without its opponents. On one occasion he was contracted by the local council to fell two chimneys. The contract obliged him to dismantle each by hand, but he decided to fell them by cutting away the base. The first chimney collapsed as planned, but the council terminated his contract and refused to pay. Dibnah contacted the borough engineer and offered to fell the second chimney for no charge, to prove the effectiveness of his technique. He even offered to let the engineer light the fire, but the wind blew so hard that the chimney did not draw the flames and once the props had been burnt through, it remained standing. Dibnah resorted to using a hydraulic jack to apply extra pressure to the intact side of the base and the chimney eventually fell. He later told the engineer that "it was all about fine balancing and counteracting high wind forces." He almost lost his life in 1997, when a concrete chimney he had been asked to fell on Canvey Island began to collapse before the felling team had finished preparing the base. As the team ran from the chimney, Dibnah tripped and fell and was greeted by the sight of 2,500 tonnes of concrete leaning toward him, but fortunately the chimney righted itself and then fell in the opposite direction. The last chimney he felled, which was his 90th, was in Royton, in May 2004. Steam Dibnah's interest in steam power stemmed from his childhood observations of the steam locomotives on the nearby railway line, and his visits to his father's workplace—a bleach works in Bolton—where he was fascinated by the steam engines used to drive the line shafting. A small mill near his childhood home was sometimes mothballed and Dibnah once broke in: He later became a steam enthusiast, befriending many of the engine drivers and firemen who worked on the nearby railway. As a teenager he met a driver who invited him onto the footplate of his locomotive and who asked him to keep the boiler supplied with fuel. Dibnah became so enamoured with steam engines that he eventually looked for one he could buy. He learned of a steamroller kept in a barn near Warrington and which the owners had bought from Flintshire County Council. He had the boiler pressure-tested and, despite its being in poor condition, bought it for £175. He towed it to a friend's