Five

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.

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

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 262½ 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.

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."

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."