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DEAR SIR,

I am without answer to my letter of the 31st ultimo. I beg you will let me know without further delay whether you do or do not propose to send me abstract of title.

I am, & c., WALTER MURTON

Or yet again:

DEAR SIR,

Will you kindly write me a reply to my letters which I can send on to the Board of Trade.

Yours, & c., WALTER MURTON

Hitherto, on one ground or another, this inspection has been again and again postponed.

I am bound to guard the rights of the Crown in this matter, and I desire to ascertain whether those rights have up to the present time been in any way invaded.

This is the object of the inspection, and as it will not brook delay ... I have only now to ask an immediate answer stating definitely when it can take place.

Sir Edward's answer was once more to beg Mr. Chamberlain himself to join a party of prominent visitors going down to see the tunnel; he added that "Colonel Yolland shall be at once communicated with."

M. de Lesseps, while down in the tunnel and under the sea, proposed the health of the Queen, remarking that the completion of the work was required in the interest of mankind.

When all the visitors were again above ground, luncheon was served in a marquee.

Sir E. Watkin, in proposing the health of M. de Lesseps, remarked that there were those in our country who seemed to consider that the work of the company they had just inspected was a crime. He had just received a telegram informing him that he would have to answer on Wednesday next at the instigation of the President of the Board of Trade before a court of law for having committed the crime of carrying on these experiments.

Somewhat revealingly, Sir Edward added, when the signs of indignation subsided, that

For his own part, if he was to be committed by a court of law for contempt, he should have this consolation--that the proceedings which had been taken against him had been delayed sufficiently long to enable him with his colleagues to have the honor of entertaining M. de Lesseps, in whom he should have a witness, if he had to call one, to prove that they had been engaged in a work which had been as successful as he believed it would be ultimately useful.

At long last, supported by all the might of the Crown, Colonel Yolland got to the tunnel on July 8 to make his inspection of the workings. But upon his arrival there he found, to his chagrin, that "I was not provided, at the time ... with all the necessary means for making the measurements, and taking the requisite bearings" in the tunnel, and he was obliged to put his inspection off once more. Properly equipped, he descended into the tunnel a week later, on Saturday, July 15, and inspected everything, including the boring apparatus that Sir Edward had insisted had to be used to ventilate the gallery and prevent loss of life. What Colonel Yolland found there caused the Board of Trade, five days later, to send a most severe letter to the tunnel proprietors. In it, the Board declared:

Calling these acts "a flagrant breach of faith" on the part of the tunnel promoters, the Board of Trade wrote that henceforth the order of the court "must be strictly and literally adhered to," and that no work of maintenance, ventilation, drainage, or otherwise would be allowed without the express permission of the board. Sir Edward Watkin and his fellow directors, after some days, replied in hurt fashion to what they termed "the unjustified accusations directed against them." They reiterated their concern for the health of their employees in the tunnel, and in connection with their tunneling activities below low-water mark they came up with the ingenious explanation that "many visits of Royal and other personages have been, by request, made to the tunnel for purposes of inspection, and it was essential fully to work the machine from time to time for the purpose of such visits." They also sent a protest to Mr. Gladstone at 10 Downing Street against their hard treatment, and asked for the Prime Minister's intercession with the Board of Trade. But there was nothing doing. Mr. Gladstone politely refused to act and replied that the actions of the Board of Trade had the full sanction of the Government.

On August 5, Colonel Yolland descended once more into the tunnel to make an inspection. He found things there in a rather run-down condition. "The tunnel is not nearly so dry as it was when I first saw it," he wrote in his report to the Board of Trade, referring to the fact that the engineers had ceased work on the drainage of the gallery. Colonel Yolland also mentioned in his report that during his previous visit, on July 15, "I had an escape from what might have been a serious accident. The wet chalk in the bottom of the tunnel, between and outside the rails of the tramways, is so slippery and greasy that it is almost impossible to keep on one's feet; and, on one occasion, I suddenly slipped, and fell at full length on my back, and the back of my head came against one of the iron rails of the tramway--fortunately with no great force or my skull might have been seriously bruised or fractured." The Colonel added, "There is not light enough in the tunnel from the electric lamps to enable one to see one's way through ... so that it is necessary to carry a lamp in one hand and a note-book in the other, to record the different measurements." The Colonel then gave some startling news. He declared that, according to his measurements, somebody had advanced the length of the tunnel some seventy yards since his inspection on July 15.

