David White – Building a false deck of canned food

The other thing about diesel submarines was not all the stores went into the space provided because you sometimes would have to take them off. If you stored for war, you would build a fourth deck throughout the submarine, of boxes of tinned food because you could have to stay at sea much, much longer than the submarine was designed to do, so I would give everybody a bag of flour and they’d stick that under their pillow. 

We would build a false deck throughout the submarine so everybody, even, I mean the tall blokes stooped anyway, but for this time, everyone stooped because you were all raised that far off the deck. 

Simon:  So what’s that, that’s sort of 12 inches?

12 inches. Because a standard box of two and a half tins of peas, beans, tomatoes, whatever, they’re two tins like that, on top of each other, in a box of 12. Very stable, very stable platform to walk on but you had …

Simon:  I guess you had to step up and down as you ate the food did you? 

Yes, yes.  Well you would try and plan it a bit better than that and, and …  make a walkway. But you had to leave holes because every four or five hours somebody’s got to go down into the Battery Tank and dip the Battery and take readings, so that means that hatch has got to be raised and lowered all the time, so you can’t put stores on top of it. So, you’ve got all these stores and a hole. Now, a lot of the time a submarine is at sea, especially at night, it’s in what we call black lighting and any light has got to be red. You’ve got to be careful and then if you have an emergency and you start running everywhere, people used to get broken ankles and sprained ankles and Christ knows what.