Word: tunneling
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Stubbornly shaking his head, George Rowland Blades, Baron Ebbisham, onetime (1926-27) Lord Mayor of London and Alderman for the Ward of Bassishaw, was the only dissenting member of a board of five which last week enthusiastically endorsed the long-shelved project to build a 20-odd-mile tunnel under the English Channel, connect London and Paris by rail. Not so Lord Ebbisham. Pressed for reasons, he contented himself with remarking ominously: "The displacement of sailors on the Cross-Channel Route would be regrettable...
Soon after the first public passenger-carrying railway was finished (1825), forward-thinking Britishers proposed and designed tunnels under the English Channel. Always the plans were nipped by timorous Tories† with the same excuse: a Channel tunnel would rob Britain of her sacred isolation. In case of war some future William the Conqueror might march through the tunnel, instantly flood Britain with a French army...
...French engineer, one J. A. Thome de Gamond, exhibited the first practical drawings for a Channel Tunnel. In 1875 tne Gunnel Tunnel Co. (still in existence) was organized. Queen Victoria spurred the idea by announcing: "All the women of England will bless the builder of the tunnel for saving them from seasickness," Preliminary borings were actually started. From the chalk cliffs of Dover and from the French shore near Sangatte, mile-long galleries were driven out under the Channel floor. Proving the theory of Engineer de Gamond that the Dover chalk beds run out under the Channel, these abandoned galleries...
...Into the tunnel leading beyond "Hell's Half Acre" stumbled the party. The tunnel led them into another towering amphitheatre, so lofty that flashlight beams failed to find the ceiling. The white marble stage was set for a vast Wagnerian twilight of the gods, in glittering onyx, with orange-tinted, translucent stone curtains and footlights of stalagmites...
...explorers went, through a meagre crevice in the tunnel to yet another hall. The rocks were coated with powdery limestone formation. Nicholson jumped from a rock onto seemingly solid floor, sank neck deep into powdery dust which, clouding aloft from its aeons of tranquillity, floated steadily off through an immense opening near the ceiling...