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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Tunnel Under the Channel, by Thomas
-Whiteside
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: The Tunnel Under the Channel
-
-Author: Thomas Whiteside
-
-Release Date: November 7, 2021 [eBook #66685]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-Produced by: Brian Wilsden, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed
-             Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
-             produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital
-             Library.)
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TUNNEL UNDER THE CHANNEL ***
-Transcriber's Note: Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
-
-[Illustration]
-
-
-
-
-  Thomas Whiteside
-
-  The Tunnel Under the Channel
-
-  [Illustration]
-
-  SIMON AND SCHUSTER · NEW YORK · 1962
-
-
-
-
-  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
-  INCLUDING THE RIGHT OF REPRODUCTION
-  IN WHOLE OR IN PART IN ANY FORM
-  COPYRIGHT © 1961, 1962 BY THOMAS WHITESIDE
-  PUBLISHED BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC.
-  ROCKEFELLER CENTER, 630 FIFTH AVENUE
-  NEW YORK 20, N. Y.
-
-  MOST OF THE MATERIAL IN THIS BOOK ORIGINATED IN
-  _The New Yorker_ AS A SERIES OF ARTICLES,
-  WHICH HAVE BEEN HERE EXPANDED.
-
-  FIRST PRINTING
-
-  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 62-9744
-  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
-  BY AMERICAN BOOK-STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK
-
-
-
-
-_To Karen, Anne, Jimmy_
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration: One]
-
-
-IN THE SOCIAL HISTORY of England, the English Channel, that proud sea
-passage some three hundred and fifty miles long, has separated that
-country from the Continent as by a great gulf or a bottomless chasm.
-However, at its narrowest point, between Dover and Cap Gris-Nez—a
-distance of some twenty-one and a half miles—the Channel, despite
-any impression that storm-tossed sea travelers across it may have of
-yawning profundities below, is actually a body of water shaped less
-like a marine chasm than like an extremely shallow puddle. Indeed, the
-relationship of depth to breadth across the Strait of Dover is quite
-extraordinary, being as one to five hundred. This relationship can
-perhaps be most graphically illustrated by drawing a section profile of
-the Channel to scale. If the drawing were two feet long, the straight
-line representing the level of the sea and the line representing the
-profile of the Channel bottom would be so close together as to be
-barely distinguishable from one another. At its narrowest part, the
-Channel is nowhere more than two hundred and sixteen feet deep, and for
-half of the distance across, it is less than a hundred feet deep. It is
-just this extreme shallowness, in combination with strong winds and
-tidal currents flowing in the Channel neck between the North Sea and
-the Atlantic, that makes the seas of the Strait of Dover so formidable,
-especially in the winter months. The weather is so bad during November
-and December that the odds of a gale's occurring on any given day are
-computed by the marine signal station at Dunkirk at one in seven,
-and during the whole year there are only sixty periods in which the
-weather remains decent in the Channel through a whole day. Under these
-difficult conditions, the passage of people traveling across the
-Channel by ferry between England and France is a notoriously trying
-one; the experience has been mentioned in print during the last hundred
-years in such phrases as "that fearful ordeal," "an hour and a half's
-torture," and "that unspeakable horror." Writing in the _Revue des
-Deux Mondes_ in 1882, a French writer named Valbert described the trip
-from Dover to Calais as "two centuries ... of agony." Ninety-odd years
-ago, an article dealing with the Channel passage, in _The Gentleman's
-Magazine_, asserted that hundreds of thousands of people crossing
-the Strait each year suffered in a manner that beggared description.
-"Probably there is no other piece of travelling in civilized countries,
-where, within equal times, so much suffering is endured; certainly it
-would be hard to find another voyage of equal length which is so much
-feared," the author said, and he went on to report that only one day
-out of four was calm, on the average, while about three days in every
-eight were made dreadful to passengers by heavy weather. He concluded,
-with feeling, "What wonder that, under such circumstances, patriotism
-often fails to survive; and that if any wish is felt in mid-Channel, it
-is that, after all, England was not an island."
-
-How many Englishmen, their loyalty having been subjected to this
-strain, might express the same wish upon safely gaining high ground
-again is a question the writer in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ did not
-venture to discuss. However, there is no question about the persistence
-with which, during the past century at least, cross-Channel ferry
-passengers have spoken about or written about the desirability of some
-sort of dry-land passage between England and France. Engineers have
-been attracted to the idea of constructing such a passage for at least
-a hundred and fifty years. During that time, they have come up with
-proposals for crossing the Channel by spanning it with great bridges,
-by laying down submersible tubes resting on the sea bottom or floating
-halfway between sea bed and sea level, or even by using transports
-shaped like enormous tea wagons, whose wheels would travel along rails
-below sea level and whose platforms would tower high above the highest
-waves. But more commonly than by any other means, they have proposed to
-do away with the hazards and hardships of the Channel boat crossing by
-boring a traffic tunnel under the rock strata that lie at conveniently
-shallow depths under sea level. The idea of a Channel tunnel, at once
-abolishing seasickness and connecting England with the Continent by an
-easy arterial flow of goods and travelers, always has had about it a
-quality of grand simplicity—the simplicity of a very large extension
-of an easily comprehended principle; in this case, digging a hole—that
-has proved irresistible in appeal to generations not only of engineers
-but of visionaries and promoters of all kinds.
-
-The tunnel seems always to have had a capacity to arouse in its
-proponents a peculiarly passionate and unquenchable enthusiasm.
-Men have devoted their adult lives to promoting the cause of the
-tunnel, and such a powerful grip does the project seem to have had
-on the imagination of its various designers that just to look at
-some of their old drawings—depicting, for example, down to the
-finest detail of architectural ornamentation, ventilation stations
-for the tunnel sticking out of the surface of the Channel as ships
-sail gracefully about nearby—one might almost think that the tunnel
-was an accomplished reality, and the artist merely a conscientious
-reporter of an existing scene. Such is the minute detail in which the
-tunnel has been designed by various people that eighty-six years ago
-the French Assembly approved a tunnel bill that specified the price
-of railway tickets for the Channel-tunnel journey, and even contained
-a clause requiring second-class carriages to be provided with stuffed
-seats rather than the harder accommodations provided for third-class
-passengers. And an Englishman called William Collard, who died in
-1943, after occupying himself for thirty years with the problem of
-the Channel tunnel, in 1928 wrote and published a book on the subject
-that went so far as to work out a time-table for Channel-tunnel
-trains between Paris and London, complete with train and platform
-numbers and arrival and departure times at intermediate stations in
-Kent and northern France. As for the actual engineering details, a
-Channel tunnel has been the subject of studies that have ranged from
-collections of mere rough guesses to the most elaborate engineering,
-geological, and hydrographic surveys carried out by highly competent
-civil-engineering companies. Interestingly enough, ever since the days,
-a century or so ago, when practical Victorian engineers began taking up
-the problem, the technical feasibility of constructing a tunnel under
-the Channel has never really been seriously questioned. Yet, despite
-effort piled on effort and campaign mounted on campaign, over all the
-years, by engineers, politicians, and promoters, nobody has quite been
-able to push the project through. Up to now, every time the proponents
-of a tunnel have tried to advance the scheme, they have encountered
-a difficulty harder to understand, harder to identify, and, indeed,
-harder to break through than any rock stratum.
-
-The difficulty seems to lie in the degree to which, among Englishmen,
-the Channel has been not only a body of water but a state of mind.
-Because of the prevalence of this curious force, the history of the
-scheme to put a tunnel below the Channel has proved almost as stormy
-as the Channel waves themselves. Winston Churchill, in an article
-in the London _Daily Mail_, wrote in 1936, "There are few projects
-against which there exists a deeper and more enduring prejudice than
-the construction of a railway tunnel between Dover and Calais. Again
-and again it has been brought forward under powerful and influential
-sponsorship. Again and again it has been prevented." Mr. Churchill,
-who could never be accused of lacking understanding of the British
-character, was obliged to add that he found the resistance to the
-tunnel "a mystery." Some thirty-five times between 1882 and 1950
-the subject of the Channel tunnel was brought before Parliament in
-one form or another for discussion, and ten bills on behalf of the
-project have been rejected or set aside. On several occasions, the
-Parliamentary vote on the tunnel has been close enough to bring the
-tunnel within reach of becoming a reality, and in the eighties the
-construction of pilot tunnels for a distance under the sea from the
-English and French coasts was even started. But always the tunnel
-advocates have had to give way before persistent opposition, and always
-they have had to begin their exertions all over again. Successive
-generations of Englishmen have argued with each other—and with the
-French, who have never showed any opposition to a Channel tunnel—with
-considerable vehemence. The ranks of pro-tunnel people have included
-Sir Winston Churchill (who once called the British opposition to the
-tunnel "occult"), Prince Albert, and, at one point, Queen Victoria; and
-the people publicly lining themselves up with the anti-tunnel forces
-have included Lord Randolph Churchill (Sir Winston's father), Alfred,
-Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Professor Thomas Huxley, and, more
-recently, First Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. Queen Victoria, once
-pro-tunnel, later turned anti-tunnel; her sometime Prime Minister,
-William E. Gladstone, took an anti-tunnel position at one period when
-he was in office, and later, out of it, turned pro-tunnel. Throughout
-its stormy history the tunnel project has had the qualities of fantasy
-and nightmare—a thing of airy grace and claustrophobic horror; a long,
-bright kaleidoscope of promoters' promises and a cavern resounding with
-Cyclopean bellowing. Proponents of the tunnel have called it an end to
-seasickness, a boon to peace, international understanding, and trade;
-and they have hailed it as potentially the greatest civil-engineering
-feat of their particular century. Its opponents have referred to it
-sharply as "a mischievous project," and they have denounced it as a
-military menace that would have enabled the French (or Germans) to
-use it as a means of invading England—the thought of which, in 1914,
-caused one prominent English anti-tunneler, Admiral Sir Algernon de
-Horsey, publicly to characterize as "unworthy of consideration" the
-dissenting views of pro-tunnelers, whom he contemptuously referred
-to as "those poor creatures who have no stomach for an hour's sea
-passage, and who think retention of their dinners more important than
-the safety of their country." Over the years, anti-tunnel forces have
-used as ammunition an extraordinary variety of further arguments, which
-have ranged from objections about probable customs difficulties at the
-English and French ends of the tunnel to suspicions that a Channel
-tunnel would make it easier for international Socialists to commingle
-and conspire.
-
-Behind all these given reasons, no matter how elaborate or how special
-they might be, there has always lurked something else, a consideration
-more subtle, more elusive, more profound, and less answer able than
-any specific objections to the construction of a Channel tunnel—the
-consideration of England's traditional insular position, the feeling
-that somehow, if England were to be connected by a tunnel with the
-Continent, the peculiar meaning, to an Englishman, of being English
-would never be quite the same again. It is this feeling, no doubt, that
-in 1882 motivated an article on the tunnel, in so sober a publication
-as _The Solicitors' Journal_, to express about it an uneasiness
-bordering on alarm, on the ground that, if successful, the construction
-of a tunnel would "effect a change in the natural geographical
-condition of things." And it is no doubt something of the same feeling
-that prompted Lord Randolph Churchill, during a speech attacking a bill
-for a Channel tunnel before the House of Commons in 1889—the bill
-was defeated, of course—to observe skillfully that "the reputation
-of England has hitherto depended upon her being, as it were, _virgo
-intacta_."
-
-If the proponents and promoters of the tunnel have never quite
-succeeded in putting their project across in all the years, they have
-never quite given up trying, either; and now, in a new strategic
-era of nuclear rockets, a new era of transport in which air ferries
-to the Continent carry cars as well as passengers, and a new era of
-trade, marked by the emergence and successful growth of the European
-Economic Community, or Common Market, the pro-tunnel forces have been
-at it again, in what one of the leading pro-tunnelers has called
-"a last glorious effort to get this thing through." This time they
-have encountered what they consider to be the most encouraging kind
-of progress in the entire history of the scheme. In April, 1960, an
-organization called the Channel Tunnel Study Group announced, in
-London, a new series of proposals for a Channel tunnel, based on a
-number of recent elaborate studies on the subject. The proposals
-called for twin parallel all-electric railway tunnels, either bored
-or immersed, with trains that would carry passengers and transport,
-in piggyback fashion, cars, buses, and trucks. The double tunnel, if
-of the immersed kind, would be 26 miles long between portals. A bored
-tunnel, as planned, would be 32 miles long and would be by far the
-longest traffic tunnel of either the underwater or under-mountain
-variety in the world. The longest continuous subaqueous traffic tunnel
-in existence is the rail tunnel under the Mersey, connecting Liverpool
-and Birkenhead, a distance of 2.2 miles; the longest rail tunnel
-through a mountain is the Simplon Tunnel, 12.3 miles in length. The
-Channel tunnel would run between the areas of Sangatte and Calais on
-the French side, and between Ashford and Folkestone on the English
-side. Trains would travel through it at an average speed of 65 miles
-an hour, reaching 87 miles an hour in some places, and at rush hours
-they would be capable of running 4,200 passengers and 1,800 vehicles on
-flatcars every hour in each direction. While a true vehicular tunnel
-could also be constructed, the obviously tremendous problems of keeping
-it safely ventilated at present make this particular project, according
-to the engineers, prohibitively expensive to build and maintain. The
-train journey from London to Paris via the proposed tunnel would take
-four hours and twenty minutes; the passenger trains would pass through
-the tunnel in about thirty minutes. Passengers would pay 32 shillings,
-or $4.48–$2.92 cheaper than the cost of a first-class passenger ticket
-on the Dover-Calais sea-ferry—to ride through the tunnel; the cost
-of accompanied small cars would be $16.48, a claimed 30 per cent less
-than a comparable sea-ferry charge. The tunnel would take four to five
-years to build, and the Study Group estimated that, including the rail
-terminals at both ends, it would cost approximately $364,000,000.
-
-All that the Study Group, which represents British, French and American
-commercial interests, needs to go ahead with the project and turn it
-into a reality is—besides money, and the Study Group seems to be
-confident that it can attract that—the approval of the British and
-French Governments of the scheme. For all practical purposes, the
-French Government never has had any objection to a fixed installation
-linking both sides of the Channel, and as far as the official British
-attitude is concerned, when the British Government announced, in
-July, 1961, that it would seek full membership in the European Common
-Market, most of the tunnel people felt sure that the forces of British
-insularity which had hindered the development of a tunnel for nearly
-a century at last had been dealt a blow to make them reel. But what
-raised the pro-tunnelers' excitement to the greatest pitch of all was
-the decision of the French and British Governments, last October,
-to hold discussions on the problem of building either a bridge or a
-tunnel. When these discussions got under way last November, the main
-question before the negotiators was the economic practicality of such a
-huge undertaking.
-
-Yet, with all the encouragement, few of the pro-tunnelers in England
-seem willing to make a flat prediction that the British Government
-will actively support the construction of a tunnel. They have been
-disappointed too often. Then again, despite the generally high hopes
-that this time the old strategic objections to the construction of a
-tunnel have been pretty well forgotten, pro-tunnelers are well aware
-that a number of Englishmen with vivid memories of 1940 are still
-doubtful about the project. "The Channel saved us last time, even in
-the age of the airplane, didn't it?" one English barrister said a while
-ago, in talking of his feelings about building the Channel tunnel. The
-tunnel project has the open enmity of Viscount Montgomery, who has
-made repeated attacks on it and who in 1960 demanded, in a newspaper
-interview, that before the Government took any stand on behalf of such
-a project, "The British people as a whole should be consulted and
-vote on the Channel tunnel as part of a General-Elections program."
-And, to show that the spirit of the anti-tunnelers has not lost its
-resilience, Major-General Sir Edward L. Spears, in the correspondence
-columns of the London _Times_ in April of that same year, denounced
-the latest Channel-tunnel scheme as "a plan which will not only cost
-millions of public money, but will let loose on to our inadequate
-roads eighteen hundred more vehicles an hour, each driven by a
-right-of-the-road driver in a machine whose steering wheel is on the
-left."
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration: Two]
-
-
-THE FIRST SCHEME for the construction of a tunnel beneath the English
-Channel was put forward in France, in 1802, by a mining engineer named
-Albert Mathieu, who that year displayed plans for such a work in
-Paris, at the Palais du Luxembourg and the École Nationale Supérieure
-des Mines. Mathieu's tunnel, divided into two lengths totaling about
-eighteen and a half miles, was to be illuminated by oil lamps and
-ventilated at intervals by chimneys projecting above the sea into the
-open air, and its base was to be a paved way over which relays of
-horses would gallop, pulling coachloads of passengers and mail between
-France and England in a couple of hours or so of actual traveling time,
-with changes of horses being provided at an artificial island to be
-constructed in mid-Channel. Mathieu managed to have his project brought
-to the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul, who was
-sufficiently impressed with it to bring it to the attention of Charles
-James Fox during a personal meeting of the two men during the Peace of
-Amiens. Fox described it as "one of the great enterprises we can now
-undertake together." But the project got no further than this talking
-stage. In 1803, a Frenchman named de Mottray came up with another
-proposal for creating a passage underneath the Channel. It consisted
-of laying down sections of a long, submerged tube on top of the sea
-bed between England and France, the sections being linked together in
-such a way as to form a watertight tunnel. However, Mottray's project
-petered out quickly, too, and the subject of an undersea connection
-between the two countries lay dormant until 1833, when it attracted the
-attention of a man named Aimé Thomé de Gamond, a twenty-six-year-old
-French civil engineer and hydrographer of visionary inclinations.
-
-Thomé de Gamond was to turn into an incomparably zealous and persistent
-projector of ways in which people could cross between England and
-France without getting wet or seasick; he devoted himself to the
-problem for no less than thirty-four years, and had no hesitation in
-exposing himself to extraordinary physical dangers in the course of his
-researches. Unlike the plans of his predecessors, Thomé de Gamond's
-were based upon fairly systematic hydrographic or geological surveys
-of the Channel area. In 1833 he made the first of these surveys by
-taking marine soundings to establish a profile of the sea bottom in a
-line between Calais and Dover; on the basis of this, he drew up, in
-1834, a plan for a submerged iron tube that was to be laid down in
-prefabricated sections on the bed of the Strait of Dover and then lined
-with masonry, the irregular bottom of the sea meanwhile having been
-prepared to receive the tube through the leveling action of a great
-battering-ram and rake operated from the surface by boat. By 1835,
-Thomé de Gamond modified this scheme by eliminating the prefabricated
-tube in favor of a movable hydrographic shield that would slowly
-advance across the Channel bottom, leaving a masonry tube behind it
-as it progressed. But the rate of progress, he calculated, would be
-slow; the work was to take thirty years to complete, or fifteen years
-if work began on two shores simultaneously. Thomé de Gamond moved on
-to schemes for other ways of crossing the Channel, and between 1835
-and 1836 he turned out, successively, detailed plans for five types
-of cross-Channel bridges. They included a granite-and-steel bridge of
-colossal proportions, and with arches "higher than the cupola of St.
-Paul's, London," which was to be built between Ness Corner Point and
-Calais; a flat-bottomed steam-driven concrete-and-stone ferryboat,
-of such size as to constitute "a true floating island," which would
-travel between two great piers each jutting out five miles into the
-Channel between Ness Corner Point and Cap Blanc-Nez; and a massive
-artificial isthmus of stone, which would stretch from Cap Gris-Nez
-to Dover and block the neck of the English Channel except for three
-transverse cuttings spanned by movable bridges, which Thomé de Gamond
-allowed across his work for the passage of ships. Thomé de Gamond was
-particularly fond of his isthmus scheme. He traveled to London and
-there promoted it vigorously among interested Englishmen during the
-Universal Exhibition of 1851, but he reluctantly abandoned it because
-of objections to its high estimated cost of £33,600,000 and to what he
-described as "the obstinate resistance of mariners, who objected to
-their being obliged to ply their ships through the narrow channels."
-
-Such exasperating objections to joining England and France above water
-sent Thomé de Gamond back to the idea of doing the job under the sea,
-and between 1842 and 1855 he made various energetic explorations of
-the Channel area in an attempt to determine the feasibility of driving
-a tunnel through the rock formations under the Strait. Geological
-conditions existing in the middle of the Strait were, up to that time,
-almost entirely a matter of surmise, based on observations made on the
-British and French sides of the Channel, and in the process of finding
-out more about them, Thomé de Gamond decided to descend in person to
-the bottom of the Channel to collect geological specimens. In 1855,
-at the age of forty-eight, he had the hardihood to make a number of
-such descents, unencumbered by diving equipment, in the middle of the
-Strait. Naked except for wrappings that he wound about his head to
-keep in place pads of buttered lint he had plastered over his ears, to
-protect them from high water pressure, he would plunge to the bottom
-of the Channel, weighted down by bags of flints and trailing a long
-safety line attached to his body, and a red distress line attached
-to his left arm, from a rowboat occupied also by a Channel pilot, a
-young assistant, and his own daughter, who went along to keep watch
-over him. On the deepest of these descents, at a point off Folkestone,
-Thomé de Gamond, having put a spoonful of olive oil into his mouth as
-a lubricant that would allow him to expel air from his lungs without
-permitting water at high pressure to force its way in, dived down
-weighted by four bags of flints weighing a total of 180 pounds. About
-his waist he wore a belt of ten inflated pig's bladders, which were to
-pull him rapidly to the surface after he had scooped up his geological
-specimen from the Channel bed and released his ballast, and, using
-this system, he actually touched bottom at a depth of between 99 and
-108 feet. His ascent from this particular dive was not unremarkable,
-either; in an account of it, he wrote that just after he had left the
-bottom of the Channel with a sample of clay
-
- ... I was attacked by voracious fish, which seized me by the legs
- and arms. One of them bit me on the chin, and would at the same time
- have attacked my throat if it had not been preserved by a thick
- handkerchief.... I was fortunate enough not to open my mouth, and
- I reappeared on top of the water after being immersed fifty-two
- seconds. My men saw one of the monsters which had assailed me, and
- which did not leave me until I had reached the surface. They were
- conger eels.
-
-Thomé de Gamond's geological observations, although they were certainly
-sketchy by later standards, were enough to convince him of the
-feasibility of a mined tunnel under the Channel, and in 1856 he drew
-up plans for such a work. This was to be a stone affair containing a
-double set of railroad tracks. It was to stretch twenty-one miles, from
-Cap Gris-Nez to Eastwear Point, and from these places was to connect,
-by more than nine miles at each end of sloping access tunnels, with
-the French and British railway systems. The junctions of the sloping
-access tunnels and the main tunnel itself were to be marked by wide
-shafts, about three hundred feet deep, at the bottom of which travelers
-would encounter the frontier stations of each nation. The line of the
-main tunnel was to be marked above the surface by a series of twelve
-small artificial islands made of stone. These were to be surmounted
-with lighthouses and were to contain ventilating shafts connecting with
-the tunnel. Thomé de Gamond prudently provided the ventilation shafts
-in his plans with sea valves, so that in case of war between England
-and France each nation would have the opportunity of flooding the
-tunnel on short notice. The tunnel was designed to cross the northern
-tip of the Varne, a narrow, submerged shelf that lies parallel to the
-English coast about ten miles off Folkestone, and so close to the
-surface that at low tide it is only about fifteen feet under water at
-its highest point. Thomé de Gamond planned to raise the Varne above
-water level, thus converting it into an artificial island, by building
-it up with rocks and earth brought to the spot in ships. Through this
-earth, engineers would dig a great shaft down to the level of the
-tunnel, so that the horizontal mining of the tunnel as a whole could
-be carried on from four working faces simultaneously, instead of only
-two. The great shaft was also to serve as a means of ventilating the
-tunnel and communicating with it from the outside, and around its apex
-Thomé de Gamond planned, with a characteristically grand flourish, an
-international port called the Étoile de Varne, which was to have four
-outer quays and an interior harbor, as well as amenities such as living
-quarters for personnel and a first-class lighthouse. As for the shaft
-leading down to the railway tunnel, according to alternate versions of
-Thomé de Gamond's plan, it was to be at least 350 feet—and possibly
-as much as 984 feet—in diameter, and 147 feet deep; and, according to
-a contemporary account in the Paris newspaper _La Patrie_, "an open
-station [would be] formed as spacious as the court of the Louvre, where
-travelers might halt to take air after running a quarter of an hour
-under the bottom of the Strait."
