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.
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MOST OF THE MATERIAL IN THIS BOOK ORIGINATED IN
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WHICH HAVE BEEN HERE EXPANDED.
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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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_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: