The Tunnel Under the Channel

by Thomas Whiteside

Such exasperating objections to joining England and France above water sent Thomé de Gamond back to the idea of doing the job under the sea, and between 1842 and 1855 he made various energetic explorations of the Channel area in an attempt to determine the feasibility of driving a tunnel through the rock formations under the Strait. Geological conditions existing in the middle of the Strait were, up to that time, almost entirely a matter of surmise, based on observations made on the British and French sides of the Channel, and in the process of finding out more about them, Thomé de Gamond decided to descend in person to the bottom of the Channel to collect geological specimens. In 1855, at the age of forty-eight, he had the hardihood to make a number of such descents, unencumbered by diving equipment, in the middle of the Strait. Naked except for wrappings that he wound about his head to keep in place pads of buttered lint he had plastered over his ears, to protect them from high water pressure, he would plunge to the bottom of the Channel, weighted down by bags of flints and trailing a long safety line attached to his body, and a red distress line attached to his left arm, from a rowboat occupied also by a Channel pilot, a young assistant, and his own daughter, who went along to keep watch over him. On the deepest of these descents, at a point off Folkestone, Thomé de Gamond, having put a spoonful of olive oil into his mouth as a lubricant that would allow him to expel air from his lungs without permitting water at high pressure to force its way in, dived down weighted by four bags of flints weighing a total of 180 pounds. About his waist he wore a belt of ten inflated pig's bladders, which were to pull him rapidly to the surface after he had scooped up his geological specimen from the Channel bed and released his ballast, and, using this system, he actually touched bottom at a depth of between 99 and 108 feet. His ascent from this particular dive was not unremarkable, either; in an account of it, he wrote that just after he had left the bottom of the Channel with a sample of clay

... I was attacked by voracious fish, which seized me by the legs and arms. One of them bit me on the chin, and would at the same time have attacked my throat if it had not been preserved by a thick handkerchief.... I was fortunate enough not to open my mouth, and I reappeared on top of the water after being immersed fifty-two seconds. My men saw one of the monsters which had assailed me, and which did not leave me until I had reached the surface. They were conger eels.

Thomé de Gamond's geological observations, although they were certainly sketchy by later standards, were enough to convince him of the feasibility of a mined tunnel under the Channel, and in 1856 he drew up plans for such a work. This was to be a stone affair containing a double set of railroad tracks. It was to stretch twenty-one miles, from Cap Gris-Nez to Eastwear Point, and from these places was to connect, by more than nine miles at each end of sloping access tunnels, with the French and British railway systems. The junctions of the sloping access tunnels and the main tunnel itself were to be marked by wide shafts, about three hundred feet deep, at the bottom of which travelers would encounter the frontier stations of each nation. The line of the main tunnel was to be marked above the surface by a series of twelve small artificial islands made of stone. These were to be surmounted with lighthouses and were to contain ventilating shafts connecting with the tunnel. Thomé de Gamond prudently provided the ventilation shafts in his plans with sea valves, so that in case of war between England and France each nation would have the opportunity of flooding the tunnel on short notice. The tunnel was designed to cross the northern tip of the Varne, a narrow, submerged shelf that lies parallel to the English coast about ten miles off Folkestone, and so close to the surface that at low tide it is only about fifteen feet under water at its highest point. Thomé de Gamond planned to raise the Varne above water level, thus converting it into an artificial island, by building it up with rocks and earth brought to the spot in ships. Through this earth, engineers would dig a great shaft down to the level of the tunnel, so that the horizontal mining of the tunnel as a whole could be carried on from four working faces simultaneously, instead of only two. The great shaft was also to serve as a means of ventilating the tunnel and communicating with it from the outside, and around its apex Thomé de Gamond planned, with a characteristically grand flourish, an international port called the Étoile de Varne, which was to have four outer quays and an interior harbor, as well as amenities such as living quarters for personnel and a first-class lighthouse. As for the shaft leading down to the railway tunnel, according to alternate versions of Thomé de Gamond's plan, it was to be at least 350 feet—and possibly as much as 984 feet—in diameter, and 147 feet deep; and, according to a contemporary account in the Paris newspaper La Patrie, "an open station [would be] formed as spacious as the court of the Louvre, where travelers might halt to take air after running a quarter of an hour under the bottom of the Strait."

From the bottom of this deep station, trains might also ascend by means of gently spiraling ramps to the surface of the Étoile de Varne, La Patrie reported. The newspaper went on to invite its readers to contemplate the panorama at sea level:

Imagine a train full of travelers, after having run for fifteen minutes in the bowels of the earth through a splendidly lighted tunnel, halting suddenly under the sky, and then ascending to the quays of this island. The island, rising in mid-sea, is furnished with solid constructions, spacious quays garnished with the ships of all nations; some bound for the Baltic or the Mediterranean, others arriving from America or India. In the distance to the North, her silver cliffs extending to the North, reflected in the sun, is white Albion, once separated from all the world, now become the British Peninsula. To the South ... is the land of France.... Those white sails spread in the midst of the Straits are the fishing vessels of the two nations.... Those rapid trains which whistle at the bottom of the subterranean station are from London or Paris in three or four hours.