-
-From the bottom of this deep station, trains might also ascend by
-means of gently spiraling ramps to the surface of the Étoile de Varne,
-_La Patrie_ reported. The newspaper went on to invite its readers to
-contemplate the panorama at sea level:
-
- Imagine a train full of travelers, after having run for fifteen
- minutes in the bowels of the earth through a splendidly lighted
- tunnel, halting suddenly under the sky, and then ascending to the
- quays of this island. The island, rising in mid-sea, is furnished
- with solid constructions, spacious quays garnished with the ships of
- all nations; some bound for the Baltic or the Mediterranean, others
- arriving from America or India. In the distance to the North, her
- silver cliffs extending to the North, reflected in the sun, is white
- Albion, once separated from all the world, now become the British
- Peninsula. To the South ... is the land of France.... Those white
- sails spread in the midst of the Straits are the fishing vessels of
- the two nations.... Those rapid trains which whistle at the bottom of
- the subterranean station are from London or Paris in three or four
- hours.
-
-In the spring of 1856, Thomé de Gamond obtained an audience with
-Napoleon III and expounded his latest plan to him. The Emperor reacted
-with interest and told the engineer that he would have a scientific
-commission look into the matter "as far as our present state of science
-allows." The commission found itself favorable to the idea of the work
-in general but lacking a good deal of necessary technical information,
-and it suggested that some sort of preliminary agreement between the
-British and French Governments on the desirability of the tunnel ought
-to be reached before a full technical survey was made. Encouraged by
-the way things seemed to be going, Thomé de Gamond set about promoting
-his scheme more energetically than ever. He obtained a promise of
-collaboration from three of Britain's most eminent engineers—Robert
-Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Locke—and in 1858 he
-traveled to London to advance the cause of the tunnel among prominent
-people and to promote it in the press. Leading journals were receptive
-to the idea. An article in the _Illustrated London News_ referred to
-the proposed tunnel as "this great line of junction," and said that
-it would put an end to the commercial isolation that England was
-being faced with by the creation on the Continent of a newly unified
-railway system that was making it possible to ship goods from Central
-to Western Europe without breaking bulk. The article added that the
-creation of the tunnel
-
- ... would still preserve for this country for the future that maritime
- isolation which formed its strength throughout the past; for the
- situation of the tunnel beneath the bed of the sea would enable the
- government on either coast, in case of war, as a means of defense,
- to inundate it immediately.... According to the calculations of the
- engineer, the tunnel might be completely filled with water in the
- course of an hour, and afterwards three days would be required, with
- the mutual consent of the two Governments, to draw off the water, and
- reestablish the traffic.
-
-Thomé de Gamond's visit to England was climaxed by a couple of
-interviews on the subject of the Channel tunnel that he obtained with
-Prince Albert, who supported the idea with considerable enthusiasm and
-even took up the matter in private with Queen Victoria. The Queen,
-who was known to suffer dreadfully from seasickness, told Albert,
-who relayed the message to Thomé de Gamond, "You may tell the French
-engineer that if he can accomplish it, I will give him my blessing in
-my own name and in the name of all the ladies of England." However, in
-a discussion Thomé de Gamond had earlier had with Her Majesty's Prime
-Minister, Lord Palmerston, who was present at one of the engineer's
-interviews with Albert, the idea of the tunnel was not so well
-received. The engineer found Palmerston "rather close" on the subject.
-"What! You pretend to ask us to contribute to a work the object of
-which is to shorten a distance which we find already too short!"
-Thomé de Gamond quoted him as exclaiming when the tunnel project was
-mentioned. And, according to an account by the engineer, when Albert,
-in the presence of both men, spoke favorably of the benefits to England
-of a passage under the Channel, Lord Palmerston "without losing that
-perfectly courteous tone which was habitual with him" remarked to the
-Prince Consort, "You would think quite differently if you had been born
-on this island."
-
-While Thomé de Gamond was occupied with his submarine-crossing
-projects, other people were producing their own particular tunnel
-schemes. Most of them seem to have been for submerged tubes, either
-laid down directly on the sea bed or raised above its irregularities by
-vertical columns to form a sort of underwater elevated railway. Perhaps
-the most ornamental of these various plans was drawn up by a Frenchman
-named Hector Horeau, in 1851. It called for a prefabricated iron tube
-containing a railway to be laid across the Channel bed along such
-judiciously inclined planes as to allow his carriages passage through
-them without their having to be drawn by smoke-bellowing locomotives—a
-suffocatingly real problem that most early Channel-tunnel designers,
-including, apparently, Thomé de Gamond, pretty well ignored. The slope
-given to Horeau's underground railway was to enable the carriages to
-glide down under the Channel from one shoreline with such wonderful
-momentum as to bring them to a point not far from the other, the
-carriages being towed the rest of the way up by cables attached to
-steam winches operated from outside the tunnel exit. The tunnel
-itself would be lighted by gas flames and, in daytime, by thick glass
-skylights that would admit natural light filtering down through the
-sea. The line of the tube was to be marked, across the surface of the
-Channel, by great floating conical structures resembling pennanted
-pavilions in some medieval tapestry. The pavilions were to be held in
-place by strong cables anchored to the Channel bottom; they were also
-to contain marine warning beacons. This project never got under the
-ground.
-
-In 1858, an attempt to assassinate Napoleon III brought France into the
-Italian war against Austria, and when word spread in France that the
-assassin's bombs had been made in Birmingham, a chill developed between
-the French and British Governments. This led to a wave of fear in
-England that another Napoleon might try a cross-Channel invasion. All
-this froze out Thomé de Gamond's tunnel-promoting for several years.
-He did not try again until 1867, when he exhibited a set of revised
-plans for his Varne tunnel at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. In
-doing so he concluded that he had pushed the cause of the tunnel about
-to the limit of his personal powers. Thirty-five years of work devoted
-to the problem had cost him a moderate personal fortune, and he was
-obliged to note in presenting his plan that "the work must now be
-undertaken by collective minds well versed in the physiology of rocks
-and the workings of subterranean deposits." After that, Thomé de Gamond
-retired into the background, squeezed out, it may be, by other tunnel
-promoters. In 1875, an article in the London _Times_ that mentioned his
-name in passing reported that he was "living in humble circumstances,
-his daughter supporting him by giving lessons on the piano." He died in
-the following year.
-
-Although Thomé de Gamond's revised plan of 1867 came to nothing in
-itself, it did cause renewed talk about a Channel tunnel. The new
-spirit of free trade was favorable to it among Europeans, and everybody
-was being greatly impressed with reports of the striking progress on
-various great European engineering projects of the time that promised
-closer communication between nations—the successful cutting of the
-Isthmus of Suez, the near completion of the 8.1-mile-long Mount Cenis
-rail tunnel, and the opening, only a few years previously, of the
-9.3-mile-long St. Gotthard Tunnel, for example. Hardly any great
-natural physical barriers between neighboring nations seemed beyond the
-ability of the great nineteenth-century engineers to bridge or breach,
-and to many people it appeared logical enough that the barrier of the
-Dover Strait should have its place on the engineers' list of conquests.
-In this generally propitious atmosphere, an Englishman named William
-Low took up where Thomé de Gamond left off. Shortly after the Universal
-Exhibition, Low came up with a Channel tunnel scheme based principally
-upon his own considerable experience as an engineer in charge of coal
-mines in Wales. Low proposed the creation of a pair of twin tunnels,
-each containing a single railway track, and interconnected at intervals
-by short cross-passages. The idea was a technically striking one, for
-it aimed at making the tunnels, in effect, self-ventilating by making
-use of the action of a train entering a tunnel to push air in front
-of it and draw fresh air in behind itself. According to Low's scheme,
-this sort of piston action, repeated on a big scale by the constant
-passage of trains bound in opposite directions in the two tunnels, was
-supposed to keep air moving along each of the tunnels and between them
-through the cross-passages in such a way as to allow for its steady
-replenishment through the length of the tunnels. With modifications,
-Low's concept of a double self-ventilating tunnel forms the basis for
-the plan most seriously advanced by the Channel Tunnel Study Group in
-1960.
-
-After showing his plans to Thomé de Gamond, who approved of them, Low
-obtained the collaboration of two other Victorian engineers—Sir John
-Hawkshaw, who in 1865 and 1866 had had a number of test borings made
-by a geologist named Hartsink Day in the bed of the Channel in the
-areas between St. Margaret's Bay, just east of Dover, and Sangatte,
-just north-east of Calais, and had become convinced that a Channel
-tunnel was a practical possibility in geological terms; and Sir James
-Brunlees, an engineer who had helped build the Suez Canal. In 1867,
-an Anglo-French committee of Channel-tunnel promoters submitted a
-scheme for a Channel tunnel based on Low's plan to a commission of
-engineers under Napoleon III, and the promoters asked for an official
-concession to build the tunnel. The members of the commission were
-unanimous in regarding the scheme as a workable one, although they
-balked at an accompanying request of the promoters that the British
-and French Governments each guarantee interest on a million sterling,
-which would be raised privately, to help get the project under way, and
-took no action. But apart from the question of money the promoters were
-encouraged. In 1870 they persuaded the French Government officially to
-ask the British Government what support it would be willing to give to
-the proposed construction of a Channel railway tunnel. Consideration of
-the question in Whitehall got sidetracked for a while by the outbreak
-of the Franco-Prussian war in the same year, but in 1872, after further
-diplomatic enquiries by the French Government, the British Government
-eventually replied that it found no objection "in principle" to a
-Channel tunnel, provided it was not asked to put up money or guarantee
-of any kind in connection with it and provided that ownership of the
-tunnel would not be a perpetual private monopoly. In the same year,
-a Channel Tunnel Company was chartered in England, with Lord Richard
-Grosvenor, chairman of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, at its
-head, and with Hawkshaw, Low, and Brunlees as its engineers. The
-tunnel envisioned by the company would stretch from Dover to Sangatte,
-and its cost, including thirty-three miles of railway that would
-connect on the English side with the London, Chatham & Dover and the
-South-Eastern Railways, and on the French side with the Chemin de Fer
-du Nord, would be £10,000,000. Three years later, the English company
-sought and obtained from Parliament temporary powers to buy up private
-land at St. Margaret's Bay, in Kent, for the purpose of going ahead
-with experimental tunneling work there. At the same time, a newly
-formed French Channel Tunnel Company backed by the House of Rothschild
-and headed by an engineer named Michel Chevalier obtained by act of
-the French legislature permission from the French Government to start
-work on a tunnel from the French side at an undetermined point between
-Boulogne and Calais, and a concession to operate the French section
-of the tunnel for ninety-nine years. The _cahier des charges_ of the
-French tunnel bill dealt in considerable detail with the terms under
-which the completed tunnel was to be run, down to providing a full
-table of tariffs for the under-Channel railroad. Thus, a first-class
-passenger riding through the tunnel in an enclosed carriage furnished
-with windows would be charged fifty centimes per kilometre. Freight
-rates were established for such categories as furniture, silks, wine,
-oysters, fresh fish, oxen, cows, pigs, goats, and horse-drawn carriages
-with or without passengers inside.
-
-The greatest uncertainty facing the two companies, now that they had
-the power to start digging toward each other's working sites, consisted
-of their lack of foreknowledge of geological obstacles they might
-encounter in the rock masses lying between the two shores at the neck
-of the Channel. However, the companies' engineers had substantial
-reasons for believing that, in general, the region and stratum into
-which they planned to take the tunnel were peculiarly suited to their
-purpose. Their belief was based on a rough reconstruction—a far more
-detailed reconstruction is available nowadays, of course—of various
-geological events occurring in the area before there ever was a
-Channel. A hundred million years ago, in the Upper Cretaceous period
-of the Mesozoic era, a great part of southern England, which had been
-connected at its easterly end with the Continental land mass, was
-inundated, along with much of Western Europe, by the ancient Southern
-Sea. As it lay submerged, this sea-washed land accumulated on its
-surface, over a period of ten million years, layers of white or whitish
-mud about nine hundred feet thick and composed principally of the
-microscopic skeletons of plankton and tiny shells. Eventually the mud
-converted itself into rock. Then, for another forty million years, at
-just the point where the neck of the Dover Strait now is, very gentle
-earth movements raised the level of this rock to form a bar-shaped
-island some forty miles long. By Eocene times this Wealden Island,
-stretching westward across the Calais-Dover area, actually seems to
-have been the only bit of solid ground standing out in a seascape of
-a Western Europe inundated by the Eocene sea. When most of France and
-southern England reappeared above the surface, in Miocene times, this
-island welded them together; later, in the ice age, the Channel isthmus
-disappeared and emerged again four times with the rise and fall of the
-sea caused by the alternate thawing and refreezing of the northern
-icecap. When each sequence of the ice age ended, the land bridge
-remained, high and dry as ever, and it was over this isthmus that
-paleolithic man shambled across from the Continent, in the trail of
-rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, giant boars, and other great beasts whose
-fossilized bones have been found in the Wealden area.
-
-Encroaching seas made a channel through the isthmus and cut the Bronze
-Age descendants of this breed of men off from the Continent about six
-thousand years ago. Then fierce tidal currents coursing between the
-North Sea and the Atlantic widened the breach still further until, as
-recently as four thousand years ago (or only about a couple of thousand
-years before Caesar's legions invaded Britain by boat), the sea wore
-away the rock of the isthmus to approximately the present width of
-the Strait, leaving exposed high at each side the eroded rock walls,
-formerly the whitish mudbank of Cretaceous times—now the white chalk
-cliffs of the Dover and Calais areas. Providentially for the later
-purposes of Channel tunnelers, however, the seas that divided England
-from the Continent also left behind them a thin remnant of the old land
-connection in the form of certain chalk layers that still stretched
-in gentle folds across the bottom of the Strait, and it was through
-this area of remaining chalk that the Victorian engineers planned to
-drive their tunnel headings. Even more providentially, they had the
-opportunity of extending their headings under the Channel through a
-substratum of chalk almost ideal for tunneling purposes, known as the
-Lower Chalk. Unlike the two layers of cretaceous rock that lie above
-it—the white Upper Chalk and the whitish Middle Chalk, both of which
-are flint-laden, heavily fissured, and water-bearing, and consequently
-almost impossible to tunnel in for any distance—the Lower Chalk (it
-is grayish in color) is virtually flint-free and nearly impermeable
-to water, especially in the lower parts of the stratum, where it is
-mixed with clay; at the same time it is stable, generally free of
-fissures, and easy to work. From the coastline between Folkestone and
-South Foreland, north-east of Dover, where its upper level is visible
-in the cliffs, the Lower Chalk dips gently down into the Strait in a
-north-easterly direction and disappears under an outcropping Middle
-Chalk, and emerges again on the French side between Calais and Cap
-Blanc-Nez. Given this knowledge and their knowledge of the state of
-Lower Chalk beds on land areas, the Victorian engineers were confident
-that the ribbon of Lower Chalk extending under the Strait would turn
-out to be a continuous one. To put this view to a further test, the
-French Channel Tunnel Company, in 1875, commissioned a team of eminent
-geologists and hydrographers to make a more detailed survey of the
-area than had yet been attempted. In 1875 and 1876 the surveyors made
-7,700 soundings and took 3,267 geological samples from the bed of the
-Strait and concluded from their studies that, except for a couple of
-localities near each shoreline, which a tunnel could avoid, the Lower
-Chalk indeed showed every sign of stretching without interruption or
-fault from shore to shore. However, when these studies were completed,
-Lord Grosvenor's Channel Tunnel Company did not find itself in a
-position to do much about them. The company was having trouble raising
-money, and its temporary power to acquire land at St. Margaret's
-Bay for experimental workings had lapsed without the promoters ever
-having used it. William Low, who had left the company in 1873 after
-disagreements with Hawkshaw on technical matters—Low had come to
-believe, for one thing, that the terrain around St. Margaret's Bay was
-unsuitable as a starting place for a channel tunnel—had become the
-chief engineering consultant of a rival Channel-tunnel outfit that
-called itself the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company. But the
-Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company wasn't getting anywhere, either.
-It remained for a third English company, headed by a railway magnate
-named Sir Edward Watkin, to push the Channel-tunnel scheme into its
-next phase, which turned out to be the most tumultuous one in all its
-history.
-
-[Illustration: A PLEDGED M.P.
-
- M.P.'s BRIDE. "_Oh! William dear—if you are—a Liberal—do bring in a
- Bill—next Session—for that Underground Tunnel!!_"
-
- This cartoon depicting the horrors of the Channel crossing originally
- appeared in _Punch_ in 1869. In 1961, 92 years later, _Punch_ found it
- as timely as ever.]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- Aimé Thomé de Gamond
-
- THE GREAT TUNNEL SCHEMERS
-
- Sir Edward Watkin]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- THE GREAT ANTI-TUNNELER
-
- Lt.-Gen. Sir Garnet Wolseley, 1882]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- Sir Garnet Wolseley's fears of a French invasion through the tunnel as
- seen in the United States in 1882 by _Puck_.]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- Hector Horeau's tunnel scheme of 1851 involved laying down a
- prefabricated submerged tube on the Channel bottom. The pavilions are
- ventilating stations.]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- Thomé de Gamond's plan in 1856 for a Channel tunnel by way of the
- Varne, which would be built up into an international harbor.]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- The Channel tunnel workings at Shakespeare Cliff in 1882. The entrance
- is by the smokestack near the twin portals, which are unconnected with
- the tunnel workings.]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- Diagram of the tunnel workings at Shakespeare Cliff in 1882. The
- Admiralty Pier at Dover is in the distance.]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- TUNNEL PARTIES IN THE 1880s
-
- Everybody who was anybody went down into the tunnel to inspect the new
- undersea road to France.
-
- 1. Guests preparing for the descent.
-
- 2. Being lowered 163 feet below the surface to the gallery.
-
- 3. Champagne party in the tunnel.
-
- 4. Inspecting the Beaumont tunneling machine as it bores toward France.
-
- 5. Tunnel oratory at champagne lunch at Dover.]
-
-[Illustration: An early Napoleonic vision of the invasion of England]
-
-[Illustration: by air, sea, and a Channel tunnel.]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- Sir Edward Watkin, at the sluice-gates, vanquishes the French invaders
- marching on England through the tunnel. A London newspaper cartoon at
- the time of the great tunnel controversy.]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- THREE SOLUTIONS TO THE INVASION PROBLEM
-
- How to have a tunnel and still keep England safe from invasion is a
- problem that has attracted the attention of artists since the eighties.
-
- The _Illustrated London News_, 1882, shows how, at
- the first sign of invasion, the tunnel could be bombarded from the
- Admiralty Pier at Dover, from the Dover fortifications, and from
- positions offshore.
-
- Viaduct for the French tunnel entrance proposed in 1906.
- At signs of French intentions to invade, the British fleet would sail
- up and blow this viaduct to smithereens, thus blocking the tunnel from
- the French end.
-
- David Langdon in _Paris Match_, 1960, suggests another way of
- handling the invasion problem.]
-
-[Illustration]
-
-[Illustration]
-
-[Illustration: PROPOSED METHOD OF CONSTRUCTING A SUBMERGED TUBE UNDER
-THE CHANNEL]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- The illustration shows the proposed laying of a "cut and cover"
- prefabricated tunnel on the Channel bottom with the aid of a DeLong
- self-elevating construction platform.]
-
-[Illustration:
-
- Artist's impression of the boring of the double Channel tunnel, with
- its extra service tunnel and cross-passages, as proposed by the
- Channel Tunnel Study Group in 1960.]
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration: Three]
-
-
-SIR EDWARD WATKIN was a vociferously successful promoter from the
-Midlands. The son of a Manchester cotton merchant, Watkin had passed up
-a chance at the family business in favor of railways in the early days
-of the age of steam, and it is a measure of his generally acknowledged
-shrewdness at railway promotion that in his mid-twenties, having become
-secretary of the Trent Valley Railway, he negotiated its sale to the
-London North Western Railway at a profit of £438,000. Now in his early
-sixties, Watkin was chairman of three British railway companies, the
-Manchester, Sheffield Lincolnshire Railway, the Metropolitan (London)
-Railway, and the South-Eastern Railway—the last-named being a company
-whose line ran from London to Dover via Folkestone—and one of his big
-current schemes was the formation of a through route under a single
-management—his own, naturally—from Manchester and the north to
-Dover. It was while he was busily promoting this scheme that Watkin
-caught the Channel-tunnel fever. He realized that part of the land
-the South-Eastern Railway owned along its line between Folkestone and
-Dover lay happily accessible to the ribbon of Lower Chalk that dipped
-into the sea in the direction of Dover and stretched under the bed of
-the Strait, and it wasn't long before he was conjuring up visions of a
-great system in which his projected Manchester-Dover line, instead of
-stopping at the Channel shoreline, would carry on under the Strait to
-the Continent.
-
-One of Sir Edward Watkin's first steps toward determining the technical
-feasibility of constructing a tunnel was to call in, sometime in
-the mid-seventies, William Low, whose own tunnel company had quite
-fallen apart, for engineering consultation. Watkin decided to aim
-for a twin tunnel based on Low's idea, which would have its starting
-point in the area west of Dover and east of Folkestone, and he put
-his own engineers to work on the job. In 1880, the engineers sank a
-seventy-four-foot shaft by the South-Eastern Railway line at Abbots
-Cliff, about midway between Folkestone and Dover, and began driving a
-horizontal pilot gallery seven feet in diameter along the Lower Chalk
-bed in the direction of the sea off Dover. By the early part of the
-following year, the experimental heading extended about half a mile
-underground. His engineers having satisfied themselves that the Lower
-Chalk was lending itself as well as expected to being tunneled, Sir
-Edward went ahead and formed the Submarine Continental Railway Company,
-capitalized at £250,000 and closely controlled by the South-Eastern
-Railway Company, to take over the existing tunnel workings and to
-continue them on a larger scale, with the aim of constructing a Channel
-tunnel connecting with the South-Eastern's coastal rail line. At the
-same time, he reached an understanding with the French Channel Tunnel
-Company on co-ordination of English and French operations; he also
-engineered through Parliament—he was an M.P. himself, and that helped
-things a bit—a bill giving the South-Eastern power to carry out the
-compulsory purchase of certain coastal land in the general direction
-taken by the existing heading.
-
-Then Sir Edward's engineers sank a second shaft, farther to the east
-but in alignment with the first heading, 160 feet below a level
-stretch of ground by the South-Eastern Railway line at Shakespeare
-Cliff, just west of Dover, 120 feet below high water, and began boring
-a new seven-foot pilot tunnel that dipped down with the Lower Chalk
-bed leading into the Channel. This second boring, like the first, was
-carried out with the use of a tunneling machine especially designed
-for the purpose by Colonel Frederick Beaumont, an engineer who had had
-a hand in the construction of the Dover fortifications. The Beaumont
-tunneling machine, a prototype of some of the most powerful tunneling
-machines in use nowadays, was run by compressed air piped in from the
-outside, and the discharge of this air from the machine as it worked
-also served as a way of keeping the gallery ventilated. The cutting of
-the rock was done by a total of fourteen steel planetary cutters set in
-two revolving arms at the head of the machine; with each turn of the
-borer a thin paring of chalk 5/16 of an inch thick was shorn away from
-the working face, the spoil being passed by conveyor belt to the back
-of the machine and dumped into carts or skips that were pushed by hand
-along the length of the gallery on narrow-gauge rails. The machine made
-one and a half to two revolutions a minute, and Sir Edward estimated
-for his stockholders that with simultaneous tunneling with the use of
-similar equipment from the French shore—the French Tunnel Company had
-already sunk a 280-foot shaft of its own at Sangatte and was preparing
-to drive a gallery toward England—the Channel bottom would be pierced
-from shore to shore by a continuous single pilot tunnel, twenty-two
-miles long, in three and a half years. Once this was done, according
-to Sir Edward's plans, the seven-foot gallery was to be enlarged by
-special cutting machinery to a fourteen-foot diameter, and a double
-tunnel, thickly lined with concrete and connected by cross-passages,
-constructed. (Four miles of access tunnel were to be added on the
-French, and possibly on the English, side, too.) The completed tunnel
-was to be lighted throughout by electric light—a novelty already being
-tried out in the pilot tunnel by the well-known electrical engineer
-C. W. Siemens—and the trains that ran through it between France and
-Britain were to be hauled by locomotives designed by Colonel Beaumont.
