Part 8

In postwar England, the tunnel project began to obtain heavy support in Parliament. By 1924, some four hundred M.P.s—about two-thirds of the House—were said to be for it, and the new Labor Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, promised a careful and sympathetic review of the Government's position on the tunnel. He called all of the four living former Prime Ministers—Lord Balfour, Herbert Asquith, Lloyd George, and Stanley Baldwin—into consultation on the matter, as well as the Committee of Imperial Defense. The Prime Ministers met for forty minutes and rejected the scheme again, and MacDonald told Parliament that the Government felt postwar military developments had "tended, without exception, to render the Channel tunnel a more dangerous experiment" than ever. Winston Churchill protested the decision. "I do not hesitate to say that it was wrong," he told the House.

In 1929, everybody had a go at the tunnel once more, and very elaborate engineering studies were made on the subject by well-established engineering firms and were carefully examined by a special Government committee, with particular attention being given to the contention of pro-tunnel people that the construction of a Channel tunnel would provide badly needed work for Englishmen in depression times. The report of the Government's committee was, with a single dissension, favorable to the construction of the tunnel. But the Committee of Imperial Defense still was to have its say, and in May 1930 it rejected the project. This time the rejection was made primarily on two grounds, according to a high British military man who was later a member of that body. The first of these, he says, was the fear of the military that the successful construction of a Channel tunnel would so adversely affect England's Channel shipping trade that the Channel ports were likely to fall into ill repair and the harbors to start silting up—dangerous conditions in periods of national emergency; the second was their fear that if Britain became involved in another war on the Continent, the tunnel would suddenly become a traffic bottleneck through which it would be difficult to move war supplies and equipment quickly and on the massive scale required. A month after this adverse verdict by the military, a motion was nonetheless put forward in the House of Commons for approval of the tunnel, and this time such a large group of M.P.s was favorable to the scheme that the motion failed to carry by only seven votes.

For most of the thirties, the tunnel project just drifted along in a dormant state. Once every so often, when things were generally slack, the press would carry a feature story on it, and the annual meetings of the Channel Tunnel Company, still gamely presided over by Baron Emile Beaumont d'Erlanger, were always good for a paragraph tucked somewhere into the financial pages under mildly mocking headlines, such as "Hope Eternal," "The Channel Tunnel Again," or, in one of the popular dailies, just "The Poor Old Tunnel."

The outbreak of the Second World War, however, far from putting the Channel tunnel completely out of sight, revived the issue, for a time, anyway. In November 1939 the French Chamber of Deputies passed a resolution calling for the construction of a tunnel; early in 1940, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain—the son, incidentally, of Joseph Chamberlain, who as president of the Board of Trade had ordered the tunnel workings stopped back in the eighties—turned the tunnel project down again in a parliamentary reply. The retreat from Dunkirk gave pro-tunnel and anti-tunnel people the opportunity of putting forth their arguments about the tunnel once more, with some variations—with the pro-tunnelers claiming that a Channel tunnel might have enabled the British Expeditionary Force to keep a bridgehead in France, and the anti-tunnelers countering that the same tunnel would have given German paratroopers the opportunity of seizing the English end and using it as a bridgehead for the invasion of England.

Then, after the fall of France, when the Germans were busily making preparations for the invasion of England, the question arose among the British military as to whether the enemy might not just possibly attempt to reach England by surreptitiously tunneling underneath the Channel. As a consequence, the War Office called in an eminent British civil engineer, the late Sir William Halcrow, and asked him to make a study of the question of whether the Germans could pull off such a feat. "We examined the situation quite carefully and concluded that, provided we kept reasonably alert, the Germans could not dig the tunnel without being detected," an engineering colleague of Sir William Halcrow's on the survey said a while ago. He added, "Their difficulty would lie in the disposal of the spoil. They couldn't get rid of it without our seeing from the air that something peculiar was going on. If they tried to dump the spoil into the sea at night it would have to be done at the turn of the tide, and the chalk would leave a cloud in the sea that would not be dissipated by daylight. If they pulverized the spoil, converted it into a slurry, and pumped it well out to sea, we would be able to spot the chalk cloud too, and even if they tried other means of dispersing the spoil the very process of dispersal would call for such extensive installations that we would soon be on to them."

In 1942, somebody at the War Office had another look into the tunnel situation, this time for the purpose of finding out if it would be practical for the British to start tunneling under the Channel—the idea presumably being the creation of a supply route to France ahead of an Allied invasion, with the last leg of the route being completed once the Allied Armies had installed themselves on the French coast. Again, several prominent British civil engineers were called into consultation, but the subject was abruptly dropped, without investigation of the problem of disposing of the spoil, when the engineers estimated that a tunnel probably would take eight years to complete—three years longer than the war then was expected to last.

From 1940 on, the British kept a routine watch on their reconnaissance photographs for signs of tunneling on the French side, especially around the site of the still existing shaft of the French Tunnel Company at Sangatte. Early in 1944, R.A.F. and U.S.A.F. reconnaissance showed signs of unusual installations being made near Sangatte, but these later turned out to be unconnected with subterranean workings. As it happened, they were launching sites for V-2 bombs.

The actual handling by the Germans of the old tunnel shaft during the occupation of France was rather peculiar. Far from trying to continue the existing tunnel in the early part of the Occupation, they treated it in contemptuous fashion, using the shaft as a dump for old chunks of machinery, used shell casings, bits of rubbish, and broken slabs of concrete. Later on, their attitude changed drastically. They sealed the top of the shaft with a poured-concrete platform. Then, in weirdly romantic fashion, they built a large rim of fitted stone around the platform to create an ornamental-wall effect, and added around the well a grass-and-flagstone terrace complete with formal walks and sets of monumental-looking stone steps laid out in symmetrical style. Apparently their notion was to bring the tunnel aesthetically into harmony with a military cemetery they installed between the tunnel entrance and the sea.

After the war, the Channel-tunnel project continued to languish in 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.