The Tunnel Under the Channel

by Thomas Whiteside

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: