Part 7
But by various intervening circumstances—joint letters got up by the tunnel promoters to the Prime Minister and to the Board of Trade protesting hard treatment, and so on—the Board of Trade found itself brooking delays all through the month of June. On June 26, the Board of Trade wrote in stern fashion to Sir Edward that the demands of the Board of Trade to inspect the tunnel workings "have been repeatedly formulated and persistently evaded on behalf of the Submarine Continental Railway Company," and that the only way the company could avoid legal action by the Crown was "to consent _at once_ to the proposed inspection." There was no satisfactory reply from the tunnel proprietors, and on July 5 the Board of Trade, after due notification to the Submarine Continental Railway Company, obtained an order from Mr. Justice Kay, in the High Court of Justice, restraining the tunnel promoters and their employees from "further working or excavating, or taking or interfering with any chalk, soil, or other substance" in the Channel tunnel without the consent of the Board of Trade, and ordering them to give the department access to the tunnel to inspect the workings. In the course of these judicial proceedings, a number of affidavits presented to Mr. Justice Kay by the Government revealed the interesting information that the Board of Trade, finding itself unable to obtain access for its inspectors into the tunnel, for some time past had felt itself obliged to station watchers on top of Shakespeare Cliff and on the sea regularly to spy upon the tunnel workings and to count the number of bucketfuls of soil it maintained had been removed from the workings. And, according to all its calculations, the Board of Trade had little doubt that the proprietors of the Submarine Continental Railway Company were deliberately and surreptitiously tunneling under the sea below low-water mark, on Crown property, and burrowing into and removing chalk of the realm.
Intimation of what was in store for him in the High Court of Justice reached Sir Edward Watkin at the very time that he was showing a party of distinguished people, including Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, around the tunnel. A glimpse of that interesting visit is contained in a report in the London _Times_:
M. de Lesseps, while down in the tunnel and under the sea, proposed the health of the Queen, remarking that the completion of the work was required in the interest of mankind.
When all the visitors were again above ground, luncheon was served in a marquee.
Sir E. Watkin, in proposing the health of M. de Lesseps, remarked that there were those in our country who seemed to consider that the work of the company they had just inspected was a crime. He had just received a telegram informing him that he would have to answer on Wednesday next at the instigation of the President of the Board of Trade before a court of law for having committed the crime of carrying on these experiments. (Hisses and groans.)
Somewhat revealingly, Sir Edward added, when the signs of indignation subsided, that
For his own part, if he was to be committed by a court of law for contempt, he should have this consolation—that the proceedings which had been taken against him had been delayed sufficiently long to enable him with his colleagues to have the honor of entertaining M. de Lesseps, in whom he should have a witness, if he had to call one, to prove that they had been engaged in a work which had been as successful as he believed it would be ultimately useful.
At long last, supported by all the might of the Crown, Colonel Yolland got to the tunnel on July 8 to make his inspection of the workings. But upon his arrival there he found, to his chagrin, that "I was not provided, at the time ... with all the necessary means for making the measurements, and taking the requisite bearings" in the tunnel, and he was obliged to put his inspection off once more. Properly equipped, he descended into the tunnel a week later, on Saturday, July 15, and inspected everything, including the boring apparatus that Sir Edward had insisted had to be used to ventilate the gallery and prevent loss of life. What Colonel Yolland found there caused the Board of Trade, five days later, to send a most severe letter to the tunnel proprietors. In it, the Board declared:
1. That the means of ventilating the tunnel could have been and be so readily disconnected from the boring machine (i.e., by the movement of a single lever that would pour a stream of compressed air coming from the supply pipe directly into the tunnel) that it has never been necessary that a single inch of cutting should have taken place in order to protect life or to secure ventilation, nor can such necessity arise in the future.
2. That in spite of the repeated orders of the Board of Trade, and the assurances of the Secretary of the Submarine Railway Company and Sir Edward Watkin himself that those orders were acquiesced in and submitted to, the substantial work of boring has nevertheless been carried to a distance of more than 600 yards from low-water mark (thus constituting a trespass on the property of the Crown).
Calling these acts "a flagrant breach of faith" on the part of the tunnel promoters, the Board of Trade wrote that henceforth the order of the court "must be strictly and literally adhered to," and that no work of maintenance, ventilation, drainage, or otherwise would be allowed without the express permission of the board. Sir Edward Watkin and his fellow directors, after some days, replied in hurt fashion to what they termed "the unjustified accusations directed against them." They reiterated their concern for the health of their employees in the tunnel, and in connection with their tunneling activities below low-water mark they came up with the ingenious explanation that "many visits of Royal and other personages have been, by request, made to the tunnel for purposes of inspection, and it was essential fully to work the machine from time to time for the purpose of such visits." They also sent a protest to Mr. Gladstone at 10 Downing Street against their hard treatment, and asked for the Prime Minister's intercession with the Board of Trade. But there was nothing doing. Mr. Gladstone politely refused to act and replied that the actions of the Board of Trade had the full sanction of the Government.
On August 5, Colonel Yolland descended once more into the tunnel to make an inspection. He found things there in a rather run-down condition. "The tunnel is not nearly so dry as it was when I first saw it," he wrote in his report to the Board of Trade, referring to the fact that the engineers had ceased work on the drainage of the gallery. Colonel Yolland also mentioned in his report that during his previous visit, on July 15, "I had an escape from what might have been a serious accident. The wet chalk in the bottom of the tunnel, between and outside the rails of the tramways, is so slippery and greasy that it is almost impossible to keep on one's feet; and, on one occasion, I suddenly slipped, and fell at full length on my back, and the back of my head came against one of the iron rails of the tramway—fortunately with no great force or my skull might have been seriously bruised or fractured." The Colonel added, "There is not light enough in the tunnel from the electric lamps to enable one to see one's way through ... so that it is necessary to carry a lamp in one hand and a note-book in the other, to record the different measurements." The Colonel then gave some startling news. He declared that, according to his measurements, somebody had advanced the length of the tunnel some seventy yards since his inspection on July 15.
When this report reached the Board of Trade, the department, outraged, 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.
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.