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SIR EDWARD WATKINwas a vociferously successful promoter from the Midlands. The son of a Manchester cotton merchant, Watkin had passed up a chance at the family business in favor of railways in the early days of the age of steam, and it is a measure of his generally acknowledged shrewdness at railway promotion that in his mid-twenties, having become secretary of the Trent Valley Railway, he negotiated its sale to the London North Western Railway at a profit of £438,000. Now in his early sixties, Watkin was chairman of three British railway companies, the Manchester, Sheffield Lincolnshire Railway, the Metropolitan (London) Railway, and the South-Eastern Railway—the last-named being a company whose line ran from London to Dover via Folkestone—and one of his big current schemes was the formation of a through route under a single management—his own, naturally—from Manchester and the north to Dover. It was while he was busily promoting this scheme that Watkin caught the Channel-tunnel fever. He realized that part of the land the South-Eastern Railway owned along its line between Folkestone and Dover lay happily accessible to the ribbon of Lower Chalk thatdipped into the sea in the direction of Dover and stretched under the bed of the Strait, and it wasn't long before he was conjuring up visions of a great system in which his projected Manchester-Dover line, instead of stopping at the Channel shoreline, would carry on under the Strait to the Continent.

One of Sir Edward Watkin's first steps toward determining the technical feasibility of constructing a tunnel was to call in, sometime in the mid-seventies, William Low, whose own tunnel company had quite fallen apart, for engineering consultation. Watkin decided to aim for a twin tunnel based on Low's idea, which would have its starting point in the area west of Dover and east of Folkestone, and he put his own engineers to work on the job. In 1880, the engineers sank a seventy-four-foot shaft by the South-Eastern Railway line at Abbots Cliff, about midway between Folkestone and Dover, and began driving a horizontal pilot gallery seven feet in diameter along the Lower Chalk bed in the direction of the sea off Dover. By the early part of the following year, the experimental heading extended about half a mile underground. His engineers having satisfied themselves that the Lower Chalk was lending itself as well as expected to being tunneled, Sir Edward went ahead and formed the Submarine Continental Railway Company, capitalized at £250,000 and closely controlled by the South-Eastern Railway Company, to take over the existing tunnel workings and to continue them on a larger scale, with the aim of constructing a Channel tunnel connecting with the South-Eastern's coastal rail line. At the same time, he reached an understanding with the French Channel Tunnel Company on co-ordination of English and French operations; he also engineered through Parliament—he was an M.P. himself, and that helped things a bit—a bill giving the South-Eastern power to carry out thecompulsory purchase of certain coastal land in the general direction taken by the existing heading.

Then Sir Edward's engineers sank a second shaft, farther to the east but in alignment with the first heading, 160 feet below a level stretch of ground by the South-Eastern Railway line at Shakespeare Cliff, just west of Dover, 120 feet below high water, and began boring a new seven-foot pilot tunnel that dipped down with the Lower Chalk bed leading into the Channel. This second boring, like the first, was carried out with the use of a tunneling machine especially designed for the purpose by Colonel Frederick Beaumont, an engineer who had had a hand in the construction of the Dover fortifications. The Beaumont tunneling machine, a prototype of some of the most powerful tunneling machines in use nowadays, was run by compressed air piped in from the outside, and the discharge of this air from the machine as it worked also served as a way of keeping the gallery ventilated. The cutting of the rock was done by a total of fourteen steel planetary cutters set in two revolving arms at the head of the machine; with each turn of the borer a thin paring of chalk 5/16 of an inch thick was shorn away from the working face, the spoil being passed by conveyor belt to the back of the machine and dumped into carts or skips that were pushed by hand along the length of the gallery on narrow-gauge rails. The machine made one and a half to two revolutions a minute, and Sir Edward estimated for his stockholders that with simultaneous tunneling with the use of similar equipment from the French shore—the French Tunnel Company had already sunk a 280-foot shaft of its own at Sangatte and was preparing to drive a gallery toward England—the Channel bottom would be pierced from shore to shore by a continuous single pilot tunnel, twenty-two miles long, in three and a half years. Once this was done, according to Sir Edward's plans, the seven-foot gallery was to be enlarged byspecial cutting machinery to a fourteen-foot diameter, and a double tunnel, thickly lined with concrete and connected by cross-passages, constructed. (Four miles of access tunnel were to be added on the French, and possibly on the English, side, too.) The completed tunnel was to be lighted throughout by electric light—a novelty already being tried out in the pilot tunnel by the well-known electrical engineer C. W. Siemens—and the trains that ran through it between France and Britain were to be hauled by locomotives designed by Colonel Beaumont. Instead of being run by smoke-producing coal, the locomotives were to be propelled by compressed air carried behind the engine in tanks, and, like the Beaumont tunneling machine, the engine was supposed to keep the tunnel ventilated by giving out fresh air as it went along. (A lot of air was to be released in the tunnel in the course of a day; a tentative schedule called for one train to traverse it in one direction or another every five minutes or so for twenty hours out of the twenty-four.)

