Part 3

Encroaching seas made a channel through the isthmus and cut the Bronze Age descendants of this breed of men off from the Continent about six thousand years ago. Then fierce tidal currents coursing between the North Sea and the Atlantic widened the breach still further until, as recently as four thousand years ago (or only about a couple of thousand years before Caesar's legions invaded Britain by boat), the sea wore away the rock of the isthmus to approximately the present width of the Strait, leaving exposed high at each side the eroded rock walls, formerly the whitish mudbank of Cretaceous times—now the white chalk cliffs of the Dover and Calais areas. Providentially for the later purposes of Channel tunnelers, however, the seas that divided England from the Continent also left behind them a thin remnant of the old land connection in the form of certain chalk layers that still stretched in gentle folds across the bottom of the Strait, and it was through this area of remaining chalk that the Victorian engineers planned to drive their tunnel headings. Even more providentially, they had the opportunity of extending their headings under the Channel through a substratum of chalk almost ideal for tunneling purposes, known as the Lower Chalk. Unlike the two layers of cretaceous rock that lie above it—the white Upper Chalk and the whitish Middle Chalk, both of which are flint-laden, heavily fissured, and water-bearing, and consequently almost impossible to tunnel in for any distance—the Lower Chalk (it is grayish in color) is virtually flint-free and nearly impermeable to water, especially in the lower parts of the stratum, where it is mixed with clay; at the same time it is stable, generally free of fissures, and easy to work. From the coastline between Folkestone and South Foreland, north-east of Dover, where its upper level is visible in the cliffs, the Lower Chalk dips gently down into the Strait in a north-easterly direction and disappears under an outcropping Middle Chalk, and emerges again on the French side between Calais and Cap Blanc-Nez. Given this knowledge and their knowledge of the state of Lower Chalk beds on land areas, the Victorian engineers were confident that the ribbon of Lower Chalk extending under the Strait would turn out to be a continuous one. To put this view to a further test, the French Channel Tunnel Company, in 1875, commissioned a team of eminent geologists and hydrographers to make a more detailed survey of the area than had yet been attempted. In 1875 and 1876 the surveyors made 7,700 soundings and took 3,267 geological samples from the bed of the Strait and concluded from their studies that, except for a couple of localities near each shoreline, which a tunnel could avoid, the Lower Chalk indeed showed every sign of stretching without interruption or fault from shore to shore. However, when these studies were completed, Lord Grosvenor's Channel Tunnel Company did not find itself in a position to do much about them. The company was having trouble raising money, and its temporary power to acquire land at St. Margaret's Bay for experimental workings had lapsed without the promoters ever having used it. William Low, who had left the company in 1873 after disagreements with Hawkshaw on technical matters—Low had come to believe, for one thing, that the terrain around St. Margaret's Bay was unsuitable as a starting place for a channel tunnel—had become the chief engineering consultant of a rival Channel-tunnel outfit that called itself the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company. But the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company wasn't getting anywhere, either. It remained for a third English company, headed by a railway magnate named Sir Edward Watkin, to push the Channel-tunnel scheme into its next phase, which turned out to be the most tumultuous one in all its history.

SIR EDWARD WATKIN was a vociferously successful promoter from the Midlands. The son of a Manchester cotton merchant, Watkin had passed up a chance at the family business in favor of railways in the early days of the age of steam, and it is a measure of his generally acknowledged shrewdness at railway promotion that in his mid-twenties, having become secretary of the Trent Valley Railway, he negotiated its sale to the London North Western Railway at a profit of £438,000. Now in his early sixties, Watkin was chairman of three British railway companies, the Manchester, Sheffield Lincolnshire Railway, the Metropolitan (London) Railway, and the South-Eastern Railway—the last-named being a company whose line ran from London to Dover via Folkestone—and one of his big current schemes was the formation of a through route under a single management—his own, naturally—from Manchester and the north to Dover. It was while he was busily promoting this scheme that Watkin caught the Channel-tunnel fever. He realized that part of the land the South-Eastern Railway owned along its line between Folkestone and Dover lay happily accessible to the ribbon of Lower Chalk that dipped into the sea in the direction of Dover and stretched under the bed of the Strait, and it wasn't long before he was conjuring up visions of a great system in which his projected Manchester-Dover line, instead of stopping at the Channel shoreline, would carry on under the Strait to the Continent.

