Fear, Friendship and the Channel Tunnel

At 8.23am on the morning of 14 November 1994, crowds cheered as the first Eurostar train carrying fare-paying passengers under the English Channel left London’s Waterloo Station. Its journey was punctuated by cheers from those on board as the train entered the tunnel at Folkestone, more cheers when it emerged 18 minutes later near Calais and by spontaneous applause when it arrived into Paris two minutes ahead of schedule at 11.21am. Passengers would later describe the ‘party atmosphere’ in every carriage, although the day’s newspapers also reported the ‘bloody awful’ coffee and lack of champagne in the buffet. Many of those who travelled on Eurostar’s maiden voyage had booked their tickets years in advance, and among them were those celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, a 90-year-old Canadian former railway worker who had crossed the Atlantic to travel on the first train, author Jeffrey Archer, television presenter Jeremy Beadle and two great-grandsons of the engineer William Low, who had proposed his own Channel tunnel scheme in the 1860s.

The celebrations were underpinned by a sense of history; the train was travelling through the longest undersea tunnel on Earth, which that year had been elected by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the seven wonders of the modern world. References to the historic importance of the journey were rooted not simply in technological achievement, however: they also pointed to the political symbolism of forging a connection between Britain and the rest of Europe. Britain was, according to a headline in the Guardian earlier that year, ‘no longer an island’. This end to insularity was welcomed in some quarters, as adverts for Eurostar promised the possibility of jumping on a train to enjoy dinner or a shopping trip in Paris. Elsewhere, newspaper headlines exposed underlying fears, whether of rabies, as ‘Rabid foxes replace the ghost of Napoleon’ (the Scotsman) or of terrorism, as the Guardian revealed that ‘Travellers fear Chunnel Terror Attack’. A survey in November 1993 found that ‘75 per cent of Britons would not use the Channel Tunnel’, and the following year, The Times described the entire venture as ‘Dogged by Fear’. Such different interpretations of what the tunnel would mean for Britain reflected a long history of proposals, rejections and false starts. As Low’s great-grandson John remarked in 1994, the train was brilliant – but more than 100 years late.

Digging in wartime

The first scheme for a tunnel under the Channel was proposed by the French mining engineer Albert Mathieu-Favier to Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 during a pause in the Revolutionary Wars. Mathieu’s tunnel would be lit by oil lamps and wide enough for a horse and carriage. Napoleon liked the idea and discussed it with the British Liberal Charles James Fox while the latter visited Paris during the Peace of Amiens. The two agreed that it represented a ‘great thing that we can do together’ – but Mathieu’s scheme was hastily abandoned when war broke out again the following year. Nonetheless, its very proposal represented an important moment as the first of more than 100 schemes for a fixed link that would follow in the centuries ahead.

Engineering progress meant that developments moved swiftly. The construction of tunnels under the Thames in 1843 and through the Alps at Mont Cenis in 1871 demonstrated the potential of tunnelling technology to dig quickly through different types of rock, as well as underwater. Meanwhile, a series of dives conducted by the French engineer Aimé Thomé de Gamond in 1855 revealed that the same type of chalk made up the seabed across the Strait of Dover. De Gamond’s own tunnel schemes fell by the wayside with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, but after Franco-British relations stabilised the two governments agreed on a protocol for a tunnel and granted permission for private companies to start digging. Work began separately on both coasts in 1880 with two companies digging in Britain and one in France. In 1881 Sir Edward Watkin, the director of the South Eastern Railway, which led the more successful British dig, announced that if work continued at its current pace the pilot tunnel would be completed within five years.

