, a about 100 meters. and placed right on top of his new car, you see, so he wanted a new roof on his new Volvo. I have to have a third party insurance policy for people like portals, you know, if I kill one of the agents, you know I'm in serious trouble you say I mean the imposing attraction engine or something like that the insurance men and I don't We get along well you know what I mean is that I have no intention of dying you know it's a bit like being a watercolor racer or this guy who jumps off cliffs on his motorcycle but he doesn't have a life insurance policy and if he does he will It will cost a fortune.

I don't really bother with that side. You know, I know one thing. I'm not going to die. I know there is no doubt that I am going to die in bed with my boots on.