for local children was playing around the many mill lodges (industrial ponds) which once littered the area. An inventive child, Dibnah and some friends designed a makeshift diving suit from a crisp tin, a car inner tube and some piping. After being told to remove it from the local swimming baths, they tested it in one of the lodges, but were unsuccessful. The Bolton arm of the Manchester Bolton & Bury Canal was one of Dibnah's regular haunts. The canal was by then largely disused (the Bolton arm had been mostly closed in 1924) and Dibnah sometimes dredged it with an iron hook on a rope, for what he called 'plunder'. Much of this was stored in the back yard of his mother's house. Dibnah and his friend Alan Heap built a canoe from old bicycle wheels (cut in half to make the ribs), slate laths and a canvas sheet from the back of a lorry. Much to the consternation of his mother, Dibnah sailed the boat along the nearby River Croal. He once astonished his teachers when, following the theft of the school keys, he cut new keys for each classroom door. As a young man At school Dibnah was placed in an art class (his reading and writing skills were judged to be poor), following which he spent three years at art college, where his work was based mainly on industrial themes such as machinery, pithead gear and spinning mills. On leaving college at 16 he was offered a job at a funeral parlour, but left quickly to begin work at a local joinery. Dibnah had watched the activities of steeplejacks throughout his childhood, and first witnessed a chimney felling from his father's allotment near Bolton's greyhound track at Raikes Park. The steeplejacks removed the top of the chimney and then created a hole in its base, propped with blocks of wood. They then lit a fire, destroying the supports and causing the chimney to collapse. Unfortunately, on this occasion the chimney fell in the wrong direction, onto the greyhound track's dog kennels, a local café and a series of power cables. His first job that involved ladders was given to him while he still worked as a joiner. He was asked to point a garden wall and then the gable end of the customer's house. He used several short ladders, lashed together with rope and hardboard. This