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." From the abyss of this submerged station, trains arriving from the Continent were to be raised, an entire train at a time, to the level of the existing South-Eastern line by a giant hydraulic lift. (Actually, constructing an elevator capable of raising such an enormous load would not seem as unlikely a feat in the eighties as it might to many people now; Victorian engineers were expert in the use of hydraulicpower for ship locks and all sorts of other devices, and, in fact, hydraulic power was so commonly used that the London of half a century ago had perhaps eight hundred miles of hydraulic piping laid below the streets to work industrial presses, motors, and most of the cranes on the Thames docks.)

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. An energetic lobbyist in Parliament for all sorts of causes, not excluding his own commercial projects, he was known as a habitual conferrer of friendly little gestures upon important people in and out of government, and his kindness is said to have gone so far at one time that he provided Mr. Gladstone with the convenience of a private railway branch line that went right to the statesman's country home.

The driving of the Channel-tunnel pilot gallery at Shakespeare Cliff offered Sir Edward a handy opportunity for exercising his gifts in the field of public relations, and he took full advantage of it. Week after week, as the boring of the tunnel progressed, he invited large groups of influential people, as many as eighty at a time, including politicians and statesmen, editors, reporters, and artists, members of great families, well-known financiers and businessmen from Britain and abroad, and members of the clergy and the military establishment to be his guests on a trip by special train from London to Dover at Shakespeare Cliff. There, at the Submarine Continental Railway Company workings, the visitorswere taken down into the tunnel to inspect the creation of the new experimental highway to the Continent. A typical enough descriptive paragraph in the press concerning one of these visits (on this occasion a group of prominent Frenchmen were the guests of Sir Edward) is contained in a contemporary report in theTimes:

The visitors were lowered six at a time in an iron "skip" down the shaft into the tunnel. 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.

Sir Edward Watkin, in a speech he made at a Submarine Continental Railway Company stockholders' meeting shortly after such a visit (the main parts of the speech were duly paraphrased in the press), found the effect of the electric light (operated on something called the Swan system) in the tunnel to be just as striking as theTimesreporter had—only brighter.

He thought the visit might be regarded as a remarkable one. Their colleague, Dr. Siemens, lighted up the tunnel with the Swan light, and it was certainly a beautiful sight to see a cavern, as it were, under the bottom of the sea made in places as brilliant as daylight.

While on their way by tramcar to view the working of Colonel Beaumont's boring machine at the far end of the tunnel, visitors stopped after a certain distance to enjoy another experience—a champagne party held in a chamber cut in the side of the tunnel. A contemporary artist's sketch in theIllustrated London Newsrecords the sight of a group of visitors clustered around a bottle-laden table at one of these way side halts. Mustachioed and bearded, and wearing Sherlock Holmes deerstalker caps and dust jackets, they are shown, in tableaued dignity, standing about within a solidly timbered cavelike area with champagne glasses in their hands; and for all the Victorian pipe-trouser formality of their posture there is no doubt that the subjects are having a good time. After such a refreshing pause, the visitors would be helped on the tramcars again and escorted on to see the boring machine cutting through the Lower Chalk and to admire the generally dry appearance of the tunnel, and after that they would be taken back to the surface and given a splendid lunch either in a marquee set up near the entrance to the shaft or at the Lord Warden Hotel, in Dover, where more champagne would be served, along with other wines and brandies, more toasts to the Queen's health proposed, and speeches made on the present and future marvels of the tunnel, the forwardness of its backers, and the new era in international relations that the whole project promised. These lunches were also convenient occasions for the speakers to pooh-pooh the claims of the rival tunnel scheme of Lord Richard Grosvenor's Channel Tunnel Company, which was still being put forward, although entirely on paper, and to make announcements of miscellaneous items of news about progress in the Lower Chalk.

Thus, at one of these lunches at the Lord Warden Hotel held in the third week of February, 1882, Mr. Myles Fenton, the general manager of the South-Eastern Railway, took occasionto announce to a large party of visitors from London that boring of the gallery had now reached a distance of eleven hundred yards, or nearly two-thirds of a mile, in the direction of the end of the great Admiralty Pier at Dover. According to an account in theTimes, Mr. Fenton read to the interested gathering a telegram he had received from Sir Edward, who was unable to be present, but who by wire "expressed the hope that by Easter Week a locomotive compressed air engine would be running in the tunnel, of which it was expected the first mile would by that time have been made. (Cheers.)"

