Fred Dibnah - Fred Dibnahs Age of Steam

Fred Dibnah and David Hall

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Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781409071891

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Acknowledgements
Warm thanks to Natalie Konopinski for research, transcripts and
typing the manuscript and to Clare White for research.

First published in 2003
This paperback edition first published in 2006
Copyright Fred Dibnah and David Hall 2003
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

ISBN-13: 978 0 563 49395 2 ISBN-10: 0 563 49395 X

Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd, Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane, London W12 0TT

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Commissioning editors: Sally Potter and Martin Redfern Project editor: Catherine Johnson. Copy editor: Ruth Baldwin Designer: Linda Blakemore. Picture researcher: Sarah Hopper Production controller: Kenneth McKay

Set in Meridien by BBC Worldwide Limited Origination and printing by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome, England

I developed my great interest in steam a long, long time ago as a small boy living near the railway lines in Bolton when, of course, I used to climb over the fence and do things that little boys shouldnt do. I remember one thing that used to fascinate me; we knew the half-past four namer was coming and we used to put a penny on the line and watch it dance up and down in between all the wheels. When the train had long gone past you went out and collected your penny, which, by this time, was about twice as big as it was before you put it on the railway line. We lived in close proximity to the engine sheds where, on my way home from school, there would be literally dozens of locomotives lined up all steaming and hissing away with water dripping off them and Id always sneak in and have a look round. Time went by and I ended up actually riding on the things it was highly illegal, but I had a lot of relations who worked on the railway, which was quite wonderful.

Its strange really, how a person becomes interested in steam. As a little lad I was surrounded by tall chimneys that fascinated me. They all had huge clouds coming out of the top of them a bit like a Lowry painting and when you wandered up the back streets you could hear the rumbling inside these great spinning mills. Then later on in my life, when I became a joiner, I used to get really brave and sneak into mill yards and climb up the engine-house steps to look at the engines. I remember as a young lad of about sixteen or seventeen, rather full of fear, looking into the engine-house through the window at the thing going round and seeing the engine minder snoozing in an easy chair. But, you know, he wouldnt really be asleep: hed be listening for any strange change in the pattern of noise that was coming from the engine, which of course would indicate if something was going wrong.

These big mill engines with massive flywheels were very impressive imagine a wheel like that, 40 feet (12 m) in diameter and 16 feet (5m) wide with 60 2-inch-diameter (5-cm-diameter) ropes going to wheels up five storeys of spinning mill, all going round almost silently: incredible pieces of machinery! Its sad now when you go to places like Oldham and Rochdale and see all these gaunt, empty engine rooms, very similar to the tin mines in Cornwall. They are just shells, but once they were graced by this beautiful machinery with fancy reeded pillars and handrails and all likes of beautiful brass-work and everything. Lovely! But now they are all gone.

In Bolton we were quite well blessed with steam-engine manufacturers. There were actually three major firms in the town. There was John and Edward Woods, who have a steam engine in Trencherfield Mill at Wigan Pier; then John Musgraves who manufactured all manner of steam engines from pit winding engines to iron-works blowing engines to big textile-mill engines. They, of course, have long faded away, but there are examples of the product still lying about, which are really quite beautiful. In fact, over my cooker in the back kitchen Ive got the plate off one of the biggest steam engines that operated in Bolton. The third of these engine manufacturers was Hick, Hargreaves and Company, which was a really old firm started by Benjamin Hick in 1834 or thereabouts. They had a huge works, which was completely demolished to make way for a supermarket. Before the last vestiges of Hick, Hargreaves had hit the deck, the roof was being put on the supermarket.

Its sad now when you look around Bolton. Even in my short lifetime and none of us is around for very long many changes have come about. The interesting machinery that used to be around has all but disappeared completely. When I was a lad, there were 200 factory chimneys sticking up in between rows of houses. It was an incredible skyline, and of course most other industrial towns in Lancashire and the northern half of England were pretty much the same. What youve got to think is that at the bottom of every one of those chimneys was a steam engine of one sort or another. A steam engine is virtually indestructible, some of them were literally made in James Watts period back in the eighteenth century. Theres a great mill in Bolton called the Gilner Mill that was still driven right up to 1947 by a beam engine with Watts parallel motion.

A steam engine really is a fascinating thing. When it is running it comes alive in a strange way. It has an unbelievable smell about it for a start. Even people who come to my garden now notice it when they go near my boiler. We had an old guy come in the other day, eighty-odd years old, and he was sniffing away and he said, That brings back memories of my youth. Oil and steam have a smell all of their own. It has been said that if you could put it in a bottle and cork it up you could sell it it smells that good.

Then theres the noise that the engines made. Some of them were very quiet, but it depended on what sort they were and where they were and what sort of job they were doing. If youve got a colliery winding engine, winding in a shaft that was 800 yards (732 m) deep, with a cage hanging on the end of a rope with maybe 10 tons of coal in it and the engines got to start from a standstill, it would make a heck of a racket. In the middle of a place called Leigh near Bolton, there was a pit known as Parsonage. There was a winding engine there that you could hear in the next town down the road when it set off. And what a sight it was. The roar of it into the clouds and a great cloud of steam over the top of the engine house! I think modern man has missed something in not seeing that sort of vision.

The boiler in my back garden makes the steam for turning a little steam engine round, and that engine drives all the machinery that Ive got there. It all comes in handy, particularly for rebuilding the traction engine Im working on. Ive been restoring this engine for nearly twenty years and, despite some major setbacks, its now nearly ready for the road. Just a bit more time and Ill be able to complete the job. Its going to be an unbelievable sense of achievement getting it finished, because by then I will have built the whole thing myself from scratch, with a complete new boiler and it will all have been done with the power of steam.