Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast in 1991,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a steeplejack. For the past 26 years, he's earned his living by helping

to alter the industrial landscape of Northern England. His work was made the subject of a series

of celebrated television documentaries in which sometimes demolishing, sometimes restoring,

and always philosophising, he came to represent many of the values of industrial Lancashire.

Whether swinging from the chimney of a factory or wrestling behind the wheel of a steam engine,

he brings alive the affection many still feel for the architecture and machinery of Britain's

once great manufacturing empire. He is Fred Dibner. It's almost Fred as if you were born out of

your time, really. I mean, would you have been happier being born in the 1890s than being around

here in the 1990s? Yeah, well, I used to think I would have been until I went in the Science Museum

the other day, and I looked around at how dentist did the job. Horrible. But nevertheless,

I think I could have put up with all of that, and the age of Ismbad, Kingdom, Brunell and George

Davidson, to me, seemed much more exciting than it does now. But what is it that you love about

all that old heavy machinery and all the intricacy of it? Is that what attracted you? Well, really,

the things that men did, and they aren't got much to do it with, they accomplished magnificent

feats with nor a lot, and no, we've got everything, and we can't even make the trends run on time,

you know, it's it's bad news, isn't it? But the motor cars they make these days are that much

better than the ones that made you go on there? No, very comfortable, yeah. But you don't like them.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I don't know. It's something that I do think I'm a reincarnation

from the the great Victorian era of engineering somewhere over there. I mean, is there anything in

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