Managing British Public Opinion of the Channel Tunnel

Abstract

MANAGING BRITISH PUBLIC OPINION OF THE CHANNEL TUNNEL RICHARD ROGERS During the run-up to the multiple openings of the Channel Tun­ nel, there was much talk in the British media and undoubtedly in British pubs about the safety and security of the three 50-km-long conduits between Folkestone and Coquelles. A couple of months be­ fore Queen Elizabeth II and President François Mitterand cut the ribbon on the tunnel in May 1994, the British government announced a much-publicized measure calling for life imprisonment for hi­ jacking, seizing control of the tunnel, destroying or damaging trains or the tunnel itself, or endangering tunnel safety by making threats. This was in direct response to a widely perceived threat of terrorist attack on the tunnel, perhaps by the Irish Republican Army. Later that month, after Le Shuttle service for lorries commenced, newspa­ pers reported several glitches in the system. In one of the initial runs, warning lights flashed in the engineer’s cockpit, indicating a fault in the system, and lorry drivers had to be evacuated into the service tunnel and transported into daylight by a maintenance vehicle. A second, similar technical failure two days later led to the temporary suspension of freight service. During a trial run of a Eurostar passen­ ger train that same week, a power failure suddenly brought the train to a halt, leaving people to wonder what would have happened had the regular freight service still been in operation. And in the fall, just days before Le Shuttle “overture automobile service” for sharehold­ ers and journalists was due to begin, newspaper headlines reported that the Channel Tunnel leaks! Silt had clogged the drainage system, resulting, according to one engineer, in a “steady and disquieting amount of saline water concentrated in a few areas.”1 Worst of all, at least from a public relations point of view, was the technical failure of an inaugural Eurostar train filled with 400 reporters in midMr . Rogers is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of technology in the Department of Science and Technology Dynamics at the University of Amsterdam, where he is writing a dissertation on British public perceptions of the Channel Tunnel in historical per­ spective. He thanks Stephen Foulger and Sabiha Foster of the Science Museum for discussing the evolution of the exhibit. '“Chunnel Takes a Bath,” London Sunday Times, September 25, 1994, business sec. p. 1.© 1995 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/95/3603-0009$01.00 636 Managing British Public Opinion of the Channel Tunnel 637 Fig. 1.—The Science Museum’s “Channel Tunnel: The Whole Story” exhibit covers various aspects of the tunnel’s history, technology, and effects—on both the British landscape and psyche. October; it undoubtedly received the most press attention of all the incidents. Eurotunnel spokespersons have downplayed these teething prob­ lems of the newborn tunnel, and since the Intergovernmental Com­ mittee issued the licenses to operate the Eurostar passenger and Le Shuttle car trains beginning late last year, all systems are go. Never­ theless, public opinion in Britain has been lukewarm to the tunnel. In a number of recent polls, a majority of Britons surveyed indicated that fears of terrorist attack or claustrophobia will keep them from ever using the tunnel. These are only the latest in an array of con­ cerns in Great Britain about the Channel Tunnel, voiced continually since the 1880s, when the first of two aborted projects (the other was in 1975) was halted ostensibly out of fear of military invasion through the tunnel. Against this backdrop, the Science Museum in London opened a timely temporary exhibition (see fig. 1) on the Channel Tunnel containing attractive spaces devoted to, among other issues, the his­ tory of tunnel projects, channel geology, environmental impacts, and tunneling techniques. Shown in London for several months in 1994 and then at the National Railway Museum in York until the end of 1995, it goes a step farther than most exhibits on controversial 638 Richard Rogers technologies. Much to its credit, and in stark contrast to the larger Eurotunnel Exhibition Centre in Folkestone, “Channel Tunnel: The Whole Story” unabashedly takes on the contemporary...