prewar fashion. If anything, even less than before was heard in the
press about the activities of the Channel Tunnel Company. The company's
headquarters at the Southern Railway offices at London Bridge were
blown up in the blitz, and all the company's records were destroyed.
For some time, while attempts were made to piece together duplicate
lists from Government files, the Channel Tunnel Company didn't even
know who the majority of its stockholders were, but that didn't
matter too much, considering the circumstances. Baron Emile Beaumont
d'Erlanger, the chairman, had died in 1939, and his place on the Board
was taken by his nephew, Leo d'Erlanger, also a banker. Leo d'Erlanger,
now a spry, elegant, silver-haired gentleman in his sixties, brightly
confesses to having had little interest in the tunnel until about
twelve years ago. "I was brought up in a home where the Channel tunnel
was a family religion, and, to tell the truth, I didn't give it too
much thought," he says. "My grandfather used to talk about it when I
came back for the holidays from Eton. 'Politics,' they all used to say.
'The only reason why the tunnel isn't built is politics.' I never paid
much attention. I thought it was an old dodo and never had anything to
do with it in my Uncle Emile's lifetime. When he died and I took over,
I used to look forward with dread to the annual general meetings. I
had nothing to say. I considered the whole thing moribund. For a few
years we met, I remember, at the Charing Cross Hotel, which belonged to
the Southern Railway [a successor to Sir Edward Watkin's South-Eastern
Railway], and the secretary was an elderly retired man by the name of
Cramp, who once had something to do with the Southern Railway, I think.
We used to have difficulty in getting a quorum. I suppose we would
manage to get four or five people to turn up."
However, the lost-cause atmosphere began to undergo a change in
1948, when Sir Herbert Walker, the former general manager of the
Southern Railway, which was taken over by British Railways in the
nationalization program of that year, acted temporarily as chairman
of the Channel Tunnel Company. Walker came to believe that the
Channel-tunnel scheme could be a practical one in the postwar era, and
he brought it to life again. Largely as a result of his persuasions,
a Parliamentary study group began to look into the tunnel question
once more, and the Channel Tunnel Company's lobbyists once more set
about building up pro-tunnel opinion among M.P.s. It was just like old
times for the pro-tunnelers, but with one significant difference. By
the mid-fifties, it became clear that in the emerging age of rockets
bearing nuclear warheads the traditional strategic arguments of the
British military against the construction of a Channel tunnel would
no longer have the same force that they had once had. And as for the
old fears of military conscription in peacetime and high taxes, they
had long ago been realized without a tunnel. It was therefore an event
to make the hearts of all pro-tunnelers beat fast when, one day in
February 1955, in the House of Commons, Harold Macmillan, then Minister
of Defense, in answer to a parliamentary question as to whether the
Government would have objections of a military nature to raise against
a Channel tunnel, replied, "Scarcely at all."
This seemed like a green light to D'Erlanger, but for a while he
couldn't quite decide what to do after seeing it flash on. Early in
1956, however, he went to see Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, who was a director
of the French Tunnel Company—the Société Concessionnaire du Chemin
de Fer Sous-marin entre la France et l'Angleterre—and the grandson
of Michel Chevalier, who had founded the company in 1875. D'Erlanger
suggested that, since the tunnel was a common ancestral interest, the
two of them have another try at promoting it. Leroy-Beaulieu agreed,
and he suggested that as the Suez Canal Company's concession in Egypt
was due to run out in 1968, and might not be renewed, the Suez Company
might possibly be interested in turning to a Channel tunnel as its
next project. Sure enough, the principals of the Suez Company, whose
headquarters were in Paris, were interested in the idea, but the sudden
seizure of the Canal by Colonel Nasser in July of that year kept
them too distracted to pursue the tunnel project just then. In the
meantime, quite independently of these tunnel developments in Paris and
London, two young international lawyers in New York, Frank Davidson
and Cyril Means, Jr., became intrigued by the possibility of a tunnel
between England and France. Davidson and Means happened to have good
connections in Wall Street, and after they established contact with the
two existing tunnel companies by letter, Means went over to London and
Paris early in February of 1957 to investigate the tunnel situation
and to offer the tunnel people there—and the Suez Canal Company—the
chance of obtaining some substantial American financial backing for the
construction of a tunnel if it proved to be a practical proposition.