-Instead of being run by smoke-producing coal, the locomotives were to
-be propelled by compressed air carried behind the engine in tanks,
-and, like the Beaumont tunneling machine, the engine was supposed to
-keep the tunnel ventilated by giving out fresh air as it went along.
-(A lot of air was to be released in the tunnel in the course of a
-day; a tentative schedule called for one train to traverse it in one
-direction or another every five minutes or so for twenty hours out of
-the twenty-four.)
-
-Trains coming through the tunnel from France were to emerge into
-the daylight and the ordinary open air of England either from a
-four-mile-long access tunnel connected to the South-Eastern's railway
-line at Abbots Cliff or—this was a favored alternative plan of Sir
-Edward's—at Shakespeare Cliff via a station to be constructed in a
-great square excavated a hundred and sixty feet deep in the ground,
-which would be covered over with glass, lighted by electric light, and
-equipped "with large waiting rooms and refreshment rooms." From the
-abyss of this submerged station, trains arriving from the Continent
-were to be raised, an entire train at a time, to the level of the
-existing South-Eastern line by a giant hydraulic lift. (Actually,
-constructing an elevator capable of raising such an enormous load would
-not seem as unlikely a feat in the eighties as it might to many people
-now; Victorian engineers were expert in the use of hydraulic power
-for ship locks and all sorts of other devices, and, in fact, hydraulic
-power was so commonly used that the London of half a century ago had
-perhaps eight hundred miles of hydraulic piping laid below the streets
-to work industrial presses, motors, and most of the cranes on the
-Thames docks.)
-
-As the experimental work progressed, Sir Edward Watkin saw to it
-that all the splendid details about the Channel-tunnel scheme
-were constantly brought to the attention of the South-Eastern's
-shareholders, the press, and the public. Sir Edward, besides
-being a nineteenth-century railway king, was also something of a
-twentieth-century public-relations operator. He was a firm believer in
-the beneficial effects of giving big dinners, a pioneer in the art of
-organizing big junkets, and an adept at getting plenty of newspaper
-space. An energetic lobbyist in Parliament for all sorts of causes,
-not excluding his own commercial projects, he was known as a habitual
-conferrer of friendly little gestures upon important people in and out
-of government, and his kindness is said to have gone so far at one
-time that he provided Mr. Gladstone with the convenience of a private
-railway branch line that went right to the statesman's country home.
-
-The driving of the Channel-tunnel pilot gallery at Shakespeare Cliff
-offered Sir Edward a handy opportunity for exercising his gifts in
-the field of public relations, and he took full advantage of it. Week
-after week, as the boring of the tunnel progressed, he invited large
-groups of influential people, as many as eighty at a time, including
-politicians and statesmen, editors, reporters, and artists, members
-of great families, well-known financiers and businessmen from Britain
-and abroad, and members of the clergy and the military establishment
-to be his guests on a trip by special train from London to Dover at
-Shakespeare Cliff. There, at the Submarine Continental Railway Company
-workings, the visitors were taken down into the tunnel to inspect the
-creation of the new experimental highway to the Continent. A typical
-enough descriptive paragraph in the press concerning one of these
-visits (on this occasion a group of prominent Frenchmen were the guests
-of Sir Edward) is contained in a contemporary report in the _Times_:
-
- The visitors were lowered six at a time in an iron "skip" down the
- shaft into the tunnel. At the bottom of this shaft, 163 feet below
- the surface of the ground, the mouth of the tunnel was reached, and
- the visitors took their seats on small tramcars which were drawn by
- workmen. So evenly has the boring machine done its work that one
- seemed to be looking along a great tube with a slightly downward
- set, and as the glowing electric lamps, placed alternately on either
- side of the way, showed fainter and fainter in the far distance, the
- tunnel, for anything one could tell from appearances, might have had
- its outlet in France.
-
-Sir Edward Watkin, in a speech he made at a Submarine Continental
-Railway Company stockholders' meeting shortly after such a visit (the
-main parts of the speech were duly paraphrased in the press), found the
-effect of the electric light (operated on something called the Swan
-system) in the tunnel to be just as striking as the _Times_ reporter
-had—only brighter.
-
- He thought the visit might be regarded as a remarkable one. Their
- colleague, Dr. Siemens, lighted up the tunnel with the Swan light, and
- it was certainly a beautiful sight to see a cavern, as it were, under
- the bottom of the sea made in places as brilliant as daylight.
-
-While on their way by tramcar to view the working of Colonel Beaumont's
-boring machine at the far end of the tunnel, visitors stopped after a
-certain distance to enjoy another experience—a champagne party held
-in a chamber cut in the side of the tunnel. A contemporary artist's
-sketch in the _Illustrated London News_ records the sight of a group of
-visitors clustered around a bottle-laden table at one of these way side
-halts. Mustachioed and bearded, and wearing Sherlock Holmes deerstalker
-caps and dust jackets, they are shown, in tableaued dignity, standing
-about within a solidly timbered cavelike area with champagne glasses
-in their hands; and for all the Victorian pipe-trouser formality of
-their posture there is no doubt that the subjects are having a good
-time. After such a refreshing pause, the visitors would be helped on
-the tramcars again and escorted on to see the boring machine cutting
-through the Lower Chalk and to admire the generally dry appearance of
-the tunnel, and after that they would be taken back to the surface and
-given a splendid lunch either in a marquee set up near the entrance to
-the shaft or at the Lord Warden Hotel, in Dover, where more champagne
-would be served, along with other wines and brandies, more toasts to
-the Queen's health proposed, and speeches made on the present and
-future marvels of the tunnel, the forwardness of its backers, and the
-new era in international relations that the whole project promised.
-These lunches were also convenient occasions for the speakers to
-pooh-pooh the claims of the rival tunnel scheme of Lord Richard
-Grosvenor's Channel Tunnel Company, which was still being put forward,
-although entirely on paper, and to make announcements of miscellaneous
-items of news about progress in the Lower Chalk.
-
-Thus, at one of these lunches at the Lord Warden Hotel held in the
-third week of February, 1882, Mr. Myles Fenton, the general manager
-of the South-Eastern Railway, took occasion to announce to a large
-party of visitors from London that boring of the gallery had now
-reached a distance of eleven hundred yards, or nearly two-thirds of
-a mile, in the direction of the end of the great Admiralty Pier at
-Dover. According to an account in the _Times_, Mr. Fenton read to the
-interested gathering a telegram he had received from Sir Edward, who
-was unable to be present, but who by wire "expressed the hope that by
-Easter Week a locomotive compressed air engine would be running in the
-tunnel, of which it was expected the first mile would by that time have
-been made. (Cheers.)"
-
-Sometimes these lunches were held down in the tunnel itself, and
-general conditions down there were such that even ladies attended them,
-on special occasions, as a contemporary magazine account of a visit
-paid to the gallery by a number of engineers with their families makes
-clear.
-
- The visitors were conducted twenty at a time to the end on a sort of
- trolley or benches on wheels drawn by a couple of men. In the centre
- of the tunnel a kind of saloon, decorated with flowers and evergreens,
- was arranged, and, on a large table, glasses and biscuits, etc., were
- spread for the inevitable luncheon. There was no infiltration of water
- in any part. In the places where several small fissures and slight
- oozings had appeared during the boring operations, a shield in sheet
- iron had been applied against the wall by the engineer, following all
- the circumference of the gallery and making it completely watertight.
- There they were as in a drawing-room, and the ladies having descended
- in all the glories of silks and lace and feathers were astonished to
- find themselves as immaculate on their return as at the beginning
- of their trip. The atmosphere in the tunnel was not less pure, but
- even fresher than outside, thanks to the compressed air machine
- which, having acted on the excavator at the beginning of the cutting,
- released its cooled air in the centre of the tunnel.
-
-With the widespread talk of champagne under the sea, potted plants
-flourishing under the electric lights, and bracing breezes blowing
-within the Lower Chalk, going down from London to attend one of Sir
-Edward's tunnel parties seems to have become one of the fashionable
-things to do in English society in the early part of 1882. By
-the beginning of spring, visitors taken down into the tunnel and
-entertained by Sir Edward included such eminent figures as the Lord
-Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Prince and
-Princess of Wales. To judge by this stage of affairs, the boring of the
-tunnel was going on under the most agreeable of auspices.
-
-Behind all the sociability and the stream of publicity engendered
-in the press by the visits of well-known people to the tunnel, the
-situation was not quite so promising. While the physical boring was
-going ahead smoothly enough in the Lower Chalk, the promotion of the
-tunnel as a full-scale project was encountering growing resistance
-from within the upper crust of The Establishment. The fact seems to be
-that the British Government had never felt altogether easy about the
-idea of the Channel tunnel from the start, and although it had never
-formally expressed any misgivings about the scheme as a whole, it had
-always been careful not to associate itself with the enterprise, and
-its attitude toward its progress generally had been one of reluctant
-acquiescence. Whatever disquiet people in government felt about the
-tunnel project appears to have been expressed in three general
-ways—first, in the introduction of caveats of a military nature;
-second, in proposals to delay the progress of the scheme on other than
-military grounds; and third, in a general, nameless suspicion of the
-whole idea. Such reservations had been evident even in 1875, when the
-Channel Tunnel Company applied to Parliament for powers to carry out
-experimental work at St. Margaret's Bay.
-
-To exemplify the first kind of reservation put forward, the Board
-of Trade, the governmental department under whose surveillance such
-commercial schemes came, made a point of insisting that for defense
-purposes the Government must retain absolute power to "erect and
-maintain such [military] works at the English mouth of the Tunnel as
-they may deem expedient," and in case of actual or threatened war to
-close the tunnel down. As for the tendency of governmental people
-to find other grounds for objection in the project, this could be
-exemplified by the delaying action of the Secretary to the Treasury,
-when in 1875 it looked as though Parliament were about to take action
-on the Channel-tunnel bill. In a memorandum to the Foreign Office, the
-Secretary sought to have the tunnel bill laid aside at the last moment
-of its consideration before Parliament so that the answers to all sorts
-of important jurisdictional questions could be sought—for example, "If
-a crime were committed in the Tunnel, by what authority would it be
-cognizable?"[1] And as for the third, unnamed kind of objection, Queen
-Victoria, who, with her late husband (Prince Albert died in 1861), had
-once been so enthusiastic about the idea of a Channel tunnel, simply
-changed her mind about the entire business; in February of 1875, the
-Queen wrote Disraeli, without elaborating, that "she hopes that the
-Government will do nothing to encourage the proposed tunnel under the
-Channel which she thinks very objectionable."
-
-Ever since 1875, all these official doubts and misgivings had continued
-to lurk in the background of the Government's dealings with the
-Channel-tunnel promoters—especially military misgivings about the
-scheme. Apart from putting down the usual bloody insurrections among
-native populations while she went about the business of maintaining
-her colonial territories, Britain was at peace with the world. As far
-as her military relations with the Continent stood, the threats of
-Napoleon I to invade the island had not been forgotten, and even in
-the reign of Napoleon III there had been occasional alarms about an
-invasion, but the country's physical separation from the Continent
-tended to make the military tensions existing over there seem rather
-comfortingly remote. Britain's home defenses were left on a pretty
-easygoing basis, the country's reliance on resistance to armed attack
-being placed, in traditional fashion, in the power of the Royal Navy
-to control her seas—meaning, for all practical purposes, its ability
-to control the Channel. With the Navy and the Channel to protect her
-shores, Britain in the seventies and eighties got along at home with
-a professional army of only sixty thousand men, as against a standing
-army in France of perhaps three-quarters of a million. Seasickness or
-no seasickness, the Channel was considered to be a convenient manpower
-and tax-money saver. The advantages of the Channel to Victorian
-England were perhaps most eloquently expressed by Mr. Gladstone in
-the course of an article of his in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1870 on
-England's relationship to the military and political turmoil existing
-on the Continent. "Happy England!" he wrote in a brief panegyric
-on the Channel. "Happy ... that the wise dispensation of Providence
-has cut her off, by that streak of silver sea, which passengers so
-often and so justly execrate ... partly from the dangers, absolutely
-from the temptations, which attend upon the local neighborhood
-of the Continental nations.... Maritime supremacy has become the
-proud—perhaps the indefectible—inheritance of England." And Mr.
-Gladstone went on, after dwelling upon one of his favorite themes, the
-evils of standing armies and the miserable burden of conscription, to
-suggest that Englishmen didn't realize just how grateful they ought to
-be for the Channel:
-
- Where the Almighty grants exceptional and peculiar bounties, He
- sometimes permits by way of counterpoise an insensibility to their
- value. Were there but a slight upward heaving of the crust of the
- earth between France and Great Britain, and were dry land thus to be
- substituted for a few leagues of sea, then indeed we should begin to
- know what we had lost.
-
-These remarks of Mr. Gladstone's on the Channel appear to have made a
-powerful impression on opinion in upper-class England; for many years
-after their publication his partly Shakespearean phrase, "the streak
-of silver sea"—or a variation of it, "the silver streak"—remained
-as a standard term in the vocabulary of Victorian patriotism. Not
-surprisingly, considering his views in 1870, the attitude of Mr.
-Gladstone in 1881 and 1882, during his term as Prime Minister, toward
-the plan of Sir Edward Watkin to undermine those Straits the statesman
-had so extolled was an equivocal one.
-
-Indeed, quite a number of people in and around Whitehall had
-considerably stronger reservations about the Channel-tunnel project
-than Mr. Gladstone did. These misgivings had to do with fears that a
-completed tunnel under the Channel might form a breach in England's
-traditional defense system, and in June of 1881 they first came to
-public notice in the form of an editorial in the _Times_. Discussing
-the Channel-tunnel project, the _Times_, while conceding that "As an
-improvement in locomotion, and as a relief to the tender stomachs
-of passengers who dread seasickness, the design is excellent," went
-on to observe that "from a national [and military] point of view it
-must not the less be received with caution." And the paper asked,
-"Shall we be as well off and as safe with it as we now are without
-it? Will it be possible for us so to guard the English end of the
-passage that it can never fall into any other hands than our own?"
-The _Times_ frankly doubted it, and questioned whether, if the tunnel
-were built, "a force of some thousands of men secretly concentrated
-in a [French] Channel port and suddenly landed on the coast of Kent"
-might not be able by surprise to seize the English end of the tunnel
-and use it as a bridgehead for a general invasion of England. At the
-very least, the paper warned, the construction of the tunnel meant
-that "a design for the invasion of England and a general plan of the
-campaign will be subjects on which every cadet in a German military
-school will be invited to display his powers," and it suggested that
-in the circumstances the Channel had best be left untunneled. "Nature
-is on our side at present," the _Times_ concluded gravely, "and she
-will continue so if we will only suffer her. The silver streak is our
-safety." The author of a letter to the _Times_ printed in the same
-issue declared that the tunnel, if constructed, could be seized by the
-French from within as easily as from without, and that "in three hours
-a cavalry force might be sent through to seize the approaches at the
-English end."
-
-To all this Sir Edward Watkin replied easily that the tunnel, when
-it was finished, could at any time be rendered unusable from the
-British end by "a pound of dynamite or a keg of gunpowder." However,
-the negative attitude of a journal as influential as the _Times_ was
-a setback for the project. As a result, the Government increased
-its caution about the tunnel. When, at the end of 1881, Sir Edward
-drew up a private bill for presentation during the coming year to
-Parliament that would formally grant the South-Eastern full authority
-to buy further coastal lands in the Shakespeare Cliff area and to
-complete the construction of and to maintain a Channel tunnel (Lord
-Richard Grosvenor and the proprietors of the London, Chatham & Dover
-Railway came up with a similar bill on behalf of the Channel Tunnel
-Company), the Board of Trade held departmental hearings on the rival
-schemes, and at these hearings further attention was turned to the
-question of the military security of the tunnel in the event of its
-being attacked. At these proceedings, Sir Edward, who appeared for the
-purpose of testifying to the civilizing magnificence of his project,
-was put somewhat on the defensive by questions about the desirability
-of the tunnel from a military point of view. He found himself in
-the disconcerting position of being obliged to show not so much the
-practicability of building a Channel tunnel as the practicability of
-disabling or destroying it. However, making the most of the situation,
-he declared that fortifying the English end of the tunnel, and knocking
-it out of commission in case of hostile action by another power, was
-a simple enough matter to be accomplished in any number of ways—by
-flooding it, by filling it with steam, by bringing it under the gunfire
-of the Dover fortifications, by exploding electrically operated mines
-laid in it, or choking it with shingle dumped in from the outside.
-(There was even mention, at the hearings, of a proposal to pour
-"boiling petroleum" down upon invaders.) Getting into the spirit of
-the thing in spite of himself, Sir Edward told the examining committee
-confidently, "I will give you the choice of blowing up, drowning,
-scalding, closing up, suffocating and other means of destroying our
-enemies.... You may touch a button at the Horse Guards and blow the
-whole thing to pieces."
-
-Notwithstanding Sir Edward's categorical assurances, the wisdom of
-constructing the tunnel came under vigorous attack at the hearings from
-a formidably high official military source—from Lieutenant-General Sir
-Garnet Wolseley, the Adjutant General of the British Army. A veteran
-of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny who was considered to be an
-expert on the art of surprise attack—his routing of such foes as
-King Koffee in the first Ashanti War of 1873-74, as well as the great
-promptitude with which he was said to have "restored the situation" in
-the Zulu War, made him a well-known figure to the British public—Sir
-Garnet Wolseley had a dual reputation as an imperialist general and
-a soldier with advanced ideas on reform of the supply system of the
-British Army. In fact, his enthusiasm for efficiency was such that
-the phrase "All Sir Garnet" was commonly used in the Army as a way of
-saying "all correct." The actor George Grossmith made himself up as
-Wolseley to sing the part of "a modern Major-General" in performances
-in the eighties of Gilbert and Sullivan's _The Pirates of Penzance_.
-Sir Garnet later became Lord Wolseley and Commander-in-Chief of the
-British Army. Sir Garnet Wolseley's opinions of the tunnel project
-were very strong ones. In a long memorandum he submitted to the Board
-of Trade committee examining the tunnel project, he described the
-Channel as "a great wet ditch" for the protection of England, the like
-of which, he said, no Continental power, if it possessed one instead
-of a land frontier, would "cast recklessly away, by allowing it to be
-tunnelled under." And he denounced the construction of a Channel tunnel
-on the ground that it would be certain to create what he termed "a
-constant inducement to the unscrupulous foreigner to make war upon
-us." In agitated language, General Wolseley invoked the opinion of the
-late Duke of Wellington that England could be invaded successfully,
-and he reiterated the fear previously expressed by the _Times_ that
-the English end of the tunnel might be seized from the outside—before
-any of its defenders had a chance of setting in motion the mechanisms
-for blocking it up—by a hostile force landing nearby on British soil,
-whereupon it could readily be converted into a bridgehead for a general
-invasion of the country. He also declared that "the works at our end
-of the tunnel may be surprised by men sent through the tunnel itself,
-without landing a man upon our shores." General Wolseley went on to
-show just how the deed could be done:
-
- A couple of thousand armed men might easily come through the tunnel in
- a train at night, avoiding all suspicion by being dressed as ordinary
- passengers, and the first thing we should know of it would be by
- finding the fort at our end of the tunnel, together with its telegraph
- office, and all the electrical arrangements, wires, batteries, etc.,
- intended for the destruction of the tunnel, in the hands of an enemy.
- We know that ... trains could be safely sent through the tunnel every
- five minutes, and do the entire distance from the station at Calais
- to that at Dover in less than half an hour. Twenty thousand infantry
- could thus be easily despatched in 20 trains and allowing ... 12
- minutes interval between each train, that force could be poured into
- Dover in four hours.... The invasion of England could not be attempted
- by 5,000 men, but half that number, ably led by a daring, dashing
- young commander might, I feel, some dark night, easily make themselves
- masters of the works at our end of the tunnel, and then England would
- be at the mercy of the invader.
-
-General Wolseley conceded that an attack from within the tunnel
-itself would be difficult if even a hundred riflemen at the English
-end had previously been alerted to the presence of the attackers, but
-he doubted that the vigilance of the defenders could always maintain
-itself at the necessary pitch. And he put it to the committee: "Since
-the day when David secured an entrance by surprise or treachery into
-Jerusalem through a tunnel under its walls, how often have places
-similarly fallen? and, I may add, will again similarly fall?" General
-Wolseley also found highly questionable the efficacy of the various
-measures proposed for the protection of the tunnel. He declared that
-"a hundred accidents" could easily render such measures useless. Thus,
-for example, he found fault with proposals to lay electrically operated
-mines inside the tunnel ("A galvanic battery is easily put out of
-order; something may be wrong with it just when it is required ... the
-gunpowder may be damp"); proposals to admit the sea into the tunnel by
-explosion ("an uncertain means of defense"); and proposals to flood
-it by sluice-gates at the English end ("These water conduits [might]
-become choked or unserviceable when required" and the "drains rendered
-useless by treachery"). Then, after pointing out all the frailties of
-the contemplated defenses, General Wolseley went on to assert that
-the construction of the tunnel would necessitate, at very least, the
-conversion of Dover at enormous expense into a first-class fortress and
-that it could very well make necessary the introduction into England on
-a permanent basis of compulsory military service to meet the increased
-threat to Britain's national security.
-
- Surely [Sir Garnet concluded] John Bull will not endanger his
- birth-right, his property, in fact all that man can hold most dear
- ... simply in order that men and women may cross to and fro between
- England and France without running the risk of seasickness.
-
-Sir Garnet reinforced the arguments against the tunnel in personal
-testimony before the committee. In this testimony he emphasized, among
-other things, his conviction that once an enemy got a foothold at
-Dover, England would find herself utterly unable "short of the direct
-interposition of God Almighty"—an eventuality that Sir Garnet did not
-appear to count on very heavily—to raise an army capable of resisting
-the invaders. And the inevitable result of such a default, Sir Garnet
-told the committee, would be that England "would then cease to exist as
-a nation."
-
-Sir Garnet's fears for Britain were not shared in a memorandum
-submitted to the committee by another high Army officer,
-Lieutenant-General Sir John Adye, the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance.
-Sir John gave his opinion that "a General in France, having the
-intention of invading England, would not, in my opinion, count on the
-tunnel as adding to his resources." He maintained that the argument
-that the English end of the tunnel might be taken from within could
-be safely dismissed, as invading troops could be destroyed as they
-arrived "by means of a small force, with a gun or two, at the mouth
-of the tunnel." As for the possibility of a hostile force landing on
-British soil to seize the mouth of the tunnel, he questioned whether
-"an enemy, having successfully invaded England, [should] turn aside to
-capture a very doubtful line of communication, when the main object
-of his efforts was straight before him." General Adye thought that
-the invaders "would probably feel a much stronger disposition to march
-straight on London and finish the campaign."
