Thomas Whiteside

“ At the bottom of this shaft, 163 feet below the surface of the ground, the mouth of the tunnel was reached, and the visitors took their seats on small tramcars which were drawn by workmen. So evenly has the boring machine done its work that one seemed to be looking along a great tube with a slightly downward set, and as the glowing electric lamps, placed alternately on either side of the way, showed fainter and fainter in the far distance, the tunnel, for anything one could tell from appearances, might have had its outlet in France. ”

“ He might be an undecided man, or a man expecting defeat by the Opposition, or a man paralyzed by the knowledge that the tunnel was full of innocent people whom his order would condemn to instant death, in a form which is at once most painful and most appalling to the imagination. ”

“ Now that so many of the conditions that have made for England's traditional economic, military, and cultural insularity have gradually subsided, like the ancient Wealden Island that once lay in what is now the Strait of Dover, the question of connecting Britain physically to the Continent is at last in the realm of practical political possibility. ”

“ Taking into account such economic advantages, the great boon to tourism that they believe a tunnel would represent, and the intangible psychological impetus that they claim a fixed link between France and Britain would give to the dream of a politically as well as economically united Europe, the pro-tunnelers believe that the construction of their railway under the Channel would be just about the greatest thing to happen to Britain in this century. ”

“ The Times discussed the merits of the latest tunnel and bridge schemes in tones of expository reasonableness, without committing itself to either one scheme or the other, and without accusing the would-be moat-crossers, as of old, of flaunting the will of Providence. And the Times wound up its editorial on a meaningful note by observing, in reference to the quotations with which the editorial had been prefaced, that while Shakespeare had the first words, John Donne deserved the last:
"No man is an island, entire of itself." ”

“ 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 [8] about nearby—one might almost think that the tunnel was an accomplished reality, and the artist merely a conscientious reporter of an existing scene. ”

“ As the experimental work progressed, Sir Edward Watkin saw to it that all the splendid details about the Channel-tunnel scheme were constantly brought to the attention of the South-Eastern's shareholders, the press, and the public. Sir Edward, besides being a nineteenth-century railway king, was also something of a twentieth-century public-relations operator. He was a firm believer in the beneficial effects of giving big dinners, a pioneer in the art of organizing big junkets, and an adept at getting plenty of newspaper space. ”

“ 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 Times wrote that, unless it was much mistaken, "the publication of the Blue Book will be found to have closed the whole question of the Channel Tunnel for a long time to come."
Undermined by land, overmined at sea, sluice-ridden at its entrance, and liable to asphyxiating vapors at intervals, the Tunnel will hardly be regarded by nervous travellers as a very pleasant alternative even to the horrors of seasickness....
The whole system of defense must forever be [85] at the mercy of blunderers, criminals, and madmen. ”

“ Queen Victoria, once pro-tunnel, later turned anti-tunnel; [10] 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 ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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 ”

“ When the subject of constructing a Channel tunnel will come up for a decision one way or the other before the British Cabinet and Parliament again nobody seems willing to predict, and what the Cabinet will decide nobody seems willing to predict, either. However, D'Erlanger, who says that he would consider another tunnel thumbs down by the British Government or Parliament "a negation of progress," is always happy to talk about the benefits a Channel tunnel would confer upon Europe. "You have fifty million people on this side of the Channel and two hundred million plus on the Continental side. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ A couple of thousand armed men might easily come through the tunnel in a train at night, avoiding all suspicion by being dressed as ordinary passengers, and the first thing we should know of it would be by finding the fort at our end of the tunnel, together with its telegraph office, and all the electrical arrangements, wires, batteries, etc., intended for the destruction of the tunnel, in the hands of an enemy. We know that ... trains could be safely sent through the tunnel every five minutes, and do the entire distance from the station at Calais to that at Dover in less than half an hour. ”

“ The Channel Tunnel Study Group people, as it turned out late last year, are not alone in their ambitions for a physical [123] connection between France and Britain. Last fall, when the French and British Governments decided—on British initiative—to negotiate with each other on a fixed connection between the two countries, it became clear that a dark horse had been entered in the Channel sweepstakes with the publicizing of the new proposal for a cross-Channel bridge made by a new French company that is headed by Jules Moch, a former French Minister of Interior. ”

