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.