-
-However, the frontal attack on the project by General Wolseley was
-not a factor to be discounted by any means. Rallying to it in typical
-fashion, Sir Edward Watkin attempted to stifle the spread of patriotic
-fears about the tunnel by giving more large lunches at the Lord Warden
-Hotel at Dover, and he tried to keep all prospects bright by inviting
-more and more prominent people down into the tunnel at Shakespeare
-Cliff to marvel at the workings and to refresh themselves with
-champagne under the electric lights. By mid-February, his guests in the
-tunnel included no less than sixty Members of Parliament whose support
-he hoped to obtain for his pending Tunnel Bill, and on one occasion he
-even succeeded in having the Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone himself,
-come down into the tunnel and be shown around. Sir Edward assured
-his stockholders that what he called "alarmist views" concerning the
-construction of the tunnel were without any real foundation. Addressing
-an extraordinary general meeting of the Submarine Continental Railway
-Company, Sir Edward quoted from an alleged reaction of Count von Moltke
-on the matter: "The invasion of England through the proposed tunnel I
-consider impossible. You might as well talk of invading her through
-that door"—pointing to the entrance to his library. Sir Edward brushed
-the arguments of military men aside as a collection of "hobgoblin
-arguments" by "men who would prefer to see England remain an island for
-ever, forgetting that steam had abolished islands, just as telegraphy
-had abolished isolated thought." He insisted that the tunnel promoters
-were engaged in a project at once idealistic and practical, and bravely
-declared their motto to be identical to that of the South-Eastern
-Railway Company—"Onwards."
-
-By way of countering Sir Garnet Wolseley's invocation of the opinion
-of the Duke of Wellington on the dangers of invasion, the promoters
-put it about that the Duke of Wellington in his day had strongly
-opposed the construction of a railway between Portsmouth and London
-on the ground that it would dangerously facilitate the movement of a
-French army upon London. They asserted that one unnamed but very high
-English military figure had even expressed alarm, at the time of the
-Universal Exhibition of 1851, that the English Cabinet did not insist
-on the Queen's retiring to Osborne, her country place on the Isle of
-Wight, because of the large numbers of foreigners at the Exhibition,
-including three thousand men of the French National Guard, who were
-allowed to parade the streets of London in uniform, wearing their side
-arms. And pro-tunnelers recalled in derisive fashion Lord Palmerston's
-denunciation of the Suez Canal project as "a madcap scheme which would
-be the ruin of our Indian Empire, were it possible of construction,
-and which would spell disaster to those who had the temerity to assert
-it." Colonel Beaumont, as an engineer and military man, too, wrote an
-article challenging the validity of General Wolseley's conclusions
-about the tunnel. Colonel Beaumont maintained that Dover might already
-be regarded as "a first-class fortress, quite safe from any _coup de
-main_ from without." Concerning an attack by bodies of infantry or
-cavalry through the tunnel, he declared, "They cannot come by train;
-as, irrespective of any suspicions on the part of the booking clerks,
-special train arrangements would have to be made to carry [them]; they
-cannot march, as they would be run over by the trains, running, as they
-would do, at intervals of ten minutes, or oftener, without cessation,
-day or night." Colonel Beaumont also outlined, in his article, a number
-of precautionary measures that could be taken to secure the safety
-of the English end of the tunnel. They included a system of pumping
-coal smoke instead of compressed air from a ventilating shaft into the
-tunnel, and also the provision of a system of iron water mains that
-would connect the sea with the ventilating shaft and make it possible
-for the officer of the guard, in case of invasion, to flood the tunnel
-by turning a stopcock. In accordance with these proposed measures,
-Sir Edward, early in 1882, attempted to forestall further military
-criticism of the Channel-tunnel scheme by having such a ventilating
-shaft sunk at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff, about a mile from
-the main shaft, and having a start made on another horizontal gallery
-bored from the foot of the new shaft in the direction of the main pilot
-tunnel under the sea. The new gallery was four feet instead of seven
-feet in diameter—the smaller aperture in itself being an additional
-measure of protection, Sir Edward explained, in that intruders would
-find it impossible to walk along the ventilation shaft in an upright
-position or in any numbers. A friendly article on the tunnel in the
-_Illustrated London News_ at the beginning of March noted significantly
-that not only the entrance at the English end—either at Abbots Cliff
-or at Sir Edward's proposed glassed-in railway station at Shakespeare
-Cliff—would be under the fire of the eighty-ton turret guns installed
-on the Admiralty Pier, but that "it is to be observed how completely
-[the entrance to the new ventilating shaft] is commanded both from
-the sea and from the Pier, and also from the guns of the fortress."
-The _Illustrated London News_ obligingly showed the principle of
-the thing by running a large two-page-wide engraving depicting, in
-handsomely apocalyptic style, the hypothetical destruction of the
-entire tunnel workings and, presumably, the invaders inside them, amid
-great ballooning clouds of smoke from gun batteries everywhere—from
-the end of the Admiralty Pier, from points within the Dover land
-fortifications, and from the cannonading broadsides of British naval
-men-of-war standing offshore. The fate of invaders from floodwaters
-was depicted in a more sensational London publication, the _Penny
-Illustrated Paper_, which published an engraving a foot and a half
-long and a foot high illustrating "Sir Edward Watkin's remedy for the
-invasion scare: Drowning the French Pharaoh in the Channel Tunnel."
-The engraving showed a cutaway section of the tunnel under the Channel
-near the English end and, rising upward at the left, a staired chamber
-of rock equipped with sluice-gates and set in the white cliffs. In
-this chamber, two figures in top hats and frock coats are standing and
-gazing down on the tunnel, which is filled with French infantry led by
-plumed, helmeted officers on horseback. One of the figures in the cliff
-chamber, evidently meant to represent Sir Edward Watkin, is in the act
-of calmly operating a turncock that has loosed, through the sluices, a
-dreadful flood cascading down into the tunnel upon the invaders, who
-are turning to flee in panic.
-
-Vivid as these scenes of destruction were, they had little effect on
-the anti-tunnel forces. Already, in February, another attack on the
-tunnel scheme had appeared in the literary magazine _The Nineteenth
-Century_, signed by Lord Dunsany. The article, repeating the claim
-that the tunnel project was a menace to Britain's security, referred
-to the capacity of the Dover fortress system to defend itself against
-a modern invading fleet as "contemptible." Lord Dunsany wrote that he
-had gone down to Dover to examine the famous fortress and had found
-that with the exception of the two recently installed turret guns on
-the Admiralty Pier, the guns "generally speaking were of an obsolete
-pattern—popguns, in fact." And he asserted that when he had remarked
-on the relatively modern appearance of one of the larger guns in a
-particularly commanding position of the fortress, "I was told by an
-artilleryman that there were orders against firing it, as it would
-bring down the brickwork of the rampart."
-
-Soon after this, an anonymous article in the _Army and Navy Gazette_
-declared that "The Island has been invaded again and again" and it
-reminded the _Gazette's_ readers that "The present constitution of
-the country depends on the last successful invasion by a Dutch Prince
-with Dutch troops, and the overthrow of the King, by an army largely
-composed of foreigners." The article took Lieutenant-General Sir John
-Adye severely to task for having found the tunnel a good security risk,
-and it even went so far afield in its criticism of him as to find fault
-with the General for what it called his "deliberate, vehement, and
-long-continued resistance to the introduction of the breech-loading
-system in our artillery that placed us at the fag-end of all the world,
-when we ought to have been first."
-
-Then, in March, 1882, _The Nineteenth Century_ carried an article
-against the tunnel by Professor Goldwin Smith, who wrote that the
-protection of the Channel, by exempting England from the necessity of
-keeping a large standing army, had preserved the country from military
-despotism and enabled her to move steadily in the path of political
-progress. The Channel, Professor Smith wrote, in the past had preserved
-England from the Armada and from the army of Napoleon I; in the
-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had preserved the Reformation;
-and in the eighteenth century it had preserved her from the spread
-of revolutionary fevers and from subjection to foreign tyranny. Now,
-he said, it was the barrier between Britain's industrial people and
-military conscription, and he went on, in an echo of Mr. Gladstone's
-earlier remarks in the _Edinburgh Review_, to declare of the Channel
-that "A convulsion of nature which should dry it up would be almost
-as fatal to England as one which should ruin the dykes would be to
-Holland."
-
-Under these circumstances of increasing controversy, the attitude of
-the Board of Trade toward the tunnel project became one of further
-reserve. In February, the Board informed the War Office that the
-military question of the tunnel had assumed such magnitude that a
-decision on it should be taken not on a departmental level but on the
-higher governmental policy level, and it suggested that the War Office
-start its own investigations on the military aspect of the matter.
-
-Commenting on the prevailing French attitude toward British fears about
-the tunnel project, the Paris correspondent of the London _Times_
-observed mildly that "the political uneasiness which the scheme
-has raised on the other side does not exist here.... No Frenchman,
-of course, regards it as jeopardizing national security. Frenchmen
-see in it a greater facility for visiting the United Kingdom, and
-for relieving the monotony of Swiss tours by a trip to the Scotch
-highlands."
-
-In satirical fashion, a paragraph in _Punch_ undertook to summarize the
-reaction in another European country:
-
- Bogie! The Italian Government are so struck by the alarm exhibited
- by Sir Garnet Wolseley at the prospect of a Channel Tunnel, that
- they have closed the Mount Cenis and St. Gotthard Tunnels, and left
- travellers to the mountain diligences. Their reason for doing this
- is the fact that Napoleon really crossed the Alps, while he only
- threatened to invade England.
-
-As for reactions in Germany, the British chargé d'affaires in Dresden
-reported in a dispatch to the Foreign Office that he had questioned
-the Chief of Staff of the 12th (Saxon) Corps—"an officer of high
-attainments"—on his attitude toward the possible invasion of England
-through the Channel tunnel, or through sudden seizure of the English
-end from the outside.
-
-He wrote that General von Holleben, the officer in question, had
-observed, in connection with the practicability of landing a
-Continental force and taking the British end, that although such an
-operation was not impossible, "that [it] would succeed in the face of
-our military and moral resources, railways and telegraphs, he should
-believe when he saw it happen."
-
- General von Holleben then remarked that the idea of moving an
- Army-Corps 25 miles beneath the sea was one which he did not quite
- take in. The distance was a heavy day's march; halts must be made; and
- the column of troops would be from eight to ten miles long. He was
- unable to realize all this off hand, and he did not know but what we
- were talking of a chimoera.
-
- I observed that no one appeared to have asked what would happen to the
- air of the tunnel if bodies of 20,000 or even 10,000 men were to move
- through at once. The General said that this atmospheric difficulty was
- new to him, and it did not sound very soluble.
-
-But the fears of the War Office were not stilled by such observations
-as these. On February 23, the War Office announced that it was
-appointing a Channel Tunnel Defense Committee, headed by Major-General
-Sir Archibald Alison, the chief of British Army Intelligence,
-to collect and examine in detail scientific evidence on "the
-practicability of closing effectually a submarine railway tunnel" in
-case of actual or apprehended war.
-
-The Board of Trade, in the meantime, did its best to hold Sir Edward
-Watkin and his project off at arm's length. On March 6, 1882, the
-secretary of the Board of Trade, which had been keeping an eye on
-newspaper accounts of the progress of the tunnel, wrote to remind Sir
-Edward of the vital fact that all the foreshore of the United Kingdom
-below high-water mark at Dover was "_prima facie_ the property of the
-Crown and under the management of the Board of Trade," and that while
-the department did not wish to impede progress it distinctly wished to
-give notice that the Government "hold themselves free to use any powers
-at their disposal in such a matter as Parliament may decide, or as the
-general interest of the country may seem to them to require." In other
-words, the Board told the Submarine Continental Railway Company that it
-could not drive its tunnel toward France without trespassing on Crown
-property extending all the way from high-water mark to the three-mile
-limit of British jurisdiction—the traditionally accepted limit of the
-carrying power of cannon.
-
-The claim of the Crown to the foreshore in this case was, however, one
-that Sir Edward Watkin disputed. He claimed that through an arrangement
-with a landowner near Shakespeare Cliff, and by certain purchases
-of land from the Archbishop of Canterbury as head of the Church of
-England, the tunnel proprietors had come into possession of ancient
-manorial rights, originally granted by the Crown itself, that permitted
-them to exploit the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff as they saw fit,
-including the right to tunnel under it. Sir Edward had claimed that he
-was having made an extensive legal search of the title in question,
-which would take a little while.
-
-But the notification from the Board of Trade was an ominous development
-for Sir Edward and his scheme; and even more ominous signs were to
-follow. During March, anti-tunneling forces in Britain circulated a
-great petition among prominent Englishmen against the scheme, for
-presentation to Parliament. The petition, recording the conviction of
-the signatories that a Channel tunnel "would involve this country
-in military dangers and liabilities from which, as an island, it has
-hitherto been happily free," was published in the April issue of _The
-Nineteenth Century_, and it was signed not only by military people
-but by many of the most diversely eminent literary, scientific, and
-ecclesiastical men of the day—including Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord
-Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, Professor T. H. Huxley, Cardinals Newman
-and Manning, and the Archbishop of York—as well as a great cloud of
-names from the nobility and the landed gentry. In an eloquent article
-accompanying the petition, the editor of _The Nineteenth Century_,
-James Knowles, implicitly added the name of William Shakespeare to the
-list of anti-tunnel signatories by invoking the John of Gaunt speech
-from _Richard II_:
-
-  This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
-  This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
-  This other Eden, demi-Paradise,
-  This fortress built by Nature for herself
-  Against infection and the hand of war,
-  This happy breed of men, this little world,
-  This precious stone set in the silver sea,
-  Which serves it in the office of a wall
-  Or as a moat defensive to a house,
-  Against the envy of less happier lands....
-
-The editor went on to declare, more prosaically, that "To hang the
-safety of England at some most critical instant upon the correct
-working of a tap, or of any mechanical contrivance, is quite beyond the
-faith of this generation of Englishmen."
-
-Almost at the instant that the heavy blow of the petition in _The
-Nineteenth Century_ fell upon the tunnel promoters, the Board of Trade
-sent down a real thunderbolt upon their heads. On April 1, the Board of
-Trade wrote Sir Edward Watkin that, whatever might be the title to the
-foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff, there was no doubt as to the title of
-the Crown under the bed of the sea below low-water mark and within the
-three-mile limit. It informed him that according to the department's
-calculations, based on a tracing of the tunnel route previously
-obtained from the Submarine Continental Railway Company, the boring
-of the tunnel now must necessarily be close to the point of low-water
-mark. And, as a consequence, the Board of Trade instructed the company
-that, pending the outcome of the Government's deliberations on the
-military security of the tunnel, it must suspend its boring operations
-forthwith and give the Government assurances to that effect.
-
-[Footnote 1: An Anglo-French Joint Commission formed to set up
-agreements on the jurisdiction of the two countries over the Channel
-tunnel in 1876 actually drew up a protocol for a channel-tunnel treaty
-between England and France. The Commission agreed to the jurisdiction
-of each government ceasing at a point to be marked in the center of the
-tunnel and it recommended that the tunnel be regulated by a specially
-appointed international body.]
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration: Four]
-
-
-All at once, it seems, the entire British press was in an uproar of
-criticism against the Channel tunnel and its unfortunate promoters. The
-_Sunday Times_ pretty well expressed a common reaction of newspapers
-and periodicals to the latest developments when it said, in an
-editorial, "We confess to experiencing a feeling of relief on hearing
-of the interdiction of [Sir Edward Watkin's] progress" in his "working
-day and night to put an end to that insular position which has in past
-times more than once proved our sheet anchor of safety. We sincerely
-hope that Sir E. Watkin's project will shortly receive its final _coup
-de grâce_. No doubt," it added presciently, "he will not yield without
-a resolute struggle."
-
-Some hard things were said in the press about the great tunnel
-promoter. He was accused in various publications of "adroit and
-unscrupulous lobbying" and of dispensing "profuse hospitality ...
-persistent and continuous" in pursuit of his scheme. In the May issue
-of _The Nineteenth Century_, which contained a further number of
-attacks on the tunnel, Lord Bury reported bitterly on the softening
-effect that Sir Edward Watkin's public-relations technique had had on
-a friend of his. Asked if he had signed the great petition against
-the tunnel, the friend was said to have replied, "No, I have not; I am
-strongly against the construction of the Tunnel, and I told Watkin so.
-But he gave a party of us, the other day, an excellent luncheon, and
-was very civil in showing us everything; so I should not like to do an
-unhandsome thing to him by signing the protest."
-
-An editorialist in a periodical called _All the Year Round_,
-which formerly had been put out by Charles Dickens, wrote of the
-"extraordinary vigor" with which Sir Edward was pushing his tunnel.
-The editorialist dwelt in satirical fashion on the manner in which
-prominent persons were "perpetually being whisked down to Dover by
-special trains, conducted into vaults in the chalk, made amiable
-with lunch and sparkling wines, and whisked back in return specials
-to dilate to their friends (and, incidentally, to the public) on the
-peculiar charm of Pommery and Greno consumed in a chamber excavated
-far under the sea." The writer found Sir Garnet Wolseley's argument,
-that the English end of the tunnel could be seized, "on reflection to
-be perfectly feasible." He asked, "Can anyone suppose that if such
-a government as that which was formed by the Communists were by any
-chance ... to rule France, the danger that the temptation to make such
-a grand coup as the conquest and plunder of England would be too much
-for them would not be a very real and very present one?" And he wound
-up by warning "that French troops might checkmate our fleet by simply
-walking underneath it, and ... take a revenge for Waterloo, the remote
-possibility of which must make every Englishman shudder."
-
-The probable future effects of the Channel tunnel upon the nervous
-systems of Englishmen were the subject of intense speculation in
-most of the press, as a matter of fact. Almost without exception,
-the prognosis of this hypothetical nervous condition was grave. If,
-nowadays, the capacity to maintain extraordinary spiritual fortitude
-under conditions of national emergency has come to be regarded almost
-as a basic characteristic of the British people, it is a characteristic
-that the Victorian British press seemed not to be aware of. Almost
-unanimously, the press warned that part of the price of constructing
-a tunnel would be the occurrence of wild periodic alarms among the
-population. "Perpetual panics and increased military expenditure are
-the natural result of such a change as that which will convert us from
-an island into a peninsula," an editorial in _John Bull_ declared. The
-London _Daily News_ demanded to know whether "anyone who is in the
-least acquainted with English character and history" could deny the
-country's susceptibility to periodic panics. The _Daily News_ dwelt
-apprehensively on the inevitable result of panics arising out of the
-construction of a Channel tunnel:
-
- We should be constantly beginning expensive and elaborate schemes for
- strengthening the defences according to the fashionable idea of the
- day.... They would be about half carried out by the time the next
- panic occurred, and then they would be obsolete.... Now it would be
- elaborate fortifications at Dover itself; now a great chain of forts
- to hem it in from inland; now the old scheme of the fortification of
- London; now the establishment of forts out at sea over the tunnel....
- Is it worth while to run the chance...?
-
-The most diverse arguments were advanced in the press against the
-construction of the tunnel. In the May issue of _The Nineteenth
-Century_, Major-General Sir E. Hamley raised the question of whether
-the French, invading Britain by train through the tunnel, might not
-seize some distinguished English people and carry the captives along
-on the engine as hostages, so that however thoroughly the officer in
-charge of the defensive apparatus at the English end were alerted to
-their presence, "still he might well be expected to pause if suddenly
-certified that he would be destroying, along with the enemy in the
-Tunnel, some highly important Englishmen." Another writer, referring to
-the responsibility and possibly also to the character of the officer
-in charge of the tunnel defenses, observed thoughtfully that "the
-commandant of Dover would carry the key of England in his pocket."
-Still another commentator wondered if responsibility for making a
-decision to blow up the tunnel might not be too much even for an
-English Prime Minister:
-
- The Premier might think himself justified in destroying twenty
- millions of property ... but also, he might not. He might be an
- undecided man, or a man expecting defeat by the Opposition, or a man
- paralyzed by the knowledge that the tunnel was full of innocent people
- whom his order would condemn to instant death, in a form which is at
- once most painful and most appalling to the imagination. They would
- all be drowned in darkness. The responsibility would be overwhelming
- for an individual, and a Cabinet, if dispersed, takes hours to bring
- together.
-
-In his article in _The Nineteenth Century_ Lord Bury, going under
-the assumption that a Prime Minister in a period of gravest national
-emergency would indeed be able to haul his Cabinet colleagues and
-military advisers together in reasonable time to consider having the
-tunnel blown up, asked his readers to conjure up the painful scene at
-Downing Street:
-
- Imagine him for a moment sitting in consultation. His military
- advisers tell him that the decisive moment has come. "I think,
- gentlemen," says the minister, turning to his colleagues, "that we are
- all agreed—the Tunnel must be immediately destroyed. Fire the mine!"
- "There is one other point," says the officer, "on which I request
- instructions—at what time am I to execute the order?" "At once, sir;
- telegraph at once, and in five minutes the blasting charge can be
- fired." "But," persists the officer, "trains laden with non-combatants
- are at this moment in the Tunnel. They enter continuously at twenty
- minutes' intervals; there are never less than four trains, two each
- way, in the Tunnel at the same time; each train contains some three
- hundred persons ... I could not destroy twelve hundred non-combatants
- without very special instructions."
-
-And Lord Bury asked, "What would any minister, under such
-circumstances, do?"
-
-As for the proposed defensive measure of flooding the tunnel in case
-of invasion, General Sir Lintorn Simmons, writing in the same issue of
-_The Nineteenth Century_, considered it to be a dubious one at best,
-since, he observed, "it is not to be believed that a great country like
-France, with the engineering talent she possesses, could not find the
-means" of pumping all the flood waters out again.
-
-An assertion by Dr. Siemens, the electric-lighting expert, that the
-tunnel could easily be rendered unusable to invaders if its British
-defenders would pump carbonic-acid gas into it to asphyxiate the
-intruders, was similarly challenged, in the correspondence columns
-of the _Times_, by a scientific colleague of his, Dr. John Tyndall.
-Dr. Tyndall offered to wager Dr. Siemens that the latter could in six
-hours devise countermeasures that would enable troops to pass unscathed
-through the tunnel, gas or no gas. Dr. Tyndall illustrated his point
-by describing an experiment he said he had made on the very day of his
-letter, while coming down home from London by train, on a part of the
-South-Eastern line where the speed was thirty miles an hour:
-
- I took out my watch and determined how long I could hold my breath
- without inhalation. By emptying my lungs very thoroughly, and then
- charging them very fully, I brought the time up to nearly a minute
- and a half. In this interval I might have been urged through more
- than half a mile of carbonic-acid gas with no injury and with little
- inconvenience to myself.
-
-Dr. Tyndall concluded, firmly, "The problem of supplying fresh air
-to persons surrounded by an irrespirable atmosphere has been already
-solved by Mr. Fleuss and others."
-
-Then there were even more disturbing objections. Could the defenders
-at the English end always be relied on as absolutely loyal Englishmen?
-_The Field_, without naming any names, wrote of "proof that in the
-United Kingdom itself ... there are numbers of daring and reckless
-persons" who, "to gain their sinister ends ... would not hesitate
-to sacrifice the independence of the country." Frankly, the paper
-feared possible acts of treachery in the tunnel by "a handful of
-unprincipled desperadoes." And the _Spectator_, visualizing the thing
-in more detail, suggested that its readers "consider ... the danger of
-treachery ... the rush on the tunnel being made by Irish Republicans in
-league with the French, while the wires of the telegraph were cut, and
-all swift communications between Dover and London suddenly suspended."
-Taking all the risks of the tunnel into account, the _Spectator_ said
-it could not bring itself to believe that "even in this age, with its
-mania for rapid riding and comfortable locomotion, such a project will
-be tolerated." The _Sunday Times_, for its part, pointed out that, as
-things stood, "the silver streak is a greater bar to the movements of
-Nihilists [and] Internationalists ... than is generally believed."
-But, it added, "with several trains a day between Paris and London,
-we should have an amount of fraternising between the discontented
-denizens of the great cities of both countries, which would yield very
-unsatisfactory results on this side of the Channel."
-
-Meetings and debates to discuss the tunnel menace were held all over
-England, and even at a meeting of so progressive an organization as
-the Balloon Society of Great Britain, which was held in the lecture
-room of the Royal Aquarium at Westminster, the subject was discussed
-with "some warmth of feeling ... on both sides." There was a wide
-circulation of sensational pamphlets, written in pseudohistorical
-style, that purported to chronicle the sudden downfall of England at
-the end of the nineteenth century through the existence of a Channel
-tunnel—Dover taken, the garrison butchered, the English end of the
-tunnel incessantly vomiting forth armed men, London invaded, and
-England enslaved—all of this in a few hours' time.
