'He bought a chimney for £5 and spent years taking it down it by hand' - Tributes to demolition man who felled mill chimneys in Middleton then set up a petting zoo
Middleton, was in desperate need of repair and its owner, prominent Rochdale businessman Barrie Bernstein, wanted it off his hands. But its location, just 4ft away from a main road, meant it had to be taken down brick-by-brick.So that's exactly what Ben - who died at home last Saturday aged 80, after suffering from vascular dementia - did.With his friend Tony Kelly he spent the next three years, from 1979 to 1982, working every Saturday and Sunday painstakingly removing thousands and thousands of bricks.But given his own way it's probably not the method he would have used.