The difficulty seems to lie in the degree to which, among Englishmen, the Channel has been not only a body of water but a state of mind. Because of the prevalence of this curious force, the history of the scheme to put a tunnel below the Channel has proved almost as stormy as the Channel waves themselves. Winston Churchill, in an article in the London Daily Mail, wrote in 1936, "There are few projects against which there exists a deeper and more enduring prejudice than the construction of a railway tunnel between Dover and Calais. Again and again it has been brought forward under powerful and influential sponsorship. Again and again it has been prevented." Mr. Churchill, who could never be accused of lacking understanding of the British character, was obliged to add that he found the resistance to the tunnel "a mystery." Some thirty-five times between 1882 and 1950 the subject of the Channel tunnel was brought before Parliament in one form or another for discussion, and ten bills on behalf of the project have been rejected or set aside. On several occasions, the Parliamentary vote on the tunnel has been close enough to bring the tunnel within reach of becoming a reality, and in the eighties the construction of pilot tunnels for a distance under the sea from the English and French coasts was even started. But always the tunnel advocates have had to give way before persistent opposition, and always they have had to begin their exertions all over again. Successive generations of Englishmen have argued with each other—and with the French, who have never showed any opposition to a Channel tunnel—with considerable vehemence. The ranks of pro-tunnel people have included Sir Winston Churchill (who once called the British opposition to the tunnel "occult"), Prince Albert, and, at one point, Queen Victoria; and the people publicly lining themselves up with the anti-tunnel forces have included Lord Randolph Churchill (Sir Winston's father), Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Professor Thomas Huxley, and, more recently, First Viscount Montgomery of Alamein. Queen Victoria, once pro-tunnel, later turned anti-tunnel; her sometime Prime Minister, William E. Gladstone, took an anti-tunnel position at one period when he was in office, and later, out of it, turned pro-tunnel. Throughout its stormy history the tunnel project has had the qualities of fantasy and nightmare—a thing of airy grace and claustrophobic horror; a long, bright kaleidoscope of promoters' promises and a cavern resounding with Cyclopean bellowing. Proponents of the tunnel have called it an end to seasickness, a boon to peace, international understanding, and trade; and they have hailed it as potentially the greatest civil-engineering feat of their particular century. Its opponents have referred to it sharply as "a mischievous project," and they have denounced it as a military menace that would have enabled the French (or Germans) to use it as a means of invading England—the thought of which, in 1914, caused one prominent English anti-tunneler, Admiral Sir Algernon de Horsey, publicly to characterize as "unworthy of consideration" the dissenting views of pro-tunnelers, whom he contemptuously referred to as "those poor creatures who have no stomach for an hour's sea passage, and who think retention of their dinners more important than the safety of their country." Over the years, anti-tunnel forces have used as ammunition an extraordinary variety of further arguments, which have ranged from objections about probable customs difficulties at the English and French ends of the tunnel to suspicions that a Channel tunnel would make it easier for international Socialists to commingle and conspire.

Behind all these given reasons, no matter how elaborate or how special they might be, there has always lurked something else, a consideration more subtle, more elusive, more profound, and less answer able than any specific objections to the construction of a Channel tunnel—the consideration of England's traditional insular position, the feeling that somehow, if England were to be connected by a tunnel with the Continent, the peculiar meaning, to an Englishman, of being English would never be quite the same again. It is this feeling, no doubt, that in 1882 motivated an article on the tunnel, in so sober a publication as The Solicitors' Journal, to express about it an uneasiness bordering on alarm, on the ground that, if successful, the construction of a tunnel would "effect a change in the natural geographical condition of things." And it is no doubt something of the same feeling that prompted Lord Randolph Churchill, during a speech attacking a bill for a Channel tunnel before the House of Commons in 1889—the bill was defeated, of course—to observe skillfully that "the reputation of England has hitherto depended upon her being, as it were, virgo intacta."

