The tunnel under the English Channel – the seaway the French call La Manche – was ready for its first trains when a Frenchman looked set to derail the whole enterprise. Florent Longuepee, a right-wing Paris city councillor, wrote to the British government requesting Waterloo station, the London terminus for the Eurostar service, be re-named. It would be upsetting, he said, for the French to arrive in England and be reminded of Napoleon’s final defeat.
There had already been tense discussions over the numbering of the passenger carriages: should carriage number one be at the British or French end of the trains. M. Longuepee’s request was politely turned down. His concerns were to prove unnecessary when the London terminal was moved to St Pancras (named innocently after the parish in which it is situated) to link with the high-speed track.) The birth of a tunnel under the Channel had not been an easy one.
The idea of making the Channel crossing under the water first surfaced at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and there were to be plenty of political challenges, as well as the engineering ones, as plans unfolded. Albert Mathieu-Favier, a French mining engineer, envisaged a tunnel for horse-drawn coaches, lit by oil lamps and with an island in the middle where the horses would be changed. Chimneys along the route would provide the fresh air. He had been working on his tunnel during his country’s revolution, and in 1802 delivered his plans to Napoleon at the Chateau de Malmaison which Bonaparte shared with Josephine. The idea appealed to the Emperor in principle but lacking even the most basic of surveys, the plans gathered dust.
Thirty years later, it was the turn of Aime Thome de Gamond. de Gamond was an engineer and hydrographer who had spent fifteen years working on plans for a tunnel. His research was altogether more thorough than that of Mathieu-Favier. He would set out in a small boat with an assistant and his daughter Elizabeth who did the rowing. Once in position, he would drop over the side, naked but for bags of flints to weigh him down, to explore the seabed. He wore a safety belt around his waist and an additional red distress line attached to his left arm. He covered his ears with pads of buttered lint to protect them from the pressure of the water as he descended. A belt of inflated pigs’ bladders aided his journey back to the surface. He had no breathing apparatus. Instead, he put a spoonful of olive oil in his mouth which allowed him to expel air slowly from his lungs without letting water force itself in.
Convinced he had done enough research on the nature of the seabed to stand his plans up, he took them to Napoleon III, who was as enthusiastic about the idea as his uncle had been with Mathieu-Favier’s proposal fifty years earlier.
The emperor commissioned an appraisal of the scheme which proved positive, and a much encouraged de Gamond left France for England. There, he met with three established and respected engineers – Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had already tunnelled under the Thames, Robert Stephenson and Joseph Locke – all of whom supported his scheme. And recognising that any permanent link between England and France would be as much a political challenge as it would be an engineering one, he secured an audience with Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert. Albert was enthusiastic, as was the queen herself, not least because she was prone, like Albert, to getting seasick. But her prime minister, Lord Palmerston, had other ideas, and soon proved de Gamond right in his fears about political challenges. Palmerston saw the Channel as a moat – and a narrow moat at that. Rather bluntly, he told Prince Albert that his enthusiasm for the link might have been tempered had he been born on the island of Britain. ‘What!’ Palmerston is reported to have exclaimed, ‘You pretend to ask us to contribute to a work the object of which is to shorten a distance which we already find too short.’
However, some twenty-five years after Palmerston’s death, tunnelling did begin on both sides of the Channel. The British dug 2,000 yards, but the realisation that a link to the Continent had become a real possibility rekindled fears that an invasion route was in the making. The Nineteenth Century, a monthly literary magazine, carried a plea from writers and others:
‘The undersigned, having had their attention called to certain proposals made by commercial companies for joining England to the Continent of Europe by a Railroad under the Channel, and feeling convinced that (notwithstanding any precautions against risk suggested by the projectors) such a Railroad would involve this country in military dangers and liabilities from which, as an island, it has hitherto been happily free hereby record their emphatic protest against the sanction or execution of any such work.’
The signatories included Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Senior military figures weighed in with their objections. The head of the British Army, Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley saw the Channel as a great wet ditch for England’s protection. ‘Surely,’ he wrote, in a lengthy submission to the Board of Trade, “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 from between England and France without running the risk of seasickness.” The project was dropped.
The political stance of successive British governments continued to be formed by these fears until ten years after the Second World War. Harold Macmillan, who was at the time Anthony Eden’s Defence Secretary, was asked in the Commons if a Channel tunnel was still a risk vis-à-vis an invading army. His reply was brief. There was, he said, ‘scarcely any military opposition to the Channel Tunnel’. This gave the green light to the railway companies, who were champing at the bit to get a tunnel under way. But their enthusiasm, like that of de Gamond, was to be thwarted. It was not until the 1970s that a renewed enthusiasm emerged, but Harold Wilson’s Labour government claimed it could afford a tunnel or Concorde but not both. Concorde got the green light, and after ten years of planning and fourteen months of digging, the tunnel project was dropped – again.
Ten more years passed. Then, come the second Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in 1984 and with François Mitterrand in the Élysée Palace, the Channel Tunnel project was given fresh impetus. The British and French governments agreed to invite bidders to present their plans. There were ten proposals from which four were shortlisted. Thatcher, true to form, was adamant from the very beginning that the project be privately funded, a condition that the French were happy to go along with. And she favoured a tunnel for cars, but technical objections put paid to her vision of driving herself to France. In the end the chosen bid from a group of fifteen British and French construction companies and banks for a rail link won the day. Their scheme provided for a double rail tunnel – one for northbound trains and one for trains going south – separated by a service tunnel. The group, which became known as Eurotunnel, estimated the cost at £4.8 billion. In the presence of Prime Minister Thatcher and President Mitterrand, the Treaty of Canterbury, which gave birth to the Channel Tunnel, was signed in the chapter house of the city’s cathedral by Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe and his French counterpart, Roland Dumas. (Dumas narrowly escaped prison years later, having been convicted on corruption charges together with his lingerie model mistress, Christine Deviers-Joncour, and Geoffrey Howe found himself at the centre of an acrimonious parting from Margaret Thatcher’s government.)
The tunnel finally opened for passengers with a limited service in November 1994 with the full service coming into operation in the Spring of the following year. For the engineers, planners, bankers and politicians it had been a long journey. Over its first twenty-five years of operations, Eurostar carried, on average, 7.8 million passengers a year. Like all travel companies, it suffered a massive loss of business during the Covid pandemic, and in 2022 the company merged with the Franco-Belgian train operator Thalys. In 2023 Eurostar notched up 18.6 million passengers, and in 2024 it celebrates thirty years of journeys under the narrow sea.
Robin Laurance is a historian and the author of The Busy Narrow Sea: A Social History of the English Channel.
