a pretty good clip, with the little car buzzing away like a high-speed
sewing machine, and in a very little time, after climbing up a long,
gentle slope by the back of the cliffs, we drew up on the heights of
East Cliff, a kind of promontory within Eastwear Bay, which lies to
the north-east of Folkestone Harbor. There, in two broad curves to the
left and right of us, the precipitous face of the white chalk cliffs
gleamed, like huge ruined walls with grassed-over rubble piled about
their base, in hazy sunlight. Far below us, and stretching away into
the haze, lay the Channel, gray and, for the time being, pretty calm.
A hundred feet or so from where our car stopped was a massive round
stone tower, its sides tapering in toward the top like a child's sand
castle; two similar towers lay some distance from us in the direction
of Folkestone. These, Adams explained, were Martello towers, formerly
cannon-bearing fortifications that were installed in prominent places
all along the Dover-Folkestone coastal area during the invasion scares
early in the nineteenth century to repel surprise landings by the
troops of Napoleon Bonaparte. (The three Martello towers comprised
the main artillery defenses of Folkestone Harbor even as late in the
century as the time of the great tunnel controversy in the eighties.)
Then he pointed to the cliffs stretching to the north-east. "You see
that large white building on top of the cliff almost at the very end of
the bay? That's Abbots Cliff, and the tunnel is at the base of it," he
said. "We'll take you down that way in a couple of minutes, but first
I'd like to show you something that may interest you."
We walked a short distance down a path by East Cliff to a point where
we could see, as we couldn't previously, the rail line that ran along
the coast, partly through rail tunnels piercing the cliffs, and partly
over the land that rose above their base. Then Adams pointed out to
me something jutting horizontally out of the chalk cliffs a little
above and to the side of the railroad cutting. It was a large and
long-rusted collection of wheels, gears, and cams, all compounded
together into the shape of some fantastic Dadaist engine. "What you
see there is the remains of the last machine ever tried out for boring
a Channel tunnel," Adams said. "That's the Whittaker boring machine,
an electrically driven affair, powered by a steam-driven generator,
and it was tried out here after the First World War. Actually, it was
developed by the Royal Engineers for mining under the German lines, and
in 1919 Sir Percy Tempest, who was chief engineer of the South East &
Chatham Railway—an amalgamation of the South-Eastern Railway and the
London, Chatham & Dover Railway, which in turn, by further amalgamation
with other lines, became the Southern Railway—thought it might do
for the Channel tunnel. In 1919 he asked permission from the Board
of Trade to drive a new heading from the old Number Three ventilating
shaft at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff a little way under the
foreshore, and got it, but he changed his mind and decided to try the
machine in the chalk down here. The Whittaker machine cut a tunnel
twelve feet in diameter, and some time between 1921 and 1924 they drove
a heading into the chalk, just at the point where it's sticking out
now, for some four hundred feet. They never quite removed the machine
from the heading when they were finished, but it was maintained right
up to the outbreak of the Second World War, when it became derelict."
Adams and I walked back to the car. As we did so, he revealed himself
as being pro-tunnel. "It's a tragic thing, this tunnel business, I
think. If the tunnel had been built forty or fifty years ago, just
think of what an asset to Europe it would have been," he said. We
packed ourselves in, and Burgess drove us down a very rough, narrow
road to the level of the railroad line. There, by a maintenance shed,
a small, thin workman was waiting for us. He was wearing an old cloth
peaked cap, a white duffel coat, and rubber knee boots, and by his feet
he had ready-lighted Tilley lamps—similar in appearance to miners'
lamps but operated by kerosene under pressure, like a Primus stove.
Adams and Burgess jumped out of the car, and Burgess unlocked and
opened up the rear trunk. I got out of the car, too. Then the workman,
whom Adams addressed as Jim, disappeared briefly into the shed and came
out with a pile of knee boots, which he began flinging into the car
trunk. "We'll be needing these," Adams remarked to me. Next Jim brought
out an enormous wrench, at least two feet long, and slung that on top
of the protesting rubber boots, and then he came up with an armful of
duffel coats, which he handed around. We put them on and all of us got
into the car; the little workman wordlessly, with a wide gaptoothed
grin, squeezed into the back seat with me and settled back with the
two big lighted Tilley lamps on his lap. The lamps gave off a gentle
roaring sound, like subdued blowtorches, and they gave off heat that
warmed the whole back of the car.