If the proponents and promoters of the tunnel have never quite succeeded in putting their project across in all the years, they have never quite given up trying, either; and now, in a new strategic era of nuclear rockets, a new era of transport in which air ferries to the Continent carry cars as well as passengers, and a new era of trade, marked by the emergence and successful growth of the European Economic Community, or Common Market, the pro-tunnel forces have been at it again, in what one of the leading pro-tunnelers has called "a last glorious effort to get this thing through." This time they have encountered what they consider to be the most encouraging kind of progress in the entire history of the scheme. In April, 1960, an organization called the Channel Tunnel Study Group announced, in London, a new series of proposals for a Channel tunnel, based on a number of recent elaborate studies on the subject. The proposals called for twin parallel all-electric railway tunnels, either bored or immersed, with trains that would carry passengers and transport, in piggyback fashion, cars, buses, and trucks. The double tunnel, if of the immersed kind, would be 26 miles long between portals. A bored tunnel, as planned, would be 32 miles long and would be by far the longest traffic tunnel of either the underwater or under-mountain variety in the world. The longest continuous subaqueous traffic tunnel in existence is the rail tunnel under the Mersey, connecting Liverpool and Birkenhead, a distance of 2.2 miles; the longest rail tunnel through a mountain is the Simplon Tunnel, 12.3 miles in length. The Channel tunnel would run between the areas of Sangatte and Calais on the French side, and between Ashford and Folkestone on the English side. Trains would travel through it at an average speed of 65 miles an hour, reaching 87 miles an hour in some places, and at rush hours they would be capable of running 4,200 passengers and 1,800 vehicles on flatcars every hour in each direction. While a true vehicular tunnel could also be constructed, the obviously tremendous problems of keeping it safely ventilated at present make this particular project, according to the engineers, prohibitively expensive to build and maintain. The train journey from London to Paris via the proposed tunnel would take four hours and twenty minutes; the passenger trains would pass through the tunnel in about thirty minutes. Passengers would pay 32 shillings, or $4.48–$2.92 cheaper than the cost of a first-class passenger ticket on the Dover-Calais sea-ferry—to ride through the tunnel; the cost of accompanied small cars would be $16.48, a claimed 30 per cent less than a comparable sea-ferry charge. The tunnel would take four to five years to build, and the Study Group estimated that, including the rail terminals at both ends, it would cost approximately $364,000,000.

All that the Study Group, which represents British, French and American commercial interests, needs to go ahead with the project and turn it into a reality is—besides money, and the Study Group seems to be confident that it can attract that—the approval of the British and French Governments of the scheme. For all practical purposes, the French Government never has had any objection to a fixed installation linking both sides of the Channel, and as far as the official British attitude is concerned, when the British Government announced, in July, 1961, that it would seek full membership in the European Common Market, most of the tunnel people felt sure that the forces of British insularity which had hindered the development of a tunnel for nearly a century at last had been dealt a blow to make them reel. But what raised the pro-tunnelers' excitement to the greatest pitch of all was the decision of the French and British Governments, last October, to hold discussions on the problem of building either a bridge or a tunnel. When these discussions got under way last November, the main question before the negotiators was the economic practicality of such a huge undertaking.

Yet, with all the encouragement, few of the pro-tunnelers in England seem willing to make a flat prediction that the British Government will actively support the construction of a tunnel. They have been disappointed too often. Then again, despite the generally high hopes that this time the old strategic objections to the construction of a tunnel have been pretty well forgotten, pro-tunnelers are well aware that a number of Englishmen with vivid memories of 1940 are still doubtful about the project. "The Channel saved us last time, even in the age of the airplane, didn't it?" one English barrister said a while ago, in talking of his feelings about building the Channel tunnel. The tunnel project has the open enmity of Viscount Montgomery, who has made repeated attacks on it and who in 1960 demanded, in a newspaper interview, that before the Government took any stand on behalf of such a project, "The British people as a whole should be consulted and vote on the Channel tunnel as part of a General-Elections program." And, to show that the spirit of the anti-tunnelers has not lost its resilience, Major-General Sir Edward L. Spears, in the correspondence columns of the London Times in April of that same year, denounced the latest Channel-tunnel scheme as "a plan which will not only cost millions of public money, but will let loose on to our inadequate roads eighteen hundred more vehicles an hour, each driven by a right-of-the-road driver in a machine whose steering wheel is on the left."