When this report reached the Board of Trade, the department, outraged, made a motion before the High Court of Justice to cite the tunnel promoters for contempt. However, a cloud of doubt descended on the issue when the tunnel promoters claimed in court that Colonel Yolland's calculations were in error. The motion was put off with the promoters' promising to obey to the letter the demands of the Board of Trade. Later on in the month, Colonel Yolland, after making a further inspection, conceded that, owing to the difficulties of working in the tunnel, he had made some error of calculation. The true advance made in the tunnel since July 15, he said, was thirty-six yards--a figure he said was confirmed by the tunnel company's engineer. Colonel Yolland reported that the company engineers had installed a pump at the eastern end of the tunnel to force out the water accumulating there. He added, somewhat testily, "Of course men had to be employed in erecting this pump in the tunnel and in working it when it was ready, and as the boring machine has not been made use of for the purpose of cutting chalk, this ... conclusively proves what I had stated in my former reports, that it was not necessary to cut an inch of chalk for the purpose of ventilating and draining the tunnel."

Altogether, and with all the difficulties they had encountered, the tunnel promoters had succeeded in boring the tunnel for a distance of 2,100 yards, or a little less than a mile and a quarter, toward France. The operations at the French end, which came to a stop in March of 1883, completed 2,009 yards of pilot tunnel from the bottom of the shaft by the cliffs at Sangatte.

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 at the mercy of blunderers, criminals, and madmen. 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.

Caught between the forces of claustrophobia and xenophobia, Sir Edward Watkin's great tunnel project was just about done for. In Westminster, angry citizens exhibited their feelings by smashing all the windows of the Channel Tunnel Company offices there. In the following year, the promised new investigation into the tunnel question was undertaken by a joint Parliamentary committee presided over by Lord Landsdowne. The committee met fourteen times, examined forty witnesses, and asked them fifty-three hundred and ninety-six questions. Not unexpectedly, the witnesses included Sir Garnet Wolseley, now Lord Wolseley. That Lord Wolseley in the interim had not changed his opinions on the perilous consequences of a tunnel is evident from his response to just five of the hundreds of questions put to him by the committee members.

When all the evidence was in, a majority of the joint Parliamentary committee sided with the views of Lord Wolseley and voted against any Parliamentary sanction's being given to a Channel tunnel.

Onward to no sound, save the splashing made by the tall workmen tramping through the mud and the drip, drip, drip of the water upon the hood above our heads, we are dragged and pushed ... under the bed of the Channel.... Sometimes, in the fitful flashes of light, the eye rests on falling red rivulets, like streams of blood, flowing down the damp walls. So we go on until the electric lamps cease altogether, and the long, awful cave is enveloped in a darkness that would be impenetrable but for the glimmer of a few tallow candles stuck into the bare walls of the cutting.

Sir Edward, in his indomitable fashion, not only pursued his geological speculations but also kept pursuing the tunnel question in Parliament. In 1887, a year in which he changed the name of the Submarine Continental Railway Company to that of the Channel Tunnel Company , he went on such a powerful campaign on behalf of a new Channel Tunnel Bill that it was defeated in the House by only seventy-six votes. In 1888, he tried again, and even managed to persuade Mr. Gladstone, now the leader of the Opposition, that the Channel could be tunneled under with propriety. As a result, Mr. Gladstone, in June 1888, gave his personal support to Sir Edward's Tunnel Bill and delivered a long Parliamentary speech on the subject. In this dissertation the venerable statesman, while taking nothing back about the wisdom of Providence in placing the Channel where it was, said he had now come to feel that a Channel tunnel could be used "without altering in any way our insular character or insular security, to give us some of the innocent and pacific advantages of a land frontier." But even Mr. Gladstone's support couldn't swing it. Parliament would not agree to the tunnel. At last, after all these setbacks, Sir Edward had to consider the tunnel project as a lost cause, if only temporarily. He stopped promoting it in 1894, having become involved in the meantime in a couple of alternate projects--a railway tunnel between Scotland and Ireland and a ship canal in Ireland between Dublin and Galway. Also, in 1889, he had become chairman of a company to erect at Wembley Park, near London, a great iron tower, modeled on the Eiffel Tower, which was to be known as the Watkin Tower. The Watkin Tower didn't get very high. Only a single stage was completed, and this was opened to the public in 1896; it was demolished eleven years later. Sir Edward Watkin died at Northenden, Cheshire, in 1901.