One of Sir Edward Watkin's first steps toward determining the technical feasibility of constructing a tunnel was to call in, sometime in the mid-seventies, William Low, whose own tunnel company had quite fallen apart, for engineering consultation. Watkin decided to aim for a twin tunnel based on Low's idea, which would have its starting point in the area west of Dover and east of Folkestone, and he put his own engineers to work on the job. In 1880, the engineers sank a seventy-four-foot shaft by the South-Eastern Railway line at Abbots Cliff, about midway between Folkestone and Dover, and began driving a horizontal pilot gallery seven feet in diameter along the Lower Chalk bed in the direction of the sea off Dover. By the early part of the following year, the experimental heading extended about half a mile underground. His engineers having satisfied themselves that the Lower Chalk was lending itself as well as expected to being tunneled, Sir Edward went ahead and formed the Submarine Continental Railway Company, capitalized at £250,000 and closely controlled by the South-Eastern Railway Company, to take over the existing tunnel workings and to continue them on a larger scale, with the aim of constructing a Channel tunnel connecting with the South-Eastern's coastal rail line. At the same time, he reached an understanding with the French Channel Tunnel Company on co-ordination of English and French operations; he also engineered through Parliament—he was an M.P. himself, and that helped things a bit—a bill giving the South-Eastern power to carry out the compulsory purchase of certain coastal land in the general direction taken by the existing heading.

Then Sir Edward's engineers sank a second shaft, farther to the east but in alignment with the first heading, 160 feet below a level stretch of ground by the South-Eastern Railway line at Shakespeare Cliff, just west of Dover, 120 feet below high water, and began boring a new seven-foot pilot tunnel that dipped down with the Lower Chalk bed leading into the Channel. This second boring, like the first, was carried out with the use of a tunneling machine especially designed for the purpose by Colonel Frederick Beaumont, an engineer who had had a hand in the construction of the Dover fortifications. The Beaumont tunneling machine, a prototype of some of the most powerful tunneling machines in use nowadays, was run by compressed air piped in from the outside, and the discharge of this air from the machine as it worked also served as a way of keeping the gallery ventilated. The cutting of the rock was done by a total of fourteen steel planetary cutters set in two revolving arms at the head of the machine; with each turn of the borer a thin paring of chalk 5/16 of an inch thick was shorn away from the working face, the spoil being passed by conveyor belt to the back of the machine and dumped into carts or skips that were pushed by hand along the length of the gallery on narrow-gauge rails. The machine made one and a half to two revolutions a minute, and Sir Edward estimated for his stockholders that with simultaneous tunneling with the use of similar equipment from the French shore—the French Tunnel Company had already sunk a 280-foot shaft of its own at Sangatte and was preparing to drive a gallery toward England—the Channel bottom would be pierced from shore to shore by a continuous single pilot tunnel, twenty-two miles long, in three and a half years. Once this was done, according to Sir Edward's plans, the seven-foot gallery was to be enlarged by special cutting machinery to a fourteen-foot diameter, and a double tunnel, thickly lined with concrete and connected by cross-passages, constructed. (Four miles of access tunnel were to be added on the French, and possibly on the English, side, too.) The completed tunnel was to be lighted throughout by electric light—a novelty already being tried out in the pilot tunnel by the well-known electrical engineer C. W. Siemens—and the trains that ran through it between France and Britain were to be hauled by locomotives designed by Colonel Beaumont. Instead of being run by smoke-producing coal, the locomotives were to be propelled by compressed air carried behind the engine in tanks, and, like the Beaumont tunneling machine, the engine was supposed to keep the tunnel ventilated by giving out fresh air as it went along. (A lot of air was to be released in the tunnel in the course of a day; a tentative schedule called for one train to traverse it in one direction or another every five minutes or so for twenty hours out of the twenty-four.)