-
-In contrast to these manifold cries of alarm among the English, it
-seems never to have occurred to anybody in France at the time seriously
-to suggest that if a tunnel were to be constructed, a hostile English
-force, supported by an English navy in control of the Channel sea,
-might suddenly seize the French entrance by surprise and use it as a
-bridgehead for a general invasion of France. A few French commentators
-did, however, remind the anti-tunnel forces in England that while the
-English had set hostile foot on French soil some two or three times in
-as many centuries—not to mention her having kept physical control
-over the port of Calais for over two hundred years following the
-Battle of Crécy—English soil had remained untouched by France. Most
-of the French newspapers appeared to be unable to fathom the cause of
-the whole tunnel commotion, which was generally put down to English
-eccentricity. Several French journals, surveying all the fulminations
-on the other side of the Channel, even took an attitude toward the
-English of a certain detached sympathy. One of the more interesting
-French commentaries on the uproar in England appeared in the _Revue
-des Deux Mondes_. In this article, the author expressed some doubt
-that British military men who denounced the dangers of the tunnel were
-really convinced of the reality of those dangers. For them to do so, he
-suggested, one would have to presuppose, on one side of the Channel, a
-"France again a conqueror with, at her head, a man gifted with ... an
-incredible depth in crime; a secret, an almost incredible diligence in
-preparation as in execution," and, on the other side, "a governor of
-Dover who would be an idiot or a traitor, a War Minister who would not
-possess the brain of a bird, a Foreign Minister who would allow himself
-to be deceived in doltish fashion." How could the French possibly
-assemble perhaps a thousand railway carriages in England without
-arousing the suspicions of British Intelligence? How could the vanguard
-of the French invaders get through the tunnel with all their required
-ammunition, horses, and supplies, and get them all unloaded in a few
-minutes—would this vanguard sally forth without biscuits? The author
-found no solution to these particular problems. Instead, he devoted
-himself to the larger issue:
-
- The day the inauguration of the Submarine Tunnel will be celebrated,
- England will no longer be an island, and that is a stupendous
- event in the history of an island people.... Islanders have always
- considered themselves the favorites of Providence, which has
- undertaken to provide for their security and independence.... They
- congratulate themselves on their separation from the rest of the world
- by natural frontiers over which nobody can squabble. They feel that
- they hold their destiny in their own hands, and that the effect of the
- follies and crimes of others could not reach them.... Their character
- is affected by this. Like Great Britain, every Englishman is an island
- where it is not easy to land.
-
-And the article asked, wonderingly, "What would an England that was not
-an island be?"
-
-The deliberations of the scientific investigating committee appointed
-by the War Office and presided over by Sir Archibald Alison lasted from
-the latter part of February until the middle of May. In the committee's
-report of its findings to the War Office, the complexity and solemn
-nature of the questions laid before it were indicated by their
-mere classification and subclassification. Thus, the contingencies
-for rendering a Channel tunnel absolutely useless to an enemy were
-considered under the headings of:
-
-  I.   Surprise from Within
-  II.   Attack from Without
-
-And the committee reported that it had considered measures to secure
-the tunnel against (I) under such subcategories as:
-
-  1.   Fortifications
-  2.   Closure or temporary obstructions
-  3.   Explosion by mines or charges
-  4.   Flooding
-    a.   Temporary
-    b.   Permanent
-
-After reviewing the situation in great detail, and from every aspect,
-the committee suggested a long list of precautionary measures that,
-it said, it would be necessary to use, singly or in combination, to
-protect and seal off the tunnel against any enemy attempts to invade
-England directly through the tunnel or by seizing the English end
-from the outside and using it as a bridgehead for invasion. The list
-included these recommendations:
-
-The mouth of the tunnel should be protected by "a portcullis or other
-defensible barrier."
-
-A trap bridge should be set in connection with this portcullis.
-
-Means should be provided for closing off the ventilation, and for
-"discharging irrespirable gases or vapors into the tunnel."
-
-Arrangements should be made for rapidly discharging loads of shingle
-into the land portion of the tunnel, shutting it off.
-
-The land portion of the tunnel should be thoroughly mined with
-explosives capable of being fired by remote control exercised not only
-from within the central fort at Dover but also from more distant points
-inland, so that even if the protective fortress fell to the enemy, the
-tunnel still could be permanently destroyed.
-
-In addition, a truck loaded with explosives and equipped with a time
-fuse should be kept ready by the entrance, so that it could be sent
-coasting down into the tunnel for some distance, there to explode
-automatically.
-
-Arrangements should be made for temporarily flooding the tunnel by
-means of culverts operated by sluice valves. ("If by chance the sluice
-valves should not act, Measure XVIII could be resorted to, or the
-tunnel could be blocked by one or more of the means ... mentioned in
-Measures VIII, IX, X, XI, and XII.")
-
-The tunnel should emerge inland, out of firing range from the sea. And
-it was imperative that it emerge under the guns and "in the immediate
-vicinity of a first-class fortress, in the modern acceptation of the
-term, a fortress which could only be reduced after a protracted siege
-both by land and sea."
-
-And so on.
-
-Even after drawing up all these elaborate precautions for closing the
-tunnel from the English end, the Channel Tunnel Defense Committee was
-left with some nagging doubts about their adequacy. In a concluding
-paragraph of its report, the committee pointed out that "it must always
-be borne in mind that, in dealing with physical agencies, an amount of
-uncertainty exists," and that it was "impossible to eliminate human
-fallibility." As a consequence, the members stated cautiously, "it
-would be presumptuous to place absolute reliance upon even the most
-comprehensive and complete arrangements."
-
-The committee also agreed, almost as an afterthought, that the Channel
-tunnel proposed by Sir Edward Watkin could not be sanctioned in the
-form envisaged, on the grounds that it did not meet the committee's
-conditions for emerging inland, out of firing range from the sea, and
-in the immediate vicinity of a first-class fortress. It also rejected,
-on the first of these grounds, a proposal by the lesser Channel Tunnel
-Company for a tunnel that would start from within Dover and for the
-sake of easy destructibility run right under a nearby corner of Dover
-Castle—and on the grounds that this entrance would be _too_ much in
-the vicinity of a fortress. And the committee objected that since the
-proposed entrance would emerge "in the heart of the main defences and
-in the midst of the town" any fire from these defenses "would inflict
-great injury on the town and its inhabitants, and the general defence
-would be much embarrassed."
-
-At the War Office, the report of the Alison committee was supplemented
-by another long memorandum on the tunnel question by Sir Garnet
-Wolseley. In this document of some twenty thousand words, which
-was conveniently furnished with numerous marginal headings like
-"Why tunnels through the Alps afford no argument in favor of the
-Channel Tunnel," "The Tunnel an acknowledged danger," "What national
-advantage then justifies its construction," "Many tunnels will be
-constructed," "What we owe to the Channel," and "Danger of surprise
-of our fortifications without warning! Fatal result!!," Sir Garnet
-recapitulated and elaborated at great length upon his previous
-arguments against the tunnel and added several new ones. Sir Garnet
-went into fine detail concerning the possibility of a sudden seizure
-of the English end of the tunnel and, simultaneously, Dover, by the
-French. For example, to his previous description of how hostile
-French forces might come by train through the tunnel dressed in
-ordinary clothes he added the detail that they might also travel
-in the carriages "at express speed, with the blinds down, in their
-uniforms and fully armed"—their co-conspirators at the other end
-meanwhile having rendered it "not likely that ticket-takers or
-telegraph operators on the French side would be allowed any channel
-of communicating with us until the operation had been effected." Sir
-Garnet was equally explicit about the situation at Dover. Warning that
-"the civilian may start in horror at the statement that Dover could
-also be taken by surprise," General Wolseley declared that, as things
-stood, anybody at all, any night, was free to walk up to any of the
-forts at Dover, and, "if he would announce himself to be an officer
-returning home to barracks, the wicket would be opened to him, and
-if he entered he would see but two men, one the sentry, the other
-the noncommissioned officer who had been roused up from sleep by the
-sentry to unlock the gate." General Wolseley demonstrated how such a
-caller might well be "a dashing partisan leader" of a French raiding
-party that had landed in Dover in the dead of night, in calm or foggy
-weather, from steamers, and had already quietly knocked down and
-silenced any watchman or other witnesses in the dark area. He showed
-how such a _soi-disant_ English officer and his accomplices "might thus
-easily obtain an entrance into every fort in Dover; the sentry and the
-sleepy sergeant might be easily disposed of. The rifles of our sentries
-at home are not loaded, and the few men on guard [could be] made
-prisoners whilst asleep on their guard bed." Thus, General Wolseley
-said, the intruders could quickly effect the seizure of all the forts
-in Dover—"In an hour's time from the moment when our end of the tunnel
-was taken possession of by the enemy, large reinforcements could reach
-Dover through the tunnel, and ... before morning dawned, Dover might
-easily be in possession of 20,000 of the enemy, and every succeeding
-hour would add to that number." With Dover done in, London would be
-next, and the future commander-in-chief of the British Army went on to
-show how the enemy force, now swelled to 150,000 men, once it reached
-London and occupied the Thames from there to the arsenal at Woolwich,
-could dictate its own terms of peace, which he estimated at a rough
-guess as the payment of six hundred million pounds and the surrender
-of the British Fleet, with the English end of the tunnel remaining
-permanently in the hands of the French, so that "the perpetual yoke of
-servitude would be ours for ever."
-
-Concerning all the various measures proposed to protect the tunnel,
-Sir Garnet had no confidence in them at all. He stressed once more
-the unreliability of anything mechanical or electrical, and he added
-the new argument that whatever secret devices, such as mines, were
-installed in the tunnel for its protection were bound to come to the
-knowledge of the enemy sooner or later. Any military secret, General
-Wolseley said, was a purchasable secret; he illustrated his argument
-with an observation concerning a meeting between Napoleon I and
-Alexander I of Russia:
-
- No two men were more loyally followed or had more absolute authority
- than Napoleon and Alexander. No two men had a stronger wish or
- stronger motive for keeping secret the words which passed between them
- personally in a most private conference in a raft in the middle of
- a river. Yet, by paying a large sum our Ministry obtained the exact
- terms of the secret agreement the two had there arrived at. Moreover,
- our Ministry obtained that information so immediately that they were
- able to act in anticipation of the designs formed by the two Emperors.
-
-Finally, having discussed, in the most elaborate fashion, all the
-measures that his previous opposition to the scheme had caused to be
-proposed for the defense of the tunnel, Sir Garnet condemned them
-on the ground of their very elaborateness. "If in any one of these
-respects our security fails, it fails in all," he wrote of the multiple
-precautions recommended by Sir Archibald Alison's scientific committee.
-Thus, in General Wolseley's eyes, the defense of the tunnel was
-foredoomed as a self-defeating process, and was therefore a practical
-impossibility.
-
-The question of the multiplicity of the proposed defenses was handled
-in different fashion in a further War Office memorandum on the tunnel,
-issued by the Duke of Cambridge, the Army Commander-in-Chief and a
-cousin of Queen Victoria. "Nothing has impressed me more with the
-magnitude of the danger which the construction of this proposed tunnel
-would bring with it," the Duke of Cambridge wrote, "than the amount
-of precautions and their elaborateness [proposed by] this Scientific
-Committee.... If this danger was small, as some would have the country
-believe, why should all these complicated precautions be necessary?"
-The Duke of Cambridge fully endorsed the position taken by Sir Garnet
-Wolseley. He protested "most emphatically" against the construction
-of a Channel tunnel and "would most earnestly beg Her Majesty's
-Government" to consider with the utmost gravity the perils of surprise
-attack upon the country arising out of even a modified scheme that
-would take into account the recommendations of the Alison committee.
-
-To his memorandum His Royal Highness appended a copy of a report
-that he had had his intelligence service put together specially in
-connection with the tunnel question—a long account purporting to
-show some hundred and seven instances occurring in the history of
-the previous two hundred years where hostilities between states had
-been started without any prior declaration of war, or even any decent
-notification.
-
-If anything seemed likely to have been successfully blocked up and
-finished off under all this bombardment, it was Sir Edward Watkin's
-Channel-tunnel scheme. Curiously enough, the Board of Trade, which
-had ordered the tunnel workings stopped back in April and had no
-intention of issuing a working permit for them now, was not altogether
-convinced of this. In fact, since April the Board had been developing
-the suspicion that something peculiar might be going on down under the
-sea at Shakespeare Cliff. Back in the early part of April, the Board
-of Trade's order to the Submarine Continental Railway Company to stop
-its tunneling activities was received, as one might expect, with some
-anguish. The first formal reaction was a letter from the permanent
-secretary of the company to T. H. Farrer, the secretary of the Board
-of Trade, saying that the company would of course acquiesce in the
-orders of the board, but begging, at the same time, to be allowed to
-continue the present gallery extending from the main, or Number Two,
-shaft at Shakespeare Cliff a short distance further, so as to be able
-to complete the first stage of the works—the junction of the main
-gallery with the new gallery extending from the ventilating, or Number
-Three, shaft. This letter was followed on April 9 by another from Sir
-Edward Watkin addressed to Joseph Chamberlain, the president of the
-Board of Trade, urgently repeating the request, this time on the ground
-of safety. Sir Edward wrote Mr. Chamberlain:
-
- The moment the Board of the Tunnel Company decided to obey you, I
- peremptorily ordered the works to be stopped. The [boring] machine has
- been silent since Thursday evening. But the Engineer sends me a very
- startling report and warning.
-
- He fears _defective ventilation_ [owing to stoppage of the air-driven
- boring machine] and danger to life—quite apart from depriving a fine
- body of skilled workmen of their bread, and general loss and damage
- in money. I can only reply to him that I am acting under your order.
- Still ... this is the first time the ventilation of a mine has been
- so interfered with. Should the engineer's alarm be well founded, and
- should men faint from bad air at the end of the gallery, there would
- be no means of getting them out alive.
-
-Sir Edward added, without changing his tone of humane agitation,
-that only the day before he had received a request from the Duke of
-Edinburgh to be allowed to see the tunnel workings, along with the
-Duchess, ten days hence, and that the Speaker of the House of Commons
-had already arranged to visit the tunnel "on Saturday, the 22nd,
-leaving Charing Cross at eleven." "What must be done?" he asked. Mr.
-Chamberlain replied promptly by telegraph that if the stopping of
-the machinery in the tunnel was constituting a danger to life, he
-authorized Sir Edward, pending further investigation of the situation
-by the Board of Trade, temporarily to keep the machinery going to the
-extent of preventing this danger. However, he followed up this telegram
-with a letter to Sir Edward in which he expressed himself as being "not
-able to understand the exact nature of the physical danger anticipated"
-by Sir Edward in the tunnel if the workings were stopped. "I do not see
-the necessity for workmen remaining in the tunnel where the ventilation
-is likely to be defective," Mr. Chamberlain observed. He added that he
-was making arrangements to have one of the Board of Trade inspectors
-visit the tunnel to investigate the situation.
-
-On April 11, the Board of Trade duly telegraphed Sir Edward that its
-chief inspector of railways, Colonel Yolland, of the Royal Engineers,
-would be at Dover at noon the next day to investigate the ventilation
-problem in the tunnel. Sir Edward, however, wired back that he was
-unable to meet the Colonel at Dover that day and could not make an
-appointment with him "until after the visit to the works of the Duke of
-Edinburgh on Tuesday next."
-
-To this the Board of Trade replied, on April 13, that Colonel Yolland
-had been instructed to visit the tunnel works "entirely out of regard
-to the very urgent and grave question raised in your letter ...
-respecting the ventilation of the boring" and that the department was
-finding it difficult to understand why Colonel Yolland's visit to
-the tunnel should be postponed. Sir Edward's answer to this was to
-invite Mr. Chamberlain down into the tunnel personally, so that Sir
-Edward could "show and explain everything," since "until you have
-seen, and had explained to you, on the spot as Mr. Gladstone did and
-had, and as we hope the Duke of Edinburgh will next Tuesday, the
-nature and condition of our works, it is, in my humble judgement,
-impossible to discuss the question with exactitude." He said nothing
-about the possibility of Mr. Chamberlain's or the Duke and Duchess of
-Edinburgh's being asphyxiated in the tunnel. Mr. Chamberlain declined
-the invitation; he said he had ordered Colonel Yolland down to Dover
-immediately to report on the tunnel. But Colonel Yolland didn't get
-down into the tunnel to make an inspection that month. Some impediment,
-some unanticipated difficulty always seemed to arise when things
-appeared to be about to straighten themselves out. By the beginning
-of May, the Board of Trade, still trying, flatly informed Sir Edward
-that Colonel Yolland and Walter Murton, its solicitor, would inspect
-the tunnel workings on May 6. But on May 4 the general manager of the
-South-Eastern Railway replied that "Sir Edward Watkin wishes me to say
-that he regrets very much that it will be quite impossible to arrange
-for such inspection to take place on that date." He suggested that Sir
-Edward could arrange it for the 13th. The Board of Trade, replying
-immediately, insisted on its taking place "not later than Wednesday
-next." That letter was met with the answer that "Sir Edward Watkin
-is at present out of town, and is not expected to return until early
-next week." He must have stayed out of town quite a while, because the
-Board of Trade heard nothing from the company until May 18, when the
-directors of the company, writing jointly, told the department that
-while they acquiesced in the request of Colonel Yolland and Mr. Murton
-to visit the tunnel, unfortunately "the machinery is under repair,"
-and as a consequence "it would not be ... safe for those gentlemen
-to go down the shaft." However, the directors added, hopefully, they
-felt sure that "by working the machinery, air compressors, and pumping
-engines for a few days and nights" their engineers could get everything
-in order for a proper tour of inspection. On May 24 Mr. Murton tried
-again. He wrote the tunnel proprietors, notifying them that "Colonel
-Yolland and myself propose to inspect the tunnel works on Saturday next
-the 27th instant." But the company's reply to the letter was regretful.
-It said that "the repairs to the winding engine cannot be completed
-until after Whitsuntide."
-
-Meanwhile, Mr. Murton was having his difficulties with the solicitor
-of the South-Eastern over the legal question of the company's claims
-to ancient manorial rights to the use of the foreshore at Shakespeare
-Cliff, as the tone of various letters he was obliged to write
-indicates. For example:
-
-  DEAR SIR,
-
- May I remind you that I have not yet received the abstract of title; I
- beg that you will at once send it to me....
-
-  I am, & c.,
-  WALTER MURTON
-
-
-Or again:
-
-  DEAR SIR,
-
- I am without answer to my letter of the 31st ultimo. I beg you will
- let me know without further delay whether you do or do not propose to
- send me abstract of title.
-
-  I am, & c.,
-  WALTER MURTON
-
-
-Or yet again:
-
-  DEAR SIR,
-
- Will you kindly write me a reply to my letters which I can send on to
- the Board of Trade.
-
-  Yours, & c.,
-  WALTER MURTON
-
-
-By June 9, the Board of Trade became quite out of patience over the
-matter of inspecting the tunnel. Introducing an ominous note, it
-informed Sir Edward that Mr. Chamberlain "feels that he must insist
-upon this visit of inspection, and if he understands that permission
-is refused, will be compelled to place the matter in the hands of his
-legal advisers, with the view of determining and enforcing the rights
-of the Crown." Sir Edward was indignant. In reply, he declared that
-he was being subjected to an "undeserved threat." Mr. Chamberlain,
-responding, denied that the threat was undeserved. He wrote firmly:
-
- Hitherto, on one ground or another, this inspection has been again and
- again postponed.
-
- I am bound to guard the rights of the Crown in this matter, and I
- desire to ascertain whether those rights have up to the present time
- been in any way invaded.
-
- This is the object of the inspection, and as it will not brook delay
- ... I have only now to ask an immediate answer stating definitely when
- it can take place.
-
-Sir Edward's answer was once more to beg Mr. Chamberlain himself to
-join a party of prominent visitors going down to see the tunnel; he
-added that "Colonel Yolland shall be at once communicated with."
-
-But by various intervening circumstances—joint letters got up by the
-tunnel promoters to the Prime Minister and to the Board of Trade
-protesting hard treatment, and so on—the Board of Trade found itself
-brooking delays all through the month of June. On June 26, the Board
-of Trade wrote in stern fashion to Sir Edward that the demands of the
-Board of Trade to inspect the tunnel workings "have been repeatedly
-formulated and persistently evaded on behalf of the Submarine
-Continental Railway Company," and that the only way the company could
-avoid legal action by the Crown was "to consent _at once_ to the
-proposed inspection." There was no satisfactory reply from the tunnel
-proprietors, and on July 5 the Board of Trade, after due notification
-to the Submarine Continental Railway Company, obtained an order from
-Mr. Justice Kay, in the High Court of Justice, restraining the tunnel
-promoters and their employees from "further working or excavating,
-or taking or interfering with any chalk, soil, or other substance"
-in the Channel tunnel without the consent of the Board of Trade, and
-ordering them to give the department access to the tunnel to inspect
-the workings. In the course of these judicial proceedings, a number of
-affidavits presented to Mr. Justice Kay by the Government revealed the
-interesting information that the Board of Trade, finding itself unable
-to obtain access for its inspectors into the tunnel, for some time
-past had felt itself obliged to station watchers on top of Shakespeare
-Cliff and on the sea regularly to spy upon the tunnel workings and
-to count the number of bucketfuls of soil it maintained had been
-removed from the workings. And, according to all its calculations, the
-Board of Trade had little doubt that the proprietors of the Submarine
-Continental Railway Company were deliberately and surreptitiously
-tunneling under the sea below low-water mark, on Crown property, and
-burrowing into and removing chalk of the realm.
-
-Intimation of what was in store for him in the High Court of Justice
-reached Sir Edward Watkin at the very time that he was showing a party
-of distinguished people, including Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of
-the Suez Canal, around the tunnel. A glimpse of that interesting visit
-is contained in a report in the London _Times_:
-
- M. de Lesseps, while down in the tunnel and under the sea, proposed
- the health of the Queen, remarking that the completion of the work was
- required in the interest of mankind.
-
- When all the visitors were again above ground, luncheon was served in
- a marquee.
-
- Sir E. Watkin, in proposing the health of M. de Lesseps, remarked
- that there were those in our country who seemed to consider that the
- work of the company they had just inspected was a crime. He had just
- received a telegram informing him that he would have to answer on
- Wednesday next at the instigation of the President of the Board of
- Trade before a court of law for having committed the crime of carrying
- on these experiments. (Hisses and groans.)
-
-Somewhat revealingly, Sir Edward added, when the signs of indignation
-subsided, that
-
- For his own part, if he was to be committed by a court of law for
- contempt, he should have this consolation—that the proceedings
- which had been taken against him had been delayed sufficiently long
- to enable him with his colleagues to have the honor of entertaining
- M. de Lesseps, in whom he should have a witness, if he had to call
- one, to prove that they had been engaged in a work which had been as
- successful as he believed it would be ultimately useful.
-
-At long last, supported by all the might of the Crown, Colonel Yolland
-got to the tunnel on July 8 to make his inspection of the workings.
-But upon his arrival there he found, to his chagrin, that "I was not
-provided, at the time ... with all the necessary means for making the
-measurements, and taking the requisite bearings" in the tunnel, and he
-was obliged to put his inspection off once more. Properly equipped,
-he descended into the tunnel a week later, on Saturday, July 15, and
-inspected everything, including the boring apparatus that Sir Edward
-had insisted had to be used to ventilate the gallery and prevent
-loss of life. What Colonel Yolland found there caused the Board of
-Trade, five days later, to send a most severe letter to the tunnel
-proprietors. In it, the Board declared:
-
- 1. That the means of ventilating the tunnel could have been and be so
- readily disconnected from the boring machine (i.e., by the movement
- of a single lever that would pour a stream of compressed air coming
- from the supply pipe directly into the tunnel) that it has never been
- necessary that a single inch of cutting should have taken place in
- order to protect life or to secure ventilation, nor can such necessity
- arise in the future.
