Midge Ure – The smell of submarines
There’s still a smell. Oh, submarines in general so …
Simon Is there? What’s the smell then? How would you …?
You’d have to ask my wife and my kids. So, you obviously sail on a submarine. You go down in a submarine, you sail, you shut the hatch, you sail, then you go away and then you come back. Now you’re only exposed to the smells, but once you’re in that environment, it’s there.
Simon: It’s the environment.
When you open the hatch, and any Submariner will tell you, the minute they open the hatch, the weird smell is the fresh air rushing in, or your smell going out and you’re like, “This smells a bit weird.”
You’re then not aware until you then bring your bag home and you’d put it somewhere, and my missus would always grab it and throw it straight out, because it stunk. You didn’t realise it until maybe the next day and go ‘ooof’.
Simon: That wasn’t just you, your body odour or …
No, obviously there is an element, but any material that you had onboard just stunk.
Simon: Right, that’s the recirculating air.
So there was an accumulation of offenses there. There’s diesel, ‘cos we still have diesel onboard, we’ve got hydraulic mist, we’ve got oil. So the way we cook onboard, the oils, the mists, the bodily smells, all that combined and ran throughout the submarine ‘cos it just travels through the ventilation.
Alright, we have machines that scrub the air and clean the air but it doesn’t remove everything. It removes bad stuff, but that smell’s still there. But when you’re in it and remember you might go to sea for 10 weeks at a time, and have a sleeping bag and some bedding, in 10 weeks’ time you’re probably still got the same sleeping bag and bedding.
I’m not saying you haven’t washed in that time ‘cos you will have washed it but you sleep in it a lot, you’re in it a lot, and it takes a bit of a hammering, so a smell generates and in a bunk space, you’ve got anywhere between maybe 9 and 20 -30 people sleeping in bunk space together.
That generates its own smells and it can be horrible, but when you’re in it, you don’t smell it. It’s when you’re out of it. And you don’t really notice it until you crack that hatch, you come out and then you’re somewhere and it’s an unexpected smell.
You go, “Oh God” and in my overalls and all my clothing used to stink. The wife would throw it out for days before she would even wash it, so yeah, there’s a definite smell from nuclear.