The tunnel people in Europe showed varying degrees of interest in the
proposal, and to strengthen their position, Davidson and Means, with
another friend, an engineer, Arnaud de Vitry d'Avancourt, formed a New
York corporation called Technical Studies, Inc., with the announced
purpose of financing technical investigations and promoting the
construction of a Channel tunnel.
In April 1957, the Suez Canal Company, which by then had given up
any hope of regaining control of the Canal, jumped into the tunnel
picture by announcing that it intended to collaborate with the English
and French tunnel companies to have made a very detailed geological
survey of the Channel bed to determine the practicability of a tunnel.
The tunnel came into the news again. When, at the seventy-sixth
annual meeting of the Channel Tunnel Company, in London, D'Erlanger
got up to confirm the latest development, he did so not before the
usual handful of disillusioned shareholders, but in a room packed
with people who had suddenly rediscovered and dusted off old Channel
Tunnel Company stock certificates. A correspondent from the _Times_
of London who was present reported of the stockholders' reaction to
the speech of the company's chairman on the possibilities of seriously
reviving the tunnel project that it took only a few minutes "to excite
their minds to a pleasurable pitch" and that "at least one member
of Mr. d'Erlanger's audience darted out in the middle of his speech
to instruct his broker to buy in shares." According to the _Times_,
the only note of doubt was struck by a stockholder at the end of the
meeting, which lasted half an hour:
Mr. John Elliott, who bought his shares for a song almost, asked where
the company's workings were. Did they really exist? He had visited
Dover, and neither police, shopkeepers, nor the county surveyor could
tell him where they were. He suggested that the board prove their
existence by escorting a nominated half-dozen shareholders on an
eye-witness excursion.
Little attention was paid to the objector. The _Times_ reported that
"other shareholders pooh-poohed his scepticism," and the meeting broke
up. It was a far cry from the days of Sir Edward Watkin's special
trains to Dover for tunnel parties. However, the price of Channel
Tunnel Company stock, which had been available for years on the London
Stock Exchange for as low as sixpence, rose to more than ten shillings
by the day of the meeting and shortly thereafter rose rapidly, until by
May 20 it reached twenty-six shillings and ninepence—six shillings and
ninepence more than the price of the first Channel Tunnel Company stock
in 1876.
The British press, on the whole, reacted to the latest tunnel
development in tolerant fashion. There was, however, a spirited
discussion of the subject in an article in the _Daily Telegraph_
in the spring of 1957, marked by an attack on the whole scheme by
Major-General Sir Edward Spears. General Spears wrote that although
powerful interests now appeared to be backing the construction of
a Channel tunnel, the objections raised to the project in the past
were as valid as ever. "Such a tunnel would bind this island to the
Continent irrevocably [and] would soon link our fate to that of our
Continental neighbors," he asserted, and he added that if the new
scheme were persisted in, steps should be taken to enlighten the public
before the Government was committed to approving it. General Spears's
position was supported by Lord Montgomery. Choosing Trafalgar Day as
the most appropriate time to express himself on the subject, Lord
Montgomery said at a Navy League luncheon in October of 1957, "There
is talk these days of a Channel tunnel. Strategically it would weaken
us. Why give up one of our greatest assets—our island home—and make
things easier for our enemies? The Channel tunnel is a wildcat scheme
and I am wholeheartedly opposed to it.... I hope that the Navy League
will have nothing to do with it."
However, by Trafalgar Day the pro-tunnelers were hard at it, too.
In July 1957, the four main interests involved in the scheme—the
English and French Channel-tunnel companies, the Suez Canal Company and
Technical Studies—had combined to create an organization called the
Channel Tunnel Study Group to contract for modern technical surveys of
the whole tunnel question. The new group is said to have spent over
a million dollars on having these surveys made. The studies included
a very detailed survey of the Channel bed with modern electronic
geophysical equipment and deep rock borings and sea-bottom samples made
across the neck of the Channel, as well as microscopic examination
of these rock samples to determine their microfossil composition and
probable position in the strata from which they were taken. Curiously
enough, while the geological survey was under way, somebody on the
project took the trouble to inquire into the old French hydrographic
surveys for a Channel tunnel, and after some diligent searching he
turned up, in a dusty waiting room of a disused Paris suburban railroad
station, where it had been stored for an age, a collection of thousands
of the sea-bottom samples made in the French Channel-tunnel surveys
of 1875 and 1876. All of the samples were found neatly packed away in
test tubes and ticketed, and the searchers even uncovered a case of the
geological specimens that Thomé de Gamond himself had recovered in 1855
by his naked plunges to the bottom of the Channel in the neighborhood
of the Varne. The geologists weren't interested in going by way of the
Varne any more, but many of the old 1875-76 samples were taken away for
microfossil examination as part of a check on how the results of the
old surveys compared with the new. Except for some variations relating
to the extent of the cretaceous outcrop in the middle of the Channel,
the findings tallied nicely.