In 1929, everybody had a go at the tunnel once more, and very elaborate engineering studies were made on the subject by well-established engineering firms and were carefully examined by a special Government committee, with particular attention being given to the contention of pro-tunnel people that the construction of a Channel tunnel would provide badly needed work for Englishmen in depression times. The report of the Government's committee was, with a single dissension, favorable to the construction of the tunnel. But the Committee of Imperial Defense still was to have its say, and in May 1930 it rejected the project. This time the rejection was made primarily on two grounds, according to a high British military man who was later a member of that body. The first of these, he says, was the fear of the military that the successful construction of a Channel tunnel would so adversely affect England's Channel shipping trade that the Channel ports were likely to fall into ill repair and the harbors to start silting up--dangerous conditions in periods of national emergency; the second was their fear that if Britain became involved in another war on the Continent, the tunnel would suddenly become a traffic bottleneck through which it would be difficult to move war supplies and equipment quickly and on the massive scale required. A month after this adverse verdict by the military, a motion was nonetheless put forward in the House of Commons for approval of the tunnel, and this time such a large group of M.P.s was favorable to the scheme that the motion failed to carry by only seven votes.

For most of the thirties, the tunnel project just drifted along in a dormant state. Once every so often, when things were generally slack, the press would carry a feature story on it, and the annual meetings of the Channel Tunnel Company, still gamely presided over by Baron Emile Beaumont d'Erlanger, were always good for a paragraph tucked somewhere into the financial pages under mildly mocking headlines, such as "Hope Eternal," "The Channel Tunnel Again," or, in one of the popular dailies, just "The Poor Old Tunnel."

The outbreak of the Second World War, however, far from putting the Channel tunnel completely out of sight, revived the issue, for a time, anyway. In November 1939 the French Chamber of Deputies passed a resolution calling for the construction of a tunnel; early in 1940, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain--the son, incidentally, of Joseph Chamberlain, who as president of the Board of Trade had ordered the tunnel workings stopped back in the eighties--turned the tunnel project down again in a parliamentary reply. The retreat from Dunkirk gave pro-tunnel and anti-tunnel people the opportunity of putting forth their arguments about the tunnel once more, with some variations--with the pro-tunnelers claiming that a Channel tunnel might have enabled the British Expeditionary Force to keep a bridgehead in France, and the anti-tunnelers countering that the same tunnel would have given German paratroopers the opportunity of seizing the English end and using it as a bridgehead for the invasion of England.

Then, after the fall of France, when the Germans were busily making preparations for the invasion of England, the question arose among the British military as to whether the enemy might not just possibly attempt to reach England by surreptitiously tunneling underneath the Channel. As a consequence, the War Office called in an eminent British civil engineer, the late Sir William Halcrow, and asked him to make a study of the question of whether the Germans could pull off such a feat. "We examined the situation quite carefully and concluded that, provided we kept reasonably alert, the Germans could not dig the tunnel without being detected," an engineering colleague of Sir William Halcrow's on the survey said a while ago. He added, "Their difficulty would lie in the disposal of the spoil. They couldn't get rid of it without our seeing from the air that something peculiar was going on. If they tried to dump the spoil into the sea at night it would have to be done at the turn of the tide, and the chalk would leave a cloud in the sea that would not be dissipated by daylight. If they pulverized the spoil, converted it into a slurry, and pumped it well out to sea, we would be able to spot the chalk cloud too, and even if they tried other means of dispersing the spoil the very process of dispersal would call for such extensive installations that we would soon be on to them."

