Watkin, Edward, and The Channel Tunnel Company.

i) correspondence: five letters by Sir Edward Watkin, including two autograph letters, to Lord Lansdowne, discussing the defensibility of Dover, a presentation of his air-locomotive, the opinions of Nathaniel de Rothschild ("...while greater access of Foreigners had disadvantages, the advantages to our Country & to the world far outweighed these..."), and his evidence to the Parliamentary enquiry into the Tunnel scheme, 20 pages; four autograph letters signed by Lord Lansdowne, discussing the Parliamentary report, 4 pages; and nineteen letters by other correspondents concerning evidence to the Parliamentary Channel Tunnel Committee, 30 pages; in total 54 pages, chiefly 8vo, May-June 1883



ii) other papers: Frederick Beaumont, memorandum on the means of destroying the Channel Tunnel ("...the tunnel could be rendered useless with no previous preparation whatever ... in 3 hours from notice being given..."), 3 pages, folio; two draft memoranda on the security implications of a tunnel in the event of a German invasion of France, 17 pages, folio; 3rd Earl of Camperdown, commission minority report criticising the Tunnel scheme, 10 pages, folio; and printed matter including a report of a meeting of the Submarine Continental Railway Company, 8 March 1883 and George Edwards, Project for Tunnelling Under Navigable Rivers, with three plates



An unusual group of papers revealing the extraordinary engineering ambitions, and also the security concerns, of Victorian Britain.  

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The railway promoter Sir Edward Watkin (1819-1901) backed a hugely ambitious scheme to link Paris and Manchester by rail. The tunnel under the Channel was to follow a similar route to that which eventually opened in 1994. These papers relate to the Parliamentary enquiry into the proposal, chaired by Lord Lansdowne. Among the concerns were the likely working conditions in the tunnel, the effect on trade, and the possibility that the tunnel could be used as an invasion route. It was the latter, with its implied threat to Victorian Britain's Splendid Isolation, that generated the greatest hostility to the scheme and led to Parliament's refusal to support it.