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Title: The Tunnel Under the Channel
Author: Thomas Whiteside
Release Date: November 7, 2021 [eBook #66685]
Language: English
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*** 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_.
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