In 1929, everybody had a go at the tunnel once more, and very elaborate engineering studies were made on the subject by well-established engineering firms and were carefully examined by a special Government committee, with particular attention being given to the contention of pro-tunnel people that the construction of a Channel tunnel would provide badly needed work for Englishmen in depression times. The report of the Government's committee was, with a single dissension, favorable to the construction of the tunnel. But the Committee of Imperial Defense still was to have its say, and in May 1930 it rejected the project. This time the rejection was made primarily on two grounds, according to a high British military man who was later a member of that body. The first of these, he says, was the fear of the military that the successful construction of a Channel tunnel would so adversely affect England's Channel shipping trade that the Channel ports were likely to fall into ill repair and the harbors to start silting up—dangerous conditions in periods of national emergency; the second was their fear that if Britain became involved in another war on the Continent, the tunnel would suddenly become a traffic bottleneck through which it would be difficult to move war supplies and equipment quickly and on the massive scale required. A month after this adverse verdict by the military, a motion was nonetheless put forward in the House of Commons for approval of the tunnel, and this time such a large group of M.P.s was favorable to the scheme that the motion failed to carry by only seven votes. For most of the thirties, the tunnel project just drifted along in a dormant state. Once every so often, when things were generally slack, the press would carry a feature story on it, and the annual meetings of the Channel Tunnel Company, still gamely presided over by Baron Emile Beaumont d'Erlanger, were always good for a paragraph tucked somewhere into the financial pages under mildly mocking headlines, such as "Hope Eternal," "The Channel Tunnel Again," or, in one of the popular dailies, just "The Poor Old Tunnel."