We drove off down a narrow, steep, tortuously winding, and very rugged
road, through a kind of wilderness of concrete rubble and piles of
old heavy wooden construction beams, toward the base of the cliffs,
and when we finally got there, we continued along the wide top of a
concrete sea wall for a considerable distance until the wall suddenly
narrowed and the car could go no farther.
We all got out, and Adams, Burgess, and I took off our shoes and put
on the knee boots that Burgess got out of the trunk; and, with Jim and
Burgess leading the way and bearing between them the glowing Tilley
lamps and the giant wrench, we continued on foot along the sea wall,
now as narrow as the sidewalk of a small city street. The chalk cliffs
towered perhaps a couple of hundred feet above us. "The tunnel is about
three-quarters of a mile ahead along the sea wall," Adams remarked
as he walked beside me, and as we went along he explained that his
primary job at British Railways was the design of sea defenses between
Folkestone and Dover to combat erosion. "It's a good job you didn't
pick a later time in the year to visit the tunnel," he went on. "This
sea wall would hardly be negotiable on foot when the water's rough, and
in winter, with the sou'westers blowing in especially, we have some
real shockers."
After another fifteen minutes or so of walking along an area where the
cliffs rose back beyond a sort of terrace formed by old landslides—the
railway line ran along this terrace in the open—Adams told me that
the tunnel entrance was not far off. A few hundred feet farther on, we
finally reached it—a small recessed place in the grassy rubble at the
base of the cliff terrace and, set into it, a four-foot-square door
of rough, thick wood encased by a frame of very old and very heavy
timbers. The door was hinged with heavy gate hinges and secured not by
a padlock but by a very large metal nut, which Jim now attacked with
his great wrench.
As he wrestled with it, Adams, smiling, remarked that the entrance
wasn't a very big one, considering the size of the Channel-tunnel
project. "I once brought a Canadian executive, a rather
impressive-looking fellow, down here by request, in '57, I think it
was," he recalled. "It seemed very important to him to inspect the
entrance to the tunnel. When I took him along the sea wall and showed
him this entrance, he took a look at it and just burst out laughing.
I asked him what was up. He went on laughing, and finally he told me
why. He said he was employed by a large American oil company, and that
his company had sent him over here to spy out the possibility of buying
up land for filling stations near the entrance to the proposed Channel
tunnel. Actually, of course, nobody knows precisely where a new tunnel
would come out on the English side, and it would be very doubtful
whether they would make use of any of the old workings."
The little workman unloosened the nut, and, with various groans
and creaks, the door to the tunnel allowed itself to be pulled and
shouldered open. Then, one by one, we stooped down and entered the
tunnel through the small opening. When my eyes adjusted themselves from
the light of day to the light of the Tilley lamps we had brought with
us, I found that we were standing in a square-timbered heading perhaps
six feet high and about the same in width. The floor, like the roof,
was timbered, and from the roof, as well as from parts of the sides
of the heading, a pale fungus growth drooped down. The atmosphere was
pretty dank. Just inside the entrance, either hanging from big rough
nails protruding from the wooden walls or lying to one side on the
floor, there was a clutter of various objects—rusty chains, augers,
lengths of decaying rope, candles, and a couple of lobster pots, the
presence of which Adams explained to me. "They get washed up from
time to time, and our lads, when they find them, put them in here for
safekeeping," he said. Slowly we made our way into the tunnel. There
was room for a set of narrow-gauge rail tracks, but most of the thin
rails had been torn up, and a number of them lay piled to our right by
the wall. On the left, untracked and abandoned, lay one of the rail
trolleys that obviously had been used for hauling out spoil. The little
rusted wheels on which it rested were of clearly Victorian design,
with spokes elaborately arranged in curlicued fashion. "This is the
access heading we're in," Adams told me as we found our way along,
heads down. "The chalk carted out from the Beaumont boring machine was
taken through here and dumped right into the sea outside the entrance.
