Part 9

When D'Erlanger announced the Study Group's proposals, calling all the latest tunnel laborings "a last glorious effort to get this through," the British press received the news with big headlines on the front pages but with considerable indignation on its editorial pages. The core of the objections was not of a military nature but had to do with the number of financial concessions that the tunnel people were asking from the British and French Governments (that is, taxpayers) as a basis for going ahead with the scheme. The general attitude of the press was that the British Government should have nothing to do with some of the financial concessions asked. There were a good many references, all very familiar to a reader of the press attacks during the tunnel uproar back in the eighties, to "promoters," and the tone of editorial reaction was fairly well typified by a sarcastic article in _The Economist_ entitled "Pie Under the Sea." And the _Times_ ran an editorial declaring snappily that, as the proposals stood, "the light at the end of the tunnel would be either bright gold for the private owners of the £20 million of equity capital or Bright Red for the Anglo-French taxpayer." Then, shortly afterward, the tunnel came under public attack by Eoin C. Mekie, chairman of Silver City Airways, which in the years since the Second World War has ferried more than three hundred thousand cars and a million and a half passengers by air to and from the Continent. Mekie denounced the tunnel scheme as "commercial folly" and described it as "a feat of engineering which is already made obsolete by the speed of modern technical advances." Other attacks were made, too, from the enthusiasts over the future of Hovercraft, the heavier-than-air craft, still in the experimental stage, which ride on a cushion of air; and from, not unexpectedly, Channel shipping and ferry interests. Then Viscount Montgomery, in a newspaper interview, returned to the attack on the tunnel on the ground of its undermining what he called "our island strategy." He also observed in particular, when asked about the feasibility of blowing the tunnel up in case of war or threatened war, "The lessons of history show that things that ought to be blown up never are, as Guy Fawkes discovered." And Major-General Spears in the spring of 1960 gave fuller vent to his anti-tunnel views in a pamphlet that he wrote and had circulated privately. Its general tenor was set by General Spears's assertion that "the Channel saved us in 1940 and may well save us again," and that "The British people need no tunnels." And he asked, "Who would have believed that in the last war the Germans would not have destroyed the enormously important bridge over the Rhine at Remagen? But they failed to do so."

To all such criticism as this, the Channel-tunnel people reacted not with the kind of broadsides that Sir Edward Watkin would have let loose in the heyday of the Channel-tunnel controversy but by hiring a public-relations outfit headed by a man called E. D. O'Brien, a former publicity director for the Conservative party, who is said to be known among his colleagues as Champagne Toby. O'Brien's champagne appears to be weaker stuff than Sir Edward Watkin's; the pro-tunnel publicity his outfit puts out seems to consist of things like a small booklet called "Channel Tunnel, the Facts," which an O'Brien assistant has described as "a sort of child's guide, in Q. and A. form, you know, about the tunnel."

As soon as the British press fell on the promoters for making the demands they did for Government financial guarantees, the promoters came up with a set of counter-proposals. They offered to finance not only the tunnel itself but also the terminals and approaches on both sides; they further proposed leasing the tunnel directly to the two governments, thus avoiding the earlier requirement of governmental guarantee of the bonds.

When the subject of constructing a Channel tunnel will come up for a decision one way or the other before the British Cabinet and Parliament again nobody seems willing to predict, and what the Cabinet will decide nobody seems willing to predict, either. However, D'Erlanger, who says that he would consider another tunnel thumbs down by the British Government or Parliament "a negation of progress," is always happy to talk about the benefits a Channel tunnel would confer upon Europe. "You have fifty million people on this side of the Channel and two hundred million plus on the Continental side. If you join them by a small hyphen, I think it _must_ facilitate trade on both sides," he says. "I like to think of the tunnel as a kind of engagement ring that would bind Britain's Outer Seven into a workable marriage with the six countries of the Common Market. Think of shipping goods from Rome to Birmingham or from Edinburgh to Bordeaux without breaking bulk, and at half the cost! It's high time Europe had a manifestation of progress along the lines of the St. Lawrence Seaway, and I think a Channel tunnel would be the great civil-engineering feat of the century for Europe."

