Read Ebook: The Tunnel Under the Channel by Whiteside Thomas

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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 by 5,000 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 ; proposals to admit the sea into the tunnel by explosion ; and proposals to flood it by sluice-gates at the English end . 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 permanent basis of compulsory military service to meet the increased threat to Britain's national security.

Surely 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, turn aside to capture a very doubtful line of communication, when the main object of his efforts 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."

Under these circumstances of increasing controversy, the attitude of the Board of Trade toward the tunnel project became 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.

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 charg? d'affaires in Dresden reported in a dispatch to the Foreign Office that he had questioned the Chief of Staff of the 12th 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 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.

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 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.

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-Paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands....

The editor went on to declare, more prosaically, that "To hang the safety of England at some most critical instant upon the correct working of a tap, or of any mechanical contrivance, is quite beyond the faith of this generation of Englishmen."

We should be constantly beginning expensive and elaborate schemes for strengthening the defences according to the fashionable idea of the day.... They would be about half carried out by the time the next panic occurred, and then they would be obsolete.... Now it would be elaborate fortifications at Dover itself; now a great chain of forts to hem it in from inland; now the old scheme of the fortification of London; now the establishment of forts out at sea over the tunnel.... Is it worth while to run the chance...?

The Premier might think himself justified in destroying twenty millions of property ... but also, he might not. 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. They would all be drowned in darkness. The responsibility would be overwhelming for an individual, and a Cabinet, if dispersed, takes hours to bring together.

Imagine him for a moment sitting in consultation. His military advisers tell him that the decisive moment has come. "I think, gentlemen," says the minister, turning to his colleagues, "that we are all agreed--the Tunnel must be immediately destroyed. Fire the mine!" "There is one other point," says the officer, "on which I request instructions--at what time am I to execute the order?" "At once, sir; telegraph at once, and in five minutes the blasting charge can be fired." "But," persists the officer, "trains laden with non-combatants are at this moment in the Tunnel. They enter continuously at twenty minutes' intervals; there are never less than four trains, two each way, in the Tunnel at the same time; each train contains some three hundred persons ... I could not destroy twelve hundred non-combatants without very special instructions."

And Lord Bury asked, "What would any minister, under such circumstances, do?"

Dr. Tyndall concluded, firmly, "The problem of supplying fresh air to persons surrounded by an irrespirable atmosphere has been already solved by Mr. Fleuss and others."

Meetings and debates to discuss the tunnel menace were held all over England, and even at a meeting of so progressive an organization as the Balloon Society of Great Britain, which was held in the lecture room of the Royal Aquarium at Westminster, the subject was discussed with "some warmth of feeling ... on both sides." There was a wide circulation of sensational pamphlets, written in pseudohistorical style, that purported to chronicle the sudden downfall of England at the end of the nineteenth century through the existence of a Channel tunnel--Dover taken, the garrison butchered, the English end of the tunnel incessantly vomiting forth armed men, London invaded, and England enslaved--all of this in a few hours' time.

The day the inauguration of the Submarine Tunnel will be celebrated, England will no longer be an island, and that is a stupendous event in the history of an island people.... Islanders have always considered themselves the favorites of Providence, which has undertaken to provide for their security and independence.... They congratulate themselves on their separation from the rest of the world by natural frontiers over which nobody can squabble. They feel that they hold their destiny in their own hands, and that the effect of the follies and crimes of others could not reach them.... Their character is affected by this. Like Great Britain, every Englishman is an island where it is not easy to land.

And the article asked, wonderingly, "What would an England that was not an island be?"

The deliberations of the scientific investigating committee appointed by the War Office and presided over by Sir Archibald Alison lasted from the latter part of February until the middle of May. In the committee's report of its findings to the War Office, the complexity and solemn nature of the questions laid before it were indicated by their mere classification and subclassification. Thus, the contingencies for rendering a Channel tunnel absolutely useless to an enemy were considered under the headings of:

And the committee reported that it had considered measures to secure the tunnel against under such subcategories as:

After reviewing the situation in great detail, and from every aspect, the committee suggested a long list of precautionary measures that, it said, it would be necessary to use, singly or in combination, to protect and seal off the tunnel against any enemy attempts to invade England directly through the tunnel or by seizing the English end from the outside and using it as a bridgehead for invasion. The list included these recommendations:

The mouth of the tunnel should be protected by "a portcullis or other defensible barrier."

A trap bridge should be set in connection with this portcullis.

Means should be provided for closing off the ventilation, and for "discharging irrespirable gases or vapors into the tunnel."

Arrangements should be made for rapidly discharging loads of shingle into the land portion of the tunnel, shutting it off.

The land portion of the tunnel should be thoroughly mined with explosives capable of being fired by remote control exercised not only from within the central fort at Dover but also from more distant points inland, so that even if the protective fortress fell to the enemy, the tunnel still could be permanently destroyed.

In addition, a truck loaded with explosives and equipped with a time fuse should be kept ready by the entrance, so that it could be sent coasting down into the tunnel for some distance, there to explode automatically.

Arrangements should be made for temporarily flooding the tunnel by means of culverts operated by sluice valves.

The tunnel should emerge inland, out of firing range from the sea. And it was imperative that it emerge under the guns and "in the immediate vicinity of a first-class fortress, in the modern acceptation of the term, a fortress which could only be reduced after a protracted siege both by land and sea."

And so on.

Even after drawing up all these elaborate precautions for closing the tunnel from the English end, the Channel Tunnel Defense Committee was left with some nagging doubts about their adequacy. In a concluding paragraph of its report, the committee pointed out that "it must always be borne in mind that, in dealing with physical agencies, an amount of uncertainty exists," and that it was "impossible to eliminate human fallibility." As a consequence, the members stated cautiously, "it would be presumptuous to place absolute reliance upon even the most comprehensive and complete arrangements."