Trains coming through the tunnel from France were to emerge into the daylight and the ordinary open air of England either from a four-mile-long access tunnel connected to the South-Eastern's railway line at Abbots Cliff or—this was a favored alternative plan of Sir Edward's—at Shakespeare Cliff via a station to be constructed in a great square excavated a hundred and sixty feet deep in the ground, which would be covered over with glass, lighted by electric light, and equipped "with large waiting rooms and refreshment rooms." From the abyss of this submerged station, trains arriving from the Continent were to be raised, an entire train at a time, to the level of the existing South-Eastern line by a giant hydraulic lift. (Actually, constructing an elevator capable of raising such an enormous load would not seem as unlikely a feat in the eighties as it might to many people now; Victorian engineers were expert in the use of hydraulic power for ship locks and all sorts of other devices, and, in fact, hydraulic power was so commonly used that the London of half a century ago had perhaps eight hundred miles of hydraulic piping laid below the streets to work industrial presses, motors, and most of the cranes on the Thames docks.)

As the experimental work progressed, Sir Edward Watkin saw to it that all the splendid details about the Channel-tunnel scheme were constantly brought to the attention of the South-Eastern's shareholders, the press, and the public. Sir Edward, besides being a nineteenth-century railway king, was also something of a twentieth-century public-relations operator. He was a firm believer in the beneficial effects of giving big dinners, a pioneer in the art of organizing big junkets, and an adept at getting plenty of newspaper space. An energetic lobbyist in Parliament for all sorts of causes, not excluding his own commercial projects, he was known as a habitual conferrer of friendly little gestures upon important people in and out of government, and his kindness is said to have gone so far at one time that he provided Mr. Gladstone with the convenience of a private railway branch line that went right to the statesman's country home.

The driving of the Channel-tunnel pilot gallery at Shakespeare Cliff offered Sir Edward a handy opportunity for exercising his gifts in the field of public relations, and he took full advantage of it. Week after week, as the boring of the tunnel progressed, he invited large groups of influential people, as many as eighty at a time, including politicians and statesmen, editors, reporters, and artists, members of great families, well-known financiers and businessmen from Britain and abroad, and members of the clergy and the military establishment to be his guests on a trip by special train from London to Dover at Shakespeare Cliff. There, at the Submarine Continental Railway Company workings, the visitors were taken down into the tunnel to inspect the creation of the new experimental highway to the Continent. A typical enough descriptive paragraph in the press concerning one of these visits (on this occasion a group of prominent Frenchmen were the guests of Sir Edward) is contained in a contemporary report in the _Times_:

The visitors were lowered six at a time in an iron "skip" down the shaft into the tunnel. At the bottom of this shaft, 163 feet below the surface of the ground, the mouth of the tunnel was reached, and the visitors took their seats on small tramcars which were drawn by workmen. So evenly has the boring machine done its work that one seemed to be looking along a great tube with a slightly downward set, and as the glowing electric lamps, placed alternately on either side of the way, showed fainter and fainter in the far distance, the tunnel, for anything one could tell from appearances, might have had its outlet in France.

Sir Edward Watkin, in a speech he made at a Submarine Continental Railway Company stockholders' meeting shortly after such a visit (the main parts of the speech were duly paraphrased in the press), found the effect of the electric light (operated on something called the Swan system) in the tunnel to be just as striking as the _Times_ reporter had—only brighter.

He thought the visit might be regarded as a remarkable one. Their colleague, Dr. Siemens, lighted up the tunnel with the Swan light, and it was certainly a beautiful sight to see a cavern, as it were, under the bottom of the sea made in places as brilliant as daylight.

