The Tunnel Under the Channel

by Thomas Whiteside

Notwithstanding Sir Edward's categorical assurances, the wisdom of constructing the tunnel came under vigorous attack at the hearings from a formidably high official military source—from Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, the Adjutant General of the British Army. A veteran of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny who was considered to be an expert on the art of surprise attack—his routing of such foes as King Koffee in the first Ashanti War of 1873-74, as well as the great promptitude with which he was said to have "restored the situation" in the Zulu War, made him a well-known figure to the British public—Sir Garnet Wolseley had a dual reputation as an imperialist general and a soldier with advanced ideas on reform of the supply system of the British Army. In fact, his enthusiasm for efficiency was such that the phrase "All Sir Garnet" was commonly used in the Army as a way of saying "all correct." The actor George Grossmith made himself up as Wolseley to sing the part of "a modern Major-General" in performances in the eighties of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. Sir Garnet later became Lord Wolseley and Commander-in-Chief of the British Army. Sir Garnet Wolseley's opinions of the tunnel project were very strong ones. In a long memorandum he submitted to the Board of Trade committee examining the tunnel project, he described the Channel as "a great wet ditch" for the protection of England, the like of which, he said, no Continental power, if it possessed one instead of a land frontier, would "cast recklessly away, by allowing it to be tunnelled under." And he denounced the construction of a Channel tunnel on the ground that it would be certain to create what he termed "a constant inducement to the unscrupulous foreigner to make war upon us." In agitated language, General Wolseley invoked the opinion of the late Duke of Wellington that England could be invaded successfully, and he reiterated the fear previously expressed by the Times that the English end of the tunnel might be seized from the outside—before any of its defenders had a chance of setting in motion the mechanisms for blocking it up—by a hostile force landing nearby on British soil, whereupon it could readily be converted into a bridgehead for a general invasion of the country. He also declared that "the works at our end of the tunnel may be surprised by men sent through the tunnel itself, without landing a man upon our shores." General Wolseley went on to show just how the deed could be done:

A couple of thousand armed men might easily come through the tunnel in a train at night, avoiding all suspicion by being dressed as ordinary passengers, and the first thing we should know of it would be by finding the fort at our end of the tunnel, together with its telegraph office, and all the electrical arrangements, wires, batteries, etc., intended for the destruction of the tunnel, in the hands of an enemy. We know that ... trains could be safely sent through the tunnel every five minutes, and do the entire distance from the station at Calais to that at Dover in less than half an hour. Twenty thousand infantry could thus be easily despatched in 20 trains and allowing ... 12 minutes interval between each train, that force could be poured into Dover in four hours.... The invasion of England could not be attempted by 5,000 men, but half that number, ably led by a daring, dashing young commander might, I feel, some dark night, easily make themselves masters of the works at our end of the tunnel, and then England would be at the mercy of the invader.

General Wolseley conceded that an attack from within the tunnel itself would be difficult if even a hundred riflemen at the English end had previously been alerted to the presence of the attackers, but he doubted that the vigilance of the defenders could always maintain itself at the necessary pitch. And he put it to the committee: "Since the day when David secured an entrance by surprise or treachery into Jerusalem through a tunnel under its walls, how often have places similarly fallen? and, I may add, will again similarly fall?" General Wolseley also found highly questionable the efficacy of the various measures proposed for the protection of the tunnel. He declared that "a hundred accidents" could easily render such measures useless. Thus, for example, he found fault with proposals to lay electrically operated mines inside the tunnel ("A galvanic battery is easily put out of order; something may be wrong with it just when it is required ... the gunpowder may be damp"); proposals to admit the sea into the tunnel by explosion ("an uncertain means of defense"); and proposals to flood it by sluice-gates at the English end ("These water conduits [might] become choked or unserviceable when required" and the "drains rendered useless by treachery"). Then, after pointing out all the frailties of the contemplated defenses, General Wolseley went on to assert that the construction of the tunnel would necessitate, at very least, the conversion of Dover at enormous expense into a first-class fortress and that it could very well make necessary the introduction into England on a permanent basis of compulsory military service to meet the increased threat to Britain's national security.

