Great post Jon

Your absolutely spot on mate

Amen.

, I worked at a cotton mill outside Stockport and would do the paper run early doors AM for the blokes there and now and then would bump in to Fred getting his fags half the time he was on his way to Bolton at this daft hour having driven through the early hours he’d say hello light a fag and ask what we did at the mill the on his way utter gentleman and very genuine

Spot on ..the camera man followed him around for 12 month up every chimney.. did so without even telling his family what he was doing most days ..he was Lord and lady pilkingtons relation from St helens ...so glad he did 🙏..Nicholas Wilding well in ....

Kids aren't even allowed to get on a school bus unattended nowadays.

He signed something for someone and said take it to the chemist they'll give you prescription 🙏☺️🤣

Legend? A man looks after his family, not train sets.

@@steveprentice4513 says the recently divorced mr prentice 🤡🤡🤡

Agreed

Men today are a shadow of their Grandad's

@@adamsmith4813 Like it or not we live in a different world today, there's no going back to the stone ages.

@@vejet i don't know when your grandad was around but mine certainly wasn't born in the stone ages. Fred was more fitted to the iron age, not quite sure the point of your comment, maybe you think the degenerated youth of today is a good thing.

@@vejet thank you for your in-depth reply. Firstly i have to say I'm a big believer in progress, of course if we can make things easier and effective, esp re getting essential jobs done safer, workers rights etc, i call myself a socialist, have you read 'Road to Wigan pier' ? Socialists were referred to as machine lovers. The point i was making on the other hand is that in the developed society it seems to be having the opposite effect of what the socialist aim is - to further develop the individual so he can reach his true ability. All this progress has given us 20 yr olds that can't even hold a shovel, I'm working on a roof in about 10 mins for the day and I'm greatful for the advanced telehandlers etc but you still need some brawn and ability. Ps, fred could have used the modern methods of tnt etc (in some cases) but chose to do it the old way out of respect of the men who built them.

Fred was right when he said 'these modern times are like the fall of Rome'

The younger generations are just hedonists, seek pleasure before work ethic, narcissism before truth and worthwhile. No wonder they are so miserable.

Plus I’m a z list celebrity get me out of here. What tf has the world come to?! 🙈

Precision? They nearly died lmfao

With 30 years of demolition experiece i can say Fred was a very lucky man this drop being case in point.

..the fact that he turned&ran was testament to this😂..still though, legend of a man

I wouldn’t call it absolute precision, it was more a matter of using his common sense and Victorian engineering knowledge of how that chimney would drop once he’d applied his skills to drop it.

Love watching Fred's documentaries. Balls of Steel, really Man! Although that Chimney did seem to implode rather than lay down?

Reason was he wore a flat cap and had dirty hands. Now if you are a tennis player that knocks a ball about that is another matter.

No way I would accept anything from the fake royals. Look up the House of Guelph, part of the Windsor family tree. This shows not only were they not English or German, they were Jewish.

@@EgoShredder I’m Jewish. I still think Fred should have been knighted as a true Brit. The Royal family are NOT Jewish BTW.

They knight footballer’s and entertainer’s who have never got their hands dirty and are vastly overpaid to entertain people. We have our priorities wrong.

Thst was not ment to happen...Fred often had luck on his side there

It wasn’t supposed to, hence the rapid retreat into the road when it came down 😂

@@TheYorkie72 Followed by the rapid retreat to the pub I imagine.

An era the likes of we will never see again. No community spirit and friendship, all about me, me, me. Britain is no longer the country it once was, made so by the people like Fred who knew how to work for a living and was an asset to the community and country in general. We now put sportspeople and so called celebrity entertainer’s on pedestals who would not know a hard days work and dirty hands. R.I.P Fred, thankfully we have these early film records to watch and enjoy seeing a man as a legend in his own time. Sadly passing at such a young age from cancer, aged 66. I am 85 and cannot imagine losing the past 20 years of my life’s activities. Southern Cross Observatory-42 South-Tasmania Australia. Former Leeds Pom

I don't think so 😂

Back then they, now the police are a complete bunch of knobh****, you only have to watch those stupid Police Interceptor programmes where they act all cocky with too much power gone to their tiny brains with their hi viz jacket uniforms on (costumes really) and try having a conversation with these ex school bullys and see how confrontation they can be.

@@Embracing01 Could not agree with you more. When I was a kid I was always riding my motorcycle and the local police would tell me off and that was that, I had respect for them and was more scared of my parents when they took me back home. I'm afraid those days are long gone. Most cops now are completely power crazy.

@@richardcarr7557 I think alot of police have been brainwashed with the training courses they've been on. There's a sinister organisation called Common Purpose.

Absolutely 😐👍🏻

He truly was. Sure there are guys that can kill someone with their bare hands and act all tough, but send them up a chimney like Fred did, and they would be crying and shaking like little girls.

Let's hope he's not shovelling coal 😆

Lovely post Neil

I never realised how decayed the chimneys where before being demolished.

@@Embracing01 Yes big time.The sulpher coal soot decayed the joints badly.Thats why so many were lost.

Fred clearly breathed in a lot of coal dust and smoke during working days as a Steeple Jack. I know someone from Bolton who's like Fred. this Polish Gentleman also loves steam engines too. he spent his working life repairing roads and building walls. we have been helping him out after his wife went back to Bolton but because of the state of his lungs and the recent heavy drinking he's in the process of being put in a home which is very sad.

