The Top 10: Once-Familiar Smells

Mostly different flavours of smoke, this list: in the old days at least you could see poor air quality

The last steam passenger service was the Fifteen Guinea Special, which made its final journey in 1968 (Getty)

We have done once-common sounds, and so Mr Memory suggested another old fogeys’ list, of smells. He suggested the first five.

1. Steam engines. Quite different from the smell of a domestic coal fire (number 6). When I travelled around India in 1979 most trains were steam; two years later they had all gone.

2. Smoky pubs. Or smoking carriages on trains or on the London Underground. A colleague did not believe that smoking was once allowed on the Tube (it was banned in 1984), or that there used to be wooden escalators (the King’s Cross fire was in 1987, after the smoking ban, but when people used to light up on the escalators on the way out of the station).

We all still know what cigarettes smell like, but the baked-in, decades-long stink of stale smoke in public places is something you now have to go abroad for.

Pipe tobacco was also nominated by The Dabbler and David Freedman, so I will have that as 2b.

3. Cap guns. A bit like the snappers in crackers, but you could really smell the sulphur.

4. Camera film. A bit specialist, this, but nothing else smells quite like it.

5. Phone books. Different from normal books: it must have been the cheap paper and the ink.

6. Coal fires. Nominated by Geoffrey Peter. Smog was before my time, dispelled in London by the Clean Air Act of 1956.

7. Embrocation. What athletes used on sprains. “The smell of football and rugby changing rooms before sports science and the ice bath took over,” said Geoffrey Peter.

8. Chalk. Distinct ingredient of pre-whiteboard, pre-flatscreen classrooms, recalled by Holly Baxter, who is not old at all.

9. Carbolic, or coal tar, soap. Nominated by Mac Kane and Sean O’Grady. You can still get it, but most people don’t. Peter Rance also wrote: “When I was a student in the 1970s one of my holiday jobs was cleaning out railway carriages overnight. In those days each toilet had a small square of green Palmolive soap. Not seen often today but just the smell reminds me of the days of British Rail.” I think I remember them from the sleeper service.

10. Napalm in the morning. There is always one, and this week it is David Mills.

Next week: Worst Policy Decisions, after Andrew Adonis compared Brexit to Appeasement

Coming soon: Best Opening Shots of Films

The e-book of Listellany: A Miscellany of Very British Top Tens, From Politics to Pop is just £3.79. Your suggestions, and ideas for future Top 10s, in the comments please, or to me on Twitter, or by email to top10@independent.co.uk