In 1942, somebody at the War Office had another look into the tunnel situation, this time for the purpose of finding out if it would be practical for the British to start tunneling under the Channel--the idea presumably being the creation of a supply route to France ahead of an Allied invasion, with the last leg of the route being completed once the Allied Armies had installed themselves on the French coast. Again, several prominent British civil engineers were called into consultation, but the subject was abruptly dropped, without investigation of the problem of disposing of the spoil, when the engineers estimated that a tunnel probably would take eight years to complete--three years longer than the war then was expected to last.

From 1940 on, the British kept a routine watch on their reconnaissance photographs for signs of tunneling on the French side, especially around the site of the still existing shaft of the French Tunnel Company at Sangatte. Early in 1944, R.A.F. and U.S.A.F. reconnaissance showed signs of unusual installations being made near Sangatte, but these later turned out to be unconnected with subterranean workings. As it happened, they were launching sites for V-2 bombs.

The actual handling by the Germans of the old tunnel shaft during the occupation of France was rather peculiar. Far from trying to continue the existing tunnel in the early part of the Occupation, they treated it in contemptuous fashion, using the shaft as a dump for old chunks of machinery, used shell casings, bits of rubbish, and broken slabs of concrete. Later on, their attitude changed drastically. They sealed the top of the shaft with a poured-concrete platform. Then, in weirdly romantic fashion, they built a large rim of fitted stone around the platform to create an ornamental-wall effect, and added around the well a grass-and-flagstone terrace complete with formal walks and sets of monumental-looking stone steps laid out in symmetrical style. Apparently their notion was to bring the tunnel aesthetically into harmony with a military cemetery they installed between the tunnel entrance and the sea.

After the war, the Channel-tunnel project continued to languish in prewar fashion. If anything, even less than before was heard in the press about the activities of the Channel Tunnel Company. The company's headquarters at the Southern Railway offices at London Bridge were blown up in the blitz, and all the company's records were destroyed. For some time, while attempts were made to piece together duplicate lists from Government files, the Channel Tunnel Company didn't even know who the majority of its stockholders were, but that didn't matter too much, considering the circumstances. Baron Emile Beaumont d'Erlanger, the chairman, had died in 1939, and his place on the Board was taken by his nephew, Leo d'Erlanger, also a banker. Leo d'Erlanger, now a spry, elegant, silver-haired gentleman in his sixties, brightly confesses to having had little interest in the tunnel until about twelve years ago. "I was brought up in a home where the Channel tunnel was a family religion, and, to tell the truth, I didn't give it too much thought," he says. "My grandfather used to talk about it when I came back for the holidays from Eton. 'Politics,' they all used to say. 'The only reason why the tunnel isn't built is politics.' I never paid much attention. I thought it was an old dodo and never had anything to do with it in my Uncle Emile's lifetime. When he died and I took over, I used to look forward with dread to the annual general meetings. I had nothing to say. I considered the whole thing moribund. For a few years we met, I remember, at the Charing Cross Hotel, which belonged to the Southern Railway , and the secretary was an elderly retired man by the name of Cramp, who once had something to do with the Southern Railway, I think. We used to have difficulty in getting a quorum. I suppose we would manage to get four or five people to turn up."

This seemed like a green light to D'Erlanger, but for a while he couldn't quite decide what to do after seeing it flash on. Early in 1956, however, he went to see Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, who was a director of the French Tunnel Company--the Soci?t? Concessionnaire du Chemin de Fer Sous-marin entre la France et l'Angleterre--and the grandson of Michel Chevalier, who had founded the company in 1875. D'Erlanger suggested that, since the tunnel was a common ancestral interest, the two of them have another try at promoting it. Leroy-Beaulieu agreed, and he suggested that as the Suez Canal Company's concession in Egypt was due to run out in 1968, and might not be renewed, the Suez Company might possibly be interested in turning to a Channel tunnel as its next project. Sure enough, the principals of the Suez Company, whose headquarters were in Paris, were interested in the idea, but the sudden seizure of the Canal by Colonel Nasser in July of that year kept them too distracted to pursue the tunnel project just then. In the meantime, quite independently of these tunnel developments in Paris and London, two young international lawyers in New York, Frank Davidson and Cyril Means, Jr., became intrigued by the possibility of a tunnel between England and France. Davidson and Means happened to have good connections in Wall Street, and after they established contact with the two existing tunnel companies by letter, Means went over to London and Paris early in February of 1957 to investigate the tunnel situation and to offer the tunnel people there--and the Suez Canal Company--the chance of obtaining some substantial American financial backing for the construction of a tunnel if it proved to be a practical proposition. The tunnel people in Europe showed varying degrees of interest in the proposal, and to strengthen their position, Davidson and Means, with another friend, an engineer, Arnaud de Vitry d'Avancourt, formed a New York corporation called Technical Studies, Inc., with the announced purpose of financing technical investigations and promoting the construction of a Channel tunnel.