Surely [Sir Garnet concluded] John Bull will not endanger his birth-right, his property, in fact all that man can hold most dear ... simply in order that men and women may cross to and fro between England and France without running the risk of seasickness.

Sir Garnet reinforced the arguments against the tunnel in personal testimony before the committee. In this testimony he emphasized, among other things, his conviction that once an enemy got a foothold at Dover, England would find herself utterly unable "short of the direct interposition of God Almighty"—an eventuality that Sir Garnet did not appear to count on very heavily—to raise an army capable of resisting the invaders. And the inevitable result of such a default, Sir Garnet told the committee, would be that England "would then cease to exist as a nation."

Sir Garnet's fears for Britain were not shared in a memorandum submitted to the committee by another high Army officer, Lieutenant-General Sir John Adye, the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance. Sir John gave his opinion that "a General in France, having the intention of invading England, would not, in my opinion, count on the tunnel as adding to his resources." He maintained that the argument that the English end of the tunnel might be taken from within could be safely dismissed, as invading troops could be destroyed as they arrived "by means of a small force, with a gun or two, at the mouth of the tunnel." As for the possibility of a hostile force landing on British soil to seize the mouth of the tunnel, he questioned whether "an enemy, having successfully invaded England, [should] turn aside to capture a very doubtful line of communication, when the main object of his efforts was straight before him." General Adye thought that the invaders "would probably feel a much stronger disposition to march straight on London and finish the campaign."

However, the frontal attack on the project by General Wolseley was not a factor to be discounted by any means. Rallying to it in typical fashion, Sir Edward Watkin attempted to stifle the spread of patriotic fears about the tunnel by giving more large lunches at the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover, and he tried to keep all prospects bright by inviting more and more prominent people down into the tunnel at Shakespeare Cliff to marvel at the workings and to refresh themselves with champagne under the electric lights. By mid-February, his guests in the tunnel included no less than sixty Members of Parliament whose support he hoped to obtain for his pending Tunnel Bill, and on one occasion he even succeeded in having the Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone himself, come down into the tunnel and be shown around. Sir Edward assured his stockholders that what he called "alarmist views" concerning the construction of the tunnel were without any real foundation. Addressing an extraordinary general meeting of the Submarine Continental Railway Company, Sir Edward quoted from an alleged reaction of Count von Moltke on the matter: "The invasion of England through the proposed tunnel I consider impossible. You might as well talk of invading her through that door"—pointing to the entrance to his library. Sir Edward brushed the arguments of military men aside as a collection of "hobgoblin arguments" by "men who would prefer to see England remain an island for ever, forgetting that steam had abolished islands, just as telegraphy had abolished isolated thought." He insisted that the tunnel promoters were engaged in a project at once idealistic and practical, and bravely declared their motto to be identical to that of the South-Eastern Railway Company—"Onwards."

