Onward to no sound, save the splashing made by the tall workmen [who drew the trolleys] tramping through the mud and the drip, drip, drip of the water upon the hood above our heads, we are dragged and pushed ... under the bed of the Channel.... Sometimes, in the fitful flashes of light, the eye rests on falling red rivulets, like streams of blood, flowing down the damp walls. So we go on until the electric lamps cease altogether, and the long, awful cave is enveloped in a darkness that would be impenetrable but for the glimmer of a few tallow candles stuck into the bare walls of the cutting.
At the end of the tunnel the action of the boring machine was briefly demonstrated, this time by special permission of the Board of Trade, and then the party was escorted out of the tunnel and taken to a good lunch, presumably at the Lord Warden Hotel. Another engraving in the same issue of The Graphic shows members of the same party of officers, chairs drawn slightly back, sitting about a luncheon table. The monocled guests, ranged on each side of a clutter of bottles, potted ferns, place cards, and an interesting variety of glasses—including, as one can see fairly clearly, champagne glasses, claret glasses, and hock glasses—are being addressed by a bearded speaker. They look dazed. Yet while using his best softening-up techniques on the Army officers, Sir Edward did not let up his fire on his principal opponents among the military. Thus, during 1884, when he reintroduced his Tunnel Bill on the floor in Parliament (it was rejected by 222 votes to 84) he ridiculed the anti-tunnel generals for publicly confessing an inability to cope with defending a frontier "no bigger than the door of the House of Commons." Dealing with the question of British insularity, he also introduced the argument that since France and England had once been united as part of the same continental land mass his opponents, in refusing to unite them again, were openly showing distrust of the wisdom of Providence in having created the connection in the first place. This last assertion really incensed the editors of the London Times, who had been steadily invoking Providence as their ally against the tunnel all along. The Times ran an editorial declaring angrily that no stronger reason could be found for distrusting the whole tunnel scheme than the fact that Sir Edward had been reduced to using such an argument. The Times added, severely, "Ordinary people will probably be content to take the world as it appears in historic times. Everything that we possess and are—our character, our language, our freedom, our institutions, our religion, our unviolated hearths, and our far-extended Empire—we owe to the encircling sea; and when Englishmen try to penetrate the designs of Providence they will not seek them in geological speculations, but will rather thank Him Who 'isled us here.'"
Sir Edward, in his indomitable fashion, not only pursued his geological speculations but also kept pursuing the tunnel question in Parliament. In 1887, a year in which he changed the name of the Submarine Continental Railway Company to that of the Channel Tunnel Company (he had taken over the long-moribund rival company in 1886), he went on such a powerful campaign on behalf of a new Channel Tunnel Bill that it was defeated in the House by only seventy-six votes. In 1888, he tried again, and even managed to persuade Mr. Gladstone, now the leader of the Opposition, that the Channel could be tunneled under with propriety. As a result, Mr. Gladstone, in June 1888, gave his personal support to Sir Edward's Tunnel Bill and delivered a long Parliamentary speech on the subject. In this dissertation the venerable statesman, while taking nothing back about the wisdom of Providence in placing the Channel where it was, said he had now come to feel that a Channel tunnel could be used "without altering in any way our insular character or insular security, to give us some of the innocent and pacific advantages of a land frontier." But even Mr. Gladstone's support couldn't swing it. Parliament would not agree to the tunnel. At last, after all these setbacks, Sir Edward had to consider the tunnel project as a lost cause, if only temporarily. He stopped promoting it in 1894, having become involved in the meantime in a couple of alternate projects—a railway tunnel between Scotland and Ireland and a ship canal in Ireland between Dublin and Galway. Also, in 1889, he had become chairman of a company to erect at Wembley Park, near London, a great iron tower, modeled on the Eiffel Tower, which was to be known as the Watkin Tower. The Watkin Tower didn't get very high. Only a single stage was completed, and this was opened to the public in 1896; it was demolished eleven years later. Sir Edward Watkin died at Northenden, Cheshire, in 1901.
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.