Always reaching for the stars

Dicing with death at dizzying heights, the work of the steeplejack is not for the faint-hearted. Ben Lerwill meets the men at the top of their spires

-  Ben Lerwill

THE life of a steeplejack is not for everyone. The profession has a long past—one panel of the Bayeux Tapestry shows a figure working on a church roof—and a daunting job description. The dictionary definition of the role is ‘a person whose work is building, painting, or repairing steeples, smokestacks, etc’, but this tells only half the story. By climbing exposed steeples, towers, monuments and chimneys with the aid of little more than rungs and ropes, steeplejacks put themselves into situations that would turn the average individual’s knees to jelly.

This has been the case for centuries. In the Middle Ages, itinerant steeplejacks journeyed where the work took them, carrying out daredevil tasks on spires and cathedrals. The trade really boomed with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, when vast towers and mill chimneys began to proliferate around the country. Fast forward to the 1970s and the trade received an unlikely PR boost after Bolton steeplejack Fred Dibnah climbed to fame by starring in a BAFTA-winning documentary about his vertiginous day job. The next 25 years saw a series of popular programmes about or presented by Dibnah. It was a lifelong calling. ‘When I were a boy, you would see little fellas with flat caps on, way up in the sky,’ he once reminisced. ‘It fascinated me.’