The Channel Tunnel

Ever since the time of Napoleon, the idea of a tunnel under the English Channel has fascinated the French, and to a lesser degree the insular English. Bonaparte beamed at the thought of his dragoons taking the dry road to England; Queen Victoria thought of a tunnel also, but as nothing more than an expensive, but foolproof, seasick remedy. "You may tell the French engineer," she said when one set of plans was brought to her attention, "that if he can accomplish it, I will give him my blessing in my own name and in the name of all the ladies of England." Tunneling actually began in 1880. But Parliament was swamped with protests. An opposition pamphlet painted the lurid picture: "Dover taken, the garrison butchered, the tunnel vomiting men of all arms, London invaded, England conquered." Britain's most respected Old Soldier, Baron Wolseley, rumbled: "Surely John Bull will not endanger his birthright, his liberty, his property simply in order that men and women may cross between England and France without running the risk of seasickness." Digging was stopped, but not the talk.

Last week the cross-Channel dig was back in the news. After two years of underwater testing and 56,000 interviews with Dover-to-Calais travelers, a combined group of English, French and U.S. engineers and economists prepared to announce, in a $700,000 report, that a tunnel through the chalk strata between England and France was both technically and economically feasible. Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, onetime head of the Foreign Office, and now co-chairman of the Channel Tunnel Study Group, indicated that the 36-mile rail tunnel under the Channel would cost over $300 million, could bring in $26 million in revenue annually.

By present plans, there would be no auto road; cars would be carried by rail because the cost of ventilating the tunnel for auto traffic would be too high. Despite the optimistic report, Kirkpatrick warned that there was at least an 18-month wait before anyone turned a shovel, because of the necessity of governmental approval.

Reaction to this latest Channel venture was mixed. "A wildcat scheme," cried Viscount Montgomery. Ignoring supersonic bombers and ICBMs, Britain's angry old field marshal added darkly that the tunnel would end "the inviolability of our island against the footsteps of an invader." To placate such critics, tunnel planners have included a dip at either end which could be flooded quickly to thwart invaders, pumped out later. The only cogent argument against construction of a tunnel, as the Times once commented, is that it would end the debate as to whether it ever was a good plan, "thus depriving posterity of an intellectual exercise from which successive generations have derived a great deal of good clean fun."

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