-
- 2. That in spite of the repeated orders of the Board of Trade, and
- the assurances of the Secretary of the Submarine Railway Company and
- Sir Edward Watkin himself that those orders were acquiesced in and
- submitted to, the substantial work of boring has nevertheless been
- carried to a distance of more than 600 yards from low-water mark (thus
- constituting a trespass on the property of the Crown).
-
-Calling these acts "a flagrant breach of faith" on the part of the
-tunnel promoters, the Board of Trade wrote that henceforth the order
-of the court "must be strictly and literally adhered to," and that
-no work of maintenance, ventilation, drainage, or otherwise would be
-allowed without the express permission of the board. Sir Edward Watkin
-and his fellow directors, after some days, replied in hurt fashion to
-what they termed "the unjustified accusations directed against them."
-They reiterated their concern for the health of their employees in
-the tunnel, and in connection with their tunneling activities below
-low-water mark they came up with the ingenious explanation that "many
-visits of Royal and other personages have been, by request, made to the
-tunnel for purposes of inspection, and it was essential fully to work
-the machine from time to time for the purpose of such visits." They
-also sent a protest to Mr. Gladstone at 10 Downing Street against their
-hard treatment, and asked for the Prime Minister's intercession with
-the Board of Trade. But there was nothing doing. Mr. Gladstone politely
-refused to act and replied that the actions of the Board of Trade had
-the full sanction of the Government.
-
-On August 5, Colonel Yolland descended once more into the tunnel
-to make an inspection. He found things there in a rather run-down
-condition. "The tunnel is not nearly so dry as it was when I first
-saw it," he wrote in his report to the Board of Trade, referring to
-the fact that the engineers had ceased work on the drainage of the
-gallery. Colonel Yolland also mentioned in his report that during his
-previous visit, on July 15, "I had an escape from what might have been
-a serious accident. The wet chalk in the bottom of the tunnel, between
-and outside the rails of the tramways, is so slippery and greasy that
-it is almost impossible to keep on one's feet; and, on one occasion, I
-suddenly slipped, and fell at full length on my back, and the back of
-my head came against one of the iron rails of the tramway—fortunately
-with no great force or my skull might have been seriously bruised or
-fractured." The Colonel added, "There is not light enough in the tunnel
-from the electric lamps to enable one to see one's way through ... so
-that it is necessary to carry a lamp in one hand and a note-book in the
-other, to record the different measurements." The Colonel then gave
-some startling news. He declared that, according to his measurements,
-somebody had advanced the length of the tunnel some seventy yards since
-his inspection on July 15.
-
-When this report reached the Board of Trade, the department, outraged,
-made a motion before the High Court of Justice to cite the tunnel
-promoters for contempt. However, a cloud of doubt descended on
-the issue when the tunnel promoters claimed in court that Colonel
-Yolland's calculations were in error. The motion was put off with the
-promoters' promising to obey to the letter the demands of the Board of
-Trade. Later on in the month, Colonel Yolland, after making a further
-inspection, conceded that, owing to the difficulties of working in the
-tunnel, he had made some error of calculation. The true advance made in
-the tunnel since July 15, he said, was thirty-six yards—a figure he
-said was confirmed by the tunnel company's engineer. Colonel Yolland
-reported that the company engineers had installed a pump at the eastern
-end of the tunnel to force out the water accumulating there. He added,
-somewhat testily, "Of course men had to be employed in erecting this
-pump in the tunnel and in working it when it was ready, and as the
-boring machine has not been made use of for the purpose of cutting
-chalk, this ... conclusively proves what I had stated in my former
-reports, that it was not necessary to cut an inch of chalk for the
-purpose of ventilating and draining the tunnel."
-
-Altogether, and with all the difficulties they had encountered, the
-tunnel promoters had succeeded in boring the tunnel for a distance
-of 2,100 yards, or a little less than a mile and a quarter, toward
-France. The operations at the French end, which came to a stop in March
-of 1883, completed 2,009 yards of pilot tunnel from the bottom of the
-shaft by the cliffs at Sangatte.
-
-In the middle of August, the Government, having received all the
-reports from the War Office and the Board of Trade on the subject
-of the tunnel, caused the rival Channel-tunnel bills that had been
-brought before it to be set aside, and at the same time Mr. Chamberlain
-announced in the House of Commons that the Government had decided to
-propose, early the following year, the appointment of a Joint Select
-Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons to dispose
-of the whole tunnel question as conclusively as possible. In the
-meantime, he announced the Government's intention of publishing a
-Blue Book containing all the principal documents and correspondence
-concerning the tunnel. The Blue Book was issued in October, and once
-again the wrath of the English press fell upon the tunnel project and
-its promoters. The tone of the press comment was most majestically
-represented by an editorial in the London _Times_, which had started
-off the press campaign against the project the year before. The _Times_
-wrote that, unless it was much mistaken, "the publication of the Blue
-Book will be found to have closed the whole question of the Channel
-Tunnel for a long time to come."
-
- Undermined by land, overmined at sea, sluice-ridden at its entrance,
- and liable to asphyxiating vapors at intervals, the Tunnel will hardly
- be regarded by nervous travellers as a very pleasant alternative even
- to the horrors of seasickness....
-
- The whole system of defense must forever be at the mercy of
- blunderers, criminals, and madmen. It is true that we take somewhat
- similar risks in ordinary railway travelling, but imagination counts
- for a good deal in such matters, and the terrors of the Channel
- Tunnel under an adequate system of defense might easily affect the
- imagination so strongly as to render the terrors of seasickness
- insignificant by comparison.
-
-Caught between the forces of claustrophobia and xenophobia, Sir Edward
-Watkin's great tunnel project was just about done for. In Westminster,
-angry citizens exhibited their feelings by smashing all the windows of
-the Channel Tunnel Company offices there. In the following year, the
-promised new investigation into the tunnel question was undertaken by
-a joint Parliamentary committee presided over by Lord Landsdowne. The
-committee met fourteen times, examined forty witnesses, and asked them
-fifty-three hundred and ninety-six questions. Not unexpectedly, the
-witnesses included Sir Garnet Wolseley, now Lord Wolseley. That Lord
-Wolseley in the interim had not changed his opinions on the perilous
-consequences of a tunnel is evident from his response to just five of
-the hundreds of questions put to him by the committee members.
-
- 5233: ... I think you said that supposing anyone in this room were to
- go to the barrack gates [at any of the forts at Dover at night] and to
- knock at the door, the door would at once be opened?—The wicket would
- be opened to you.
-
- 5234: Would it be the case if the person who went there had a hundred
- men in his company?—The man inside would not know that he had them,
- he would never suspect a hundred men being outside; but I would go
- further and say, even supposing that he would not open the barrack
- gates, the barrack gates are very easily knocked in.
-
- 5235: Are there any drawbridges there?—There are, but they are very
- seldom, if ever, drawn up in Dover.
-
- 5236: You said that if the tunnel were in existence, it would be
- necessary that the conditions of life in Dover should be altered;
- would that be one of the conditions which would be altered?—Yes.
-
- 5237: And the drawbridges would be up at night?—The drawbridges would
- be up at night, and nobody would be allowed to go in or out after a
- certain hour.
-
-When all the evidence was in, a majority of the joint Parliamentary
-committee sided with the views of Lord Wolseley and voted against any
-Parliamentary sanction's being given to a Channel tunnel.
-
-Sir Edward Watkin kept right on promoting his tunnel project for quite
-a while. By 1884—a year, incidentally, when Lord Wolseley was called
-away from the country to command the British expeditionary force that
-arrived too late at Khartoum to relieve General Gordon—Sir Edward was
-still doing his best to bring the British Army around to his viewpoint
-on the tunnel. A series of contemporary illustrations in the London
-illustrated weekly publication _The Graphic_ records some views of
-a tunnel party held during that year for a group of British Army
-officers. One of the engravings shows a number of officers preparing
-to descend into the tunnel; the caption reads, "I say, Dear Chappie,
-if we invade France through the Tunnel, I hope I shan't be told off
-to lead the Advanced Guard." The visit was further reported on in an
-accompanying article by one of a few journalists accompanying the
-party. From this, it appears that the condition of the tunnel hadn't
-improved since the time that Colonel Yolland nearly split his head open
-in it. "Under foot for a great portion of the way," the author said,
-in describing how the visitors were drawn along the long gallery on
-canvas-hooded trolleys, "was ankle deep in slush," and he went on to
-quote from the report of one of his colleagues:
-
- Onward to no sound, save the splashing made by the tall workmen [who
- drew the trolleys] tramping through the mud and the drip, drip, drip
- of the water upon the hood above our heads, we are dragged and pushed
- ... under the bed of the Channel.... Sometimes, in the fitful flashes
- of light, the eye rests on falling red rivulets, like streams of
- blood, flowing down the damp walls. So we go on until the electric
- lamps cease altogether, and the long, awful cave is enveloped in a
- darkness that would be impenetrable but for the glimmer of a few
- tallow candles stuck into the bare walls of the cutting.
-
-At the end of the tunnel the action of the boring machine was briefly
-demonstrated, this time by special permission of the Board of Trade,
-and then the party was escorted out of the tunnel and taken to a
-good lunch, presumably at the Lord Warden Hotel. Another engraving
-in the same issue of _The Graphic_ shows members of the same party
-of officers, chairs drawn slightly back, sitting about a luncheon
-table. The monocled guests, ranged on each side of a clutter of
-bottles, potted ferns, place cards, and an interesting variety of
-glasses—including, as one can see fairly clearly, champagne glasses,
-claret glasses, and hock glasses—are being addressed by a bearded
-speaker. They look dazed. Yet while using his best softening-up
-techniques on the Army officers, Sir Edward did not let up his fire on
-his principal opponents among the military. Thus, during 1884, when
-he reintroduced his Tunnel Bill on the floor in Parliament (it was
-rejected by 222 votes to 84) he ridiculed the anti-tunnel generals for
-publicly confessing an inability to cope with defending a frontier
-"no bigger than the door of the House of Commons." Dealing with the
-question of British insularity, he also introduced the argument that
-since France and England had once been united as part of the same
-continental land mass his opponents, in refusing to unite them again,
-were openly showing distrust of the wisdom of Providence in having
-created the connection in the first place. This last assertion really
-incensed the editors of the London _Times_, who had been steadily
-invoking Providence as their ally against the tunnel all along. The
-_Times_ ran an editorial declaring angrily that no stronger reason
-could be found for distrusting the whole tunnel scheme than the fact
-that Sir Edward had been reduced to using such an argument. The _Times_
-added, severely, "Ordinary people will probably be content to take the
-world as it appears in historic times. Everything that we possess and
-are—our character, our language, our freedom, our institutions, our
-religion, our unviolated hearths, and our far-extended Empire—we owe
-to the encircling sea; and when Englishmen try to penetrate the designs
-of Providence they will not seek them in geological speculations, but
-will rather thank Him Who 'isled us here.'"
-
-Sir Edward, in his indomitable fashion, not only pursued his
-geological speculations but also kept pursuing the tunnel question
-in Parliament. In 1887, a year in which he changed the name of the
-Submarine Continental Railway Company to that of the Channel Tunnel
-Company (he had taken over the long-moribund rival company in 1886),
-he went on such a powerful campaign on behalf of a new Channel Tunnel
-Bill that it was defeated in the House by only seventy-six votes. In
-1888, he tried again, and even managed to persuade Mr. Gladstone,
-now the leader of the Opposition, that the Channel could be tunneled
-under with propriety. As a result, Mr. Gladstone, in June 1888, gave
-his personal support to Sir Edward's Tunnel Bill and delivered a long
-Parliamentary speech on the subject. In this dissertation the venerable
-statesman, while taking nothing back about the wisdom of Providence
-in placing the Channel where it was, said he had now come to feel
-that a Channel tunnel could be used "without altering in any way our
-insular character or insular security, to give us some of the innocent
-and pacific advantages of a land frontier." But even Mr. Gladstone's
-support couldn't swing it. Parliament would not agree to the tunnel. At
-last, after all these setbacks, Sir Edward had to consider the tunnel
-project as a lost cause, if only temporarily. He stopped promoting
-it in 1894, having become involved in the meantime in a couple of
-alternate projects—a railway tunnel between Scotland and Ireland and a
-ship canal in Ireland between Dublin and Galway. Also, in 1889, he had
-become chairman of a company to erect at Wembley Park, near London, a
-great iron tower, modeled on the Eiffel Tower, which was to be known as
-the Watkin Tower. The Watkin Tower didn't get very high. Only a single
-stage was completed, and this was opened to the public in 1896; it was
-demolished eleven years later. Sir Edward Watkin died at Northenden,
-Cheshire, in 1901.
-
-
-
-
-[Illustration: Five]
-
-
-The advent of the Entente Cordiale in 1904 provided the basis for the
-next attempt to revive the tunnel scheme. In 1907, the English Channel
-Tunnel Company, by now under the chairmanship of Baron Frederic Emile
-d'Erlanger, a banker, made another attempt to obtain Parliamentary
-approval for a tunnel. This time, the company had the advantage
-of bringing to bear on its behalf solid engineering studies and
-twentieth-century technology. The trains in the tunnel were now to be
-all electric, and the difficult task of evacuating the spoil from the
-tunnel during its construction was to be carried out by an ingenious
-new method, invented by a Frenchman named Philippe Fougerolles, of
-pulverizing it and mixing it with sea water into a soft slurry, then
-pumping the slurry out of the tunnel through pipelines. This time,
-while all the old arguments for and against the tunnel were being
-rehashed in Parliament, the tunnel promoters came up with a novel
-proposal designed to demonstrate the benign intentions toward England
-of the French Government and to allay the suspicions of the anti-tunnel
-faction in England. They suggested that the French end of the tunnel
-emerge from the side of a steep cliff on the shore of the Channel at
-Wissant, not far from Sangatte. The sole access to the tunnel entrance
-on the French side then would be made through a long horseshoe-shaped
-railway viaduct extending for some distance out over the sea and
-doubling back again to join, a mile or so away from the tunnel
-entrance, the French coastal rail line. Thus, the French suggested, the
-British fleet would be at liberty to sail up and array itself at any
-point offshore in a time of national emergency and at its convenience
-to shell the viaduct and tunnel entrance to smithereens. Expounding
-on the advantages of this plan in the pages of the _Revue Politique
-et Parlementaire_, one of the two principal architects of the 1907
-tunnel plan, Albert Sartiaux—the other was the engineer, Sir Francis
-Fox—encouragingly pointed out that such a viaduct not only would
-constitute the most perfect target imaginable for the guns of the Royal
-Navy, but also "would be a magnificent _point de vue_ for tourists."
-These inducements were insufficient, however. Parliament turned down
-the tunnel again. And a Labor M.P. declared, "If the Channel were
-tunneled, the Army and Navy estimates would speedily grow beyond the
-control of the most resolutely prudent financier. Old-age pensions
-would dwindle out of sight, and a shilling income tax would soon be
-regarded as the distant dream of an Arcadian past."
-
-Just before the First World War, the Channel Tunnel Company, headed by
-Baron Frederic Emile d'Erlanger's son, Baron Emile Beaumont d'Erlanger,
-embarked on another crusade. In 1913, a deputation representing ninety
-M.P.s favorable to the tunnel scheme visited Herbert Asquith, the
-Prime Minister, to ask for the Government's approval for the scheme,
-and the Liberal London _Daily Chronicle_, editorially proclaiming that
-the advent of the airplane had put an end to England's position as an
-island, came through with a big pro-tunnel press campaign. However, the
-_Times_ of London continued to stick firmly to its ancient position,
-and it ran an editorial restating its old arguments against the tunnel
-and ingeniously adding a new one—that even if there were no real
-possibility of invasion, the very existence of the tunnel "might even
-itself lead to a precipitation of war, if in case of international
-complications it was considered necessary, in a possible moment of
-confusion, to close the tunnel at the Dover end." In July 1914,
-less than a fortnight before the outbreak of war, the Committee of
-Imperial Defense turned the tunnel scheme down again. But the value
-of a Channel tunnel as a supply route for the Allied armies on the
-Continent continued to be debated throughout the war, and when it was
-over Marshal Foch declared publicly that "If the English and the French
-had had a tunnel under the Channel in 1914, the war would have been
-shortened by at least two years." The Marshal was promptly made the
-honorary president of the Comité Français du Tunnel.
-
-In postwar England, the tunnel project began to obtain heavy support
-in Parliament. By 1924, some four hundred M.P.s—about two-thirds of
-the House—were said to be for it, and the new Labor Prime Minister,
-Ramsay MacDonald, promised a careful and sympathetic review of the
-Government's position on the tunnel. He called all of the four living
-former Prime Ministers—Lord Balfour, Herbert Asquith, Lloyd George,
-and Stanley Baldwin—into consultation on the matter, as well as the
-Committee of Imperial Defense. The Prime Ministers met for forty
-minutes and rejected the scheme again, and MacDonald told Parliament
-that the Government felt postwar military developments had "tended,
-without exception, to render the Channel tunnel a more dangerous
-experiment" than ever. Winston Churchill protested the decision. "I do
-not hesitate to say that it was wrong," he told the House.
-
-In 1929, everybody had a go at the tunnel once more, and very elaborate
-engineering studies were made on the subject by well-established
-engineering firms and were carefully examined by a special Government
-committee, with particular attention being given to the contention
-of pro-tunnel people that the construction of a Channel tunnel would
-provide badly needed work for Englishmen in depression times. The
-report of the Government's committee was, with a single dissension,
-favorable to the construction of the tunnel. But the Committee of
-Imperial Defense still was to have its say, and in May 1930 it
-rejected the project. This time the rejection was made primarily on
-two grounds, according to a high British military man who was later a
-member of that body. The first of these, he says, was the fear of the
-military that the successful construction of a Channel tunnel would
-so adversely affect England's Channel shipping trade that the Channel
-ports were likely to fall into ill repair and the harbors to start
-silting up—dangerous conditions in periods of national emergency; the
-second was their fear that if Britain became involved in another war on
-the Continent, the tunnel would suddenly become a traffic bottleneck
-through which it would be difficult to move war supplies and equipment
-quickly and on the massive scale required. A month after this adverse
-verdict by the military, a motion was nonetheless put forward in the
-House of Commons for approval of the tunnel, and this time such a large
-group of M.P.s was favorable to the scheme that the motion failed to
-carry by only seven votes.
-
-For most of the thirties, the tunnel project just drifted along in a
-dormant state. Once every so often, when things were generally slack,
-the press would carry a feature story on it, and the annual meetings of
-the Channel Tunnel Company, still gamely presided over by Baron Emile
-Beaumont d'Erlanger, were always good for a paragraph tucked somewhere
-into the financial pages under mildly mocking headlines, such as
-"Hope Eternal," "The Channel Tunnel Again," or, in one of the popular
-dailies, just "The Poor Old Tunnel."
-
-The outbreak of the Second World War, however, far from putting the
-Channel tunnel completely out of sight, revived the issue, for a
-time, anyway. In November 1939 the French Chamber of Deputies passed
-a resolution calling for the construction of a tunnel; early in 1940,
-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain—the son, incidentally, of Joseph
-Chamberlain, who as president of the Board of Trade had ordered the
-tunnel workings stopped back in the eighties—turned the tunnel project
-down again in a parliamentary reply. The retreat from Dunkirk gave
-pro-tunnel and anti-tunnel people the opportunity of putting forth
-their arguments about the tunnel once more, with some variations—with
-the pro-tunnelers claiming that a Channel tunnel might have enabled the
-British Expeditionary Force to keep a bridgehead in France, and the
-anti-tunnelers countering that the same tunnel would have given German
-paratroopers the opportunity of seizing the English end and using it as
-a bridgehead for the invasion of England.
-
-Then, after the fall of France, when the Germans were busily making
-preparations for the invasion of England, the question arose among
-the British military as to whether the enemy might not just possibly
-attempt to reach England by surreptitiously tunneling underneath the
-Channel. As a consequence, the War Office called in an eminent British
-civil engineer, the late Sir William Halcrow, and asked him to make
-a study of the question of whether the Germans could pull off such a
-feat. "We examined the situation quite carefully and concluded that,
-provided we kept reasonably alert, the Germans could not dig the tunnel
-without being detected," an engineering colleague of Sir William
-Halcrow's on the survey said a while ago. He added, "Their difficulty
-would lie in the disposal of the spoil. They couldn't get rid of it
-without our seeing from the air that something peculiar was going on.
-If they tried to dump the spoil into the sea at night it would have to
-be done at the turn of the tide, and the chalk would leave a cloud in
-the sea that would not be dissipated by daylight. If they pulverized
-the spoil, converted it into a slurry, and pumped it well out to sea,
-we would be able to spot the chalk cloud too, and even if they tried
-other means of dispersing the spoil the very process of dispersal would
-call for such extensive installations that we would soon be on to them."
-
-In 1942, somebody at the War Office had another look into the tunnel
-situation, this time for the purpose of finding out if it would be
-practical for the British to start tunneling under the Channel—the
-idea presumably being the creation of a supply route to France ahead
-of an Allied invasion, with the last leg of the route being completed
-once the Allied Armies had installed themselves on the French
-coast. Again, several prominent British civil engineers were called
-into consultation, but the subject was abruptly dropped, without
-investigation of the problem of disposing of the spoil, when the
-engineers estimated that a tunnel probably would take eight years to
-complete—three years longer than the war then was expected to last.
-
-From 1940 on, the British kept a routine watch on their reconnaissance
-photographs for signs of tunneling on the French side, especially
-around the site of the still existing shaft of the French Tunnel
-Company at Sangatte. Early in 1944, R.A.F. and U.S.A.F. reconnaissance
-showed signs of unusual installations being made near Sangatte, but
-these later turned out to be unconnected with subterranean workings. As
-it happened, they were launching sites for V-2 bombs.
-
-The actual handling by the Germans of the old tunnel shaft during the
-occupation of France was rather peculiar. Far from trying to continue
-the existing tunnel in the early part of the Occupation, they treated
-it in contemptuous fashion, using the shaft as a dump for old chunks
-of machinery, used shell casings, bits of rubbish, and broken slabs of
-concrete. Later on, their attitude changed drastically. They sealed
-the top of the shaft with a poured-concrete platform. Then, in weirdly
-romantic fashion, they built a large rim of fitted stone around the
-platform to create an ornamental-wall effect, and added around the
-well a grass-and-flagstone terrace complete with formal walks and
-sets of monumental-looking stone steps laid out in symmetrical style.
-Apparently their notion was to bring the tunnel aesthetically into
-harmony with a military cemetery they installed between the tunnel
-entrance and the sea.
-
-After the war, the Channel-tunnel project continued to languish in
-prewar fashion. If anything, even less than before was heard in the
-press about the activities of the Channel Tunnel Company. The company's
-headquarters at the Southern Railway offices at London Bridge were
-blown up in the blitz, and all the company's records were destroyed.
-For some time, while attempts were made to piece together duplicate
-lists from Government files, the Channel Tunnel Company didn't even
-know who the majority of its stockholders were, but that didn't
-matter too much, considering the circumstances. Baron Emile Beaumont
-d'Erlanger, the chairman, had died in 1939, and his place on the Board
-was taken by his nephew, Leo d'Erlanger, also a banker. Leo d'Erlanger,
-now a spry, elegant, silver-haired gentleman in his sixties, brightly
-confesses to having had little interest in the tunnel until about
-twelve years ago. "I was brought up in a home where the Channel tunnel
-was a family religion, and, to tell the truth, I didn't give it too
-much thought," he says. "My grandfather used to talk about it when I
-came back for the holidays from Eton. 'Politics,' they all used to say.
-'The only reason why the tunnel isn't built is politics.' I never paid
-much attention. I thought it was an old dodo and never had anything to
-do with it in my Uncle Emile's lifetime. When he died and I took over,
-I used to look forward with dread to the annual general meetings. I
-had nothing to say. I considered the whole thing moribund. For a few
-years we met, I remember, at the Charing Cross Hotel, which belonged to
-the Southern Railway [a successor to Sir Edward Watkin's South-Eastern
-Railway], and the secretary was an elderly retired man by the name of
-Cramp, who once had something to do with the Southern Railway, I think.