Mr. John Elliott, who bought his shares for a song almost, asked where the company's workings were. Did they really exist? He had visited Dover, and neither police, shopkeepers, nor the county surveyor could tell him where they were. He suggested that the board prove their existence by escorting a nominated half-dozen shareholders on an eye-witness excursion.

However, by Trafalgar Day the pro-tunnelers were hard at it, too. In July 1957, the four main interests involved in the scheme--the English and French Channel-tunnel companies, the Suez Canal Company and Technical Studies--had combined to create an organization called the Channel Tunnel Study Group to contract for modern technical surveys of the whole tunnel question. The new group is said to have spent over a million dollars on having these surveys made. The studies included a very detailed survey of the Channel bed with modern electronic geophysical equipment and deep rock borings and sea-bottom samples made across the neck of the Channel, as well as microscopic examination of these rock samples to determine their microfossil composition and probable position in the strata from which they were taken. Curiously enough, while the geological survey was under way, somebody on the project took the trouble to inquire into the old French hydrographic surveys for a Channel tunnel, and after some diligent searching he turned up, in a dusty waiting room of a disused Paris suburban railroad station, where it had been stored for an age, a collection of thousands of the sea-bottom samples made in the French Channel-tunnel surveys of 1875 and 1876. All of the samples were found neatly packed away in test tubes and ticketed, and the searchers even uncovered a case of the geological specimens that Thom? de Gamond himself had recovered in 1855 by his naked plunges to the bottom of the Channel in the neighborhood of the Varne. The geologists weren't interested in going by way of the Varne any more, but many of the old 1875-76 samples were taken away for microfossil examination as part of a check on how the results of the old surveys compared with the new. Except for some variations relating to the extent of the cretaceous outcrop in the middle of the Channel, the findings tallied nicely.

The new Study Group had a number of other elaborate surveys made, too, on the economic and engineering problems involved in the creation and operation of a Channel tunnel or an equivalent means of cross-Channel transport. Besides developing plans for a bored tunnel--the projected double-rail tunnel, interconnected at intervals by cross-passages, is essentially a modern version of William Low's plan of the 1860s, with an extra small service tunnel being added between the main tunnels--the Study Group's engineering consultants developed in detail schemes for a Channel bridge, an immersed railway tube, an immersed road tube, a combined immersed tube with two railway tracks, and a four-way road system on two levels. The bridge proposed would be an enormous affair with approximately 142 piers and with four main spans in the center of the Strait each 984 feet long. These spans would tower a maximum of 262-1/2 feet above sea level to allow the largest ships in the world to pass underneath with plenty of room to spare. The bridge would take no longer to build than a road tunnel, but it would cost about twice as much, and in addition it would be expensive and difficult to maintain and would present a hazard to navigation. The immersed tube proposed for either rail or road traffic probably would cost about the same as a bored tunnel and might be constructed in four years. A combined road-rail tube would take about the same time to build, but would be more expensive even than a bridge. Among the best-known schemes for a combined tube is that of a Frenchman, Andr? Basdevant, who has proposed one with a four-lane highway and a two-track rail line. This scheme would pretty much run along the old Cap Gris-Nez-Folkestone route of Thom? de Gamond, and it would even have, like most of Thom? de Gamond's schemes, an artificial island in mid-channel on the Varne. As for the latest scheme for a laid, rather than a bored, tube, it would be no different from Thom? de Gamond's plan in 1834 for a submerged tube, and as in that old plan a trench would be dug, by operations conducted at the surface, across the Channel bottom to receive the tube, which would be prefabricated in sections and towed out to sea to be laid down in the trench a section at a time. This time the digging of the trench would be carried out from a huge above-surface working platform, something like an aircraft-carrier deck on sets of two-hundred-foot-high stilts, that would jack itself up and move on across the Channel as the work progressed. From these and other surveys, the Study Group concluded by March 1960 that the best means of linking Britain and France would be by a rail tunnel, either bored or immersed, which, while avoiding the difficult ventilation problems of a long road tunnel, would make for convenient transport of cars and trucks by a piggyback system. It further proposed that the tunnel be operated jointly by the British and French Government-run railways under a long lease from an international company yet to be formed, and that only the bare tunnel itself be privately financed, with the British and French state-run railways providing the installations, terminals, and rolling stock at a cost of some twenty million pounds.