But this access heading wasn't the first to be built; it was dug by
hand from the direction in which we're going, from the bottom of a
vertical shaft sunk from the level of the South-Eastern Railway line
seventy-four feet up above this concrete lining we're coming to now.
As you see—" Adams took a Tilley lamp from Burgess and flashed it on
the roof of the concrete lining—"the shaft has been closed up long
ago. Now we'll go on. This first stretch is taking us in a northerly
direction."
After going a short distance, we came to another concrete lining. This,
Adams said, was to reinforce the tunnel at the point where it passed
underneath the railway line. We went on again, this time walking on a
dirt floor, and then we came to a timbered junction, from which the
tunnel branched off again to the right in the north-east direction that
was originally intended to bring it into line with the gallery at
Shakespeare Cliff, while to the left there was a low-roofed chamber
that probably once housed a siding and a maintenance workshop for the
Beaumont boring machine. Then, walking now on half-rotted planks, in
the warm light of the restlessly moving Tilley lamps, we entered the
circular, unlined tunnel of Lower Chalk—a smooth, light-gray cavern,
seven feet in diameter, that stretched far ahead to disappear into
darkness. Our footing was slippery, and a small stream of water ran
in the direction from which we had come in a rough gutter cut in the
chalk, but the tunnel at this point seemed surprisingly dry for a hole
that had lain unlined for some eighty years, and the stream of water
draining away didn't seem to me to be really any greater than the one
in the Orangeburg pipe that drains seepage from under the cellar of my
summer house in Connecticut.
We had gone only a little way along the chalk tunnel when Adams,
walking ahead of me, began flashing his light along the wall and
then stopped and motioned me to come and look at the spot where he
had focused his lamp. I did so and saw, cut into the chalk in crude
lettering, the following inscription:
THIS
TUNNEL
WAS
BUGN
IN
1880
WILLIAM SHARP
However, this was not exactly how the inscription went, for its author,
after finishing it, obviously had decided that "BUGN" didn't look
right, and, being unable to erase the incision, he had had another go
at it, inscribing the second try to one side and partly over the first,
so that the intended "begun" now came out like "BEGUBNUGN." But with
all the crudeness of the inscription, the author had been careful with
the lettering, even to point of conscientiously incising serifs on the
"T"s and "E"s.
While the light played about the inscription, I could see clearly, on
the tunnel face, the ringlike marks left by individual revolutions of
the cutting head of the Beaumont boring machine. After a few moments we
moved on again, and eventually, after trudging over ground that became
increasingly slippery, we came to a point where some of the chalk
had given way, filling the tunnel about a quarter of the way up with
debris. Adams said that the going got a bit better later on but that we
were likely to find ourselves in water over our knee boots if we went
any farther. At that point, impressed with the sight of all the fallen
rock about and by the realization that we were in a seven-foot hole at
least a quarter of a mile inside a huge cliff on a deserted stretch of
coast, I felt as though I had seen enough. I suddenly realized what a
smart idea Sir Edward Watkin had had in providing visitors with that
champagne lift while they were well under the sea. So we turned back
again and slowly, in silence, made our way out of Sir Edward's first
tunnel.
When I stepped through the tunnel entrance into the light, it seemed
very noisy outside. Sea gulls were shrieking overhead, and the Channel
waves were roaring and heaving insistently. I had a slight headache,
and I mentioned this to Adams. "Oh, yes, I have the same thing," he
said. "Although the air in the tunnel is remarkably fresh, considering
the length of time it's been locked up and the fact that there's only
one entrance, there isn't quite as much oxygen in it as one might
want." Jim began to lock up the entrance again, and while he was doing
so, Adams suggested that we might see if we could spot the entrance
shaft on the plateau above us. We climbed up the cliffside, and after
a while we located it, a filled-in depression resting in a mass of
bramble bushes. We waded through the bushes and stood over the remains
of Number One shaft, still feeling a bit headachy. As we stood there,
we picked and ate a few blackberries still left on the bushes from
summer. "They're quite good," Adams said.
