made a motion before the High Court of Justice to cite the tunnel
promoters for contempt. However, a cloud of doubt descended on
the issue when the tunnel promoters claimed in court that Colonel
Yolland's calculations were in error. The motion was put off with the
promoters' promising to obey to the letter the demands of the Board of
Trade. Later on in the month, Colonel Yolland, after making a further
inspection, conceded that, owing to the difficulties of working in the
tunnel, he had made some error of calculation. The true advance made in
the tunnel since July 15, he said, was thirty-six yards—a figure he
said was confirmed by the tunnel company's engineer. Colonel Yolland
reported that the company engineers had installed a pump at the eastern
end of the tunnel to force out the water accumulating there. He added,
somewhat testily, "Of course men had to be employed in erecting this
pump in the tunnel and in working it when it was ready, and as the
boring machine has not been made use of for the purpose of cutting
chalk, this ... conclusively proves what I had stated in my former
reports, that it was not necessary to cut an inch of chalk for the
purpose of ventilating and draining the tunnel."
Altogether, and with all the difficulties they had encountered, the
tunnel promoters had succeeded in boring the tunnel for a distance
of 2,100 yards, or a little less than a mile and a quarter, toward
France. The operations at the French end, which came to a stop in March
of 1883, completed 2,009 yards of pilot tunnel from the bottom of the
shaft by the cliffs at Sangatte.
In the middle of August, the Government, having received all the
reports from the War Office and the Board of Trade on the subject
of the tunnel, caused the rival Channel-tunnel bills that had been
brought before it to be set aside, and at the same time Mr. Chamberlain
announced in the House of Commons that the Government had decided to
propose, early the following year, the appointment of a Joint Select
Committee of the House of Lords and the House of Commons to dispose
of the whole tunnel question as conclusively as possible. In the
meantime, he announced the Government's intention of publishing a
Blue Book containing all the principal documents and correspondence
concerning the tunnel. The Blue Book was issued in October, and once
again the wrath of the English press fell upon the tunnel project and
its promoters. The tone of the press comment was most majestically
represented by an editorial in the London _Times_, which had started
off the press campaign against the project the year before. The _Times_
wrote that, unless it was much mistaken, "the publication of the Blue
Book will be found to have closed the whole question of the Channel
Tunnel for a long time to come."
Undermined by land, overmined at sea, sluice-ridden at its entrance,
and liable to asphyxiating vapors at intervals, the Tunnel will hardly
be regarded by nervous travellers as a very pleasant alternative even
to the horrors of seasickness....
The whole system of defense must forever be at the mercy of
blunderers, criminals, and madmen. It is true that we take somewhat
similar risks in ordinary railway travelling, but imagination counts
for a good deal in such matters, and the terrors of the Channel
Tunnel under an adequate system of defense might easily affect the
imagination so strongly as to render the terrors of seasickness
insignificant by comparison.
Caught between the forces of claustrophobia and xenophobia, Sir Edward
Watkin's great tunnel project was just about done for. In Westminster,
angry citizens exhibited their feelings by smashing all the windows of
the Channel Tunnel Company offices there. In the following year, the
promised new investigation into the tunnel question was undertaken by
a joint Parliamentary committee presided over by Lord Landsdowne. The
committee met fourteen times, examined forty witnesses, and asked them
fifty-three hundred and ninety-six questions. Not unexpectedly, the
witnesses included Sir Garnet Wolseley, now Lord Wolseley. That Lord
Wolseley in the interim had not changed his opinions on the perilous
consequences of a tunnel is evident from his response to just five of
the hundreds of questions put to him by the committee members.
5233: ... I think you said that supposing anyone in this room were to
go to the barrack gates [at any of the forts at Dover at night] and to
knock at the door, the door would at once be opened?—The wicket would
be opened to you.
5234: Would it be the case if the person who went there had a hundred
men in his company?—The man inside would not know that he had them,
he would never suspect a hundred men being outside; but I would go
further and say, even supposing that he would not open the barrack
gates, the barrack gates are very easily knocked in.
