SIR EDWARD WATKIN was a vociferously successful promoter from the Midlands. The son of a Manchester cotton merchant, Watkin had passed up a chance at the family business in favor of railways in the early days of the age of steam, and it is a measure of his generally acknowledged shrewdness at railway promotion that in his mid-twenties, having become secretary of the Trent Valley Railway, he negotiated its sale to the London North Western Railway at a profit of £438,000. Now in his early sixties, Watkin was chairman of three British railway companies, the Manchester, Sheffield Lincolnshire Railway, the Metropolitan (London) Railway, and the South-Eastern Railway—the last-named being a company whose line ran from London to Dover via Folkestone—and one of his big current schemes was the formation of a through route under a single management—his own, naturally—from Manchester and the north to Dover. It was while he was busily promoting this scheme that Watkin caught the Channel-tunnel fever. He realized that part of the land the South-Eastern Railway owned along its line between Folkestone and Dover lay happily accessible to the ribbon of Lower Chalk that dipped into the sea in the direction of Dover and stretched under the bed of the Strait, and it wasn't long before he was conjuring up visions of a great system in which his projected Manchester-Dover line, instead of stopping at the Channel shoreline, would carry on under the Strait to the Continent. One of Sir Edward Watkin's first steps toward determining the technical feasibility of constructing a tunnel was to call in, sometime in the mid-seventies, William Low, whose own tunnel company had quite fallen apart, for engineering consultation. Watkin decided to aim for a twin tunnel based on Low's idea, which would have its starting point in the area west of Dover and east of Folkestone, and he put his own engineers to work on the job. In 1880, the engineers sank a seventy-four-foot shaft by the South-Eastern Railway line at Abbots Cliff, about midway between Folkestone and Dover, and began driving a horizontal pilot gallery seven feet in diameter along the Lower Chalk bed in the direction of the sea off Dover. By the early part of the following year, the experimental heading extended about half a mile underground. His engineers having satisfied themselves that the Lower Chalk was lending itself as well as expected to being tunneled, Sir Edward went ahead and formed the Submarine Continental Railway Company, capitalized at £250,000 and closely controlled by the South-Eastern Railway Company, to take over the existing tunnel workings and to continue them on a larger scale, with the aim of constructing a Channel tunnel connecting with the South-Eastern's coastal rail line. At the same time, he reached an understanding with the French Channel Tunnel Company on co-ordination of English and French operations; he also engineered through Parliament—he was an M.P. himself, and that helped