Sometimes these lunches were held down in the tunnel itself, and general conditions down there were such that even ladies attended them, on special occasions, as a contemporary magazine account of a visit paid to the gallery by a number of engineers with their families makes clear.

The visitors were conducted twenty at a time to the end on a sort of trolley or benches on wheels drawn by a couple of men. In the centre of the tunnel a kind of saloon, decorated with flowers and evergreens, was arranged, and, on a large table, glasses and biscuits, etc., were spread for the inevitable luncheon. There was no infiltration of water in any part. In the places where several small fissures and slight oozings had appeared during the boring operations, a shield in sheet iron had been applied against the wall by the engineer, following all the circumference of the gallery and making it completely watertight. There they were as in a drawing-room, and the ladies having descended in all the glories of silks and lace and feathers were astonished to find themselves asimmaculate on their return as at the beginning of their trip. The atmosphere in the tunnel was not less pure, but even fresher than outside, thanks to the compressed air machine which, having acted on the excavator at the beginning of the cutting, released its cooled air in the centre of the tunnel.

With the widespread talk of champagne under the sea, potted plants flourishing under the electric lights, and bracing breezes blowing within the Lower Chalk, going down from London to attend one of Sir Edward's tunnel parties seems to have become one of the fashionable things to do in English society in the early part of 1882. By the beginning of spring, visitors taken down into the tunnel and entertained by Sir Edward included such eminent figures as the Lord Mayor of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Prince and Princess of Wales. To judge by this stage of affairs, the boring of the tunnel was going on under the most agreeable of auspices.

Behind all the sociability and the stream of publicity engendered in the press by the visits of well-known people to the tunnel, the situation was not quite so promising. While the physical boring was going ahead smoothly enough in the Lower Chalk, the promotion of the tunnel as a full-scale project was encountering growing resistance from within the upper crust of The Establishment. The fact seems to be that the British Government had never felt altogether easy about the idea of the Channel tunnel from the start, and although it had never formally expressed any misgivings about the scheme as a whole, it had always been careful not to associate itself with the enterprise, and its attitude toward its progress generally had been one of reluctant acquiescence. Whatever disquiet people in government felt about the tunnel projectappears to have been expressed in three general ways—first, in the introduction of caveats of a military nature; second, in proposals to delay the progress of the scheme on other than military grounds; and third, in a general, nameless suspicion of the whole idea. Such reservations had been evident even in 1875, when the Channel Tunnel Company applied to Parliament for powers to carry out experimental work at St. Margaret's Bay.

To exemplify the first kind of reservation put forward, the Board of Trade, the governmental department under whose surveillance such commercial schemes came, made a point of insisting that for defense purposes the Government must retain absolute power to "erect and maintain such [military] works at the English mouth of the Tunnel as they may deem expedient," and in case of actual or threatened war to close the tunnel down. As for the tendency of governmental people to find other grounds for objection in the project, this could be exemplified by the delaying action of the Secretary to the Treasury, when in 1875 it looked as though Parliament were about to take action on the Channel-tunnel bill. In a memorandum to the Foreign Office, the Secretary sought to have the tunnel bill laid aside at the last moment of its consideration before Parliament so that the answers to all sorts of important jurisdictional questions could be sought—for example, "If a crime were committed in the Tunnel, by what authority would it be cognizable?"[1]And as for the third, unnamed kind of objection, Queen Victoria, who, with her late husband (Prince Albert died in 1861), had once been soenthusiastic about the idea of a Channel tunnel, simply changed her mind about the entire business; in February of 1875, the Queen wrote Disraeli, without elaborating, that "she hopes that the Government will do nothing to encourage the proposed tunnel under the Channel which she thinks very objectionable."

