Sometimes these lunches were held down in the tunnel itself, and general conditions down there were such that even ladies attended them, on special occasions, as a contemporary magazine account of a visit paid to the gallery by a number of engineers with their families makes clear.
The visitors were conducted twenty at a time to the end on a sort of trolley or benches on wheels drawn by a couple of men. In the centre of the tunnel a kind of saloon, decorated with flowers and evergreens, was arranged, and, on a large table, glasses and biscuits, etc., were spread for the inevitable luncheon. There was no infiltration of water in any part. In the places where several small fissures and slight oozings had appeared during the boring operations, a shield in sheet iron had been applied against the wall by the engineer, following all the circumference of the gallery and making it completely watertight. There they were as in a drawing-room, and the ladies having descended in all the glories of silks and lace and feathers were astonished to find themselves as immaculate on their return as at the beginning of their trip. The atmosphere in the tunnel was not less pure, but even fresher than outside, thanks to the compressed air machine which, having acted on the excavator at the beginning of the cutting, released its cooled air in the centre of the tunnel.
With the widespread talk of champagne under the sea, potted plants flourishing under the electric lights, and bracing breezes blowing within the Lower Chalk, going down from London to attend one of Sir Edward's tunnel parties seems to have become one of the fashionable things to do in English society in the early part of 1882. By the beginning of spring, visitors taken down into the tunnel and entertained by Sir Edward included such eminent figures as the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Prince and Princess of Wales. To judge by this stage of affairs, the boring of the tunnel was going on under the most agreeable of auspices.
Behind all the sociability and the stream of publicity engendered in the press by the visits of well-known people to the tunnel, the situation was not quite so promising. While the physical boring was going ahead smoothly enough in the Lower Chalk, the promotion of the tunnel as a full-scale project was encountering growing resistance from within the upper crust of The Establishment. The fact seems to be that the British Government had never felt altogether easy about the idea of the Channel tunnel from the start, and although it had never formally expressed any misgivings about the scheme as a whole, it had always been careful not to associate itself with the enterprise, and its attitude toward its progress generally had been one of reluctant acquiescence. Whatever disquiet people in government felt about the tunnel project appears to have been expressed in three general ways—first, in the introduction of caveats of a military nature; second, in proposals to delay the progress of the scheme on other than military grounds; and third, in a general, nameless suspicion of the whole idea. Such reservations had been evident even in 1875, when the Channel Tunnel Company applied to Parliament for powers to carry out experimental work at St. Margaret's Bay.
To exemplify the first kind of reservation put forward, the Board of Trade, the governmental department under whose surveillance such commercial schemes came, made a point of insisting that for defense purposes the Government must retain absolute power to "erect and maintain such [military] works at the English mouth of the Tunnel as they may deem expedient," and in case of actual or threatened war to close the tunnel down. As for the tendency of governmental people to find other grounds for objection in the project, this could be exemplified by the delaying action of the Secretary to the Treasury, when in 1875 it looked as though Parliament were about to take action on the Channel-tunnel bill. In a memorandum to the Foreign Office, the Secretary sought to have the tunnel bill laid aside at the last moment of its consideration before Parliament so that the answers to all sorts of important jurisdictional questions could be sought—for example, "If a crime were committed in the Tunnel, by what authority would it be cognizable?"[1] And as for the third, unnamed kind of objection, Queen Victoria, who, with her late husband (Prince Albert died in 1861), had once been so enthusiastic about the idea of a Channel tunnel, simply changed her mind about the entire business; in February of 1875, the Queen wrote Disraeli, without elaborating, that "she hopes that the Government will do nothing to encourage the proposed tunnel under the Channel which she thinks very objectionable."
Ever since 1875, all these official doubts and misgivings had continued to lurk in the background of the Government's dealings with the Channel-tunnel promoters—especially military misgivings about the scheme. Apart from putting down the usual bloody insurrections among native populations while she went about the business of maintaining her colonial territories, Britain was at peace with the world. As far as her military relations with the Continent stood, the threats of Napoleon I to invade the island had not been forgotten, and even in the reign of Napoleon III there had been occasional alarms about an invasion, but the country's physical separation from the Continent tended to make the military tensions existing over there seem rather comfortingly remote. Britain's home defenses were left on a pretty easygoing basis, the country's reliance on resistance to armed attack being placed, in traditional fashion, in the power of the Royal Navy to control her seas—meaning, for all practical purposes, its ability to control the Channel. With the Navy and the Channel to protect her shores, Britain in the seventies and eighties got along at home with a professional army of only sixty thousand men, as against a standing army in France of perhaps three-quarters of a million. Seasickness or no seasickness, the Channel was considered to be a convenient manpower and tax-money saver. The advantages of the Channel to Victorian England were perhaps most eloquently expressed by Mr. Gladstone in the course of an article of his in the Edinburgh Review in 1870 on England's relationship to the military and political turmoil existing on the Continent. "Happy England!" he wrote in a brief panegyric on the Channel. "Happy ... that the wise dispensation of Providence has cut her off, by that streak of silver sea, which passengers so often and so justly execrate ... partly from the dangers, absolutely from the temptations, which attend upon the local neighborhood of the Continental nations.... Maritime supremacy has become the proud—perhaps the indefectible—inheritance of England." And Mr. Gladstone went on, after dwelling upon one of his favorite themes, the evils of standing armies and the miserable burden of conscription, to suggest that Englishmen didn't realize just how grateful they ought to be for the Channel:
Where the Almighty grants exceptional and peculiar bounties, He sometimes permits by way of counterpoise an insensibility to their value. Were there but a slight upward heaving of the crust of the earth between France and Great Britain, and were dry land thus to be substituted for a few leagues of sea, then indeed we should begin to know what we had lost.