“ Then Adams pointed out to me something jutting horizontally out of the chalk cliffs a little above and to the side of the railroad cutting. It was a large and long-rusted collection of wheels, gears, and cams, all compounded together into the shape of some fantastic Dadaist engine. "What you see there is the remains of the last machine ever tried out for boring a Channel tunnel," Adams said. "That's the Whittaker boring machine, an electrically driven affair, powered by a steam-driven generator, and it was tried out here after the First World War. ”

“ Trains coming through the tunnel from France were to emerge into the daylight and the ordinary open air of England either from a four-mile-long access tunnel connected to the South-Eastern's railway line at Abbots Cliff or—this was a favored alternative plan of Sir Edward's—at Shakespeare Cliff via a station to be constructed in a great square excavated a hundred and sixty feet deep in the ground, which would be covered over with glass, lighted by electric light, and equipped "with large waiting rooms and refreshment rooms." ”

“ Notwithstanding all her misgivings on the subject of committing herself to abandonment of her ancient aloofness from the Continent, Britain can hardly ignore the implications of the relentless march of that process once described by the Duke of Wellington over a century ago in the heyday of the sailing ship, when he observed that Britain and the Continent were rapidly becoming joined by an "isthmus of steam." ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is true that we take somewhat similar risks in ordinary railway travelling, but imagination counts for a good deal in such matters, and the terrors of the Channel Tunnel under an adequate system of defense might easily affect the imagination so strongly as to render the terrors of seasickness insignificant by comparison. ”

“ Precisely what Britain's entry into the Common Market would mean in terms of increased commercial intercourse between Britain and the Continent no one knows, but the increase plainly would be enormous, and considering this potentiality, proponents of the Channel tunnel are not backward in claiming that Britain's present cross-Channel transportation facilities are grossly inadequate to meet the demands ahead. They are even inadequate, the pro-tunnelers claim, for coping with Britain's present needs. ”

“ In the May issue of The Nineteenth Century, Major-General Sir E. Hamley raised the question of whether the French, invading Britain [62] by train through the tunnel, might not seize some distinguished English people and carry the captives along on the engine as hostages, so that however thoroughly the officer in charge of the defensive apparatus at the English end were alerted to their presence, "still he might well be expected to pause if suddenly certified that he would be destroying, along with the enemy in the Tunnel, some highly important Englishmen." ”

“ That the means of ventilating the tunnel could have been and be so readily disconnected from the boring machine (i.e., by the movement of a single lever that would pour a stream of compressed air coming from the supply pipe directly into the tunnel) that it has never been necessary that a single inch of cutting should have taken place in order to protect life or to secure ventilation, nor can such necessity arise in the future. ”

“ In the past, it was never possible for proponents of the tunnel to advance their cause with any success so long as their advocacy was not based on the prior existence of any profound change in Britain's traditional economic and strategic special and separate place in Europe, or of any change in the peculiar British sense of being an island people apart. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Sea gulls were shrieking overhead, and the Channel waves were roaring and heaving insistently. I had a slight headache, and I mentioned this to Adams. "Oh, yes, I have the same thing," he said. "Although the air in the tunnel is remarkably fresh, considering the length of time it's been locked up and the fact that there's only one entrance, there isn't quite as much oxygen in it as one might want." Jim began to lock up the entrance again, and while he was doing so, Adams suggested that we might see if we could spot the entrance shaft on the plateau above us. ”

“ The London Daily News demanded to know whether "anyone who is in the least acquainted with English character and history" could deny the country's susceptibility to periodic panics. The Daily News dwelt apprehensively on the inevitable result of panics arising out of the construction of a Channel tunnel:
We should be constantly beginning expensive and elaborate schemes for strengthening the defences according to the fashionable idea of the day.... ”

“ Could the defenders at the English end always be relied on as absolutely loyal Englishmen? The Field, without naming any names, wrote of "proof that in the United Kingdom itself ... there are numbers of daring and reckless persons" who, "to gain their sinister ends ... would not hesitate to sacrifice the independence of the country." Frankly, the paper feared possible acts of treachery in the tunnel by "a handful of unprincipled desperadoes." ”