Ever since 1875, all these official doubts and misgivings had continued to lurk in the background of the Government's dealings with the Channel-tunnel promoters—especially military misgivings about the scheme. Apart from putting down the usual bloody insurrections among native populations while she went about the business of maintaining her colonial territories, Britain was at peace with the world. As far as her military relations with the Continent stood, the threats of Napoleon I to invade the island had not been forgotten, and even in the reign of Napoleon III there had been occasional alarms about an invasion, but the country's physical separation from the Continent tended to make the military tensions existing over there seem rather comfortingly remote. Britain's home defenses were left on a pretty easygoing basis, the country's reliance on resistance to armed attack being placed, in traditional fashion, in the power of the Royal Navy to control her seas—meaning, for all practical purposes, its ability to control the Channel. With the Navy and the Channel to protect her shores, Britain in the seventies and eighties got along at home with a professional army of only sixty thousand men, as against a standing army in France of perhaps three-quarters of a million. Seasickness or no seasickness, the Channel was considered to be a convenient manpower and tax-money saver. The advantages of the Channel to Victorian England were perhaps most eloquently expressed by Mr. Gladstone in the course of an article of his in theEdinburgh Reviewin 1870 on England's relationship to the military and political turmoil existing on the Continent."Happy England!" he wrote in a brief panegyric on the Channel. "Happy ... that the wise dispensation of Providence has cut her off, by that streak of silver sea, which passengers so often and so justly execrate ... partly from the dangers, absolutely from the temptations, which attend upon the local neighborhood of the Continental nations.... Maritime supremacy has become the proud—perhaps the indefectible—inheritance of England." And Mr. Gladstone went on, after dwelling upon one of his favorite themes, the evils of standing armies and the miserable burden of conscription, to suggest that Englishmen didn't realize just how grateful they ought to be for the Channel:

Where the Almighty grants exceptional and peculiar bounties, He sometimes permits by way of counterpoise an insensibility to their value. Were there but a slight upward heaving of the crust of the earth between France and Great Britain, and were dry land thus to be substituted for a few leagues of sea, then indeed we should begin to know what we had lost.

These remarks of Mr. Gladstone's on the Channel appear to have made a powerful impression on opinion in upper-class England; for many years after their publication his partly Shakespearean phrase, "the streak of silver sea"—or a variation of it, "the silver streak"—remained as a standard term in the vocabulary of Victorian patriotism. Not surprisingly, considering his views in 1870, the attitude of Mr. Gladstone in 1881 and 1882, during his term as Prime Minister, toward the plan of Sir Edward Watkin to undermine those Straits the statesman had so extolled was an equivocal one.

Indeed, quite a number of people in and around Whitehall had considerably stronger reservations about the Channel-tunnel project than Mr. Gladstone did. These misgivingshad to do with fears that a completed tunnel under the Channel might form a breach in England's traditional defense system, and in June of 1881 they first came to public notice in the form of an editorial in theTimes. Discussing the Channel-tunnel project, theTimes, while conceding that "As an improvement in locomotion, and as a relief to the tender stomachs of passengers who dread seasickness, the design is excellent," went on to observe that "from a national [and military] point of view it must not the less be received with caution." And the paper asked, "Shall we be as well off and as safe with it as we now are without it? Will it be possible for us so to guard the English end of the passage that it can never fall into any other hands than our own?" TheTimesfrankly doubted it, and questioned whether, if the tunnel were built, "a force of some thousands of men secretly concentrated in a [French] Channel port and suddenly landed on the coast of Kent" might not be able by surprise to seize the English end of the tunnel and use it as a bridgehead for a general invasion of England. At the very least, the paper warned, the construction of the tunnel meant that "a design for the invasion of England and a general plan of the campaign will be subjects on which every cadet in a German military school will be invited to display his powers," and it suggested that in the circumstances the Channel had best be left untunneled. "Nature is on our side at present," theTimesconcluded gravely, "and she will continue so if we will only suffer her. The silver streak is our safety." The author of a letter to theTimesprinted in the same issue declared that the tunnel, if constructed, could be seized by the French from within as easily as from without, and that "in three hours a cavalry force might be sent through to seize the approaches at the English end."

To all this Sir Edward Watkin replied easily that the tunnel, when it was finished, could at any time be rendered unusablefrom the British end by "a pound of dynamite or a keg of gunpowder." However, the negative attitude of a journal as influential as theTimeswas a setback for the project. As a result, the Government increased its caution about the tunnel. When, at the end of 1881, Sir Edward drew up a private bill for presentation during the coming year to Parliament that would formally grant the South-Eastern full authority to buy further coastal lands in the Shakespeare Cliff area and to complete the construction of and to maintain a Channel tunnel (Lord Richard Grosvenor and the proprietors of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway came up with a similar bill on behalf of the Channel Tunnel Company), the Board of Trade held departmental hearings on the rival schemes, and at these hearings further attention was turned to the question of the military security of the tunnel in the event of its being attacked. At these proceedings, Sir Edward, who appeared for the purpose of testifying to the civilizing magnificence of his project, was put somewhat on the defensive by questions about the desirability of the tunnel from a military point of view. He found himself in the disconcerting position of being obliged to show not so much the practicability of building a Channel tunnel as the practicability of disabling or destroying it. However, making the most of the situation, he declared that fortifying the English end of the tunnel, and knocking it out of commission in case of hostile action by another power, was a simple enough matter to be accomplished in any number of ways—by flooding it, by filling it with steam, by bringing it under the gunfire of the Dover fortifications, by exploding electrically operated mines laid in it, or choking it with shingle dumped in from the outside. (There was even mention, at the hearings, of a proposal to pour "boiling petroleum" down upon invaders.) Getting into the spirit of the thing in spite of himself, Sir Edward told the examining committee confidently,"I will give you the choice of blowing up, drowning, scalding, closing up, suffocating and other means of destroying our enemies.... You may touch a button at the Horse Guards and blow the whole thing to pieces."