The new Study Group had a number of other elaborate surveys made, too,
on the economic and engineering problems involved in the creation and
operation of a Channel tunnel or an equivalent means of cross-Channel
transport. Besides developing plans for a bored tunnel—the projected
double-rail tunnel, interconnected at intervals by cross-passages,
is essentially a modern version of William Low's plan of the 1860s,
with an extra small service tunnel being added between the main
tunnels—the Study Group's engineering consultants developed in detail
schemes for a Channel bridge, an immersed railway tube, an immersed
road tube, a combined immersed tube with two railway tracks, and a
four-way road system on two levels. The bridge proposed would be an
enormous affair with approximately 142 piers and with four main spans
in the center of the Strait each 984 feet long. These spans would
tower a maximum of 262-1/2 feet above sea level to allow the largest
ships in the world to pass underneath with plenty of room to spare.
The bridge would take no longer to build than a road tunnel, but it
would cost about twice as much, and in addition it would be expensive
and difficult to maintain and would present a hazard to navigation.
The immersed tube proposed for either rail or road traffic (but not
both) probably would cost about the same as a bored tunnel and might
be constructed in four years. A combined road-rail tube would take
about the same time to build, but would be more expensive even than a
bridge. Among the best-known schemes for a combined tube is that of
a Frenchman, André Basdevant, who has proposed one with a four-lane
highway and a two-track rail line. This scheme would pretty much
run along the old Cap Gris-Nez-Folkestone route of Thomé de Gamond,
and it would even have, like most of Thomé de Gamond's schemes, an
artificial island in mid-channel on the Varne. As for the latest
scheme for a laid, rather than a bored, tube, it would be no different
from Thomé de Gamond's plan in 1834 for a submerged tube, and as in
that old plan a trench would be dug, by operations conducted at the
surface, across the Channel bottom to receive the tube, which would be
prefabricated in sections and towed out to sea to be laid down in the
trench a section at a time. This time the digging of the trench would
be carried out from a huge above-surface working platform, something
like an aircraft-carrier deck on sets of two-hundred-foot-high stilts,
that would jack itself up and move on across the Channel as the work
progressed. From these and other surveys, the Study Group concluded
by March 1960 that the best means of linking Britain and France would
be by a rail tunnel, either bored or immersed, which, while avoiding
the difficult ventilation problems of a long road tunnel, would make
for convenient transport of cars and trucks by a piggyback system. It
further proposed that the tunnel be operated jointly by the British and
French Government-run railways under a long lease from an international
company yet to be formed, and that only the bare tunnel itself be
privately financed, with the British and French state-run railways
providing the installations, terminals, and rolling stock at a cost of
some twenty million pounds.
When D'Erlanger announced the Study Group's proposals, calling all the
latest tunnel laborings "a last glorious effort to get this through,"
the British press received the news with big headlines on the front
pages but with considerable indignation on its editorial pages. The
core of the objections was not of a military nature but had to do
with the number of financial concessions that the tunnel people were
asking from the British and French Governments (that is, taxpayers)
as a basis for going ahead with the scheme. The general attitude of
the press was that the British Government should have nothing to do
with some of the financial concessions asked. There were a good many
references, all very familiar to a reader of the press attacks during
the tunnel uproar back in the eighties, to "promoters," and the tone of
editorial reaction was fairly well typified by a sarcastic article in
_The Economist_ entitled "Pie Under the Sea." And the _Times_ ran an
editorial declaring snappily that, as the proposals stood, "the light
at the end of the tunnel would be either bright gold for the private
owners of the £20 million of equity capital or Bright Red for the
Anglo-French taxpayer." Then, shortly afterward, the tunnel came under
public attack by Eoin C. Mekie, chairman of Silver City Airways, which
in the years since the Second World War has ferried more than three
hundred thousand cars and a million and a half passengers by air to and
from the Continent. Mekie denounced the tunnel scheme as "commercial
folly" and described it as "a feat of engineering which is already made
obsolete by the speed of modern technical advances." Other attacks were
made, too, from the enthusiasts over the future of Hovercraft, the
heavier-than-air craft, still in the experimental stage, which ride
on a cushion of air; and from, not unexpectedly, Channel shipping and
ferry interests. Then Viscount Montgomery, in a newspaper interview,
returned to the attack on the tunnel on the ground of its undermining
what he called "our island strategy." He also observed in particular,
when asked about the feasibility of blowing the tunnel up in case
of war or threatened war, "The lessons of history show that things
that ought to be blown up never are, as Guy Fawkes discovered." And
Major-General Spears in the spring of 1960 gave fuller vent to his
anti-tunnel views in a pamphlet that he wrote and had circulated
privately. Its general tenor was set by General Spears's assertion that
"the Channel saved us in 1940 and may well save us again," and that
"The British people need no tunnels." And he asked, "Who would have
believed that in the last war the Germans would not have destroyed the
enormously important bridge over the Rhine at Remagen? But they failed
to do so."
