Fred: The Definitive Biography Of Fred Dibnah

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A lifelong Manchester United fan, one of his books chronicles life in Manchester in the aftermath of the deaths of the Busby Babes in the Munich air disaster. Devoted collectors of rare books will love finding proofs, galleys, and advance review copies of their favorite pieces of literature. Fred became a high profile media personality and the fame which accompanied that status never affected him, or in any way changed his down to earth demeanour. Keith Langston contributes news and feature material on a regular basis across a wide range of heritage titles.

JUST published, Fred Dibnah’s friend and well-known boilermaker Alan McEwen has produced the first book of its type to concentrate purely on the famous chimney drops that became steeplejack Fred’s trademark.After he retired from steeplejacking he took to the road, looking at the achievements of the craftsmen, engineers, inventors and industrial workers whose endeavour made engines like his possible. His latest work includes a documentary on Fred's garden and Founders of the Great Dynasties for History Channel International. Cheshire based Keith Langston is a widely published and highly respected photo journalist specialising in railway and other transport related subjects. A book leaves our collection of over seven million titles and begins a new chapter every two seconds, enabling more goods to be reused.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. David's 30 years producing and directing network television programmes include a number of years at both Yorkshire Television and the BBC, as well as making landmark documentaries for Channel 4 and the History Channel. Keith counts himself fortunate to have known Fred Dibnah personally and to have observed the 'great man' first hand as he went about his fascinating work. But to just place an explosive charge in the chimney’s base and blow them down when they came to the end of their lives, did not appeal to Fred for to him there was another more traditional way of felling these chimneys that embodied respect for the old time chimney builders and would demolish them with great aplomb and not a little drama”. The biographer of Fred Dibnah, he was also Fred's TV producer for many years, as well as a close personal friend, and has published a number of books celebrating Fred's life and interests.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). For the young Fred Dibnah was captivated by the gigantic, gleaming steam engines with their enormous whirling flywheels that powered the cotton mills and that were jammed cheek by jowl into Bolton’s townscape.

His deep-seated knowledge of chimney construction and of steeplejacking lore, his charismatic and competent showmanship rapidly made him nationally famous: particularly following those memorable early BBC television programmes. Fred Dibnah's Building of Britain DVDFred Dibnah reveals the genius, the vision and the sheer bloody graft that went into creating some of Britain's greatest national monuments. Lancastrian Fred Dibnah was born in 1938 into an England which in his view has been going downhill ever since. Fred’s greatest passion however, was industrial chimneys and steeplejacking, which had thrilled him from being a small lad when he had witnessed, during the local wakes weeks when the cotton mills closed, the sight of steeplejack’s’ red-painted ladders running up the sides of the towering mill chimneys and the tiny ‘Lowry-esq’ figures, the steeplejacks ‘dancing around’ on the platform some 200 feet up in the sky.

Especially poignant for me, as my father died a few years back of cancer and he was very much build of the same stuff. He held these towering structures with great affection and he often related stories about the ‘hard men’, the chimney builders who erected them and of the men also, who maintained and repaired them: the steeplejacks. His interest and vast knowledge of all things railway stem from being brought up in the North West of England as part of a railway family.

The book can of course go much further than the series, including an extraordinarily account of Fred's childhood which evokes a lost England and our great industrial heritage.Alan had also spent time with Fred and some of his close colleagues during the preparation of the `drop’ and describes expressively the situation, the history and work involved. Alan McEwen’s writing style and respect for accurate documentation serve to make a very interesting book even more interesting.