Did yer like that?

In my Mr Memory Man vision bank: a flat-capped, forty-something bloke running for all his might from the path of a falling industrial chimney, honking a clown’s horn on the end of a rope around his neck, shouting, ‘Bloody hell, it’s goin’, it’s goin!’ And narrowly getting away with his life once again. Then, when the dust has settled, grinning ‘That were good, wan’it? Did yer like that?’ Bolton’s Fred Dibnah was born middle-aged. One of those blokes who was never young. At the time Fred first began appearing on TV, I’d still have been a student at Bradford University, in a city still mourning the loss of its proud Victorian industrial power. Many a dark, drunken night we walked home past abandoned, brokendown factory hulks housing the ghosts of fob-watched philanthropists, looking down from orange-lit warehouses shrouded by coughing chimneys. All tombstone-quiet by then, just waiting for the handy work of Fred Dibnah, chimney feller fellah. He never set out in life to knock down disused chimneys. It’s just how he ended up, TV-famous, like, you know. On April 28th 1938, the day Fred was actually born, King Zog of Albania married Countess Geraldine of Hungary. Fred’s was a different world. One that had disappeared before he was born (and he knew it). A world of steam, machine tools, crankshafts, mill wheels and a windswept, working–class, sepia-tinted philosophy of a lost golden industrial age honed atop many a redundant factory chimney. A white world of empire where everyone knew their place. Well, Fred fell from his chimney of life back in 2004. He’d have been 71 today. Strangely, although I was never part of his world, he is very much part of mine.

Mark Griffiths www.idealconsulting.co.uk