Notwithstanding Sir Edward's categorical assurances, the wisdom of constructing the tunnel came under vigorous attack at the hearings from a formidably high official military source—from Lieutenant-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, the Adjutant General of the British Army. A veteran of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny who was considered to be an expert on the art of surprise attack—his routing of such foes as King Koffee in the first Ashanti War of 1873-74, as well as the great promptitude with which he was said to have "restored the situation" in the Zulu War, made him a well-known figure to the British public—Sir Garnet Wolseley had a dual reputation as an imperialist general and a soldier with advanced ideas on reform of the supply system of the British Army. In fact, his enthusiasm for efficiency was such that the phrase "All Sir Garnet" was commonly used in the Army as a way of saying "all correct." The actor George Grossmith made himself up as Wolseley to sing the part of "a modern Major-General" in performances in the eighties of Gilbert and Sullivan'sThe Pirates of Penzance. Sir Garnet later became Lord Wolseley and Commander-in-Chief of the British Army. Sir Garnet Wolseley's opinions of the tunnel project were very strong ones. In a long memorandum he submitted to the Board of Trade committee examining the tunnel project, he described the Channel as "a great wet ditch" for the protection of England, the like of which, he said, no Continental power, if it possessed one instead of a land frontier, would "cast recklessly away, by allowing it to be tunnelled under." And he denounced the construction of a Channel tunnel on the ground that it wouldbe certain to create what he termed "a constant inducement to the unscrupulous foreigner to make war upon us." In agitated language, General Wolseley invoked the opinion of the late Duke of Wellington that England could be invaded successfully, and he reiterated the fear previously expressed by theTimesthat the English end of the tunnel might be seized from the outside—before any of its defenders had a chance of setting in motion the mechanisms for blocking it up—by a hostile force landing nearby on British soil, whereupon it could readily be converted into a bridgehead for a general invasion of the country. He also declared that "the works at our end of the tunnel may be surprised by men sent through the tunnel itself, without landing a man upon our shores." General Wolseley went on to show just how the deed could be done:

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. Twenty thousand infantry could thus be easily despatched in 20 trains and allowing ... 12 minutes interval between each train, that force could be poured into Dover in four hours.... The invasion of England could not be attempted by5,000 men, but half that number, ably led by a daring, dashing young commander might, I feel, some dark night, easily make themselves masters of the works at our end of the tunnel, and then England would be at the mercy of the invader.

General Wolseley conceded that an attack from within the tunnel itself would be difficult if even a hundred riflemen at the English end had previously been alerted to the presence of the attackers, but he doubted that the vigilance of the defenders could always maintain itself at the necessary pitch. And he put it to the committee: "Since the day when David secured an entrance by surprise or treachery into Jerusalem through a tunnel under its walls, how often have places similarly fallen? and, I may add, will again similarly fall?" General Wolseley also found highly questionable the efficacy of the various measures proposed for the protection of the tunnel. He declared that "a hundred accidents" could easily render such measures useless. Thus, for example, he found fault with proposals to lay electrically operated mines inside the tunnel ("A galvanic battery is easily put out of order; something may be wrong with it just when it is required ... the gunpowder may be damp"); proposals to admit the sea into the tunnel by explosion ("an uncertain means of defense"); and proposals to flood it by sluice-gates at the English end ("These water conduits [might] become choked or unserviceable when required" and the "drains rendered useless by treachery"). Then, after pointing out all the frailties of the contemplated defenses, General Wolseley went on to assert that the construction of the tunnel would necessitate, at very least, the conversion of Dover at enormous expense into a first-class fortress and that it could very well make necessary the introduction into England on a permanentbasis of compulsory military service to meet the increased threat to Britain's national security.

Surely [Sir Garnet concluded] John Bull will not endanger his birth-right, his property, in fact all that man can hold most dear ... simply in order that men and women may cross to and fro between England and France without running the risk of seasickness.