To all such criticism as this, the Channel-tunnel people reacted not with the kind of broadsides that Sir Edward Watkin would have let loose in the heyday of the Channel-tunnel controversy but by hiring a public-relations outfit headed by a man called E. D. O'Brien, a former publicity director for the Conservative party, who is said to be known among his colleagues as Champagne Toby. O'Brien's champagne appears to be weaker stuff than Sir Edward Watkin's; the pro-tunnel publicity his outfit puts out seems to consist of things like a small booklet called "Channel Tunnel, the Facts," which an O'Brien assistant has described as "a sort of child's guide, in Q. and A. form, you know, about the tunnel."

As soon as the British press fell on the promoters for making the demands they did for Government financial guarantees, the promoters came up with a set of counter-proposals. They offered to finance not only the tunnel itself but also the terminals and approaches on both sides; they further proposed leasing the tunnel directly to the two governments, thus avoiding the earlier requirement of governmental guarantee of the bonds.

In the meantime, with all the brave words, and all the money poured into the project, the Channel Tunnel Company still has something of a phantom air about it. It doesn't have a regular staff--D'Erlanger is a busy City banker--and it has no real office of its own. D'Erlanger's banking headquarters are at the investment house of which he is a partner, Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlangers, Ltd., along Moorgate, but no Channel Tunnel Company records are kept there. The nearest thing to a headquarters for the Channel Tunnel Company is a set of Victorian offices on Broad Street Place, in the City, occupied by a firm of "secretaries" called W. H. Stentiford & Co. These offices are reached by a very ancient and slow ironwork-gate lift, and a sign in the corridor shows that W. H. Stentiford & Co. is the representative of an astonishing variety of companies, including the Channel Tunnel Company, Ltd., and a number of outfits with such exotic corporate names as the Tea Share Trust, Ltd., Uruwira Minerals, Ltd., Dominion Keep , and Klerksdorp Consolidated Goldfields, Ltd. Inside, amid a clutter of ticking clocks, great ledgers, old safes emblazoned with peeling coats of arms, great piles of papers, and trays of teacups, a small staff of round-shouldered retainers toils away vicariously over the affairs of these far-flung organizations--making up accounts and annual or quarterly statements, filling out and recording stock certificates, answering letters, and so on. All this clerkly activity is presided over by an eminently respectable and precisely mannered man by the name of P. S. Elliston, who also arranges board meetings for his many client companies in a room set aside at Stentiford's for the purpose. Mr. Elliston's organization "took on" the Channel Tunnel Company in the early forties, and all its annual meetings since 1947 have been held at Stentiford's, with Mr. Elliston present in his capacity of representative of his firm of secretaries. Mr. Elliston finds things changed a bit from the time when the Channel Tunnel Company first became one of his firm's clients. In those old days, he says, the whole annual meeting could generally be disposed of in between five and ten minutes, with only a couple of directors being present--Mr. Elliston having thoughtfully bought one share of Channel Tunnel Company stock to enable himself to vote in case no other shareholder besides a couple of directors could be persuaded to turn up to make a quorum of three. Now, he says, it may sometimes take twenty-five minutes or even as long as forty-five minutes to transact necessary business. As for Channel Tunnel Company stock, it has fluctuated all the way from sixpence to fifty shillings--its price one day in 1959 at a time when the company's balance sheet showed a cash balance of just ?161. The price of the stock at the time this book was written was about twenty-two shillings, and the company's cash in hand was ?91,351 "and a few shillings." Owing to the wartime destruction of its records and the difficulty of tracking down all the old transactions, the Channel Tunnel Company still doesn't know who all its stockholders are, and, conversely, there are quite a few people scattered about who probably aren't aware that they are company stockholders.

