1967, following disagreements over who should be invited to their wedding, Dibnah and 19-year-old hairdresser Alison Mary Foster eloped to Gretna Green, to get married. Dibnah had first spotted Alison from the top of a chimney and, when one day she walked into the pub where he was drinking, he asked her out; six weeks later, the two became engaged. They left notes for their parents, caught a train to Carlisle and from there on a series of buses to Dumfries. They had initially planned to stay at the house of a friend but as he had returned to Bolton for his holidays, they stayed instead at a local farmhouse. The two had to be resident for at least 21 days to be married and so Dibnah agreed to point the gable ends of a local hotel in exchange for bed and board. On 19 May, the two married at the church at Gretna Green and returned to live at Dibnah's mother's house. They later moved into a Victorian gatehouse on the Earl of Bradford's estate, just outside Bolton. Dibnah spent years restoring the property, including building an extension. The house was a listed building and so he had to source appropriately aged bricks for the extension. A vicar offered him some of the old gravestones from the church graveyard, which Dibnah then used to create the stone lintels and mullions, though he later expressed his fear that his property would now be haunted. The couple later purchased the house for £5,000, although it required major repairs to stabilize the rear wall. The couple had their first child, a girl named Jayne, in June 1968. Alison was initially worried about her husband's occupation but learned to deal with the risk and to trust Fred. She organised his accounts and even collected debts. She also helped him demolish some of the chimneys that he worked on, by lighting the fire to burn away the temporary supports he had put in place. Chimney felling Having mastered his trade repairing chimneys, Dibnah became aware of the demand for a cost-effective method of demolishing them. He offered to remove them without using explosives, by cutting an ingress at the base of the chimney—supporting the brickwork with wooden props—and then burning away the props so that the chimney fell, hopefully in the intended direction. Although this was a tried and tested method, it was not