The driving of the Channel-tunnel pilot gallery at Shakespeare Cliff offered Sir Edward a handy opportunity for exercising his gifts in the field of public relations, and he took full advantage of it. Week after week, as the boring of the tunnel progressed, he invited large groups of influential people, as many as eighty at a time, including politicians and statesmen, editors, reporters, and artists, members of great families, well-known financiers and businessmen from Britain and abroad, and members of the clergy and the military establishment to be his guests on a trip by special train from London to Dover at Shakespeare Cliff. There, at the Submarine Continental Railway Company workings, the visitors were taken down into the tunnel to inspect the creation of the new experimental highway to the Continent. A typical enough descriptive paragraph in the press concerning one of these visits (on this occasion a group of prominent Frenchmen were the guests of Sir Edward) is contained in a contemporary report in the _Times_: The visitors were lowered six at a time in an iron "skip" down the shaft into the tunnel. At the bottom of this shaft, 163 feet below the surface of the ground, the mouth of the tunnel was reached, and the visitors took their seats on small tramcars which were drawn by workmen. So evenly has the boring machine done its work that one seemed to be looking along a great tube with a slightly downward set, and as the glowing electric lamps, placed alternately on either side of the way, showed fainter and fainter in the far distance, the tunnel, for anything one could tell from appearances, might have had its outlet in France. Sir Edward Watkin, in a speech he made at a Submarine Continental Railway Company stockholders' meeting shortly after such a visit (the main parts of the speech were duly paraphrased in the press), found the effect of the electric light (operated on something called the Swan system) in the tunnel to be just as striking as the _Times_ reporter had—only brighter. He thought the visit might be regarded as a remarkable one. Their colleague, Dr. Siemens, lighted up the tunnel with the Swan light, and it was certainly a beautiful sight to see a cavern, as it were, under the bottom of the sea made in places as brilliant as daylight.