A Chunnel for the "Great Wet Ditch"

After 171 years of debate, negotiations and Utopian dreams, the British government last week gave its final blessing to a project that will physically unite the tight little isle with the European continent. The project: building a tunnel beneath the "great wet ditch" that Britons chauvinistically refer to as the English Channel and Frenchmen call La Manche (The Sleeve). According to the timetable laid out in a government White Paper, on Nov. 15 Britain and France will sign a treaty committing the two nations to support the construction of a 32-mile tunnel between the Kentish village of Cheriton and Frethun near Calais. Construction of "the chunnel," as it has been unfortunately dubbed by Britons, is expected to start within 18 months. Estimated cost: $2.1 billion. By 1980, if all goes well, sleek, fast trains will be whisking passengers between London and Paris in a mere 3 hours and 40 minutes.

Originally proposed in 1802 by French Engineer Albert Mathieu, whose plan envisioned horse-drawn coaches passing through a candlelit tube, the tunnel idea has a long history of revivals and rejections. In the 1850s another French engineer, Aime Thome de Gamond, drew up a scheme for a railway tunnel. Queen Victoria promised De Gamond the blessing of "all the ladies of England" if he could carry it off, but the whole thing was quashed by suspicions that Napoleon III might have in mind a cross-Channel invasion.

Throughout, the French have shown more enthusiasm for the tunnel idea than the British, who have tended to agree with Sir Garnet Wolseley's 1882 protest that this link between England and the Continent would provide "a constant inducement to the unscrupulous foreigner to make war upon us." Although the security argument has faded into the background, skepticism among the British remains strong today. Detractors of the tunnel complain that the government has rushed ahead so quickly with the project that it has not given due consideration to alternatives, as, for example, bigger and better Hovercraft. Its proponents reply, however, that following British entry into the Common Market, the tunnel has become a straightforward economic proposition. British Transport officials estimate that the tunnel, in its first year of operation, will carry 15 million passengers and at least 5,000,000 tons of freight.

While the tunnel may well be the best possible way to maintain Britain's thrust into Europe, it will have its victims. Impassioned objections have come from the Kentish villages that will be most affected. Residents are justifiably worried that their green and pleasant countryside will turn into a nightmarish octopus of access roads and tracks leading to and from the tunnel terminus. Complained William Hunt, 46, of Newington: "We don't count. We're like a pea on top of a mountain. If they don't want us, they just flick us away."

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