air nor sea-ferry services are equipped to handle anything like this
potential load. They estimate that without construction of a tunnel,
the British and French Governments, through their nationalized rail and
air lines, will be obliged to spend some $90,000,000 in the next five
years to replace or expand existing transport facilities if they are
to keep up with the increase in cross-Channel traffic expected in that
time without Britain's participation in the Common Market. As for the
capacity of the tunnel, the promoters claim that all the road vehicles
that crossed the Channel in 1960 could easily be carried through the
tunnel in three or four days. As for the transporting of merchandise,
11,000,000 tons of it are now being moved across the Channel in a year,
most of this in bulk form—coal, for example—which it would not be
practical to send through a tunnel. But of this freight, well over a
million tons of nonbulk goods could, the Study Group declares, be sent
by tunnel, and at about half the rates now prevailing.
Taking into account such economic advantages, the great boon to
tourism that they believe a tunnel would represent, and the intangible
psychological impetus that they claim a fixed link between France
and Britain would give to the dream of a politically as well as
economically united Europe, the pro-tunnelers believe that the
construction of their railway under the Channel would be just about the
greatest thing to happen to Britain in this century.
The Channel Tunnel Study Group people, as it turned out late last year,
are not alone in their ambitions for a physical connection between
France and Britain. Last fall, when the French and British Governments
decided—on British initiative—to negotiate with each other on a fixed
connection between the two countries, it became clear that a dark horse
had been entered in the Channel sweepstakes with the publicizing of the
new proposal for a cross-Channel bridge made by a new French company
that is headed by Jules Moch, a former French Minister of Interior.
The bridge proposed by the new French company would be a multipurpose
affair of steel capable of carrying not only two railroad lines but
five lanes of motor traffic and even two bicycle tracks. It would
extend between Dover and a point near Calais. Its width would be 115
feet and its height 230 feet, allowing (as the Tunnel Study Group's
proposed bridge scheme would) ample clearance for the largest ocean
liners afloat. Its length would be 21 miles; it would rest on 164
concrete piles 65 feet in diameter and sunk 660 feet apart. Motorists
would travel along it, without any speed limit, at a peak rate of
5,000 vehicles an hour, and an average toll of about $22.50 per car.
The bridge would take between four and six years to construct, and as
for the cost, that would run to about $630,000,000—or $266,000,000
more than the estimated cost of a rail tunnel. Despite some backing
that the new French bridge group appears to have established for its
scheme among French commercial circles, the chances are that the
British Government, as representatives of a maritime nation, will
have a number of objections to this plan for spanning the Channel.
A principal objection—a technical one that has confounded all the
Channel bridge planners from Thomé de Gamond's day onward—is the
hazard to navigation within the Strait of Dover that a bridge would
create. The English Channel is one of the most heavily trafficked sea
lanes in the world, and considering the violent state of wind and sea
within the Strait of Dover for much of the year—as well as the heavy
Channel fogs—insuring safe passage between the piers of such a bridge
for all the thousands of ships that pass through the Strait every year,
in all weathers, would pose formidable problems even in the era of
radar. Also, the Channel-tunnel advocates, who already have considered
a bridge and pretty much rejected the idea because of its high cost,
point to other difficulties standing in the way of the bridge idea—for
example, the requirements of international law, which would make
necessary a special treaty signed by all countries (including Russia)
presently sending ships through the Channel before such an obstruction
to navigation could be constructed; the difficulties, with all the bad
weather, of keeping such an enormous structure in good repair; and
the dangers of Channel gales to light European cars traversing the
bridge. (The French bridge advocates claim that they could reduce the
winds buffeting traffic to a quarter of their intensity by installing
deflectors on the sides of the traffic lanes; to this the tunnel
advocates counter that boxing cars in traffic lanes for some twenty-one
miles would create a psychological sense of confinement that drivers
would find far more intimidating than riding on a train under the
sea.) But the main objection to the bridge is its cost. It could only
be built with the help of substantial government subsidies, and the
experience of the pro-tunnelers is that such subsidies are almost
impossible to obtain.
Whatever the merits of the two schemes, they are certain to be
considered in quite a different atmosphere now than they were back in
the seventies, when, according to the observations that Sir Garnet
Wolseley subsequently made to Sir Archibald Alison's scientific
committee that investigated the tunnel question, "the tunnel scheme was
... looked upon as fanciful and unfeasible. It was not then regarded
as having entered within the zone or scope of practical undertakings.
No one believed that it would ever be made and, if mentioned, it
always raised a smile, as does now any reference to flying machines
as substitutes for railways." On August 28, 1961, things somehow
seemed to come full circle when the London _Times_, which had started
all the opposition in the press to the tunnel eighty years earlier,
devoted a leading editorial to discussion of the subject of a fixed
connection between France and Britain. The _Times_ started out in
familiar fashion for a tunnel editorial by quoting from Shakespeare's
"This royal throne" speech, but then it went on to concede in stately
fashion that times had changed and that "Britain must soon decide
whether to leap over the wall, to become a part of Europe." The _Times_
discussed the merits of the latest tunnel and bridge schemes in tones
of expository reasonableness, without committing itself to either one
scheme or the other, and without accusing the would-be moat-crossers,
as of old, of flaunting the will of Providence. And the _Times_ wound
up its editorial on a meaningful note by observing, in reference to
the quotations with which the editorial had been prefaced, that while
Shakespeare had the first words, John Donne deserved the last:
"No man is an island, entire of itself."
To which all the tunnel dreamers, after all their years of adversity in
the face of the insular British character, reasonably can say Amen.
About the Author
THOMAS WHITESIDE _was born in England in 1918 at Berwick-upon-Tweed, on
the Scottish border. After working as a newspaperman in Canada, he came
to this country in 1940. He is a United States citizen. After wartime
service with the Office of War Information, he worked as a reporter
for_ The New Republic, _and for some years he has been a writer for_
The New Yorker. _Mr. Whiteside is married to a French-born wife and has
three children. They live in Greenwich Village. He is the author of_
The Relaxed Sell, _published in 1954_.