-We used to have difficulty in getting a quorum. I suppose we would
-manage to get four or five people to turn up."
-
-However, the lost-cause atmosphere began to undergo a change in
-1948, when Sir Herbert Walker, the former general manager of the
-Southern Railway, which was taken over by British Railways in the
-nationalization program of that year, acted temporarily as chairman
-of the Channel Tunnel Company. Walker came to believe that the
-Channel-tunnel scheme could be a practical one in the postwar era, and
-he brought it to life again. Largely as a result of his persuasions,
-a Parliamentary study group began to look into the tunnel question
-once more, and the Channel Tunnel Company's lobbyists once more set
-about building up pro-tunnel opinion among M.P.s. It was just like old
-times for the pro-tunnelers, but with one significant difference. By
-the mid-fifties, it became clear that in the emerging age of rockets
-bearing nuclear warheads the traditional strategic arguments of the
-British military against the construction of a Channel tunnel would
-no longer have the same force that they had once had. And as for the
-old fears of military conscription in peacetime and high taxes, they
-had long ago been realized without a tunnel. It was therefore an event
-to make the hearts of all pro-tunnelers beat fast when, one day in
-February 1955, in the House of Commons, Harold Macmillan, then Minister
-of Defense, in answer to a parliamentary question as to whether the
-Government would have objections of a military nature to raise against
-a Channel tunnel, replied, "Scarcely at all."
-
-This seemed like a green light to D'Erlanger, but for a while he
-couldn't quite decide what to do after seeing it flash on. Early in
-1956, however, he went to see Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, who was a director
-of the French Tunnel Company—the Société Concessionnaire du Chemin
-de Fer Sous-marin entre la France et l'Angleterre—and the grandson
-of Michel Chevalier, who had founded the company in 1875. D'Erlanger
-suggested that, since the tunnel was a common ancestral interest, the
-two of them have another try at promoting it. Leroy-Beaulieu agreed,
-and he suggested that as the Suez Canal Company's concession in Egypt
-was due to run out in 1968, and might not be renewed, the Suez Company
-might possibly be interested in turning to a Channel tunnel as its
-next project. Sure enough, the principals of the Suez Company, whose
-headquarters were in Paris, were interested in the idea, but the sudden
-seizure of the Canal by Colonel Nasser in July of that year kept
-them too distracted to pursue the tunnel project just then. In the
-meantime, quite independently of these tunnel developments in Paris and
-London, two young international lawyers in New York, Frank Davidson
-and Cyril Means, Jr., became intrigued by the possibility of a tunnel
-between England and France. Davidson and Means happened to have good
-connections in Wall Street, and after they established contact with the
-two existing tunnel companies by letter, Means went over to London and
-Paris early in February of 1957 to investigate the tunnel situation
-and to offer the tunnel people there—and the Suez Canal Company—the
-chance of obtaining some substantial American financial backing for the
-construction of a tunnel if it proved to be a practical proposition.
-The tunnel people in Europe showed varying degrees of interest in the
-proposal, and to strengthen their position, Davidson and Means, with
-another friend, an engineer, Arnaud de Vitry d'Avancourt, formed a New
-York corporation called Technical Studies, Inc., with the announced
-purpose of financing technical investigations and promoting the
-construction of a Channel tunnel.
-
-In April 1957, the Suez Canal Company, which by then had given up
-any hope of regaining control of the Canal, jumped into the tunnel
-picture by announcing that it intended to collaborate with the English
-and French tunnel companies to have made a very detailed geological
-survey of the Channel bed to determine the practicability of a tunnel.
-The tunnel came into the news again. When, at the seventy-sixth
-annual meeting of the Channel Tunnel Company, in London, D'Erlanger
-got up to confirm the latest development, he did so not before the
-usual handful of disillusioned shareholders, but in a room packed
-with people who had suddenly rediscovered and dusted off old Channel
-Tunnel Company stock certificates. A correspondent from the _Times_
-of London who was present reported of the stockholders' reaction to
-the speech of the company's chairman on the possibilities of seriously
-reviving the tunnel project that it took only a few minutes "to excite
-their minds to a pleasurable pitch" and that "at least one member
-of Mr. d'Erlanger's audience darted out in the middle of his speech
-to instruct his broker to buy in shares." According to the _Times_,
-the only note of doubt was struck by a stockholder at the end of the
-meeting, which lasted half an hour:
-
- Mr. John Elliott, who bought his shares for a song almost, asked where
- the company's workings were. Did they really exist? He had visited
- Dover, and neither police, shopkeepers, nor the county surveyor could
- tell him where they were. He suggested that the board prove their
- existence by escorting a nominated half-dozen shareholders on an
- eye-witness excursion.
-
-Little attention was paid to the objector. The _Times_ reported that
-"other shareholders pooh-poohed his scepticism," and the meeting broke
-up. It was a far cry from the days of Sir Edward Watkin's special
-trains to Dover for tunnel parties. However, the price of Channel
-Tunnel Company stock, which had been available for years on the London
-Stock Exchange for as low as sixpence, rose to more than ten shillings
-by the day of the meeting and shortly thereafter rose rapidly, until by
-May 20 it reached twenty-six shillings and ninepence—six shillings and
-ninepence more than the price of the first Channel Tunnel Company stock
-in 1876.
-
-The British press, on the whole, reacted to the latest tunnel
-development in tolerant fashion. There was, however, a spirited
-discussion of the subject in an article in the _Daily Telegraph_
-in the spring of 1957, marked by an attack on the whole scheme by
-Major-General Sir Edward Spears. General Spears wrote that although
-powerful interests now appeared to be backing the construction of
-a Channel tunnel, the objections raised to the project in the past
-were as valid as ever. "Such a tunnel would bind this island to the
-Continent irrevocably [and] would soon link our fate to that of our
-Continental neighbors," he asserted, and he added that if the new
-scheme were persisted in, steps should be taken to enlighten the public
-before the Government was committed to approving it. General Spears's
-position was supported by Lord Montgomery. Choosing Trafalgar Day as
-the most appropriate time to express himself on the subject, Lord
-Montgomery said at a Navy League luncheon in October of 1957, "There
-is talk these days of a Channel tunnel. Strategically it would weaken
-us. Why give up one of our greatest assets—our island home—and make
-things easier for our enemies? The Channel tunnel is a wildcat scheme
-and I am wholeheartedly opposed to it.... I hope that the Navy League
-will have nothing to do with it."
-
-However, by Trafalgar Day the pro-tunnelers were hard at it, too.
-In July 1957, the four main interests involved in the scheme—the
-English and French Channel-tunnel companies, the Suez Canal Company and
-Technical Studies—had combined to create an organization called the
-Channel Tunnel Study Group to contract for modern technical surveys of
-the whole tunnel question. The new group is said to have spent over
-a million dollars on having these surveys made. The studies included
-a very detailed survey of the Channel bed with modern electronic
-geophysical equipment and deep rock borings and sea-bottom samples made
-across the neck of the Channel, as well as microscopic examination
-of these rock samples to determine their microfossil composition and
-probable position in the strata from which they were taken. Curiously
-enough, while the geological survey was under way, somebody on the
-project took the trouble to inquire into the old French hydrographic
-surveys for a Channel tunnel, and after some diligent searching he
-turned up, in a dusty waiting room of a disused Paris suburban railroad
-station, where it had been stored for an age, a collection of thousands
-of the sea-bottom samples made in the French Channel-tunnel surveys
-of 1875 and 1876. All of the samples were found neatly packed away in
-test tubes and ticketed, and the searchers even uncovered a case of the
-geological specimens that Thomé de Gamond himself had recovered in 1855
-by his naked plunges to the bottom of the Channel in the neighborhood
-of the Varne. The geologists weren't interested in going by way of the
-Varne any more, but many of the old 1875-76 samples were taken away for
-microfossil examination as part of a check on how the results of the
-old surveys compared with the new. Except for some variations relating
-to the extent of the cretaceous outcrop in the middle of the Channel,
-the findings tallied nicely.
-
-The new Study Group had a number of other elaborate surveys made, too,
-on the economic and engineering problems involved in the creation and
-operation of a Channel tunnel or an equivalent means of cross-Channel
-transport. Besides developing plans for a bored tunnel—the projected
-double-rail tunnel, interconnected at intervals by cross-passages,
-is essentially a modern version of William Low's plan of the 1860s,
-with an extra small service tunnel being added between the main
-tunnels—the Study Group's engineering consultants developed in detail
-schemes for a Channel bridge, an immersed railway tube, an immersed
-road tube, a combined immersed tube with two railway tracks, and a
-four-way road system on two levels. The bridge proposed would be an
-enormous affair with approximately 142 piers and with four main spans
-in the center of the Strait each 984 feet long. These spans would
-tower a maximum of 262-1/2 feet above sea level to allow the largest
-ships in the world to pass underneath with plenty of room to spare.
-The bridge would take no longer to build than a road tunnel, but it
-would cost about twice as much, and in addition it would be expensive
-and difficult to maintain and would present a hazard to navigation.
-The immersed tube proposed for either rail or road traffic (but not
-both) probably would cost about the same as a bored tunnel and might
-be constructed in four years. A combined road-rail tube would take
-about the same time to build, but would be more expensive even than a
-bridge. Among the best-known schemes for a combined tube is that of
-a Frenchman, André Basdevant, who has proposed one with a four-lane
-highway and a two-track rail line. This scheme would pretty much
-run along the old Cap Gris-Nez-Folkestone route of Thomé de Gamond,
-and it would even have, like most of Thomé de Gamond's schemes, an
-artificial island in mid-channel on the Varne. As for the latest
-scheme for a laid, rather than a bored, tube, it would be no different
-from Thomé de Gamond's plan in 1834 for a submerged tube, and as in
-that old plan a trench would be dug, by operations conducted at the
-surface, across the Channel bottom to receive the tube, which would be
-prefabricated in sections and towed out to sea to be laid down in the
-trench a section at a time. This time the digging of the trench would
-be carried out from a huge above-surface working platform, something
-like an aircraft-carrier deck on sets of two-hundred-foot-high stilts,
-that would jack itself up and move on across the Channel as the work
-progressed. From these and other surveys, the Study Group concluded
-by March 1960 that the best means of linking Britain and France would
-be by a rail tunnel, either bored or immersed, which, while avoiding
-the difficult ventilation problems of a long road tunnel, would make
-for convenient transport of cars and trucks by a piggyback system. It
-further proposed that the tunnel be operated jointly by the British and
-French Government-run railways under a long lease from an international
-company yet to be formed, and that only the bare tunnel itself be
-privately financed, with the British and French state-run railways
-providing the installations, terminals, and rolling stock at a cost of
-some twenty million pounds.
-
-When D'Erlanger announced the Study Group's proposals, calling all the
-latest tunnel laborings "a last glorious effort to get this through,"
-the British press received the news with big headlines on the front
-pages but with considerable indignation on its editorial pages. The
-core of the objections was not of a military nature but had to do
-with the number of financial concessions that the tunnel people were
-asking from the British and French Governments (that is, taxpayers)
-as a basis for going ahead with the scheme. The general attitude of
-the press was that the British Government should have nothing to do
-with some of the financial concessions asked. There were a good many
-references, all very familiar to a reader of the press attacks during
-the tunnel uproar back in the eighties, to "promoters," and the tone of
-editorial reaction was fairly well typified by a sarcastic article in
-_The Economist_ entitled "Pie Under the Sea." And the _Times_ ran an
-editorial declaring snappily that, as the proposals stood, "the light
-at the end of the tunnel would be either bright gold for the private
-owners of the £20 million of equity capital or Bright Red for the
-Anglo-French taxpayer." Then, shortly afterward, the tunnel came under
-public attack by Eoin C. Mekie, chairman of Silver City Airways, which
-in the years since the Second World War has ferried more than three
-hundred thousand cars and a million and a half passengers by air to and
-from the Continent. Mekie denounced the tunnel scheme as "commercial
-folly" and described it as "a feat of engineering which is already made
-obsolete by the speed of modern technical advances." Other attacks were
-made, too, from the enthusiasts over the future of Hovercraft, the
-heavier-than-air craft, still in the experimental stage, which ride
-on a cushion of air; and from, not unexpectedly, Channel shipping and
-ferry interests. Then Viscount Montgomery, in a newspaper interview,
-returned to the attack on the tunnel on the ground of its undermining
-what he called "our island strategy." He also observed in particular,
-when asked about the feasibility of blowing the tunnel up in case
-of war or threatened war, "The lessons of history show that things
-that ought to be blown up never are, as Guy Fawkes discovered." And
-Major-General Spears in the spring of 1960 gave fuller vent to his
-anti-tunnel views in a pamphlet that he wrote and had circulated
-privately. Its general tenor was set by General Spears's assertion that
-"the Channel saved us in 1940 and may well save us again," and that
-"The British people need no tunnels." And he asked, "Who would have
-believed that in the last war the Germans would not have destroyed the
-enormously important bridge over the Rhine at Remagen? But they failed
-to do so."
-
-To all such criticism as this, the Channel-tunnel people reacted not
-with the kind of broadsides that Sir Edward Watkin would have let
-loose in the heyday of the Channel-tunnel controversy but by hiring a
-public-relations outfit headed by a man called E. D. O'Brien, a former
-publicity director for the Conservative party, who is said to be known
-among his colleagues as Champagne Toby. O'Brien's champagne appears to
-be weaker stuff than Sir Edward Watkin's; the pro-tunnel publicity his
-outfit puts out seems to consist of things like a small booklet called
-"Channel Tunnel, the Facts," which an O'Brien assistant has described
-as "a sort of child's guide, in Q. and A. form, you know, about the
-tunnel."
-
-As soon as the British press fell on the promoters for making the
-demands they did for Government financial guarantees, the promoters
-came up with a set of counter-proposals. They offered to finance not
-only the tunnel itself but also the terminals and approaches on both
-sides; they further proposed leasing the tunnel directly to the two
-governments, thus avoiding the earlier requirement of governmental
-guarantee of the bonds.
-
-When the subject of constructing a Channel tunnel will come up for a
-decision one way or the other before the British Cabinet and Parliament
-again nobody seems willing to predict, and what the Cabinet will decide
-nobody seems willing to predict, either. However, D'Erlanger, who
-says that he would consider another tunnel thumbs down by the British
-Government or Parliament "a negation of progress," is always happy to
-talk about the benefits a Channel tunnel would confer upon Europe.
-"You have fifty million people on this side of the Channel and two
-hundred million plus on the Continental side. If you join them by a
-small hyphen, I think it _must_ facilitate trade on both sides," he
-says. "I like to think of the tunnel as a kind of engagement ring that
-would bind Britain's Outer Seven into a workable marriage with the six
-countries of the Common Market. Think of shipping goods from Rome to
-Birmingham or from Edinburgh to Bordeaux without breaking bulk, and at
-half the cost! It's high time Europe had a manifestation of progress
-along the lines of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and I think a Channel
-tunnel would be the great civil-engineering feat of the century for
-Europe."
-
-In the meantime, with all the brave words, and all the money poured
-into the project, the Channel Tunnel Company still has something of a
-phantom air about it. It doesn't have a regular staff—D'Erlanger is a
-busy City banker—and it has no real office of its own. D'Erlanger's
-banking headquarters are at the investment house of which he is a
-partner, Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlangers, Ltd., along Moorgate,
-but no Channel Tunnel Company records are kept there. The nearest
-thing to a headquarters for the Channel Tunnel Company is a set of
-Victorian offices on Broad Street Place, in the City, occupied by a
-firm of "secretaries" called W. H. Stentiford & Co. These offices are
-reached by a very ancient and slow ironwork-gate lift, and a sign in
-the corridor shows that W. H. Stentiford & Co. is the representative
-of an astonishing variety of companies, including the Channel Tunnel
-Company, Ltd., and a number of outfits with such exotic corporate
-names as the Tea Share Trust, Ltd., Uruwira Minerals, Ltd., Dominion
-Keep (Klerksdorp, Ltd.), and Klerksdorp Consolidated Goldfields, Ltd.
-Inside, amid a clutter of ticking clocks, great ledgers, old safes
-emblazoned with peeling coats of arms, great piles of papers, and trays
-of teacups, a small staff of round-shouldered retainers toils away
-vicariously over the affairs of these far-flung organizations—making
-up accounts and annual or quarterly statements, filling out and
-recording stock certificates, answering letters, and so on. All this
-clerkly activity is presided over by an eminently respectable and
-precisely mannered man by the name of P. S. Elliston, who also arranges
-board meetings for his many client companies in a room set aside at
-Stentiford's for the purpose. Mr. Elliston's organization "took on"
-the Channel Tunnel Company in the early forties, and all its annual
-meetings since 1947 have been held at Stentiford's, with Mr. Elliston
-present in his capacity of representative of his firm of secretaries.
-Mr. Elliston finds things changed a bit from the time when the Channel
-Tunnel Company first became one of his firm's clients. In those old
-days, he says, the whole annual meeting could generally be disposed
-of in between five and ten minutes, with only a couple of directors
-being present—Mr. Elliston having thoughtfully bought one share of
-Channel Tunnel Company stock to enable himself to vote in case no
-other shareholder besides a couple of directors could be persuaded to
-turn up to make a quorum of three. Now, he says, it may sometimes take
-twenty-five minutes or even as long as forty-five minutes to transact
-necessary business. As for Channel Tunnel Company stock, it has
-fluctuated all the way from sixpence to fifty shillings—its price one
-day in 1959 at a time when the company's balance sheet showed a cash
-balance of just £161. The price of the stock at the time this book was
-written was about twenty-two shillings, and the company's cash in hand
-(in 1961 it issued a little more stock to keep going) was £91,351 "and
-a few shillings." Owing to the wartime destruction of its records and
-the difficulty of tracking down all the old transactions, the Channel
-Tunnel Company still doesn't know who all its stockholders are, and,
-conversely, there are quite a few people scattered about who probably
-aren't aware that they are company stockholders.
-
-Mr. Elliston describes the last fifteen years or so of the company's
-history as containing "several periods where there was very keen
-interest" in the tunnel scheme, especially in 1957 and 1958, with
-Stentiford's being subjected, he says, to "a persistent spate of
-enquiries," including calls from newspaper reporters and letters from
-schoolboys asking why the tunnel was never built.
-
-Some time ago, when I was in England, I decided to take a trip down
-to the coast between Folkestone and Dover to the scene of the violent
-tunnel controversy of the eighties. I had heard that the shaft of the
-old Shakespeare Cliff gallery in which Sir Edward Watkin did so much of
-his promoting and entertaining, as well as tunneling, had been sealed
-off many years ago, but I was aware that the Abbots Cliff gallery, or
-part of it, still existed. Through the good offices of Leo d'Erlanger
-and Harold J. B. Harding, the vice-president of the Institution of
-Civil Engineers, who has directed many of the latest technical surveys
-on the proposed Channel tunnel, I arranged to go down one day from
-London to Folkestone and to be taken into the old Abbots Cliff tunnel.
-Written permission had to be obtained from the Government for the
-visit, and the necessary arrangements had to be made well in advance
-with officials of British Railways, the present owner, representing
-the Crown, of the coastal lands once the domain of Sir Edward Watkin's
-South-Eastern Railway Company. Harding explained to me that since the
-tunnel entrance was kept locked up and lay in a not readily accessible
-part of the cliffs facing the sea, it would be practical for me to make
-the visit only under fairly good weather conditions, and then under
-the escort of people equipped with lamps and the means of opening up
-the tunnel entrance. "You may get a bit wet and a bit dirty, so don't
-wear a good suit," Harding added, and he went on to say that he had
-seen to it that I would be shown around the tunnel by a civil engineer
-named Kenneth W. Adams, from the district office of British Railways at
-Ashford, Kent—Adams being, in Harding's words, "a keen engineer who
-has become something of a hobbyist on the old tunnel workings."
-
-Wearing an old suit, I duly took a train early one fair morning in
-autumn, from Charing Cross, and when I got off at Folkestone Central
-Station, Adams, a stocky, cheerful man who seemed to be about forty,
-was waiting for me. He had a little car waiting outside the station,
-and when he got into it, he introduced me to an assistant sitting in
-the driver's seat named Jack Burgess. "Jack's grandfather was a surface
-worker at the tunnel workings at Shakespeare Cliff," Adams said as
-Burgess started the car up. "Jack was just telling me that he remembers
-his grandfather telling him, when he was a boy, about Lord Palmerston
-coming down to visit the tunnel in 1881. The old chap remembered that
-the food that was brought into the tunnel for parties of visitors from
-the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover came in hay boxes—that is, in big
-wicker boxes interlined with a thick layer of hay to keep the food
-warm."
-
-Burgess drove us through the outer part of Folkestone toward the sea at
-a pretty good clip, with the little car buzzing away like a high-speed
-sewing machine, and in a very little time, after climbing up a long,
-gentle slope by the back of the cliffs, we drew up on the heights of
-East Cliff, a kind of promontory within Eastwear Bay, which lies to
-the north-east of Folkestone Harbor. There, in two broad curves to the
-left and right of us, the precipitous face of the white chalk cliffs
-gleamed, like huge ruined walls with grassed-over rubble piled about
-their base, in hazy sunlight. Far below us, and stretching away into
-the haze, lay the Channel, gray and, for the time being, pretty calm.
-A hundred feet or so from where our car stopped was a massive round
-stone tower, its sides tapering in toward the top like a child's sand
-castle; two similar towers lay some distance from us in the direction
-of Folkestone. These, Adams explained, were Martello towers, formerly
-cannon-bearing fortifications that were installed in prominent places
-all along the Dover-Folkestone coastal area during the invasion scares
-early in the nineteenth century to repel surprise landings by the
-troops of Napoleon Bonaparte. (The three Martello towers comprised
-the main artillery defenses of Folkestone Harbor even as late in the
-century as the time of the great tunnel controversy in the eighties.)
-Then he pointed to the cliffs stretching to the north-east. "You see
-that large white building on top of the cliff almost at the very end of
-the bay? That's Abbots Cliff, and the tunnel is at the base of it," he
-said. "We'll take you down that way in a couple of minutes, but first
-I'd like to show you something that may interest you."
-
-We walked a short distance down a path by East Cliff to a point where
-we could see, as we couldn't previously, the rail line that ran along
-the coast, partly through rail tunnels piercing the cliffs, and partly
-over the land that rose above their base. Then Adams pointed out to
-me something jutting horizontally out of the chalk cliffs a little
-above and to the side of the railroad cutting. It was a large and
-long-rusted collection of wheels, gears, and cams, all compounded
-together into the shape of some fantastic Dadaist engine. "What you
-see there is the remains of the last machine ever tried out for boring
-a Channel tunnel," Adams said. "That's the Whittaker boring machine,
-an electrically driven affair, powered by a steam-driven generator,
-and it was tried out here after the First World War. Actually, it was
-developed by the Royal Engineers for mining under the German lines, and
-in 1919 Sir Percy Tempest, who was chief engineer of the South East &
-Chatham Railway—an amalgamation of the South-Eastern Railway and the
-London, Chatham & Dover Railway, which in turn, by further amalgamation
-with other lines, became the Southern Railway—thought it might do
-for the Channel tunnel. In 1919 he asked permission from the Board
-of Trade to drive a new heading from the old Number Three ventilating
-shaft at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff a little way under the
-foreshore, and got it, but he changed his mind and decided to try the
-machine in the chalk down here. The Whittaker machine cut a tunnel
-twelve feet in diameter, and some time between 1921 and 1924 they drove
-a heading into the chalk, just at the point where it's sticking out
-now, for some four hundred feet. They never quite removed the machine
-from the heading when they were finished, but it was maintained right
-up to the outbreak of the Second World War, when it became derelict."