After we had had some lunch in Folkestone, Adams suggested that before
I went back to London I might want to take a look at the site of the
old Number Two shaft and the main tunnel at Shakespeare Cliff, even
though the Number Two shaft and the Number Three ventilating shaft had
been long ago closed up. I was agreeable to that, and Burgess drove
us, by way of Dover, to a point along a back road, from which we could
walk to the top of Shakespeare Cliff from the land side. While Burgess
stayed in the little car, Adams and I set off up a long slope to the
cliff head, walking along the edge of a harrowed field, the soil of
which seemed to be riddled with the kind of large flints typical of the
Upper Chalk layer.
On the way up, Adams told me what had happened to the main tunnel
and shaft after the workings were finally stopped by the Board of
Trade. "Everything stopped dead at the tunnel workings until 1892,"
Adams said. "By then, Sir Edward Watkin knew he was beaten on the
Channel tunnel, so he tried a different kind of tunneling, and the
South-Eastern Railway engineers began boring for coal a matter of a few
yards away from the tunnel shaft. They went down to 2,222 feet with
their boring, at which level they met a four-foot seam of good-quality
coal, and the company obtained authority by an act of Parliament to
mine for coal under the foreshore. As for the Channel-tunnel shaft
itself, it was abandoned in 1902 and filled up with breeze—ashes and
slag—from the colliery, and the Number Three ventilation shaft at the
eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff was also filled with breeze in the
same year. But the colliery never paid off any better than the tunnel
project. It ran into trouble around 1907 or 1908, and then the owners
decided they'd have a try at getting iron ore out of the workings,
and so all the mineral mining rights were bought by the Channel Steel
Company, but the iron mining didn't prosper any more than the coal
mining. The Channel Steel Company went into voluntary liquidation in
1952, and all the mining rights passed to the original freeholders, who
are now the British Government."
Adams and I climbed over a wooden fence stile, and after a couple of
more minutes of uphill walking we arrived at the top of Shakespeare
Cliff. We approached to a point near the edge and kneeled in the tall
grass, buffeted by a strong afternoon wind that struck us squarely in
the face. It was a magnificent view. The Channel lay very far below
us, and although I could not see the coast of France because of the
haze—Adams said that on a fine day anybody could see clearly the
clock tower outside Boulogne—I could see shipping scudding along in
whitecaps in the middle of the Strait. To the left of us, not far away,
lay the Admiralty Pier at Dover, the one that once had the great gun
which the _Illustrated London News_ had imaginatively depicted in the
act of blowing the tunnel entrance to pieces at the first sign of a
French invasion of England through the tunnel.
Then, on hands and knees, we crawled against the pommeling wind to
the very edge of the cliff, and lying on our stomachs peered straight
down upon the site of the Shakespeare Cliff tunnel. I still had traces
of the headache I had picked up while creeping around in the depths
of the Abbots Cliff tunnel and it was a dizzying change for me now
to peer three hundred feet down a sheer cliff face, but it was worth
it, even though there was nothing so startling to see. Far below us
lay a plateau with a couple of railway sidings on it. There were no
buildings about, and certainly nothing that resembled any trace of a
mine entrance. "British Railways had to build a sea wall around the
whole Shakespeare Cliff area a few years ago because of the erosion
from the Channel, and when we were doing that we cleaned out all the
old mine workings," Adams said. "One of the last buildings to go was a
shed that the old custodian of the works used to live in. His name was
Charlie Gatehouse. He died about ten years ago at the age of ninety.
He had worked as a timberman on both the Abbots Cliff and Shakespeare
Cliff tunnels, and he took up the first sod when they dug the shaft
down here. He used to tell about how one day Mr. Gladstone came down
into the tunnel."
Then Adams pointed out to me exactly where the entrance to Number Two
shaft had been. It lay by the third rain puddle to the left near one of
the sidings. I enjoyed the thought of having its location fixed in my
mind, and I believe Mr. Adams did, too. We gazed down silently. "Just
imagine, if the Board of Trade hadn't stopped the works, a man might
have been able to go right on to Vladivostock without getting out of
his train," Adams said after a while. And he added earnestly, "But I
think they'll build the tunnel yet."
