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COPYRIGHT © 1961, 1962 BY THOMAS WHITESIDE
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One
In the social history of England, the English Channel, that proud sea passage some three hundred and fifty miles long, has separated that country from the Continent as by a great gulf or a bottomless chasm. However, at its narrowest point, between Dover and Cap Gris-Nez—a distance of some twenty-one and a half miles—the Channel, despite any impression that storm-tossed sea travelers across it may have of yawning profundities below, is actually a body of water shaped less like a marine chasm than like an extremely shallow puddle. Indeed, the relationship of depth to breadth across the Strait of Dover is quite extraordinary, being as one to five hundred. This relationship can perhaps be most graphically illustrated by drawing a section profile of the Channel to scale. If the drawing were two feet long, the straight line representing the level of the sea and the line representing the profile of the Channel bottom would be so close together as to be barely distinguishable from one another. At its narrowest part, the Channel is nowhere more than two hundred and sixteen feet deep, and for half of the distance across, it is less than a hundred feet deep. It is just this extreme shallowness, in combination with strong winds and tidal currents flowing in the Channel neck between the North Sea and the Atlantic, that makes the seas of the Strait of Dover so formidable, especially in the winter months. The weather is so bad during November and December that the odds of a gale's occurring on any given day are computed by the marine signal station at Dunkirk at one in seven, and during the whole year there are only sixty periods in which the weather remains decent in the Channel through a whole day. Under these difficult conditions, the passage of people traveling across the Channel by ferry between England and France is a notoriously trying one; the experience has been mentioned in print during the last hundred years in such phrases as "that fearful ordeal," "an hour and a half's torture," and "that unspeakable horror." Writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1882, a French writer named Valbert described the trip from Dover to Calais as "two centuries ... of agony." Ninety-odd years ago, an article dealing with the Channel passage, in The Gentleman's Magazine, asserted that hundreds of thousands of people crossing the Strait each year suffered in a manner that beggared description. "Probably there is no other piece of travelling in civilized countries, where, within equal times, so much suffering is endured; certainly it would be hard to find another voyage of equal length which is so much feared," the author said, and he went on to report that only one day out of four was calm, on the average, while about three days in every eight were made dreadful to passengers by heavy weather. He concluded, with feeling, "What wonder that, under such circumstances, patriotism often fails to survive; and that if any wish is felt in mid-Channel, it is that, after all, England was not an island."
How many Englishmen, their loyalty having been subjected to this strain, might express the same wish upon safely gaining high ground again is a question the writer in The Gentleman's Magazine did not venture to discuss. However, there is no question about the persistence with which, during the past century at least, cross-Channel ferry passengers have spoken about or written about the desirability of some sort of dry-land passage between England and France. Engineers have been attracted to the idea of constructing such a passage for at least a hundred and fifty years. During that time, they have come up with proposals for crossing the Channel by spanning it with great bridges, by laying down submersible tubes resting on the sea bottom or floating halfway between sea bed and sea level, or even by using transports shaped like enormous tea wagons, whose wheels would travel along rails below sea level and whose platforms would tower high above the highest waves. But more commonly than by any other means, they have proposed to do away with the hazards and hardships of the Channel boat crossing by boring a traffic tunnel under the rock strata that lie at conveniently shallow depths under sea level. The idea of a Channel tunnel, at once abolishing seasickness and connecting England with the Continent by an easy arterial flow of goods and travelers, always has had about it a quality of grand simplicity—the simplicity of a very large extension of an easily comprehended principle; in this case, digging a hole—that has proved irresistible in appeal to generations not only of engineers but of visionaries and promoters of all kinds.
The tunnel seems always to have had a capacity to arouse in its proponents a peculiarly passionate and unquenchable enthusiasm. Men have devoted their adult lives to promoting the cause of the tunnel, and such a powerful grip does the project seem to have had on the imagination of its various designers that just to look at some of their old drawings—depicting, for example, down to the finest detail of architectural ornamentation, ventilation stations for the tunnel sticking out of the surface of the Channel as ships sail gracefully about nearby—one might almost think that the tunnel was an accomplished reality, and the artist merely a conscientious reporter of an existing scene. Such is the minute detail in which the tunnel has been designed by various people that eighty-six years ago the French Assembly approved a tunnel bill that specified the price of railway tickets for the Channel-tunnel journey, and even contained a clause requiring second-class carriages to be provided with stuffed seats rather than the harder accommodations provided for third-class passengers. And an Englishman called William Collard, who died in 1943, after occupying himself for thirty years with the problem of the Channel tunnel, in 1928 wrote and published a book on the subject that went so far as to work out a time-table for Channel-tunnel trains between Paris and London, complete with train and platform numbers and arrival and departure times at intermediate stations in Kent and northern France. As for the actual engineering details, a Channel tunnel has been the subject of studies that have ranged from collections of mere rough guesses to the most elaborate engineering, geological, and hydrographic surveys carried out by highly competent civil-engineering companies. Interestingly enough, ever since the days, a century or so ago, when practical Victorian engineers began taking up the problem, the technical feasibility of constructing a tunnel under the Channel has never really been seriously questioned. Yet, despite effort piled on effort and campaign mounted on campaign, over all the years, by engineers, politicians, and promoters, nobody has quite been able to push the project through. Up to now, every time the proponents of a tunnel have tried to advance the scheme, they have encountered a difficulty harder to understand, harder to identify, and, indeed, harder to break through than any rock stratum.