CAN Looking Back readers give historian Ben Chapman a true measure of the famous Blackburn Giant, Fred Kempster?

Fred, from Wiltshire, died at the age of 29 while taking part in a showman's exhibition in Blackburn in 1918 and is buried in the town's cemetery.

He is frequently described as being 8ft 4in tall and weighing 27 stones.

But Ben, who says he is perhaps the only historian and researcher in the country specialising in people of unusual growth -- those once described as giants and midgets -- wants to be dead certain about his height... by locating the measurements made by the undertaker who organised Fred's funeral.

He is writing a book on king-size characters and believes Fred could be Britain's tallest-ever man -- bigger even than 7ft 9in William Bradley, the Yorkshireman born in 1787, to whom both he and the Guinness Book of Records grant the title at present.

Despite having evidence that Fred was 7ft 8in and still growing when he was 20, Guinness refused to accept he had reached 8ft 4in by the time of his death and claimed the measurement was showman's propaganda. But was it?

Says Ben: "My main stumbling block lies in the measurements allegedly taken by the undertaker.

"I believe his daughter had these and would dearly like to contact her or anyone who can shed light on his true height."

Certainly, the dimensions of Fred's coffin cited at his funeral seem to have been exaggerated.

It was said to be 9ft long, 2ft 3in at the shoulder and 20 inches deep and to have needed 14 men to lower it into the grave.

For 34 years ago, amid debate in this newspaper over Guinness's rejection of Fred's claim, undertaker's daughter Miss Agnes Walker produced the item shown giving an intriguing clue to the giant's true height.

Her father was the one who buried Fred, from the now-gone Haymarket Hotel in Ainsworth Street, Blackburn, close by the Victoria Street bazaar where there was a sideshow attraction before he was brought down by pneumonia.

And among his old accounts, she found one that gave the particulars of the Kempster coffin.

Dated April 9, 1918, it reads: "Kempster, Oak, 8ft 8in by 2ft 0in, with brass and shroud. £9.0s.0d."

At the time, Miss Walker reported that her father, who measured the body, always said that Fred was more than 8ft and she added that in a coffin of 8ft 8in there would not be much more than two inches to spare at either end -- making it just possible for Fred to really have been 8ft 4in.

A veteran funeral director, however, tells Looking Back that at least nine inches needs knocking off the length of a coffin to gauge the height of the body it contains.

And applied to the measurements of the coffin supplied by Miss Walker's father, that yardstick would shrink Fred down to 7ft 11in.

That's still enough to give him the title Ben thinks he may deserve.

But are there somewhere still in East Lancashire's the measurements the undertaker made of his corpse?

Back in 1967, Miss Walker said they had been lost, probably for good, but she remained convinced that Fred was more than 8ft tall, even if he was not quite 8ft 4in.

If you know more, drop Ben a line at 10 Young Street, Withernsea, East Yorkshire, HU19 2DX.