To all such criticism as this, the Channel-tunnel people reacted not
with the kind of broadsides that Sir Edward Watkin would have let
loose in the heyday of the Channel-tunnel controversy but by hiring a
public-relations outfit headed by a man called E. D. O'Brien, a former
publicity director for the Conservative party, who is said to be known
among his colleagues as Champagne Toby. O'Brien's champagne appears to
be weaker stuff than Sir Edward Watkin's; the pro-tunnel publicity his
outfit puts out seems to consist of things like a small booklet called
"Channel Tunnel, the Facts," which an O'Brien assistant has described
as "a sort of child's guide, in Q. and A. form, you know, about the
tunnel."
As soon as the British press fell on the promoters for making the
demands they did for Government financial guarantees, the promoters
came up with a set of counter-proposals. They offered to finance not
only the tunnel itself but also the terminals and approaches on both
sides; they further proposed leasing the tunnel directly to the two
governments, thus avoiding the earlier requirement of governmental
guarantee of the bonds.
When the subject of constructing a Channel tunnel will come up for a
decision one way or the other before the British Cabinet and Parliament
again nobody seems willing to predict, and what the Cabinet will decide
nobody seems willing to predict, either. However, D'Erlanger, who
says that he would consider another tunnel thumbs down by the British
Government or Parliament "a negation of progress," is always happy to
talk about the benefits a Channel tunnel would confer upon Europe.
"You have fifty million people on this side of the Channel and two
hundred million plus on the Continental side. If you join them by a
small hyphen, I think it _must_ facilitate trade on both sides," he
says. "I like to think of the tunnel as a kind of engagement ring that
would bind Britain's Outer Seven into a workable marriage with the six
countries of the Common Market. Think of shipping goods from Rome to
Birmingham or from Edinburgh to Bordeaux without breaking bulk, and at
half the cost! It's high time Europe had a manifestation of progress
along the lines of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and I think a Channel
tunnel would be the great civil-engineering feat of the century for
Europe."
In the meantime, with all the brave words, and all the money poured
into the project, the Channel Tunnel Company still has something of a
phantom air about it. It doesn't have a regular staff—D'Erlanger is a
busy City banker—and it has no real office of its own. D'Erlanger's
banking headquarters are at the investment house of which he is a
partner, Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlangers, Ltd., along Moorgate,
but no Channel Tunnel Company records are kept there. The nearest
thing to a headquarters for the Channel Tunnel Company is a set of
Victorian offices on Broad Street Place, in the City, occupied by a
firm of "secretaries" called W. H. Stentiford & Co. These offices are
reached by a very ancient and slow ironwork-gate lift, and a sign in
the corridor shows that W. H. Stentiford & Co. is the representative
of an astonishing variety of companies, including the Channel Tunnel
Company, Ltd., and a number of outfits with such exotic corporate
names as the Tea Share Trust, Ltd., Uruwira Minerals, Ltd., Dominion
Keep (Klerksdorp, Ltd.), and Klerksdorp Consolidated Goldfields, Ltd.