5235: Are there any drawbridges there?—There are, but they are very
seldom, if ever, drawn up in Dover.
5236: You said that if the tunnel were in existence, it would be
necessary that the conditions of life in Dover should be altered;
would that be one of the conditions which would be altered?—Yes.
5237: And the drawbridges would be up at night?—The drawbridges would
be up at night, and nobody would be allowed to go in or out after a
certain hour.
When all the evidence was in, a majority of the joint Parliamentary
committee sided with the views of Lord Wolseley and voted against any
Parliamentary sanction's being given to a Channel tunnel.
Sir Edward Watkin kept right on promoting his tunnel project for quite
a while. By 1884—a year, incidentally, when Lord Wolseley was called
away from the country to command the British expeditionary force that
arrived too late at Khartoum to relieve General Gordon—Sir Edward was
still doing his best to bring the British Army around to his viewpoint
on the tunnel. A series of contemporary illustrations in the London
illustrated weekly publication _The Graphic_ records some views of
a tunnel party held during that year for a group of British Army
officers. One of the engravings shows a number of officers preparing
to descend into the tunnel; the caption reads, "I say, Dear Chappie,
if we invade France through the Tunnel, I hope I shan't be told off
to lead the Advanced Guard." The visit was further reported on in an
accompanying article by one of a few journalists accompanying the
party. From this, it appears that the condition of the tunnel hadn't
improved since the time that Colonel Yolland nearly split his head open
in it. "Under foot for a great portion of the way," the author said,
in describing how the visitors were drawn along the long gallery on
canvas-hooded trolleys, "was ankle deep in slush," and he went on to
quote from the report of one of his colleagues:
Onward to no sound, save the splashing made by the tall workmen [who
drew the trolleys] tramping through the mud and the drip, drip, drip
of the water upon the hood above our heads, we are dragged and pushed
... under the bed of the Channel.... Sometimes, in the fitful flashes
of light, the eye rests on falling red rivulets, like streams of
blood, flowing down the damp walls. So we go on until the electric
lamps cease altogether, and the long, awful cave is enveloped in a
darkness that would be impenetrable but for the glimmer of a few
tallow candles stuck into the bare walls of the cutting.
At the end of the tunnel the action of the boring machine was briefly
demonstrated, this time by special permission of the Board of Trade,
and then the party was escorted out of the tunnel and taken to a
good lunch, presumably at the Lord Warden Hotel. Another engraving
in the same issue of _The Graphic_ shows members of the same party
of officers, chairs drawn slightly back, sitting about a luncheon
table. The monocled guests, ranged on each side of a clutter of
bottles, potted ferns, place cards, and an interesting variety of
glasses—including, as one can see fairly clearly, champagne glasses,
claret glasses, and hock glasses—are being addressed by a bearded
speaker. They look dazed. Yet while using his best softening-up
techniques on the Army officers, Sir Edward did not let up his fire on
his principal opponents among the military. Thus, during 1884, when
he reintroduced his Tunnel Bill on the floor in Parliament (it was
rejected by 222 votes to 84) he ridiculed the anti-tunnel generals for
publicly confessing an inability to cope with defending a frontier
"no bigger than the door of the House of Commons." Dealing with the
question of British insularity, he also introduced the argument that
since France and England had once been united as part of the same
continental land mass his opponents, in refusing to unite them again,
were openly showing distrust of the wisdom of Providence in having
created the connection in the first place. This last assertion really
incensed the editors of the London _Times_, who had been steadily
invoking Providence as their ally against the tunnel all along. The
_Times_ ran an editorial declaring angrily that no stronger reason
could be found for distrusting the whole tunnel scheme than the fact
that Sir Edward had been reduced to using such an argument. The _Times_
added, severely, "Ordinary people will probably be content to take the
world as it appears in historic times. Everything that we possess and
are—our character, our language, our freedom, our institutions, our
religion, our unviolated hearths, and our far-extended Empire—we owe
to the encircling sea; and when Englishmen try to penetrate the designs
of Providence they will not seek them in geological speculations, but
will rather thank Him Who 'isled us here.'"