-
-Adams and I walked back to the car. As we did so, he revealed himself
-as being pro-tunnel. "It's a tragic thing, this tunnel business, I
-think. If the tunnel had been built forty or fifty years ago, just
-think of what an asset to Europe it would have been," he said. We
-packed ourselves in, and Burgess drove us down a very rough, narrow
-road to the level of the railroad line. There, by a maintenance shed,
-a small, thin workman was waiting for us. He was wearing an old cloth
-peaked cap, a white duffel coat, and rubber knee boots, and by his feet
-he had ready-lighted Tilley lamps—similar in appearance to miners'
-lamps but operated by kerosene under pressure, like a Primus stove.
-Adams and Burgess jumped out of the car, and Burgess unlocked and
-opened up the rear trunk. I got out of the car, too. Then the workman,
-whom Adams addressed as Jim, disappeared briefly into the shed and came
-out with a pile of knee boots, which he began flinging into the car
-trunk. "We'll be needing these," Adams remarked to me. Next Jim brought
-out an enormous wrench, at least two feet long, and slung that on top
-of the protesting rubber boots, and then he came up with an armful of
-duffel coats, which he handed around. We put them on and all of us got
-into the car; the little workman wordlessly, with a wide gaptoothed
-grin, squeezed into the back seat with me and settled back with the
-two big lighted Tilley lamps on his lap. The lamps gave off a gentle
-roaring sound, like subdued blowtorches, and they gave off heat that
-warmed the whole back of the car.
-
-We drove off down a narrow, steep, tortuously winding, and very rugged
-road, through a kind of wilderness of concrete rubble and piles of
-old heavy wooden construction beams, toward the base of the cliffs,
-and when we finally got there, we continued along the wide top of a
-concrete sea wall for a considerable distance until the wall suddenly
-narrowed and the car could go no farther.
-
-We all got out, and Adams, Burgess, and I took off our shoes and put
-on the knee boots that Burgess got out of the trunk; and, with Jim and
-Burgess leading the way and bearing between them the glowing Tilley
-lamps and the giant wrench, we continued on foot along the sea wall,
-now as narrow as the sidewalk of a small city street. The chalk cliffs
-towered perhaps a couple of hundred feet above us. "The tunnel is about
-three-quarters of a mile ahead along the sea wall," Adams remarked
-as he walked beside me, and as we went along he explained that his
-primary job at British Railways was the design of sea defenses between
-Folkestone and Dover to combat erosion. "It's a good job you didn't
-pick a later time in the year to visit the tunnel," he went on. "This
-sea wall would hardly be negotiable on foot when the water's rough, and
-in winter, with the sou'westers blowing in especially, we have some
-real shockers."
-
-After another fifteen minutes or so of walking along an area where the
-cliffs rose back beyond a sort of terrace formed by old landslides—the
-railway line ran along this terrace in the open—Adams told me that
-the tunnel entrance was not far off. A few hundred feet farther on, we
-finally reached it—a small recessed place in the grassy rubble at the
-base of the cliff terrace and, set into it, a four-foot-square door
-of rough, thick wood encased by a frame of very old and very heavy
-timbers. The door was hinged with heavy gate hinges and secured not by
-a padlock but by a very large metal nut, which Jim now attacked with
-his great wrench.
-
-As he wrestled with it, Adams, smiling, remarked that the entrance
-wasn't a very big one, considering the size of the Channel-tunnel
-project. "I once brought a Canadian executive, a rather
-impressive-looking fellow, down here by request, in '57, I think it
-was," he recalled. "It seemed very important to him to inspect the
-entrance to the tunnel. When I took him along the sea wall and showed
-him this entrance, he took a look at it and just burst out laughing.
-I asked him what was up. He went on laughing, and finally he told me
-why. He said he was employed by a large American oil company, and that
-his company had sent him over here to spy out the possibility of buying
-up land for filling stations near the entrance to the proposed Channel
-tunnel. Actually, of course, nobody knows precisely where a new tunnel
-would come out on the English side, and it would be very doubtful
-whether they would make use of any of the old workings."
-
-The little workman unloosened the nut, and, with various groans
-and creaks, the door to the tunnel allowed itself to be pulled and
-shouldered open. Then, one by one, we stooped down and entered the
-tunnel through the small opening. When my eyes adjusted themselves from
-the light of day to the light of the Tilley lamps we had brought with
-us, I found that we were standing in a square-timbered heading perhaps
-six feet high and about the same in width. The floor, like the roof,
-was timbered, and from the roof, as well as from parts of the sides
-of the heading, a pale fungus growth drooped down. The atmosphere was
-pretty dank. Just inside the entrance, either hanging from big rough
-nails protruding from the wooden walls or lying to one side on the
-floor, there was a clutter of various objects—rusty chains, augers,
-lengths of decaying rope, candles, and a couple of lobster pots, the
-presence of which Adams explained to me. "They get washed up from
-time to time, and our lads, when they find them, put them in here for
-safekeeping," he said. Slowly we made our way into the tunnel. There
-was room for a set of narrow-gauge rail tracks, but most of the thin
-rails had been torn up, and a number of them lay piled to our right by
-the wall. On the left, untracked and abandoned, lay one of the rail
-trolleys that obviously had been used for hauling out spoil. The little
-rusted wheels on which it rested were of clearly Victorian design,
-with spokes elaborately arranged in curlicued fashion. "This is the
-access heading we're in," Adams told me as we found our way along,
-heads down. "The chalk carted out from the Beaumont boring machine was
-taken through here and dumped right into the sea outside the entrance.
-But this access heading wasn't the first to be built; it was dug by
-hand from the direction in which we're going, from the bottom of a
-vertical shaft sunk from the level of the South-Eastern Railway line
-seventy-four feet up above this concrete lining we're coming to now.
-As you see—" Adams took a Tilley lamp from Burgess and flashed it on
-the roof of the concrete lining—"the shaft has been closed up long
-ago. Now we'll go on. This first stretch is taking us in a northerly
-direction."
-
-After going a short distance, we came to another concrete lining. This,
-Adams said, was to reinforce the tunnel at the point where it passed
-underneath the railway line. We went on again, this time walking on a
-dirt floor, and then we came to a timbered junction, from which the
-tunnel branched off again to the right in the north-east direction that
-was originally intended to bring it into line with the gallery at
-Shakespeare Cliff, while to the left there was a low-roofed chamber
-that probably once housed a siding and a maintenance workshop for the
-Beaumont boring machine. Then, walking now on half-rotted planks, in
-the warm light of the restlessly moving Tilley lamps, we entered the
-circular, unlined tunnel of Lower Chalk—a smooth, light-gray cavern,
-seven feet in diameter, that stretched far ahead to disappear into
-darkness. Our footing was slippery, and a small stream of water ran
-in the direction from which we had come in a rough gutter cut in the
-chalk, but the tunnel at this point seemed surprisingly dry for a hole
-that had lain unlined for some eighty years, and the stream of water
-draining away didn't seem to me to be really any greater than the one
-in the Orangeburg pipe that drains seepage from under the cellar of my
-summer house in Connecticut.
-
-We had gone only a little way along the chalk tunnel when Adams,
-walking ahead of me, began flashing his light along the wall and
-then stopped and motioned me to come and look at the spot where he
-had focused his lamp. I did so and saw, cut into the chalk in crude
-lettering, the following inscription:
-
-  THIS
-  TUNNEL
-  WAS
-  BUGN
-  IN
-  1880
-  WILLIAM SHARP
-
-However, this was not exactly how the inscription went, for its author,
-after finishing it, obviously had decided that "BUGN" didn't look
-right, and, being unable to erase the incision, he had had another go
-at it, inscribing the second try to one side and partly over the first,
-so that the intended "begun" now came out like "BEGUBNUGN." But with
-all the crudeness of the inscription, the author had been careful with
-the lettering, even to point of conscientiously incising serifs on the
-"T"s and "E"s.
-
-While the light played about the inscription, I could see clearly, on
-the tunnel face, the ringlike marks left by individual revolutions of
-the cutting head of the Beaumont boring machine. After a few moments we
-moved on again, and eventually, after trudging over ground that became
-increasingly slippery, we came to a point where some of the chalk
-had given way, filling the tunnel about a quarter of the way up with
-debris. Adams said that the going got a bit better later on but that we
-were likely to find ourselves in water over our knee boots if we went
-any farther. At that point, impressed with the sight of all the fallen
-rock about and by the realization that we were in a seven-foot hole at
-least a quarter of a mile inside a huge cliff on a deserted stretch of
-coast, I felt as though I had seen enough. I suddenly realized what a
-smart idea Sir Edward Watkin had had in providing visitors with that
-champagne lift while they were well under the sea. So we turned back
-again and slowly, in silence, made our way out of Sir Edward's first
-tunnel.
-
-When I stepped through the tunnel entrance into the light, it seemed
-very noisy outside. Sea gulls were shrieking overhead, and the Channel
-waves were roaring and heaving insistently. I had a slight headache,
-and I mentioned this to Adams. "Oh, yes, I have the same thing," he
-said. "Although the air in the tunnel is remarkably fresh, considering
-the length of time it's been locked up and the fact that there's only
-one entrance, there isn't quite as much oxygen in it as one might
-want." Jim began to lock up the entrance again, and while he was doing
-so, Adams suggested that we might see if we could spot the entrance
-shaft on the plateau above us. We climbed up the cliffside, and after
-a while we located it, a filled-in depression resting in a mass of
-bramble bushes. We waded through the bushes and stood over the remains
-of Number One shaft, still feeling a bit headachy. As we stood there,
-we picked and ate a few blackberries still left on the bushes from
-summer. "They're quite good," Adams said.
-
-After we had had some lunch in Folkestone, Adams suggested that before
-I went back to London I might want to take a look at the site of the
-old Number Two shaft and the main tunnel at Shakespeare Cliff, even
-though the Number Two shaft and the Number Three ventilating shaft had
-been long ago closed up. I was agreeable to that, and Burgess drove
-us, by way of Dover, to a point along a back road, from which we could
-walk to the top of Shakespeare Cliff from the land side. While Burgess
-stayed in the little car, Adams and I set off up a long slope to the
-cliff head, walking along the edge of a harrowed field, the soil of
-which seemed to be riddled with the kind of large flints typical of the
-Upper Chalk layer.
-
-On the way up, Adams told me what had happened to the main tunnel
-and shaft after the workings were finally stopped by the Board of
-Trade. "Everything stopped dead at the tunnel workings until 1892,"
-Adams said. "By then, Sir Edward Watkin knew he was beaten on the
-Channel tunnel, so he tried a different kind of tunneling, and the
-South-Eastern Railway engineers began boring for coal a matter of a few
-yards away from the tunnel shaft. They went down to 2,222 feet with
-their boring, at which level they met a four-foot seam of good-quality
-coal, and the company obtained authority by an act of Parliament to
-mine for coal under the foreshore. As for the Channel-tunnel shaft
-itself, it was abandoned in 1902 and filled up with breeze—ashes and
-slag—from the colliery, and the Number Three ventilation shaft at the
-eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff was also filled with breeze in the
-same year. But the colliery never paid off any better than the tunnel
-project. It ran into trouble around 1907 or 1908, and then the owners
-decided they'd have a try at getting iron ore out of the workings,
-and so all the mineral mining rights were bought by the Channel Steel
-Company, but the iron mining didn't prosper any more than the coal
-mining. The Channel Steel Company went into voluntary liquidation in
-1952, and all the mining rights passed to the original freeholders, who
-are now the British Government."
-
-Adams and I climbed over a wooden fence stile, and after a couple of
-more minutes of uphill walking we arrived at the top of Shakespeare
-Cliff. We approached to a point near the edge and kneeled in the tall
-grass, buffeted by a strong afternoon wind that struck us squarely in
-the face. It was a magnificent view. The Channel lay very far below
-us, and although I could not see the coast of France because of the
-haze—Adams said that on a fine day anybody could see clearly the
-clock tower outside Boulogne—I could see shipping scudding along in
-whitecaps in the middle of the Strait. To the left of us, not far away,
-lay the Admiralty Pier at Dover, the one that once had the great gun
-which the _Illustrated London News_ had imaginatively depicted in the
-act of blowing the tunnel entrance to pieces at the first sign of a
-French invasion of England through the tunnel.
-
-Then, on hands and knees, we crawled against the pommeling wind to
-the very edge of the cliff, and lying on our stomachs peered straight
-down upon the site of the Shakespeare Cliff tunnel. I still had traces
-of the headache I had picked up while creeping around in the depths
-of the Abbots Cliff tunnel and it was a dizzying change for me now
-to peer three hundred feet down a sheer cliff face, but it was worth
-it, even though there was nothing so startling to see. Far below us
-lay a plateau with a couple of railway sidings on it. There were no
-buildings about, and certainly nothing that resembled any trace of a
-mine entrance. "British Railways had to build a sea wall around the
-whole Shakespeare Cliff area a few years ago because of the erosion
-from the Channel, and when we were doing that we cleaned out all the
-old mine workings," Adams said. "One of the last buildings to go was a
-shed that the old custodian of the works used to live in. His name was
-Charlie Gatehouse. He died about ten years ago at the age of ninety.
-He had worked as a timberman on both the Abbots Cliff and Shakespeare
-Cliff tunnels, and he took up the first sod when they dug the shaft
-down here. He used to tell about how one day Mr. Gladstone came down
-into the tunnel."
-
-Then Adams pointed out to me exactly where the entrance to Number Two
-shaft had been. It lay by the third rain puddle to the left near one of
-the sidings. I enjoyed the thought of having its location fixed in my
-mind, and I believe Mr. Adams did, too. We gazed down silently. "Just
-imagine, if the Board of Trade hadn't stopped the works, a man might
-have been able to go right on to Vladivostock without getting out of
-his train," Adams said after a while. And he added earnestly, "But I
-think they'll build the tunnel yet."
-
-Since my visit to the tunnel, the tendency of events has been to
-reinforce the brave hopes of Adams and his fellow pro-tunnelers. To be
-sure, while even the most dedicated of tunnel promoters may be prone
-to his black moments while pondering the nature and the effects of
-traditional British insularity—one of the most distinguished, Sir
-Ivone Kirkpatrick, the president of the Tunnel Study Group, a while ago
-observed with some touch of bitterness that it seemed as though "men
-may be flying to the moon before Britons can make a reasonable surface
-journey to Paris"—Britain's decision to seek full membership in the
-European Common Market, and the agreement of the French and British
-Governments to hold official talks on the construction of either a
-tunnel or a bridge across the Channel, have given the pro-tunnelers
-more solid reason for hope than perhaps has ever existed in the ranks
-of these visionaries in a century and a half. In the past, it was
-never possible for proponents of the tunnel to advance their cause
-with any success so long as their advocacy was not based on the prior
-existence of any profound change in Britain's traditional economic and
-strategic special and separate place in Europe, or of any change in
-the peculiar British sense of being an island people apart. But now
-such changes have taken place, or are in the process of taking place.
-Britain's strategic position has been profoundly altered by the advent
-of nuclear and rocket armaments. Her political and economic position
-has been as profoundly altered by the withering away of the British
-Empire and by the successful emergence of a new European commonwealth
-in the form of the Common Market. And the ancient British sense of
-being an island race apart seems to have been steadily eroded by a
-strange kind of rootlessness, partly arising out of Britain's altered
-place in the world, and as a general accompaniment of the intrusion of
-such uninsular influences as the jet airplane, commercial television,
-high-powered advertising, expense-account living, and the spread of
-installment buying. Notwithstanding all her misgivings on the subject
-of committing herself to abandonment of her ancient aloofness from the
-Continent, Britain can hardly ignore the implications of the relentless
-march of that process once described by the Duke of Wellington over a
-century ago in the heyday of the sailing ship, when he observed that
-Britain and the Continent were rapidly becoming joined by an "isthmus
-of steam."
-
-Now that so many of the conditions that have made for England's
-traditional economic, military, and cultural insularity have gradually
-subsided, like the ancient Wealden Island that once lay in what is now
-the Strait of Dover, the question of connecting Britain physically
-to the Continent is at last in the realm of practical political
-possibility. In spite of all her misgivings about the abandonment
-of her privileged relationships with the countries of the British
-Commonwealth, it seems as though Britain has no choice ahead but to
-throw in her lot with the Common Market, which has proved itself to be
-such an astonishing success in its four years of existence.
-
-Since 1958, when the special trade arrangements between the countries
-of the European Economic Community went into effect, up to 1960,
-their industrial production increased by 22 per cent, while Britain's
-industrial production increased only 11 per cent. And it has been
-estimated that by 1970 the Gross National Product of the Common Market
-countries will double that of 1961. This estimate does not take into
-account Britain's joining the Common Market, either; when she does so,
-as it seems she must, the Common Market boom will be a spectacular
-one; the member countries will then be serving a market of more than
-200 million people. Precisely what Britain's entry into the Common
-Market would mean in terms of increased commercial intercourse between
-Britain and the Continent no one knows, but the increase plainly would
-be enormous, and considering this potentiality, proponents of the
-Channel tunnel are not backward in claiming that Britain's present
-cross-Channel transportation facilities are grossly inadequate to meet
-the demands ahead. They are even inadequate, the pro-tunnelers claim,
-for coping with Britain's present needs.
-
-As things stand, some 8 million passengers and about 400,000 vehicles
-cross the Channel in a year. Of these, 3.3 million passengers and
-about 100,000 vehicles go by air. Most of this traffic crisscrosses
-the Channel in the four peak summer months and results in severe
-bottlenecks in the existing means of communication. (A motorist who
-wishes to take his car abroad either by air or sea-ferry during the
-peak season must book a passage some months ahead of time, and if he
-can't make it on the assigned date "he runs the risk," as one of the
-tunnel promoters has put it, "of being marooned on this island for
-several more months.") Even without taking into account Britain's
-probable entry into the Common Market, the number of vehicles crossing
-Britain and the Continent probably will double itself by 1965.
-
-The Channel Tunnel Study Group people claim that neither the existing
-air nor sea-ferry services are equipped to handle anything like this
-potential load. They estimate that without construction of a tunnel,
-the British and French Governments, through their nationalized rail and
-air lines, will be obliged to spend some $90,000,000 in the next five
-years to replace or expand existing transport facilities if they are
-to keep up with the increase in cross-Channel traffic expected in that
-time without Britain's participation in the Common Market. As for the
-capacity of the tunnel, the promoters claim that all the road vehicles
-that crossed the Channel in 1960 could easily be carried through the
-tunnel in three or four days. As for the transporting of merchandise,
-11,000,000 tons of it are now being moved across the Channel in a year,
-most of this in bulk form—coal, for example—which it would not be
-practical to send through a tunnel. But of this freight, well over a
-million tons of nonbulk goods could, the Study Group declares, be sent
-by tunnel, and at about half the rates now prevailing.
-
-Taking into account such economic advantages, the great boon to
-tourism that they believe a tunnel would represent, and the intangible
-psychological impetus that they claim a fixed link between France
-and Britain would give to the dream of a politically as well as
-economically united Europe, the pro-tunnelers believe that the
-construction of their railway under the Channel would be just about the
-greatest thing to happen to Britain in this century.
-
-The Channel Tunnel Study Group people, as it turned out late last year,
-are not alone in their ambitions for a physical connection between
-France and Britain. Last fall, when the French and British Governments
-decided—on British initiative—to negotiate with each other on a fixed
-connection between the two countries, it became clear that a dark horse
-had been entered in the Channel sweepstakes with the publicizing of the
-new proposal for a cross-Channel bridge made by a new French company
-that is headed by Jules Moch, a former French Minister of Interior.
-The bridge proposed by the new French company would be a multipurpose
-affair of steel capable of carrying not only two railroad lines but
-five lanes of motor traffic and even two bicycle tracks. It would
-extend between Dover and a point near Calais. Its width would be 115
-feet and its height 230 feet, allowing (as the Tunnel Study Group's
-proposed bridge scheme would) ample clearance for the largest ocean
-liners afloat. Its length would be 21 miles; it would rest on 164
-concrete piles 65 feet in diameter and sunk 660 feet apart. Motorists
-would travel along it, without any speed limit, at a peak rate of
-5,000 vehicles an hour, and an average toll of about $22.50 per car.
-The bridge would take between four and six years to construct, and as
-for the cost, that would run to about $630,000,000—or $266,000,000
-more than the estimated cost of a rail tunnel. Despite some backing
-that the new French bridge group appears to have established for its
-scheme among French commercial circles, the chances are that the
-British Government, as representatives of a maritime nation, will
-have a number of objections to this plan for spanning the Channel.
-A principal objection—a technical one that has confounded all the
-Channel bridge planners from Thomé de Gamond's day onward—is the
-hazard to navigation within the Strait of Dover that a bridge would
-create. The English Channel is one of the most heavily trafficked sea
-lanes in the world, and considering the violent state of wind and sea
-within the Strait of Dover for much of the year—as well as the heavy
-Channel fogs—insuring safe passage between the piers of such a bridge
-for all the thousands of ships that pass through the Strait every year,
-in all weathers, would pose formidable problems even in the era of
-radar. Also, the Channel-tunnel advocates, who already have considered
-a bridge and pretty much rejected the idea because of its high cost,
-point to other difficulties standing in the way of the bridge idea—for
-example, the requirements of international law, which would make
-necessary a special treaty signed by all countries (including Russia)
-presently sending ships through the Channel before such an obstruction
-to navigation could be constructed; the difficulties, with all the bad
-weather, of keeping such an enormous structure in good repair; and
-the dangers of Channel gales to light European cars traversing the
-bridge. (The French bridge advocates claim that they could reduce the
-winds buffeting traffic to a quarter of their intensity by installing
-deflectors on the sides of the traffic lanes; to this the tunnel
-advocates counter that boxing cars in traffic lanes for some twenty-one
-miles would create a psychological sense of confinement that drivers
-would find far more intimidating than riding on a train under the
-sea.) But the main objection to the bridge is its cost. It could only
-be built with the help of substantial government subsidies, and the
-experience of the pro-tunnelers is that such subsidies are almost
-impossible to obtain.
-
-Whatever the merits of the two schemes, they are certain to be
-considered in quite a different atmosphere now than they were back in
-the seventies, when, according to the observations that Sir Garnet
-Wolseley subsequently made to Sir Archibald Alison's scientific
-committee that investigated the tunnel question, "the tunnel scheme was
-... looked upon as fanciful and unfeasible. It was not then regarded
-as having entered within the zone or scope of practical undertakings.
-No one believed that it would ever be made and, if mentioned, it
-always raised a smile, as does now any reference to flying machines
-as substitutes for railways." On August 28, 1961, things somehow
-seemed to come full circle when the London _Times_, which had started
-all the opposition in the press to the tunnel eighty years earlier,
-devoted a leading editorial to discussion of the subject of a fixed
-connection between France and Britain. The _Times_ started out in
-familiar fashion for a tunnel editorial by quoting from Shakespeare's
-"This royal throne" speech, but then it went on to concede in stately
-fashion that times had changed and that "Britain must soon decide
-whether to leap over the wall, to become a part of Europe." The _Times_
-discussed the merits of the latest tunnel and bridge schemes in tones
-of expository reasonableness, without committing itself to either one
-scheme or the other, and without accusing the would-be moat-crossers,
-as of old, of flaunting the will of Providence. And the _Times_ wound
-up its editorial on a meaningful note by observing, in reference to
-the quotations with which the editorial had been prefaced, that while
-Shakespeare had the first words, John Donne deserved the last:
-
-"No man is an island, entire of itself."
-
-To which all the tunnel dreamers, after all their years of adversity in
-the face of the insular British character, reasonably can say Amen.
-
-
-
-
-About the Author
-
-
-THOMAS WHITESIDE _was born in England in 1918 at Berwick-upon-Tweed, on
-the Scottish border. After working as a newspaperman in Canada, he came
-to this country in 1940. He is a United States citizen. After wartime
-service with the Office of War Information, he worked as a reporter
-for_ The New Republic, _and for some years he has been a writer for_
-The New Yorker. _Mr. Whiteside is married to a French-born wife and has
-three children. They live in Greenwich Village. He is the author of_
-The Relaxed Sell, _published in 1954_.
-
-*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TUNNEL UNDER THE CHANNEL ***
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