While on their way by tramcar to view the working of Colonel Beaumont's boring machine at the far end of the tunnel, visitors stopped after a certain distance to enjoy another experience—a champagne party held in a chamber cut in the side of the tunnel. A contemporary artist's sketch in the _Illustrated London News_ records the sight of a group of visitors clustered around a bottle-laden table at one of these way side halts. Mustachioed and bearded, and wearing Sherlock Holmes deerstalker caps and dust jackets, they are shown, in tableaued dignity, standing about within a solidly timbered cavelike area with champagne glasses in their hands; and for all the Victorian pipe-trouser formality of their posture there is no doubt that the subjects are having a good time. After such a refreshing pause, the visitors would be helped on the tramcars again and escorted on to see the boring machine cutting through the Lower Chalk and to admire the generally dry appearance of the tunnel, and after that they would be taken back to the surface and given a splendid lunch either in a marquee set up near the entrance to the shaft or at the Lord Warden Hotel, in Dover, where more champagne would be served, along with other wines and brandies, more toasts to the Queen's health proposed, and speeches made on the present and future marvels of the tunnel, the forwardness of its backers, and the new era in international relations that the whole project promised. These lunches were also convenient occasions for the speakers to pooh-pooh the claims of the rival tunnel scheme of Lord Richard Grosvenor's Channel Tunnel Company, which was still being put forward, although entirely on paper, and to make announcements of miscellaneous items of news about progress in the Lower Chalk.

Thus, at one of these lunches at the Lord Warden Hotel held in the third week of February, 1882, Mr. Myles Fenton, the general manager of the South-Eastern Railway, took occasion to announce to a large party of visitors from London that boring of the gallery had now reached a distance of eleven hundred yards, or nearly two-thirds of a mile, in the direction of the end of the great Admiralty Pier at Dover. According to an account in the _Times_, Mr. Fenton read to the interested gathering a telegram he had received from Sir Edward, who was unable to be present, but who by wire "expressed the hope that by Easter Week a locomotive compressed air engine would be running in the tunnel, of which it was expected the first mile would by that time have been made. (Cheers.)"

Sometimes these lunches were held down in the tunnel itself, and general conditions down there were such that even ladies attended them, on special occasions, as a contemporary magazine account of a visit paid to the gallery by a number of engineers with their families makes clear.

The visitors were conducted twenty at a time to the end on a sort of trolley or benches on wheels drawn by a couple of men. In the centre of the tunnel a kind of saloon, decorated with flowers and evergreens, was arranged, and, on a large table, glasses and biscuits, etc., were spread for the inevitable luncheon. There was no infiltration of water in any part. In the places where several small fissures and slight oozings had appeared during the boring operations, a shield in sheet iron had been applied against the wall by the engineer, following all the circumference of the gallery and making it completely watertight. There they were as in a drawing-room, and the ladies having descended in all the glories of silks and lace and feathers were astonished to find themselves as immaculate on their return as at the beginning of their trip. The atmosphere in the tunnel was not less pure, but even fresher than outside, thanks to the compressed air machine which, having acted on the excavator at the beginning of the cutting, released its cooled air in the centre of the tunnel.

With the widespread talk of champagne under the sea, potted plants flourishing under the electric lights, and bracing breezes blowing within the Lower Chalk, going down from London to attend one of Sir Edward's tunnel parties seems to have become one of the fashionable things to do in English society in the early part of 1882. By the beginning of spring, visitors taken down into the tunnel and entertained by Sir Edward included such eminent figures as the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Prince and Princess of Wales. To judge by this stage of affairs, the boring of the tunnel was going on under the most agreeable of auspices.

Behind all the sociability and the stream of publicity engendered in the press by the visits of well-known people to the tunnel, the situation was not quite so promising. While the physical boring was going ahead smoothly enough in the Lower Chalk, the promotion of the tunnel as a full-scale project was encountering growing resistance from within the upper crust of The Establishment. The fact seems to be that the British Government had never felt altogether easy about the idea of the Channel tunnel from the start, and although it had never formally expressed any misgivings about the scheme as a whole, it had always been careful not to associate itself with the enterprise, and its attitude toward its progress generally had been one of reluctant acquiescence. Whatever disquiet people in government felt about the tunnel project appears to have been expressed in three general ways—first, in the introduction of caveats of a military nature; second, in proposals to delay the progress of the scheme on other than military grounds; and third, in a general, nameless suspicion of the whole idea. Such reservations had been evident even in 1875, when the Channel Tunnel Company applied to Parliament for powers to carry out experimental work at St. Margaret's Bay.