In France the news was met with enthusiasm but the response in Britain was mixed. While politicians including the prime minister William Gladstone, military leaders such as Sir John Adye of the Ordnance Board and manufacturers including Wedgwood argued in favour of the economic and political benefits that a tunnel would bring, others, notably the adjutant general Sir Garnet Wolseley, raised concerns over the invasion risk it represented. In an effort to drum up publicity for the scheme, Watkin hosted tours of the tunnel for invited dignitaries including Gladstone, the prince of Wales and the archbishop of Canterbury. Visitors donned overalls to descend into the shaft at Dover where they observed the boring machine and toasted the venture with champagne, before attending celebratory banquets in a dining room decked out in tricolour and Union flags. But, in 1882, inspectors from the Board of Trade visited the dig site in Kent and ordered an immediate stop to works as they had determined that the tunnel shaft extended further than permitted. The following year a parliamentary Commission created to discuss the tunnel question expressed the view that no further digs should be permitted, and a tunnel bill was withdrawn from Parliament in July 1883, primarily due to fears that a tunnel might facilitate an invasion.

Making peace

Talk of a tunnel continued as Britain and France fought as allies during the First World War. At the end of the conflict, Supreme Allied Commander Maréchal Ferdinand Foch remarked that, had the tunnel been completed before the war, it would have shortened the length of the conflict by two years. In 1919 British prime minister David Lloyd George proposed a tunnel during the discussions at the Versailles Peace Conference and it was discussed during the 1920s by the League of Nations. Engineers from across the globe proposed different types of schemes. The American engineer Allan C. Rush suggested a bridge, which was to be constructed from melted down war materiel as a ‘beacon of peace’. In France, stable peace was understood to rely upon the maintenance of the wartime Franco-British alliance. In 1919, when the prospect of the tunnel was posed as a question in the final exam for French students sitting the brevet qualification, one candidate wrote that a tunnel might spell the end of tariffs and checks between Britain and France, while for another ‘in getting to know each other better we would get to like one another better’.

When war broke out again in 1939, rumours swirled that the German army was making use of the shaft at Calais abandoned in the 1880s to tunnel under the Channel and invade Britain. In response, the RAF flew reconnaissance missions in search of signs of digging or of soil discharge in the water and, in 1941, a group of Royal Engineers took listening equipment into the deserted 1880s shaft in Dover. There, they attempted to detect sounds of digging, but neither they, nor the RAF, found anything unusual.

In the aftermath of the war, plans began again for a tunnel and by this stage the connection was envisaged in international terms and planned to accommodate the growth of the automobile industry – one suggestion was for a six-lane motorway bridge across the Channel. Impetus increased with Britain’s entry into the Common Market in 1973, but after its election victory in 1974, Harold Wilson’s government cancelled the scheme due to escalating costs in January 1975.

When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979 the discussions were renewed. Thatcher’s preference was for a road tunnel for motorists, but the Treaty of Canterbury, signed in February 1986, paved the way for a rail tunnel to be constructed by private companies that would carry passengers between London, Paris and Brussels, and cars between Dover and Calais.

Only connect

By the time the first passengers travelled in November 1994, commentators were already expressing hopes that the tunnel would spell the end of British insularity; in the words of a 1993 Eurotunnel advert: ‘The island race is no more.’ The first trains coincided with the arrival of low-cost air travel and the idea of the ‘city break’; it was suggested that night trains should run from Scotland, Wales and the north of England to destinations across Europe, as well as for short trips between Kent and the Pas-de-Calais that would allow commuting between Britain and France for work. None of these hopes materialised, as the need to recoup the high costs of construction meant that long distance night trains would be unable to compete with low-cost flights. It was only in 2013 that passenger numbers finally reached the target figure of ten million per year.

As we arrive at the 30th anniversary of the first passengers travelling between London and Paris on Eurostar, the experience has recently changed again. New Brexit rules mean longer wait times for passport checks, while some routes have been cut; trains no longer stop at Calais or Ashford. The tunnel did not live up to the expectations of 1994, yet the strong opinions it has provoked throughout its history remind us that even failed attempts brought Britain and France closer together. 

Alison Carrol is Reader in European History at Brunel, University of London and the author of The Return of Alsace to France, 1918-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2018).