CLIMBING the 393 steps to the very top of Big Ben this week was a local man re-enacting an achievement he undertook nearly 50 years ago.

But Slim Bradford, from Hindhead, who is 89 later this month and who first tackled the climb in 1955, wasn't given the chance to hang his jacket over the spire as he did them.

Slim left Haslemere station for Parliament Square on Wednesday morning. Not only was he planning to climb the steep steps up most famous clock tower in the world, but attending the last Prime Minister's question time with Iain Duncan Smith as the ex-leader of the Conservative party. Lunch in the House of Commons was also on the agenda.

By the middle of the afternoon, Slim, a well-known local campaigner, had climbed the 334 steps up to the belfry, and then a further 59 up to the very top.

A former film stunt man, appearing in films with stars such as Gary Cooper and David Niven, Slim had undertaken his first climb on the outside of the tower.

He had inched his way up yards of scaffolding and then climbed to the top of the spire where he hang his coat as a gesture, protesting about the lack of housing after the war.

Recalling those days, he said: "There was a terrible housing shortage, my wife was living in London and was pregnant, and I was away on location.

"I returned home to find her gone and when we found each other, I was told she had been thrown out because the place we were living had been sold.

"We couldn't get anybody to listen to us and I knew that Big Ben reached out to the world. It was a way of saying something about the way people were treated," said Slim.

"Everybody was so nice, I did it on my own and managed to break through the security," said Slim, whose story was headline news not only in The Herald but in national newspapers, including the Daily Mirror the next day.

It was also one of the first news stories to be broadcast on the then newly launched ITN.

Slim, who brought up in an orphanage before being sent to work as a child labourer on a farm, later served with the Canadian Army during the war.

He was based at Aldershot where he met his wife, Christine, and the couple were married for 62 years until she sadly died last summer.

The idea of his grandson Neil, a former Woolmer Hill School pupil, who is now a television political corespondent for Carlton TV, Canadian-born Mr Bradford was looking forward to his special day when The Herald spoke to him on Wednesday morning.

And he only had one reservation about finding his favourite tipple in The House of Commons bar.

"You can bet your bottom dollar I won't find a drop of barley wine."