Sir Edward, in his indomitable fashion, not only pursued his
geological speculations but also kept pursuing the tunnel question
in Parliament. In 1887, a year in which he changed the name of the
Submarine Continental Railway Company to that of the Channel Tunnel
Company (he had taken over the long-moribund rival company in 1886),
he went on such a powerful campaign on behalf of a new Channel Tunnel
Bill that it was defeated in the House by only seventy-six votes. In
1888, he tried again, and even managed to persuade Mr. Gladstone,
now the leader of the Opposition, that the Channel could be tunneled
under with propriety. As a result, Mr. Gladstone, in June 1888, gave
his personal support to Sir Edward's Tunnel Bill and delivered a long
Parliamentary speech on the subject. In this dissertation the venerable
statesman, while taking nothing back about the wisdom of Providence
in placing the Channel where it was, said he had now come to feel
that a Channel tunnel could be used "without altering in any way our
insular character or insular security, to give us some of the innocent
and pacific advantages of a land frontier." But even Mr. Gladstone's
support couldn't swing it. Parliament would not agree to the tunnel. At
last, after all these setbacks, Sir Edward had to consider the tunnel
project as a lost cause, if only temporarily. He stopped promoting
it in 1894, having become involved in the meantime in a couple of
alternate projects—a railway tunnel between Scotland and Ireland and a
ship canal in Ireland between Dublin and Galway. Also, in 1889, he had
become chairman of a company to erect at Wembley Park, near London, a
great iron tower, modeled on the Eiffel Tower, which was to be known as
the Watkin Tower. The Watkin Tower didn't get very high. Only a single
stage was completed, and this was opened to the public in 1896; it was
demolished eleven years later. Sir Edward Watkin died at Northenden,
Cheshire, in 1901.
[Illustration: Five]
The advent of the Entente Cordiale in 1904 provided the basis for the
next attempt to revive the tunnel scheme. In 1907, the English Channel
Tunnel Company, by now under the chairmanship of Baron Frederic Emile
d'Erlanger, a banker, made another attempt to obtain Parliamentary
approval for a tunnel. This time, the company had the advantage
of bringing to bear on its behalf solid engineering studies and
twentieth-century technology. The trains in the tunnel were now to be
all electric, and the difficult task of evacuating the spoil from the
tunnel during its construction was to be carried out by an ingenious
new method, invented by a Frenchman named Philippe Fougerolles, of
pulverizing it and mixing it with sea water into a soft slurry, then
pumping the slurry out of the tunnel through pipelines. This time,
while all the old arguments for and against the tunnel were being
rehashed in Parliament, the tunnel promoters came up with a novel
proposal designed to demonstrate the benign intentions toward England
of the French Government and to allay the suspicions of the anti-tunnel
faction in England. They suggested that the French end of the tunnel
emerge from the side of a steep cliff on the shore of the Channel at
Wissant, not far from Sangatte. The sole access to the tunnel entrance
on the French side then would be made through a long horseshoe-shaped
railway viaduct extending for some distance out over the sea and
doubling back again to join, a mile or so away from the tunnel
entrance, the French coastal rail line. Thus, the French suggested, the
British fleet would be at liberty to sail up and array itself at any
point offshore in a time of national emergency and at its convenience
to shell the viaduct and tunnel entrance to smithereens. Expounding
on the advantages of this plan in the pages of the _Revue Politique
et Parlementaire_, one of the two principal architects of the 1907
tunnel plan, Albert Sartiaux—the other was the engineer, Sir Francis
Fox—encouragingly pointed out that such a viaduct not only would
constitute the most perfect target imaginable for the guns of the Royal
Navy, but also "would be a magnificent _point de vue_ for tourists."
