For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress. According to this reading of history, banishing odours is a sign of progress. Civilisation doesn’t smell.
Neither Bjorn Berge nor William Tullett stand for this. For them, older times may have been smellier, but people were comfortable with living alongside middens, rotting corpses and foul tanneries. Smell in the modern age is now under threat and at risk of extinction or of being even more marginalised – Tullett uses the word ‘ephemeralised’ – than it already is in this age of visual primacy and screens. Even after reading the third book in my small library on the subject, I am still not persuaded by this argument. We definitely live in strange times when it comes to smell – we are, after all, the culture that requires an artificial fragrance named ‘new car’. But perhaps the artificiality of modern odour doesn’t mean we’re incapable of smelling; we just smell different things.
Berge is a Norwegian architect who writes with the erudition and whimsy of W.G. Sebald. I have no idea how his mind went from exploring the stench of burning bodies in the Holocaust to what testosterone smelt like on 1929 Wall Street on the next page, but I think I’m glad it did.
Tullett is a history lecturer at the University of York and a noted smell expert. Although his book is accessible, it has a teacherly whiff about it, perhaps because of his decision to take a historical journey, smell by smell (pungent paper or lilac vagina). The chronology can feel like a repetitive narrative rhythm. But both authors overcome these minor criticisms by providing me with reams of delightful facts for my next dull dinner party.
Sperm contains the odorants putrescine and cadaverine. More people dislike the smell of honey than like it. Children don’t mind the smell of excrement until adults tell them they should. Ambergris, produced by sperm whales, was not only an early popular fragrance but ‘among the substances that a 17th-century suitor could use to anoint his “yard”, in order to “delight his partner’s womb”’.
Women are more sensitive to smell than men, and smell is notoriously hard to measure because of how subjective it can be, changing with diet, age, hormones and all sorts of other variables. For decades, the residents of Mogden in west London battled against what they called the Mogden Pong (the residents of Whitley in Reading, near another giant sewage treatment plant, still endure the Whitley Whiff), but providing a burden of proof was a challenge when the evidence was ‘it stinks’.
Perhaps these Mogden residents were unusual in their olfactory sensitivity. Both authors think modern people less adept at smelling. When Tullett sent out questionnaires about smell as part of a modern-day Mass Observation project, he added three tasks for participants: to make a smell diary of an ordinary day; to describe an odorous object in the home; and to reflect on smells they had experienced in their lives. For the diary and the current smelly object, he received apologies. ‘I’m not very good at describing smells’; ‘I don’t have a very sensitive nose.’ But the smell nostalgia was different, as the following response makes clear:
Fireworks smelled differently back then, so did our Dads coming home grubby from a day’s graft, welding in a filthy shipyard. The smell from a can of 3 in 1 oil lubricating a bike chain in the shed, a paraffin lamp lighting the same shed… I remember the smell of a library book when I got it home and opened its pages for the first time. The smell of my Grandad’s old News of the World when it was a Sunday broadsheet, it smelled so different from my Dad’s Observer, a different ink perhaps.
What has blunted us? Tullett says that ‘pollution, pandemics and poverty have all conspired to reduce our sensitivity’, with industry and commerce playing their part. Berge points to roses, once popular sources of fragrance, now being bred as a monoculture to the point that some have lost their scent. (The roses on my allotment did not get this memo: they smell gorgeous and I make a point of sinking my nose into them whenever I pass.)
A modern obsession with hygiene has taken smell from us, and so have modern furnishings. Actually both authors would take issue with that ‘modern’, as they believe that even people who lived in smelly environments tried to remain fragrant. Well into the 18th century, writes Berge, ‘French generals turned up on the battlefield heavily powdered and perfumed.’ (But the same generals thought it normal to urinate and defecate behind the drapes at Versailles, where toilets were not installed for years to come.)
Porous wood, wallpaper and plasterboard have been replaced by wall-foil and surface treatments. Yet our smoothed, laminated, hygienic homes are better loved by bacteria and viruses: ‘While the feared Covid virus gives up the ghost after a mere 24 hours on regular wallpaper, it can survive for up to 72 hours on plastic wall covering,’ we are told.
Smell is a weapon, and not just in Tullett’s captivating chapter on the history of stink bombs in war. Both authors provide many examples of how thinking someone stinks has put undesirables in an inferior place for centuries. Who are these undesirables? The poor, the female, the foreign and the witches. All this is mostly imaginary – smell differences are mostly diet-based. During the Vietnam War, ‘the Viet Cong could smell the Americans from a long way off, even in dense jungle. After the Americans became aware of this, newly arrived soldiers were immediately put on the local diet and their milk consumption reduced.’
One of the most powerful schoolyard insults used to be: ‘You smell!’ How do you defend yourself against that? We live now in a world where smells may be reduced, or just different, but I bet that insult still works, even among screen-obsessed youngsters. I like to think that smell is not gone, not yet, and nor is its power.
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