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In the social historyof England, the English Channel, that proud sea passage some three hundred and fifty miles long, has separated that country from the Continent as by a great gulf or a bottomless chasm. However, at its narrowest point, between Dover and Cap Gris-Nez—a distance of some twenty-one and a half miles—the Channel, despite any impression that storm-tossed sea travelers across it may have of yawning profundities below, is actually a body of water shaped less like a marine chasm than like an extremely shallow puddle. Indeed, the relationship of depth to breadth across the Strait of Dover is quite extraordinary, being as one to five hundred. This relationship can perhaps be most graphically illustrated by drawing a section profile of the Channel to scale. If the drawing were two feet long, the straight line representing the level of the sea and the line representing the profile of the Channel bottom would be so close together as to be barely distinguishable from one another. At its narrowest part, the Channel is nowhere more than two hundred and sixteen feet deep, and for half of the distance across, it is less than a hundred feet deep. It is just this extreme shallowness, in combination with strong windsand tidal currents flowing in the Channel neck between the North Sea and the Atlantic, that makes the seas of the Strait of Dover so formidable, especially in the winter months. The weather is so bad during November and December that the odds of a gale's occurring on any given day are computed by the marine signal station at Dunkirk at one in seven, and during the whole year there are only sixty periods in which the weather remains decent in the Channel through a whole day. Under these difficult conditions, the passage of people traveling across the Channel by ferry between England and France is a notoriously trying one; the experience has been mentioned in print during the last hundred years in such phrases as "that fearful ordeal," "an hour and a half's torture," and "that unspeakable horror." Writing in theRevue des Deux Mondesin 1882, a French writer named Valbert described the trip from Dover to Calais as "two centuries ... of agony." Ninety-odd years ago, an article dealing with the Channel passage, inThe Gentleman's Magazine, asserted that hundreds of thousands of people crossing the Strait each year suffered in a manner that beggared description. "Probably there is no other piece of travelling in civilized countries, where, within equal times, so much suffering is endured; certainly it would be hard to find another voyage of equal length which is so much feared," the author said, and he went on to report that only one day out of four was calm, on the average, while about three days in every eight were made dreadful to passengers by heavy weather. He concluded, with feeling, "What wonder that, under such circumstances, patriotism often fails to survive; and that if any wish is felt in mid-Channel, it is that, after all, England was not an island."
How many Englishmen, their loyalty having been subjected to this strain, might express the same wish upon safely gaining high ground again is a question the writer inTheGentleman's Magazinedid not venture to discuss. However, there is no question about the persistence with which, during the past century at least, cross-Channel ferry passengers have spoken about or written about the desirability of some sort of dry-land passage between England and France. Engineers have been attracted to the idea of constructing such a passage for at least a hundred and fifty years. During that time, they have come up with proposals for crossing the Channel by spanning it with great bridges, by laying down submersible tubes resting on the sea bottom or floating halfway between sea bed and sea level, or even by using transports shaped like enormous tea wagons, whose wheels would travel along rails below sea level and whose platforms would tower high above the highest waves. But more commonly than by any other means, they have proposed to do away with the hazards and hardships of the Channel boat crossing by boring a traffic tunnel under the rock strata that lie at conveniently shallow depths under sea level. The idea of a Channel tunnel, at once abolishing seasickness and connecting England with the Continent by an easy arterial flow of goods and travelers, always has had about it a quality of grand simplicity—the simplicity of a very large extension of an easily comprehended principle; in this case, digging a hole—that has proved irresistible in appeal to generations not only of engineers but of visionaries and promoters of all kinds.
The tunnel seems always to have had a capacity to arouse in its proponents a peculiarly passionate and unquenchable enthusiasm. 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 gracefullyabout nearby—one might almost think that the tunnel was an accomplished reality, and the artist merely a conscientious reporter of an existing scene. Such is the minute detail in which the tunnel has been designed by various people that eighty-six years ago the French Assembly approved a tunnel bill that specified the price of railway tickets for the Channel-tunnel journey, and even contained a clause requiring second-class carriages to be provided with stuffed seats rather than the harder accommodations provided for third-class passengers. And an Englishman called William Collard, who died in 1943, after occupying himself for thirty years with the problem of the Channel tunnel, in 1928 wrote and published a book on the subject that went so far as to work out a time-table for Channel-tunnel trains between Paris and London, complete with train and platform numbers and arrival and departure times at intermediate stations in Kent and northern France. 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. 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.
The difficulty seems to lie in the degree to which, among Englishmen, the Channel has been not only a body of waterbut 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 LondonDaily 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 theContinent, 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 asThe 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 mileslong 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 FrenchGovernment 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 LondonTimesin 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."