These inducements were insufficient, however. Parliament turned down
the tunnel again. And a Labor M.P. declared, "If the Channel were
tunneled, the Army and Navy estimates would speedily grow beyond the
control of the most resolutely prudent financier. Old-age pensions
would dwindle out of sight, and a shilling income tax would soon be
regarded as the distant dream of an Arcadian past."
Just before the First World War, the Channel Tunnel Company, headed by
Baron Frederic Emile d'Erlanger's son, Baron Emile Beaumont d'Erlanger,
embarked on another crusade. In 1913, a deputation representing ninety
M.P.s favorable to the tunnel scheme visited Herbert Asquith, the
Prime Minister, to ask for the Government's approval for the scheme,
and the Liberal London _Daily Chronicle_, editorially proclaiming that
the advent of the airplane had put an end to England's position as an
island, came through with a big pro-tunnel press campaign. However, the
_Times_ of London continued to stick firmly to its ancient position,
and it ran an editorial restating its old arguments against the tunnel
and ingeniously adding a new one—that even if there were no real
possibility of invasion, the very existence of the tunnel "might even
itself lead to a precipitation of war, if in case of international
complications it was considered necessary, in a possible moment of
confusion, to close the tunnel at the Dover end." In July 1914,
less than a fortnight before the outbreak of war, the Committee of
Imperial Defense turned the tunnel scheme down again. But the value
of a Channel tunnel as a supply route for the Allied armies on the
Continent continued to be debated throughout the war, and when it was
over Marshal Foch declared publicly that "If the English and the French
had had a tunnel under the Channel in 1914, the war would have been
shortened by at least two years." The Marshal was promptly made the
honorary president of the Comité Français du Tunnel.
In postwar England, the tunnel project began to obtain heavy support
in Parliament. By 1924, some four hundred M.P.s—about two-thirds of
the House—were said to be for it, and the new Labor Prime Minister,
Ramsay MacDonald, promised a careful and sympathetic review of the
Government's position on the tunnel. He called all of the four living
former Prime Ministers—Lord Balfour, Herbert Asquith, Lloyd George,
and Stanley Baldwin—into consultation on the matter, as well as the
Committee of Imperial Defense. The Prime Ministers met for forty
minutes and rejected the scheme again, and MacDonald told Parliament
that the Government felt postwar military developments had "tended,
without exception, to render the Channel tunnel a more dangerous
experiment" than ever. Winston Churchill protested the decision. "I do
not hesitate to say that it was wrong," he told the House.
In 1929, everybody had a go at the tunnel once more, and very elaborate
engineering studies were made on the subject by well-established
engineering firms and were carefully examined by a special Government
committee, with particular attention being given to the contention
of pro-tunnel people that the construction of a Channel tunnel would
provide badly needed work for Englishmen in depression times. The
report of the Government's committee was, with a single dissension,
favorable to the construction of the tunnel. But the Committee of
Imperial Defense still was to have its say, and in May 1930 it
rejected the project. This time the rejection was made primarily on
two grounds, according to a high British military man who was later a
member of that body. The first of these, he says, was the fear of the
military that the successful construction of a Channel tunnel would
so adversely affect England's Channel shipping trade that the Channel
ports were likely to fall into ill repair and the harbors to start
silting up—dangerous conditions in periods of national emergency; the
second was their fear that if Britain became involved in another war on
the Continent, the tunnel would suddenly become a traffic bottleneck
through which it would be difficult to move war supplies and equipment
quickly and on the massive scale required. A month after this adverse
verdict by the military, a motion was nonetheless put forward in the
House of Commons for approval of the tunnel, and this time such a large
group of M.P.s was favorable to the scheme that the motion failed to
carry by only seven votes.
For most of the thirties, the tunnel project just drifted along in a
dormant state. Once every so often, when things were generally slack,
the press would carry a feature story on it, and the annual meetings of
the Channel Tunnel Company, still gamely presided over by Baron Emile
Beaumont d'Erlanger, were always good for a paragraph tucked somewhere
into the financial pages under mildly mocking headlines, such as
"Hope Eternal," "The Channel Tunnel Again," or, in one of the popular
dailies, just "The Poor Old Tunnel."