Mr. Elliston describes the last fifteen years or so of the company's history as containing "several periods where there was very keen interest" in the tunnel scheme, especially in 1957 and 1958, with Stentiford's being subjected, he says, to "a persistent spate of enquiries," including calls from newspaper reporters and letters from schoolboys asking why the tunnel was never built.

Some time ago, when I was in England, I decided to take a trip down to the coast between Folkestone and Dover to the scene of the violent tunnel controversy of the eighties. I had heard that the shaft of the old Shakespeare Cliff gallery in which Sir Edward Watkin did so much of his promoting and entertaining, as well as tunneling, had been sealed off many years ago, but I was aware that the Abbots Cliff gallery, or part of it, still existed. Through the good offices of Leo d'Erlanger and Harold J. B. Harding, the vice-president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, who has directed many of the latest technical surveys on the proposed Channel tunnel, I arranged to go down one day from London to Folkestone and to be taken into the old Abbots Cliff tunnel. Written permission had to be obtained from the Government for the visit, and the necessary arrangements had to be made well in advance with officials of British Railways, the present owner, representing the Crown, of the coastal lands once the domain of Sir Edward Watkin's South-Eastern Railway Company. Harding explained to me that since the tunnel entrance was kept locked up and lay in a not readily accessible part of the cliffs facing the sea, it would be practical for me to make the visit only under fairly good weather conditions, and then under the escort of people equipped with lamps and the means of opening up the tunnel entrance. "You may get a bit wet and a bit dirty, so don't wear a good suit," Harding added, and he went on to say that he had seen to it that I would be shown around the tunnel by a civil engineer named Kenneth W. Adams, from the district office of British Railways at Ashford, Kent--Adams being, in Harding's words, "a keen engineer who has become something of a hobbyist on the old tunnel workings."

Wearing an old suit, I duly took a train early one fair morning in autumn, from Charing Cross, and when I got off at Folkestone Central Station, Adams, a stocky, cheerful man who seemed to be about forty, was waiting for me. He had a little car waiting outside the station, and when he got into it, he introduced me to an assistant sitting in the driver's seat named Jack Burgess. "Jack's grandfather was a surface worker at the tunnel workings at Shakespeare Cliff," Adams said as Burgess started the car up. "Jack was just telling me that he remembers his grandfather telling him, when he was a boy, about Lord Palmerston coming down to visit the tunnel in 1881. The old chap remembered that the food that was brought into the tunnel for parties of visitors from the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover came in hay boxes--that is, in big wicker boxes interlined with a thick layer of hay to keep the food warm."

Burgess drove us through the outer part of Folkestone toward the sea at a pretty good clip, with the little car buzzing away like a high-speed sewing machine, and in a very little time, after climbing up a long, gentle slope by the back of the cliffs, we drew up on the heights of East Cliff, a kind of promontory within Eastwear Bay, which lies to the north-east of Folkestone Harbor. There, in two broad curves to the left and right of us, the precipitous face of the white chalk cliffs gleamed, like huge ruined walls with grassed-over rubble piled about their base, in hazy sunlight. Far below us, and stretching away into the haze, lay the Channel, gray and, for the time being, pretty calm. A hundred feet or so from where our car stopped was a massive round stone tower, its sides tapering in toward the top like a child's sand castle; two similar towers lay some distance from us in the direction of Folkestone. These, Adams explained, were Martello towers, formerly cannon-bearing fortifications that were installed in prominent places all along the Dover-Folkestone coastal area during the invasion scares early in the nineteenth century to repel surprise landings by the troops of Napoleon Bonaparte. Then he pointed to the cliffs stretching to the north-east. "You see that large white building on top of the cliff almost at the very end of the bay? That's Abbots Cliff, and the tunnel is at the base of it," he said. "We'll take you down that way in a couple of minutes, but first I'd like to show you something that may interest you."

