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.