Two

The first scheme for the construction of a tunnel beneath the English Channel was put forward in France, in 1802, by a mining engineer named Albert Mathieu, who that year displayed plans for such a work in Paris, at the Palais du Luxembourg and the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines. Mathieu's tunnel, divided into two lengths totaling about eighteen and a half miles, was to be illuminated by oil lamps and ventilated at intervals by chimneys projecting above the sea into the open air, and its base was to be a paved way over which relays of horses would gallop, pulling coachloads of passengers and mail between France and England in a couple of hours or so of actual traveling time, with changes of horses being provided at an artificial island to be constructed in mid-Channel. Mathieu managed to have his project brought to the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul, who was sufficiently impressed with it to bring it to the attention of Charles James Fox during a personal meeting of the two men during the Peace of Amiens. Fox described it as "one of the great enterprises we can now undertake together." But the project got no further than this talking stage. In 1803, a Frenchman named de Mottray came up with another proposal for creating a passage underneath the Channel. It consisted of laying down sections of a long, submerged tube on top of the sea bed between England and France, the sections being linked together in such a way as to form a watertight tunnel. However, Mottray's project petered out quickly, too, and the subject of an undersea connection between the two countries lay dormant until 1833, when it attracted the attention of a man named Aimé Thomé de Gamond, a twenty-six-year-old French civil engineer and hydrographer of visionary inclinations.

Thomé de Gamond was to turn into an incomparably zealous and persistent projector of ways in which people could cross between England and France without getting wet or seasick; he devoted himself to the problem for no less than thirty-four years, and had no hesitation in exposing himself to extraordinary physical dangers in the course of his researches. Unlike the plans of his predecessors, Thomé de Gamond's were based upon fairly systematic hydrographic or geological surveys of the Channel area. In 1833 he made the first of these surveys by taking marine soundings to establish a profile of the sea bottom in a line between Calais and Dover; on the basis of this, he drew up, in 1834, a plan for a submerged iron tube that was to be laid down in prefabricated sections on the bed of the Strait of Dover and then lined with masonry, the irregular bottom of the sea meanwhile having been prepared to receive the tube through the leveling action of a great battering-ram and rake operated from the surface by boat. By 1835, Thomé de Gamond modified this scheme by eliminating the prefabricated tube in favor of a movable hydrographic shield that would slowly advance across the Channel bottom, leaving a masonry tube behind it as it progressed. But the rate of progress, he calculated, would be slow; the work was to take thirty years to complete, or fifteen years if work began on two shores simultaneously. Thomé de Gamond moved on to schemes for other ways of crossing the Channel, and between 1835 and 1836 he turned out, successively, detailed plans for five types of cross-Channel bridges. They included a granite-and-steel bridge of colossal proportions, and with arches "higher than the cupola of St. Paul's, London," which was to be built between Ness Corner Point and Calais; a flat-bottomed steam-driven concrete-and-stone ferryboat, of such size as to constitute "a true floating island," which would travel between two great piers each jutting out five miles into the Channel between Ness Corner Point and Cap Blanc-Nez; and a massive artificial isthmus of stone, which would stretch from Cap Gris-Nez to Dover and block the neck of the English Channel except for three transverse cuttings spanned by movable bridges, which Thomé de Gamond allowed across his work for the passage of ships. Thomé de Gamond was particularly fond of his isthmus scheme. He traveled to London and there promoted it vigorously among interested Englishmen during the Universal Exhibition of 1851, but he reluctantly abandoned it because of objections to its high estimated cost of £33,600,000 and to what he described as "the obstinate resistance of mariners, who objected to their being obliged to ply their ships through the narrow channels."