The outbreak of the Second World War, however, far from putting the
Channel tunnel completely out of sight, revived the issue, for a
time, anyway. In November 1939 the French Chamber of Deputies passed
a resolution calling for the construction of a tunnel; early in 1940,
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain—the son, incidentally, of Joseph
Chamberlain, who as president of the Board of Trade had ordered the
tunnel workings stopped back in the eighties—turned the tunnel project
down again in a parliamentary reply. The retreat from Dunkirk gave
pro-tunnel and anti-tunnel people the opportunity of putting forth
their arguments about the tunnel once more, with some variations—with
the pro-tunnelers claiming that a Channel tunnel might have enabled the
British Expeditionary Force to keep a bridgehead in France, and the
anti-tunnelers countering that the same tunnel would have given German
paratroopers the opportunity of seizing the English end and using it as
a bridgehead for the invasion of England.
Then, after the fall of France, when the Germans were busily making
preparations for the invasion of England, the question arose among
the British military as to whether the enemy might not just possibly
attempt to reach England by surreptitiously tunneling underneath the
Channel. As a consequence, the War Office called in an eminent British
civil engineer, the late Sir William Halcrow, and asked him to make
a study of the question of whether the Germans could pull off such a
feat. "We examined the situation quite carefully and concluded that,
provided we kept reasonably alert, the Germans could not dig the tunnel
without being detected," an engineering colleague of Sir William
Halcrow's on the survey said a while ago. He added, "Their difficulty
would lie in the disposal of the spoil. They couldn't get rid of it
without our seeing from the air that something peculiar was going on.
If they tried to dump the spoil into the sea at night it would have to
be done at the turn of the tide, and the chalk would leave a cloud in
the sea that would not be dissipated by daylight. If they pulverized
the spoil, converted it into a slurry, and pumped it well out to sea,
we would be able to spot the chalk cloud too, and even if they tried
other means of dispersing the spoil the very process of dispersal would
call for such extensive installations that we would soon be on to them."
In 1942, somebody at the War Office had another look into the tunnel
situation, this time for the purpose of finding out if it would be
practical for the British to start tunneling under the Channel—the
idea presumably being the creation of a supply route to France ahead
of an Allied invasion, with the last leg of the route being completed
once the Allied Armies had installed themselves on the French
coast. Again, several prominent British civil engineers were called
into consultation, but the subject was abruptly dropped, without
investigation of the problem of disposing of the spoil, when the
engineers estimated that a tunnel probably would take eight years to
complete—three years longer than the war then was expected to last.
From 1940 on, the British kept a routine watch on their reconnaissance
photographs for signs of tunneling on the French side, especially
around the site of the still existing shaft of the French Tunnel
Company at Sangatte. Early in 1944, R.A.F. and U.S.A.F. reconnaissance
showed signs of unusual installations being made near Sangatte, but
these later turned out to be unconnected with subterranean workings. As
it happened, they were launching sites for V-2 bombs.
The actual handling by the Germans of the old tunnel shaft during the
occupation of France was rather peculiar. Far from trying to continue
the existing tunnel in the early part of the Occupation, they treated
it in contemptuous fashion, using the shaft as a dump for old chunks
of machinery, used shell casings, bits of rubbish, and broken slabs of
concrete. Later on, their attitude changed drastically. They sealed
the top of the shaft with a poured-concrete platform. Then, in weirdly
romantic fashion, they built a large rim of fitted stone around the
platform to create an ornamental-wall effect, and added around the
well a grass-and-flagstone terrace complete with formal walks and
sets of monumental-looking stone steps laid out in symmetrical style.
Apparently their notion was to bring the tunnel aesthetically into
harmony with a military cemetery they installed between the tunnel
entrance and the sea.