Inside, amid a clutter of ticking clocks, great ledgers, old safes
emblazoned with peeling coats of arms, great piles of papers, and trays
of teacups, a small staff of round-shouldered retainers toils away
vicariously over the affairs of these far-flung organizations—making
up accounts and annual or quarterly statements, filling out and
recording stock certificates, answering letters, and so on. All this
clerkly activity is presided over by an eminently respectable and
precisely mannered man by the name of P. S. Elliston, who also arranges
board meetings for his many client companies in a room set aside at
Stentiford's for the purpose. Mr. Elliston's organization "took on"
the Channel Tunnel Company in the early forties, and all its annual
meetings since 1947 have been held at Stentiford's, with Mr. Elliston
present in his capacity of representative of his firm of secretaries.
Mr. Elliston finds things changed a bit from the time when the Channel
Tunnel Company first became one of his firm's clients. In those old
days, he says, the whole annual meeting could generally be disposed
of in between five and ten minutes, with only a couple of directors
being present—Mr. Elliston having thoughtfully bought one share of
Channel Tunnel Company stock to enable himself to vote in case no
other shareholder besides a couple of directors could be persuaded to
turn up to make a quorum of three. Now, he says, it may sometimes take
twenty-five minutes or even as long as forty-five minutes to transact
necessary business. As for Channel Tunnel Company stock, it has
fluctuated all the way from sixpence to fifty shillings—its price one
day in 1959 at a time when the company's balance sheet showed a cash
balance of just £161. The price of the stock at the time this book was
written was about twenty-two shillings, and the company's cash in hand
(in 1961 it issued a little more stock to keep going) was £91,351 "and
a few shillings." Owing to the wartime destruction of its records and
the difficulty of tracking down all the old transactions, the Channel
Tunnel Company still doesn't know who all its stockholders are, and,
conversely, there are quite a few people scattered about who probably
aren't aware that they are company stockholders.
Mr. Elliston describes the last fifteen years or so of the company's
history as containing "several periods where there was very keen
interest" in the tunnel scheme, especially in 1957 and 1958, with
Stentiford's being subjected, he says, to "a persistent spate of
enquiries," including calls from newspaper reporters and letters from
schoolboys asking why the tunnel was never built.
Some time ago, when I was in England, I decided to take a trip down
to the coast between Folkestone and Dover to the scene of the violent
tunnel controversy of the eighties. I had heard that the shaft of the
old Shakespeare Cliff gallery in which Sir Edward Watkin did so much of
his promoting and entertaining, as well as tunneling, had been sealed
off many years ago, but I was aware that the Abbots Cliff gallery, or
part of it, still existed. Through the good offices of Leo d'Erlanger
and Harold J. B. Harding, the vice-president of the Institution of
Civil Engineers, who has directed many of the latest technical surveys
on the proposed Channel tunnel, I arranged to go down one day from
London to Folkestone and to be taken into the old Abbots Cliff tunnel.
Written permission had to be obtained from the Government for the
visit, and the necessary arrangements had to be made well in advance
with officials of British Railways, the present owner, representing
the Crown, of the coastal lands once the domain of Sir Edward Watkin's
South-Eastern Railway Company. Harding explained to me that since the
tunnel entrance was kept locked up and lay in a not readily accessible
part of the cliffs facing the sea, it would be practical for me to make
the visit only under fairly good weather conditions, and then under
the escort of people equipped with lamps and the means of opening up
the tunnel entrance. "You may get a bit wet and a bit dirty, so don't
wear a good suit," Harding added, and he went on to say that he had
seen to it that I would be shown around the tunnel by a civil engineer
named Kenneth W. Adams, from the district office of British Railways at
Ashford, Kent—Adams being, in Harding's words, "a keen engineer who
has become something of a hobbyist on the old tunnel workings."
Wearing an old suit, I duly took a train early one fair morning in
autumn, from Charing Cross, and when I got off at Folkestone Central
Station, Adams, a stocky, cheerful man who seemed to be about forty,
was waiting for me. He had a little car waiting outside the station,
and when he got into it, he introduced me to an assistant sitting in
the driver's seat named Jack Burgess. "Jack's grandfather was a surface
worker at the tunnel workings at Shakespeare Cliff," Adams said as
Burgess started the car up. "Jack was just telling me that he remembers
his grandfather telling him, when he was a boy, about Lord Palmerston
coming down to visit the tunnel in 1881. The old chap remembered that
the food that was brought into the tunnel for parties of visitors from
the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover came in hay boxes—that is, in big
wicker boxes interlined with a thick layer of hay to keep the food
warm."