Great comments indeed Glenn and one thing about Fred was that he was a keen observer on the quality and condition of the brickwork, especially when it came to the chimneys he was hired to drop. There was a brief moment that showed the mouthing Fred had cut into the chimney and it looked like he wall of the chimney was strangely thin for such a tall stack. I wasn't surprised that this one crumbled apart, when the brickwork at the bottom wasn't thick enough to keep supporting the weight, it seemed like only gravity itself was keeping the bugger up before Fred dropped it. It seems that most of the chimneys that Fred dropped in his life had fairly solid brickwork at the bottom, which made them a bit more predictable to how they were going to fall, but there would always be one or two that weren't so solid or reliable to drop.

A working-class rockstar. Something the youth today would turn their nose up at

True celebrity, admired by all for his knowledge, skill and experience - not for getting plastic put in their face and getting their arse out. although I’m sure the builders crack did make an appearance once in a while!

That last thing that man needed was some safety regulation…

No one knew any different. It was like that, the way it was. Imagine seeing someone smoke indoors now!. Shock horror.

Go for it Sea S

@baby trump whos in jail?

@baby trump Fre*D* dibnah died in 2004.

He’s joking because you wrote free dibnah.

@@fegstachops6746 😅😅😅 never noticed,ah well its staying unedited

There’s a few of us left that do. Sole traders that don’t need to fill in a encyclopaedia of risk assessments and safety inspections. Plan, turn up & get the job done for less. Every man is their own safety man. I’ve died 0 times so far

I agree

I think they'd be more interested in turning the house into a block of flats with 20 families crammed into it than a museum. More money to made that way from all the greedy housing developers and corrupt council.

It was turned into a museum, but this snotty nosed fancy piece that was his last wife cashed it in, then those who bought it, closed it.

@@IfInDoubt..I know that it was open to the public where you could have a guided tour, my dad went there once, took my camcorder but the video didn't come out so good as he pressed record at the wrong time and all he took was the floor and some bloke heard talking lol. He wasn't happy, but he had big hands and my HD camcorder is tiny lol. I think he last wife/partner was called Sheila, I'm assuming she's dead now.

@@Embracing01 She's still going. Living off his money.

I wonder why he left his last wife out of his will-maybe bits will emerge as I see more episodes. I started this series at his funeral-it popped up on my YT viewing options. A very sad end to a unique man in a time when so much Victoriana was being demolished to make way for the rubbish we see today and will be outdated almost before completion.

He lost my respect a little when he accepted an MBE and said to a reporter that the Queen and the British Empire is what made Britain great. Sorry Fred but weren't the ones that made Britain great (or what's left of Britain, communist Britain more like), the Royal Family and British empire are about stealing land and resources from countries, they don't care about the people.

Communism is Capitalism's brutally honest brother. Communism tells you outright that they own you and you own nothing. Capitalism is like Communism but with a narccissistic personality disorder. You are given the illusion of freedom and owning your property but you are manipulated in to credit and debt and if you do not keep them repayments - you then find out who really owns your property and who owns you.

@@clark5401 I agree, the same things really. And who said "you will own nothing but you will be happy".

@@Embracing01 I believe Fred was given his MBE for services to support heritage steam. when he went to collect it I have read that he joked with Shelia his third wife by simply saying if they had given him a few bags of coal. He'd have flattened the Queen's drive with his steam roller.

​@@eliotreader8220 But he still accepted it nonetheless, which is something I and many of other people would never do. If people really knew what the royal families are about and what they get up, there would pitchforks outside the palace gates waiting to string em up to the nearest lamppost, and Prince Andrew wouldn't be the only one.

No, he replaces part of the chimney bottom with hard wood and continues to take enough of the bricks away. Then part of the chimney is supported by wood that can be burned away. When the wood burns off it doesn't support the chimney anymore and it collapses. I think that needs a hell of a lot balls to make an opening to chimney bottom and trust the wood parts!

I couldn't see anyone in a black leather coat, unless you mean that young lad standing behind him lol. I believe he met Sue at a vintage steam rally sometime around the mid 80s (later than when this episode was filmed), possibly somewhere in Cheshire I would think. I have a photo of Fred on his Betsy traction engine when he passed my old house near Wigan, probably sometime between 86 and 88 but no later than that. His then second future wife Sue was with, but she looked alot younger than we see her in the Life with Fred series from 1994.

@@Embracing01 The girl in the black jacket at 0:31 But sue is in this video at 0:46

I'm not sure to be honest, could be Fred's wife.

I know. Building 7 came down all on its own, supposedly from fire from the north and south tower, but that's nonsense IMO. They either used explosives or some kind of advanced weapon, and I'm going with the latter as there's alot of evidence the WTC had brought down with some kind of advanced energy weapon as evidenced by how it just turned into dust on freefall, hardly any rubble at all. Lots of vehicles some distance from the epicentre where found scorched but nearby objects which should've been affect weren't even touched.

@@Embracing01 Doctor Judith Wood and her "Where Did The Towers Go" presentation is essential viewing. She even took them to court with this scientific evidence. Been a while since I watched it, but I think her conclusion was direct energy weapons etc.

@@EgoShredder Yep I have heard of Dr Judy Wood, she's done alot of excellent research into how those towers fell.

@@EgoShredder Beware of Judith Wood and her ilk. You are being led astray by theory and conjecture, however plausible or implausible. I refer to Christopher Bollyn (journalist). A true hero (currently exiled), who's interest is in identifying and prosecuting the perpetrators of the events of 9/11, who are known, and must be convicted of their crimes.

What’s gag gag club?