Concerning all the various measures proposed to protect the tunnel, Sir Garnet had no confidence in them at all. He stressed once more the unreliability of anything mechanical or electrical, and he added the new argument that whatever secret devices, such as mines, were installed in the tunnel for its protection were bound to come to the knowledge of the enemy sooner or later. Any military secret, General Wolseley said, was a purchasable secret; he illustrated his argument with an observation concerning a meeting between Napoleon I and Alexander I of Russia:

No two men were more loyally followed or had more absolute authority than Napoleon and Alexander. No two men had a stronger wish or stronger motive for keeping secret the words which passed between them personally in a most private conference in a raft in the middle of a river. Yet, by paying a large sum our Ministry obtained the exact terms of the secret agreement the two had there arrived at. Moreover, our Ministry obtained that information so immediately that they were able to act in anticipation of the designs formed by the two Emperors.

Finally, having discussed, in the most elaborate fashion, all the measures that his previous opposition to the scheme had caused to be proposed for the defense of the tunnel, Sir Garnet condemned them on the ground of their very elaborateness. "If in any one of these respects our security fails, it fails in all," he wrote of the multiple precautions recommended by Sir Archibald Alison's scientific committee. Thus, in General Wolseley's eyes, the defense of the tunnel was foredoomed as a self-defeating process, and was therefore a practical impossibility.

The question of the multiplicity of the proposed defenses was handled in different fashion in a further War Office memorandum on the tunnel, issued by the Duke of Cambridge, the Army Commander-in-Chief and a cousin of Queen Victoria. "Nothing has impressed me more with the magnitude of the danger which the construction of this proposed tunnel would bring with it," the Duke of Cambridge wrote, "than the amount of precautions and their elaborateness this Scientific Committee.... If this danger was small, as some would have the country believe, why should all these complicated precautions be necessary?" The Duke of Cambridge fully endorsed the position taken by Sir Garnet Wolseley. He protested "most emphatically" against the construction of a Channel tunnel and "would most earnestly beg Her Majesty's Government" to consider with the utmost gravity the perils of surprise attack upon the country arising out of even a modified scheme that would take into account the recommendations of the Alison committee.

To his memorandum His Royal Highness appended a copy of a report that he had had his intelligence service put together specially in connection with the tunnel question--a long account purporting to show some hundred and seven instances occurring in the history of the previous two hundred years where hostilities between states had been started without any prior declaration of war, or even any decent notification.

If anything seemed likely to have been successfully blocked up and finished off under all this bombardment, it was Sir Edward Watkin's Channel-tunnel scheme. Curiously enough, the Board of Trade, which had ordered the tunnel workings stopped back in April and had no intention of issuing a working permit for them now, was not altogether convinced of this. In fact, since April the Board had been developing the suspicion that something peculiar might be going on down under the sea at Shakespeare Cliff. Back in the early part of April, the Board of Trade's order to the Submarine Continental Railway Company to stop its tunneling activities was received, as one might expect, with some anguish. The first formal reaction was a letter from the permanent secretary of the company to T. H. Farrer, the secretary of the Board of Trade, saying that the company would of course acquiesce in the orders of the board, but begging, at the same time, to be allowed to continue the present gallery extending from the main, or Number Two, shaft at Shakespeare Cliff a short distance further, so as to be able to complete the first stage of the works--the junction of the main gallery with the new gallery extending from the ventilating, or Number Three, shaft. This letter was followed on April 9 by another from Sir Edward Watkin addressed to Joseph Chamberlain, the president of the Board of Trade, urgently repeating the request, this time on the ground of safety. Sir Edward wrote Mr. Chamberlain:

The moment the Board of the Tunnel Company decided to obey you, I peremptorily ordered the works to be stopped. The machine has been silent since Thursday evening. But the Engineer sends me a very startling report and warning.

Sir Edward added, without changing his tone of humane agitation, that only the day before he had received a request from the Duke of Edinburgh to be allowed to see the tunnel workings, along with the Duchess, ten days hence, and that the Speaker of the House of Commons had already arranged to visit the tunnel "on Saturday, the 22nd, leaving Charing Cross at eleven." "What must be done?" he asked. Mr. Chamberlain replied promptly by telegraph that if the stopping of the machinery in the tunnel was constituting a danger to life, he authorized Sir Edward, pending further investigation of the situation by the Board of Trade, temporarily to keep the machinery going to the extent of preventing this danger. However, he followed up this telegram with a letter to Sir Edward in which he expressed himself as being "not able to understand the exact nature of the physical danger anticipated" by Sir Edward in the tunnel if the workings were stopped. "I do not see the necessity for workmen remaining in the tunnel where the ventilation is likely to be defective," Mr. Chamberlain observed. He added that he was making arrangements to have one of the Board of Trade inspectors visit the tunnel to investigate the situation.

On April 11, the Board of Trade duly telegraphed Sir Edward that its chief inspector of railways, Colonel Yolland, of the Royal Engineers, would be at Dover at noon the next day to investigate the ventilation problem in the tunnel. Sir Edward, however, wired back that he was unable to meet the Colonel at Dover that day and could not make an appointment with him "until after the visit to the works of the Duke of Edinburgh on Tuesday next."

Meanwhile, Mr. Murton was having his difficulties with the solicitor of the South-Eastern over the legal question of the company's claims to ancient manorial rights to the use of the foreshore at Shakespeare Cliff, as the tone of various letters he was obliged to write indicates. For example:

DEAR SIR,

May I remind you that I have not yet received the abstract of title; I beg that you will at once send it to me....

I am, & c., WALTER MURTON

Or again:

DEAR SIR,

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