Sir Garnet reinforced the arguments against the tunnel in personal testimony before the committee. In this testimony he emphasized, among other things, his conviction that once an enemy got a foothold at Dover, England would find herself utterly unable "short of the direct interposition of God Almighty"—an eventuality that Sir Garnet did not appear to count on very heavily—to raise an army capable of resisting the invaders. And the inevitable result of such a default, Sir Garnet told the committee, would be that England "would then cease to exist as a nation."

Sir Garnet's fears for Britain were not shared in a memorandum submitted to the committee by another high Army officer, Lieutenant-General Sir John Adye, the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance. Sir John gave his opinion that "a General in France, having the intention of invading England, would not, in my opinion, count on the tunnel as adding to his resources." He maintained that the argument that the English end of the tunnel might be taken from within could be safely dismissed, as invading troops could be destroyed as they arrived "by means of a small force, with a gun or two, at the mouth of the tunnel." As for the possibility of a hostile force landing on British soil to seize the mouth of the tunnel, he questioned whether "an enemy, having successfully invaded England, [should] turn aside to capture a very doubtful line of communication, when the main object of hisefforts was straight before him." General Adye thought that the invaders "would probably feel a much stronger disposition to march straight on London and finish the campaign."

However, the frontal attack on the project by General Wolseley was not a factor to be discounted by any means. Rallying to it in typical fashion, Sir Edward Watkin attempted to stifle the spread of patriotic fears about the tunnel by giving more large lunches at the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover, and he tried to keep all prospects bright by inviting more and more prominent people down into the tunnel at Shakespeare Cliff to marvel at the workings and to refresh themselves with champagne under the electric lights. By mid-February, his guests in the tunnel included no less than sixty Members of Parliament whose support he hoped to obtain for his pending Tunnel Bill, and on one occasion he even succeeded in having the Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone himself, come down into the tunnel and be shown around. Sir Edward assured his stockholders that what he called "alarmist views" concerning the construction of the tunnel were without any real foundation. Addressing an extraordinary general meeting of the Submarine Continental Railway Company, Sir Edward quoted from an alleged reaction of Count von Moltke on the matter: "The invasion of England through the proposed tunnel I consider impossible. You might as well talk of invading her through that door"—pointing to the entrance to his library. Sir Edward brushed the arguments of military men aside as a collection of "hobgoblin arguments" by "men who would prefer to see England remain an island for ever, forgetting that steam had abolished islands, just as telegraphy had abolished isolated thought." He insisted that the tunnel promoters were engaged in a project at once idealistic and practical, and bravely declared their motto to be identical to that of the South-Eastern Railway Company—"Onwards."

By way of countering Sir Garnet Wolseley's invocation of the opinion of the Duke of Wellington on the dangers of invasion, the promoters put it about that the Duke of Wellington in his day had strongly opposed the construction of a railway between Portsmouth and London on the ground that it would dangerously facilitate the movement of a French army upon London. They asserted that one unnamed but very high English military figure had even expressed alarm, at the time of the Universal Exhibition of 1851, that the English Cabinet did not insist on the Queen's retiring to Osborne, her country place on the Isle of Wight, because of the large numbers of foreigners at the Exhibition, including three thousand men of the French National Guard, who were allowed to parade the streets of London in uniform, wearing their side arms. And pro-tunnelers recalled in derisive fashion Lord Palmerston's denunciation of the Suez Canal project as "a madcap scheme which would be the ruin of our Indian Empire, were it possible of construction, and which would spell disaster to those who had the temerity to assert it." Colonel Beaumont, as an engineer and military man, too, wrote an article challenging the validity of General Wolseley's conclusions about the tunnel. Colonel Beaumont maintained that Dover might already be regarded as "a first-class fortress, quite safe from anycoup de mainfrom without." Concerning an attack by bodies of infantry or cavalry through the tunnel, he declared, "They cannot come by train; as, irrespective of any suspicions on the part of the booking clerks, special train arrangements would have to be made to carry [them]; they cannot march, as they would be run over by the trains, running, as they would do, at intervals of ten minutes, or oftener, without cessation, day or night." Colonel Beaumont also outlined, in his article, a number of precautionary measures that could be taken to secure the safety of the English end of the tunnel. They included asystem of pumping coal smoke instead of compressed air from a ventilating shaft into the tunnel, and also the provision of a system of iron water mains that would connect the sea with the ventilating shaft and make it possible for the officer of the guard, in case of invasion, to flood the tunnel by turning a stopcock. In accordance with these proposed measures, Sir Edward, early in 1882, attempted to forestall further military criticism of the Channel-tunnel scheme by having such a ventilating shaft sunk at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff, about a mile from the main shaft, and having a start made on another horizontal gallery bored from the foot of the new shaft in the direction of the main pilot tunnel under the sea. The new gallery was four feet instead of seven feet in diameter—the smaller aperture in itself being an additional measure of protection, Sir Edward explained, in that intruders would find it impossible to walk along the ventilation shaft in an upright position or in any numbers. A friendly article on the tunnel in theIllustrated London Newsat the beginning of March noted significantly that not only the entrance at the English end—either at Abbots Cliff or at Sir Edward's proposed glassed-in railway station at Shakespeare Cliff—would be under the fire of the eighty-ton turret guns installed on the Admiralty Pier, but that "it is to be observed how completely [the entrance to the new ventilating shaft] is commanded both from the sea and from the Pier, and also from the guns of the fortress." TheIllustrated London Newsobligingly showed the principle of the thing by running a large two-page-wide engraving depicting, in handsomely apocalyptic style, the hypothetical destruction of the entire tunnel workings and, presumably, the invaders inside them, amid great ballooning clouds of smoke from gun batteries everywhere—from the end of the Admiralty Pier, from points within the Dover land fortifications, and from the cannonading broadsides of British navalmen-of-war standing offshore. The fate of invaders from floodwaters was depicted in a more sensational London publication, thePenny Illustrated Paper, which published an engraving a foot and a half long and a foot high illustrating "Sir Edward Watkin's remedy for the invasion scare: Drowning the French Pharaoh in the Channel Tunnel." The engraving showed a cutaway section of the tunnel under the Channel near the English end and, rising upward at the left, a staired chamber of rock equipped with sluice-gates and set in the white cliffs. In this chamber, two figures in top hats and frock coats are standing and gazing down on the tunnel, which is filled with French infantry led by plumed, helmeted officers on horseback. One of the figures in the cliff chamber, evidently meant to represent Sir Edward Watkin, is in the act of calmly operating a turncock that has loosed, through the sluices, a dreadful flood cascading down into the tunnel upon the invaders, who are turning to flee in panic.