By way of countering Sir Garnet Wolseley's invocation of the opinion of the Duke of Wellington on the dangers of invasion, the promoters put it about that the Duke of Wellington in his day had strongly opposed the construction of a railway between Portsmouth and London on the ground that it would dangerously facilitate the movement of a French army upon London. They asserted that one unnamed but very high English military figure had even expressed alarm, at the time of the Universal Exhibition of 1851, that the English Cabinet did not insist on the Queen's retiring to Osborne, her country place on the Isle of Wight, because of the large numbers of foreigners at the Exhibition, including three thousand men of the French National Guard, who were allowed to parade the streets of London in uniform, wearing their side arms. And pro-tunnelers recalled in derisive fashion Lord Palmerston's denunciation of the Suez Canal project as "a madcap scheme which would be the ruin of our Indian Empire, were it possible of construction, and which would spell disaster to those who had the temerity to assert it." Colonel Beaumont, as an engineer and military man, too, wrote an article challenging the validity of General Wolseley's conclusions about the tunnel. Colonel Beaumont maintained that Dover might already be regarded as "a first-class fortress, quite safe from any coup de main from without." Concerning an attack by bodies of infantry or cavalry through the tunnel, he declared, "They cannot come by train; as, irrespective of any suspicions on the part of the booking clerks, special train arrangements would have to be made to carry [them]; they cannot march, as they would be run over by the trains, running, as they would do, at intervals of ten minutes, or oftener, without cessation, day or night." Colonel Beaumont also outlined, in his article, a number of precautionary measures that could be taken to secure the safety of the English end of the tunnel. They included a system of pumping coal smoke instead of compressed air from a ventilating shaft into the tunnel, and also the provision of a system of iron water mains that would connect the sea with the ventilating shaft and make it possible for the officer of the guard, in case of invasion, to flood the tunnel by turning a stopcock. In accordance with these proposed measures, Sir Edward, early in 1882, attempted to forestall further military criticism of the Channel-tunnel scheme by having such a ventilating shaft sunk at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff, about a mile from the main shaft, and having a start made on another horizontal gallery bored from the foot of the new shaft in the direction of the main pilot tunnel under the sea. The new gallery was four feet instead of seven feet in diameter—the smaller aperture in itself being an additional measure of protection, Sir Edward explained, in that intruders would find it impossible to walk along the ventilation shaft in an upright position or in any numbers. A friendly article on the tunnel in the Illustrated London News at the beginning of March noted significantly that not only the entrance at the English end—either at Abbots Cliff or at Sir Edward's proposed glassed-in railway station at Shakespeare Cliff—would be under the fire of the eighty-ton turret guns installed on the Admiralty Pier, but that "it is to be observed how completely [the entrance to the new ventilating shaft] is commanded both from the sea and from the Pier, and also from the guns of the fortress." The Illustrated London News obligingly showed the principle of the thing by running a large two-page-wide engraving depicting, in handsomely apocalyptic style, the hypothetical destruction of the entire tunnel workings and, presumably, the invaders inside them, amid great ballooning clouds of smoke from gun batteries everywhere—from the end of the Admiralty Pier, from points within the Dover land fortifications, and from the cannonading broadsides of British naval men-of-war standing offshore. The fate of invaders from floodwaters was depicted in a more sensational London publication, the Penny Illustrated Paper, which published an engraving a foot and a half long and a foot high illustrating "Sir Edward Watkin's remedy for the invasion scare: Drowning the French Pharaoh in the Channel Tunnel." The engraving showed a cutaway section of the tunnel under the Channel near the English end and, rising upward at the left, a staired chamber of rock equipped with sluice-gates and set in the white cliffs. In this chamber, two figures in top hats and frock coats are standing and gazing down on the tunnel, which is filled with French infantry led by plumed, helmeted officers on horseback. One of the figures in the cliff chamber, evidently meant to represent Sir Edward Watkin, is in the act of calmly operating a turncock that has loosed, through the sluices, a dreadful flood cascading down into the tunnel upon the invaders, who are turning to flee in panic.

Vivid as these scenes of destruction were, they had little effect on the anti-tunnel forces. Already, in February, another attack on the tunnel scheme had appeared in the literary magazine The Nineteenth Century, signed by Lord Dunsany. The article, repeating the claim that the tunnel project was a menace to Britain's security, referred to the capacity of the Dover fortress system to defend itself against a modern invading fleet as "contemptible." Lord Dunsany wrote that he had gone down to Dover to examine the famous fortress and had found that with the exception of the two recently installed turret guns on the Admiralty Pier, the guns "generally speaking were of an obsolete pattern—popguns, in fact." And he asserted that when he had remarked on the relatively modern appearance of one of the larger guns in a particularly commanding position of the fortress, "I was told by an artilleryman that there were orders against firing it, as it would bring down the brickwork of the rampart."

Soon after this, an anonymous article in the Army and Navy Gazette declared that "The Island has been invaded again and again" and it reminded the Gazette's readers that "The present constitution of the country depends on the last successful invasion by a Dutch Prince with Dutch troops, and the overthrow of the King, by an army largely composed of foreigners." The article took Lieutenant-General Sir John Adye severely to task for having found the tunnel a good security risk, and it even went so far afield in its criticism of him as to find fault with the General for what it called his "deliberate, vehement, and long-continued resistance to the introduction of the breech-loading system in our artillery that placed us at the fag-end of all the world, when we ought to have been first."