While on their way by tramcar to view the working of Colonel Beaumont's boring machine at the far end of the tunnel, visitors stopped after a certain distance to enjoy another experience—a champagne party held in a chamber cut in the side of the tunnel. A contemporary artist's sketch in the _Illustrated London News_ records the sight of a group of visitors clustered around a bottle-laden table at one of these way side halts. Mustachioed and bearded, and wearing Sherlock Holmes deerstalker caps and dust jackets, they are shown, in tableaued dignity, standing about within a solidly timbered cavelike area with champagne glasses in their hands; and for all the Victorian pipe-trouser formality of their posture there is no doubt that the subjects are having a good time. After such a refreshing pause, the visitors would be helped on the tramcars again and escorted on to see the boring machine cutting through the Lower Chalk and to admire the generally dry appearance of the tunnel, and after that they would be taken back to the surface and given a splendid lunch either in a marquee set up near the entrance to the shaft or at the Lord Warden Hotel, in Dover, where more champagne would be served, along with other wines and brandies, more toasts to the Queen's health proposed, and speeches made on the present and future marvels of the tunnel, the forwardness of its backers, and the new era in international relations that the whole project promised. These lunches were also convenient occasions for the speakers to pooh-pooh the claims of the rival tunnel scheme of Lord Richard Grosvenor's Channel Tunnel Company, which was still being put forward, although entirely on paper, and to make announcements of miscellaneous items of news about progress in the Lower Chalk. Thus, at one of these lunches at the Lord Warden Hotel held in the third week of February, 1882, Mr. Myles Fenton, the general manager of the South-Eastern Railway, took occasion to announce to a large party of visitors from London that boring of the gallery had now reached a distance of eleven hundred yards, or nearly two-thirds of a mile, in the direction of the end of the great Admiralty Pier at Dover. According to an account in the _Times_, Mr. Fenton read to the interested gathering a telegram he had received from Sir Edward, who was unable to be present, but who by wire "expressed the hope that by Easter Week a locomotive compressed air engine would be running in the tunnel, of which it was expected the first mile would by that time have been made. (Cheers.)" Sometimes these lunches were held down in the tunnel itself, and general conditions down there were such that even ladies attended them, on special occasions, as a contemporary magazine account of a visit paid to the gallery by a number of engineers with their families makes clear.