STEEPLEJACK’S FEATS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 22 November 1924, Page 12

STEEPLEJACK’S FEATS.

DANGLING IN FRONT OF BIG BEN.

1 The famous steeplejack, Mr W. Larkins, who lately, washed the face of Big Bep, takes all his meals up aloft. . Swinging in the boatswain’s cradle, which he is the first man to use for getting into close contact with Big Ben y Mr Larkins recently made a hearty lunch from a wing of a chicken, and later brewed himself a cup of teal using a. kettle which lie had taken from. home for the purpose. While he ate his meal his’ wife and daughter watched him from < below. Mrs* Larkins is very proud of her husband’s airy achievements. , ‘‘He is the first man who has ever .’cleaned Big Ben without stopping the hands, ’ ’ Mrs Larkin fold a. Daily Chronicle representative. “By his method he is able to clean one part at a time, and the cleaning is carefully timed, so as not to interfere with the hands. When he goes up he stays there until just before darkness falls.” While the steeplejack’s wife, was proudly explaining her husband’s achievements, buckets, which looked no bigger than’thimbles, were dangling in front of Big Ben’s half-washed face. “Those are the buckets in which one of the assistants lowers warm water in a jug to my husband,” she explained. “He is under contract not to use anything but plain warm water to the clock. His method is to apply water with a whitewash brush, wash that section a little later with an ordinary chamois leather, and then to polish it well with a builder’s swab.

Big Ben is by no means the tallest proposition Mr. Larkins has tackled. He has conducted three separate operations on the Nelson Statue in Trafalgar Square. He lias washed Nelson, mended his arm. and strung him with electric lights for a Victory- Lopn celebration.

“The ichief difficulty my husband had to meet in dealing with Nelson,” said Mrs. Larkin, “was that of getting over the sloping projection which finishes the column, just below Nelson’s feet. This .sloping projection was covered with a slimy deposit, and it was very difficult to get a footing.” .One of the most difficult climbs Mr. Larkins ever accomplished was when he undertook to clean a monument on Ben Bhragie, on the Duke of Sutherland’s estate. His official climb was preceded by an unofficial one of several miles over the mountains before his objective was reached. And then the weather was so severe that he and his assistant had to chop away ice from, their ladders, step by' step, every time they went up. Mr. Larkins’s eldest son, Mr. y. N, Larkins, lias also a taste for heights. He climbs for a different reason, however. He is an artist, and had a picture hung in the last Academy. Some of his most successful etchings have had,for their subject scenes he lias surveyed when accompanying his- father, v/lio was at work on the Shot Tower, near the Tiver.