In the spring of 1856, Thomé de Gamond obtained an audience with Napoleon III and expounded his latest plan to him. The Emperor reacted with interest and told the engineer that he would have a scientific commission look into the matter "as far as our present state of science allows." The commission found itself favorable to the idea of the work in general but lacking a good deal of necessary technical information, and it suggested that some sort of preliminary agreement between the British and French Governments on the desirability of the tunnel ought to be reached before a full technical survey was made. Encouraged by the way things seemed to be going, Thomé de Gamond set about promoting his scheme more energetically than ever. He obtained a promise of collaboration from three of Britain's most eminent engineers—Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Locke—and in 1858 he traveled to London to advance the cause of the tunnel among prominent people and to promote it in the press. Leading journals were receptive to the idea. An article in the Illustrated London News referred to the proposed tunnel as "this great line of junction," and said that it would put an end to the commercial isolation that England was being faced with by the creation on the Continent of a newly unified railway system that was making it possible to ship goods from Central to Western Europe without breaking bulk. The article added that the creation of the tunnel

... would still preserve for this country for the future that maritime isolation which formed its strength throughout the past; for the situation of the tunnel beneath the bed of the sea would enable the government on either coast, in case of war, as a means of defense, to inundate it immediately.... According to the calculations of the engineer, the tunnel might be completely filled with water in the course of an hour, and afterwards three days would be required, with the mutual consent of the two Governments, to draw off the water, and reestablish the traffic.

Thomé de Gamond's visit to England was climaxed by a couple of interviews on the subject of the Channel tunnel that he obtained with Prince Albert, who supported the idea with considerable enthusiasm and even took up the matter in private with Queen Victoria. The Queen, who was known to suffer dreadfully from seasickness, told Albert, who relayed the message to Thomé de Gamond, "You may tell the French engineer that if he can accomplish it, I will give him my blessing in my own name and in the name of all the ladies of England." However, in a discussion Thomé de Gamond had earlier had with Her Majesty's Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who was present at one of the engineer's interviews with Albert, the idea of the tunnel was not so well received. The engineer found Palmerston "rather close" on the subject. "What! You pretend to ask us to contribute to a work the object of which is to shorten a distance which we find already too short!" Thomé de Gamond quoted him as exclaiming when the tunnel project was mentioned. And, according to an account by the engineer, when Albert, in the presence of both men, spoke favorably of the benefits to England of a passage under the Channel, Lord Palmerston "without losing that perfectly courteous tone which was habitual with him" remarked to the Prince Consort, "You would think quite differently if you had been born on this island."

While Thomé de Gamond was occupied with his submarine-crossing projects, other people were producing their own particular tunnel schemes. Most of them seem to have been for submerged tubes, either laid down directly on the sea bed or raised above its irregularities by vertical columns to form a sort of underwater elevated railway. Perhaps the most ornamental of these various plans was drawn up by a Frenchman named Hector Horeau, in 1851. It called for a prefabricated iron tube containing a railway to be laid across the Channel bed along such judiciously inclined planes as to allow his carriages passage through them without their having to be drawn by smoke-bellowing locomotives—a suffocatingly real problem that most early Channel-tunnel designers, including, apparently, Thomé de Gamond, pretty well ignored. The slope given to Horeau's underground railway was to enable the carriages to glide down under the Channel from one shoreline with such wonderful momentum as to bring them to a point not far from the other, the carriages being towed the rest of the way up by cables attached to steam winches operated from outside the tunnel exit. The tunnel itself would be lighted by gas flames and, in daytime, by thick glass skylights that would admit natural light filtering down through the sea. The line of the tube was to be marked, across the surface of the Channel, by great floating conical structures resembling pennanted pavilions in some medieval tapestry. The pavilions were to be held in place by strong cables anchored to the Channel bottom; they were also to contain marine warning beacons. This project never got under the ground.

In 1858, an attempt to assassinate Napoleon III brought France into the Italian war against Austria, and when word spread in France that the assassin's bombs had been made in Birmingham, a chill developed between the French and British Governments. This led to a wave of fear in England that another Napoleon might try a cross-Channel invasion. All this froze out Thomé de Gamond's tunnel-promoting for several years. He did not try again until 1867, when he exhibited a set of revised plans for his Varne tunnel at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. In doing so he concluded that he had pushed the cause of the tunnel about to the limit of his personal powers. Thirty-five years of work devoted to the problem had cost him a moderate personal fortune, and he was obliged to note in presenting his plan that "the work must now be undertaken by collective minds well versed in the physiology of rocks and the workings of subterranean deposits." After that, Thomé de Gamond retired into the background, squeezed out, it may be, by other tunnel promoters. In 1875, an article in the London Times that mentioned his name in passing reported that he was "living in humble circumstances, his daughter supporting him by giving lessons on the piano." He died in the following year.