These remarks of Mr. Gladstone's on the Channel appear to have made a powerful impression on opinion in upper-class England; for many years after their publication his partly Shakespearean phrase, "the streak of silver sea"—or a variation of it, "the silver streak"—remained as a standard term in the vocabulary of Victorian patriotism. Not surprisingly, considering his views in 1870, the attitude of Mr. Gladstone in 1881 and 1882, during his term as Prime Minister, toward the plan of Sir Edward Watkin to undermine those Straits the statesman had so extolled was an equivocal one.
Indeed, quite a number of people in and around Whitehall had considerably stronger reservations about the Channel-tunnel project than Mr. Gladstone did. These misgivings had to do with fears that a completed tunnel under the Channel might form a breach in England's traditional defense system, and in June of 1881 they first came to public notice in the form of an editorial in the Times. Discussing the Channel-tunnel project, the Times, while conceding that "As an improvement in locomotion, and as a relief to the tender stomachs of passengers who dread seasickness, the design is excellent," went on to observe that "from a national [and military] point of view it must not the less be received with caution." And the paper asked, "Shall we be as well off and as safe with it as we now are without it? Will it be possible for us so to guard the English end of the passage that it can never fall into any other hands than our own?" The Times frankly doubted it, and questioned whether, if the tunnel were built, "a force of some thousands of men secretly concentrated in a [French] Channel port and suddenly landed on the coast of Kent" might not be able by surprise to seize the English end of the tunnel and use it as a bridgehead for a general invasion of England. At the very least, the paper warned, the construction of the tunnel meant that "a design for the invasion of England and a general plan of the campaign will be subjects on which every cadet in a German military school will be invited to display his powers," and it suggested that in the circumstances the Channel had best be left untunneled. "Nature is on our side at present," the Times concluded gravely, "and she will continue so if we will only suffer her. The silver streak is our safety." The author of a letter to the Times printed in the same issue declared that the tunnel, if constructed, could be seized by the French from within as easily as from without, and that "in three hours a cavalry force might be sent through to seize the approaches at the English end."
To all this Sir Edward Watkin replied easily that the tunnel, when it was finished, could at any time be rendered unusable from the British end by "a pound of dynamite or a keg of gunpowder." However, the negative attitude of a journal as influential as the Times was a setback for the project. As a result, the Government increased its caution about the tunnel. When, at the end of 1881, Sir Edward drew up a private bill for presentation during the coming year to Parliament that would formally grant the South-Eastern full authority to buy further coastal lands in the Shakespeare Cliff area and to complete the construction of and to maintain a Channel tunnel (Lord Richard Grosvenor and the proprietors of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway came up with a similar bill on behalf of the Channel Tunnel Company), the Board of Trade held departmental hearings on the rival schemes, and at these hearings further attention was turned to the question of the military security of the tunnel in the event of its being attacked. At these proceedings, Sir Edward, who appeared for the purpose of testifying to the civilizing magnificence of his project, was put somewhat on the defensive by questions about the desirability of the tunnel from a military point of view. He found himself in the disconcerting position of being obliged to show not so much the practicability of building a Channel tunnel as the practicability of disabling or destroying it. However, making the most of the situation, he declared that fortifying the English end of the tunnel, and knocking it out of commission in case of hostile action by another power, was a simple enough matter to be accomplished in any number of ways—by flooding it, by filling it with steam, by bringing it under the gunfire of the Dover fortifications, by exploding electrically operated mines laid in it, or choking it with shingle dumped in from the outside. (There was even mention, at the hearings, of a proposal to pour "boiling petroleum" down upon invaders.) Getting into the spirit of the thing in spite of himself, Sir Edward told the examining committee confidently, "I will give you the choice of blowing up, drowning, scalding, closing up, suffocating and other means of destroying our enemies.... You may touch a button at the Horse Guards and blow the whole thing to pieces."