Colin Hamilton – Difference between diesel and nuclear submarines
But diesels are different to nuclear. Very, very different type of submarine.
Diesels submarines are much muckier, they’re much noisier and they are generally colder because you’ve got this … when you’re running on the surface, the engines draw the air down the Control Room, and the water or whatever, sea water, whatever else comes in.
It goes through the Control Room, everybody gets soaked in the Control Room and then through, past the toilets and the Galley, and then into the Engine Room, into the engines and the noise … I think it’s 120 decibels the engine makes so initially they issued you with little rubber ear plugs, and as a consequence they’d drop in the bilges, you wouldn’t find them so you went without.
The diesel Frigate, Chichester, had eight 16-cylinder diesel engines. That’s why I have to wear hearing aids because my hearing is shot because of this, and we didn’t take enough … pay enough attention.
The first thing you do when you retire, when you go your final meeting, they say, “Have you applied for your hearing aid, or your hearing damage.”
I never bothered because it was my own stupid fault mainly, but there is a big difference.
Accommodation is different. You have to ‘hot bunk’ in a conventional submarine because you’re carrying more people than there are beds. People are sleeping on sacks of potatoes particularly on the older boats, and it gets a bit crowded. But it’s crabby but happy.
They don’t wash. Explaining to the people on Alliance, you don’t wash on a submarine. You can clean your teeth and perhaps wash your hands, but quite often you’re having a competition to see who’s the longest without washing (laughs) but you can’t physically wash. You can’t have a bath, there’s no bath. There are only four toilets on there and two taps.
You just can’t wash, so everybody, “Ooh, don’t you smell?” I said, “We’re all the same aren’t we?” You’ve got the smell of bodies, you’ve got the smell of cooking, you’ve got the smell of diesel and also after the toilet tank is full, you blow the tank out and you vent the thing back in. That happens even on the more modern submarine. But it doesn’t matter.
At the end of the day, when you get into harbour, quite often you’ll go ashore and live in an Hotel.