"We had been looking at ochre walls not realizing how much they were smoke stained."
I worked for seven years in London as a maintenance electrician for a firm whic received the bulk of its work from one of the major English Breweries.
We were working in a Victorian pub in central London, entirely renovating it back to its former glory.
The painters were washing down the beautiful embossed ceiling, removing the layers of grime, mainly nicotine that had accumulated there in over a century, when one of them scrambled down from his platform clutching his face, which had been splashed by some of the liquid soap and water (first step in the process) dripping down from above.
He was in considerable pain, which gradually got worse, and after about an hour it became obvious that is was serious, so someone drove him to the local hospital A&E department.
We learned later that, thanks to the nicotine content of what had splashed into his eye, he lost the sight of it - it had literally burned a hole in it.
If you examined the ceilings of the old pubs in those days, especially the embossed ones, you would see that they were covered with small bubbles of hardened liquid - a mixture of natural condensation and nicotine.
Nasty stuff!
Jim Carroll