Since my visit to the tunnel, the tendency of events has been to
reinforce the brave hopes of Adams and his fellow pro-tunnelers. To be
sure, while even the most dedicated of tunnel promoters may be prone
to his black moments while pondering the nature and the effects of
traditional British insularity—one of the most distinguished, Sir
Ivone Kirkpatrick, the president of the Tunnel Study Group, a while ago
observed with some touch of bitterness that it seemed as though "men
may be flying to the moon before Britons can make a reasonable surface
journey to Paris"—Britain's decision to seek full membership in the
European Common Market, and the agreement of the French and British
Governments to hold official talks on the construction of either a
tunnel or a bridge across the Channel, have given the pro-tunnelers
more solid reason for hope than perhaps has ever existed in the ranks
of these visionaries in a century and a half. In the past, it was
never possible for proponents of the tunnel to advance their cause
with any success so long as their advocacy was not based on the prior
existence of any profound change in Britain's traditional economic and
strategic special and separate place in Europe, or of any change in
the peculiar British sense of being an island people apart. But now
such changes have taken place, or are in the process of taking place.
Britain's strategic position has been profoundly altered by the advent
of nuclear and rocket armaments. Her political and economic position
has been as profoundly altered by the withering away of the British
Empire and by the successful emergence of a new European commonwealth
in the form of the Common Market. And the ancient British sense of
being an island race apart seems to have been steadily eroded by a
strange kind of rootlessness, partly arising out of Britain's altered
place in the world, and as a general accompaniment of the intrusion of
such uninsular influences as the jet airplane, commercial television,
high-powered advertising, expense-account living, and the spread of
installment buying. Notwithstanding all her misgivings on the subject
of committing herself to abandonment of her ancient aloofness from the
Continent, Britain can hardly ignore the implications of the relentless
march of that process once described by the Duke of Wellington over a
century ago in the heyday of the sailing ship, when he observed that
Britain and the Continent were rapidly becoming joined by an "isthmus
of steam."
Now that so many of the conditions that have made for England's
traditional economic, military, and cultural insularity have gradually
subsided, like the ancient Wealden Island that once lay in what is now
the Strait of Dover, the question of connecting Britain physically
to the Continent is at last in the realm of practical political
possibility. In spite of all her misgivings about the abandonment
of her privileged relationships with the countries of the British
Commonwealth, it seems as though Britain has no choice ahead but to
throw in her lot with the Common Market, which has proved itself to be
such an astonishing success in its four years of existence.
Since 1958, when the special trade arrangements between the countries
of the European Economic Community went into effect, up to 1960,
their industrial production increased by 22 per cent, while Britain's
industrial production increased only 11 per cent. And it has been
estimated that by 1970 the Gross National Product of the Common Market
countries will double that of 1961. This estimate does not take into
account Britain's joining the Common Market, either; when she does so,
as it seems she must, the Common Market boom will be a spectacular
one; the member countries will then be serving a market of more than
200 million people. Precisely what Britain's entry into the Common
Market would mean in terms of increased commercial intercourse between
Britain and the Continent no one knows, but the increase plainly would
be enormous, and considering this potentiality, proponents of the
Channel tunnel are not backward in claiming that Britain's present
cross-Channel transportation facilities are grossly inadequate to meet
the demands ahead. They are even inadequate, the pro-tunnelers claim,
for coping with Britain's present needs.
As things stand, some 8 million passengers and about 400,000 vehicles
cross the Channel in a year. Of these, 3.3 million passengers and
about 100,000 vehicles go by air. Most of this traffic crisscrosses
the Channel in the four peak summer months and results in severe
bottlenecks in the existing means of communication. (A motorist who
wishes to take his car abroad either by air or sea-ferry during the
peak season must book a passage some months ahead of time, and if he
can't make it on the assigned date "he runs the risk," as one of the
tunnel promoters has put it, "of being marooned on this island for
several more months.") Even without taking into account Britain's
probable entry into the Common Market, the number of vehicles crossing
Britain and the Continent probably will double itself by 1965.