Vivid as these scenes of destruction were, they had little effect on the anti-tunnel forces. Already, in February, another attack on the tunnel scheme had appeared in the literary magazineThe Nineteenth Century, signed by Lord Dunsany. The article, repeating the claim that the tunnel project was a menace to Britain's security, referred to the capacity of the Dover fortress system to defend itself against a modern invading fleet as "contemptible." Lord Dunsany wrote that he had gone down to Dover to examine the famous fortress and had found that with the exception of the two recently installed turret guns on the Admiralty Pier, the guns "generally speaking were of an obsolete pattern—popguns, in fact." And he asserted that when he had remarked on the relatively modern appearance of one of the larger guns in a particularly commanding position of the fortress, "I was told by an artilleryman that there were orders against firing it, as it would bring down the brickwork of the rampart."

Soon after this, an anonymous article in theArmy and Navy Gazettedeclared that "The Island has been invaded again and again" and it reminded theGazette'sreaders that "The present constitution of the country depends on the last successful invasion by a Dutch Prince with Dutch troops, and the overthrow of the King, by an army largely composed of foreigners." The article took Lieutenant-General Sir John Adye severely to task for having found the tunnel a good security risk, and it even went so far afield in its criticism of him as to find fault with the General for what it called his "deliberate, vehement, and long-continued resistance to the introduction of the breech-loading system in our artillery that placed us at the fag-end of all the world, when we ought to have been first."

Then, in March, 1882,The Nineteenth Centurycarried an article against the tunnel by Professor Goldwin Smith, who wrote that the protection of the Channel, by exempting England from the necessity of keeping a large standing army, had preserved the country from military despotism and enabled her to move steadily in the path of political progress. The Channel, Professor Smith wrote, in the past had preserved England from the Armada and from the army of Napoleon I; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it had preserved the Reformation; and in the eighteenth century it had preserved her from the spread of revolutionary fevers and from subjection to foreign tyranny. Now, he said, it was the barrier between Britain's industrial people and military conscription, and he went on, in an echo of Mr. Gladstone's earlier remarks in theEdinburgh Review, to declare of the Channel that "A convulsion of nature which should dry it up would be almost as fatal to England as one which should ruin the dykes would be to Holland."

Under these circumstances of increasing controversy, the attitude of the Board of Trade toward the tunnel projectbecame one of further reserve. In February, the Board informed the War Office that the military question of the tunnel had assumed such magnitude that a decision on it should be taken not on a departmental level but on the higher governmental policy level, and it suggested that the War Office start its own investigations on the military aspect of the matter.