In the meantime, with all the brave words, and all the money poured into the project, the Channel Tunnel Company still has something of a phantom air about it. It doesn't have a regular staff—D'Erlanger is a busy City banker—and it has no real office of its own. D'Erlanger's banking headquarters are at the investment house of which he is a partner, Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlangers, Ltd., along Moorgate, but no Channel Tunnel Company records are kept there. The nearest thing to a headquarters for the Channel Tunnel Company is a set of Victorian offices on Broad Street Place, in the City, occupied by a firm of "secretaries" called W. H. Stentiford & Co. These offices are reached by a very ancient and slow ironwork-gate lift, and a sign in the corridor shows that W. H. Stentiford & Co. is the representative of an astonishing variety of companies, including the Channel Tunnel Company, Ltd., and a number of outfits with such exotic corporate names as the Tea Share Trust, Ltd., Uruwira Minerals, Ltd., Dominion Keep (Klerksdorp, Ltd.), and Klerksdorp Consolidated Goldfields, Ltd. Inside, amid a clutter of ticking clocks, great ledgers, old safes emblazoned with peeling coats of arms, great piles of papers, and trays of teacups, a small staff of round-shouldered retainers toils away vicariously over the affairs of these far-flung organizations—making up accounts and annual or quarterly statements, filling out and recording stock certificates, answering letters, and so on. All this clerkly activity is presided over by an eminently respectable and precisely mannered man by the name of P. S. Elliston, who also arranges board meetings for his many client companies in a room set aside at Stentiford's for the purpose. Mr. Elliston's organization "took on" the Channel Tunnel Company in the early forties, and all its annual meetings since 1947 have been held at Stentiford's, with Mr. Elliston present in his capacity of representative of his firm of secretaries. Mr. Elliston finds things changed a bit from the time when the Channel Tunnel Company first became one of his firm's clients. In those old days, he says, the whole annual meeting could generally be disposed of in between five and ten minutes, with only a couple of directors being present—Mr. Elliston having thoughtfully bought one share of Channel Tunnel Company stock to enable himself to vote in case no other shareholder besides a couple of directors could be persuaded to turn up to make a quorum of three. Now, he says, it may sometimes take twenty-five minutes or even as long as forty-five minutes to transact necessary business. As for Channel Tunnel Company stock, it has fluctuated all the way from sixpence to fifty shillings—its price one day in 1959 at a time when the company's balance sheet showed a cash balance of just £161. The price of the stock at the time this book was written was about twenty-two shillings, and the company's cash in hand (in 1961 it issued a little more stock to keep going) was £91,351 "and a few shillings." Owing to the wartime destruction of its records and the difficulty of tracking down all the old transactions, the Channel Tunnel Company still doesn't know who all its stockholders are, and, conversely, there are quite a few people scattered about who probably aren't aware that they are company stockholders.

Mr. Elliston describes the last fifteen years or so of the company's history as containing "several periods where there was very keen interest" in the tunnel scheme, especially in 1957 and 1958, with Stentiford's being subjected, he says, to "a persistent spate of enquiries," including calls from newspaper reporters and letters from schoolboys asking why the tunnel was never built.

Some time ago, when I was in England, I decided to take a trip down to the coast between Folkestone and Dover to the scene of the violent tunnel controversy of the eighties. I had heard that the shaft of the old Shakespeare Cliff gallery in which Sir Edward Watkin did so much of his promoting and entertaining, as well as tunneling, had been sealed off many years ago, but I was aware that the Abbots Cliff gallery, or part of it, still existed. Through the good offices of Leo d'Erlanger and Harold J. B. Harding, the vice-president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, who has directed many of the latest technical surveys on the proposed Channel tunnel, I arranged to go down one day from London to Folkestone and to be taken into the old Abbots Cliff tunnel. Written permission had to be obtained from the Government for the visit, and the necessary arrangements had to be made well in advance with officials of British Railways, the present owner, representing the Crown, of the coastal lands once the domain of Sir Edward Watkin's South-Eastern Railway Company. Harding explained to me that since the tunnel entrance was kept locked up and lay in a not readily accessible part of the cliffs facing the sea, it would be practical for me to make the visit only under fairly good weather conditions, and then under the escort of people equipped with lamps and the means of opening up the tunnel entrance. "You may get a bit wet and a bit dirty, so don't wear a good suit," Harding added, and he went on to say that he had seen to it that I would be shown around the tunnel by a civil engineer named Kenneth W. Adams, from the district office of British Railways at Ashford, Kent—Adams being, in Harding's words, "a keen engineer who has become something of a hobbyist on the old tunnel workings."

Wearing an old suit, I duly took a train early one fair morning in autumn, from Charing Cross, and when I got off at Folkestone Central Station, Adams, a stocky, cheerful man who seemed to be about forty, was waiting for me. He had a little car waiting outside the station, and when he got into it, he introduced me to an assistant sitting in the driver's seat named Jack Burgess. "Jack's grandfather was a surface worker at the tunnel workings at Shakespeare Cliff," Adams said as Burgess started the car up. "Jack was just telling me that he remembers his grandfather telling him, when he was a boy, about Lord Palmerston coming down to visit the tunnel in 1881. The old chap remembered that the food that was brought into the tunnel for parties of visitors from the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover came in hay boxes—that is, in big wicker boxes interlined with a thick layer of hay to keep the food warm."

Burgess drove us through the outer part of Folkestone toward the sea at 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.