We walked a short distance down a path by East Cliff to a point where we could see, as we couldn't previously, the rail line that ran along the coast, partly through rail tunnels piercing the cliffs, and partly over the land that rose above their base. 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. Actually, it was developed by the Royal Engineers for mining under the German lines, and in 1919 Sir Percy Tempest, who was chief engineer of the South East & Chatham Railway--an amalgamation of the South-Eastern Railway and the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, which in turn, by further amalgamation with other lines, became the Southern Railway--thought it might do for the Channel tunnel. In 1919 he asked permission from the Board of Trade to drive a new heading from the old Number Three ventilating shaft at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff a little way under the foreshore, and got it, but he changed his mind and decided to try the machine in the chalk down here. The Whittaker machine cut a tunnel twelve feet in diameter, and some time between 1921 and 1924 they drove a heading into the chalk, just at the point where it's sticking out now, for some four hundred feet. They never quite removed the machine from the heading when they were finished, but it was maintained right up to the outbreak of the Second World War, when it became derelict."

Adams and I walked back to the car. As we did so, he revealed himself as being pro-tunnel. "It's a tragic thing, this tunnel business, I think. If the tunnel had been built forty or fifty years ago, just think of what an asset to Europe it would have been," he said. We packed ourselves in, and Burgess drove us down a very rough, narrow road to the level of the railroad line. There, by a maintenance shed, a small, thin workman was waiting for us. He was wearing an old cloth peaked cap, a white duffel coat, and rubber knee boots, and by his feet he had ready-lighted Tilley lamps--similar in appearance to miners' lamps but operated by kerosene under pressure, like a Primus stove. Adams and Burgess jumped out of the car, and Burgess unlocked and opened up the rear trunk. I got out of the car, too. Then the workman, whom Adams addressed as Jim, disappeared briefly into the shed and came out with a pile of knee boots, which he began flinging into the car trunk. "We'll be needing these," Adams remarked to me. Next Jim brought out an enormous wrench, at least two feet long, and slung that on top of the protesting rubber boots, and then he came up with an armful of duffel coats, which he handed around. We put them on and all of us got into the car; the little workman wordlessly, with a wide gaptoothed grin, squeezed into the back seat with me and settled back with the two big lighted Tilley lamps on his lap. The lamps gave off a gentle roaring sound, like subdued blowtorches, and they gave off heat that warmed the whole back of the car.

We drove off down a narrow, steep, tortuously winding, and very rugged road, through a kind of wilderness of concrete rubble and piles of old heavy wooden construction beams, toward the base of the cliffs, and when we finally got there, we continued along the wide top of a concrete sea wall for a considerable distance until the wall suddenly narrowed and the car could go no farther.

We all got out, and Adams, Burgess, and I took off our shoes and put on the knee boots that Burgess got out of the trunk; and, with Jim and Burgess leading the way and bearing between them the glowing Tilley lamps and the giant wrench, we continued on foot along the sea wall, now as narrow as the sidewalk of a small city street. The chalk cliffs towered perhaps a couple of hundred feet above us. "The tunnel is about three-quarters of a mile ahead along the sea wall," Adams remarked as he walked beside me, and as we went along he explained that his primary job at British Railways was the design of sea defenses between Folkestone and Dover to combat erosion. "It's a good job you didn't pick a later time in the year to visit the tunnel," he went on. "This sea wall would hardly be negotiable on foot when the water's rough, and in winter, with the sou'westers blowing in especially, we have some real shockers."

After another fifteen minutes or so of walking along an area where the cliffs rose back beyond a sort of terrace formed by old landslides--the railway line ran along this terrace in the open--Adams told me that the tunnel entrance was not far off. A few hundred feet farther on, we finally reached it--a small recessed place in the grassy rubble at the base of the cliff terrace and, set into it, a four-foot-square door of rough, thick wood encased by a frame of very old and very heavy timbers. The door was hinged with heavy gate hinges and secured not by a padlock but by a very large metal nut, which Jim now attacked with his great wrench.

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