Commenting on the prevailing French attitude toward British fears about the tunnel project, the Paris correspondent of the LondonTimesobserved mildly that "the political uneasiness which the scheme has raised on the other side does not exist here.... No Frenchman, of course, regards it as jeopardizing national security. Frenchmen see in it a greater facility for visiting the United Kingdom, and for relieving the monotony of Swiss tours by a trip to the Scotch highlands."

In satirical fashion, a paragraph inPunchundertook to summarize the reaction in another European country:

Bogie! The Italian Government are so struck by the alarm exhibited by Sir Garnet Wolseley at the prospect of a Channel Tunnel, that they have closed the Mount Cenis and St. Gotthard Tunnels, and left travellers to the mountain diligences. Their reason for doing this is the fact that Napoleon really crossed the Alps, while he only threatened to invade England.

As for reactions in Germany, the British chargé d'affaires in Dresden reported in a dispatch to the Foreign Office that he had questioned the Chief of Staff of the 12th (Saxon) Corps—"an officer of high attainments"—on his attitude toward the possible invasion of England through the Channel tunnel, or through sudden seizure of the English end from the outside.

He wrote that General von Holleben, the officer in question, had observed, in connection with the practicability of landing a Continental force and taking the British end, that although such an operation was not impossible, "that [it] would succeed in the face of our military and moral resources, railways and telegraphs, he should believe when he saw it happen."

General von Holleben then remarked that the idea of moving an Army-Corps 25 miles beneath the sea was one which he did not quite take in. The distance was a heavy day's march; halts must be made; and the column of troops would be from eight to ten miles long. He was unable to realize all this off hand, and he did not know but what we were talking of a chimoera.I observed that no one appeared to have asked what would happen to the air of the tunnel if bodies of 20,000 or even 10,000 men were to move through at once. The General said that this atmospheric difficulty was new to him, and it did not sound very soluble.

I observed that no one appeared to have asked what would happen to the air of the tunnel if bodies of 20,000 or even 10,000 men were to move through at once. The General said that this atmospheric difficulty was new to him, and it did not sound very soluble.

But the fears of the War Office were not stilled by such observations as these. On February 23, the War Office announced that it was appointing a Channel Tunnel Defense Committee, headed by Major-General Sir Archibald Alison, the chief of British Army Intelligence, to collect and examine in detail scientific evidence on "the practicability of closing effectually a submarine railway tunnel" in case of actual or apprehended war.

The Board of Trade, in the meantime, did its best to hold Sir Edward Watkin and his project off at arm's length. On March 6, 1882, the secretary of the Board of Trade, which had been keeping an eye on newspaper accounts of the progressof the tunnel, wrote to remind Sir Edward of the vital fact that all the foreshore of the United Kingdom below high-water mark at Dover was "prima faciethe property of the Crown and under the management of the Board of Trade," and that while the department did not wish to impede progress it distinctly wished to give notice that the Government "hold themselves free to use any powers at their disposal in such a matter as Parliament may decide, or as the general interest of the country may seem to them to require." In other words, the Board told the Submarine Continental Railway Company that it could not drive its tunnel toward France without trespassing on Crown property extending all the way from high-water mark to the three-mile limit of British jurisdiction—the traditionally accepted limit of the carrying power of cannon.

The claim of the Crown to the foreshore in this case was, however, one that Sir Edward Watkin disputed. He claimed that through an arrangement with a landowner near Shakespeare Cliff, and by certain purchases of land from the Archbishop of Canterbury as head of the Church of England, the tunnel proprietors had come into possession of ancient manorial rights, originally granted by the Crown itself, that permitted them to exploit the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff as they saw fit, including the right to tunnel under it. Sir Edward had claimed that he was having made an extensive legal search of the title in question, which would take a little while.

But the notification from the Board of Trade was an ominous development for Sir Edward and his scheme; and even more ominous signs were to follow. During March, anti-tunneling forces in Britain circulated a great petition among prominent Englishmen against the scheme, for presentation to Parliament. The petition, recording the conviction of the signatories that a Channel tunnel "would involve this countryin military dangers and liabilities from which, as an island, it has hitherto been happily free," was published in the April issue ofThe Nineteenth Century, and it was signed not only by military people but by many of the most diversely eminent literary, scientific, and ecclesiastical men of the day—including Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, Professor T. H. Huxley, Cardinals Newman and Manning, and the Archbishop of York—as well as a great cloud of names from the nobility and the landed gentry. In an eloquent article accompanying the petition, the editor ofThe Nineteenth Century, James Knowles, implicitly added the name of William Shakespeare to the list of anti-tunnel signatories by invoking the John of Gaunt speech fromRichard II:

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