In the meantime, with all the brave words, and all the money poured into the project, the Channel Tunnel Company still has something of a phantom air about it. It doesn't have a regular staff—D'Erlanger is a busy City banker—and it has no real office of its own. D'Erlanger's banking headquarters are at the investment house of which he is a partner, Philip Hill, Higginson, Erlangers, Ltd., along Moorgate, but no Channel Tunnel Company records are kept there. The nearest thing to a headquarters for the Channel Tunnel Company is a set of Victorian offices on Broad Street Place, in the City, occupied by a firm of "secretaries" called W. H. Stentiford & Co. These offices are reached by a very ancient and slow ironwork-gate lift, and a sign in the corridor shows that W. H. Stentiford & Co. is the representative of an astonishing variety of companies, including the Channel Tunnel Company, Ltd., and a number of outfits with such exotic corporate names as the Tea Share Trust, Ltd., Uruwira Minerals, Ltd., Dominion Keep (Klerksdorp, Ltd.), and Klerksdorp Consolidated Goldfields, Ltd. Inside, amid a clutter of ticking clocks, great ledgers, old safes emblazoned with peeling coats of arms, great piles of papers, and trays of teacups, a small staff of round-shouldered retainers toils away vicariously over the affairs of these far-flung organizations—making up accounts and annual or quarterly statements, filling out and recording stock certificates, answering letters, and so on. All this clerkly activity is presided over by an eminently respectable and precisely mannered man by the name of P. S. Elliston, who also arranges board meetings for his many client companies in a room set aside at Stentiford's for the purpose. Mr. Elliston's organization "took on" the Channel Tunnel Company in the early forties, and all its annual meetings since 1947 have been held at Stentiford's, with Mr. Elliston present in his capacity of representative of his firm of secretaries. Mr. Elliston finds things changed a bit from the time when the Channel Tunnel Company first became one of his firm's clients. In those old days, he says, the whole annual meeting could generally be disposed of in between five and ten minutes, with only a couple of directors being present—Mr. Elliston having thoughtfully bought one share of Channel Tunnel Company stock to enable himself to vote in case no other shareholder besides a couple of directors could be persuaded to turn up to make a quorum of three. Now, he says, it may sometimes take twenty-five minutes or even as long as forty-five minutes to transact necessary business. As for Channel Tunnel Company stock, it has fluctuated all the way from sixpence to fifty shillings—its price one day in 1959 at a time when the company's balance sheet showed a cash balance of just £161. The price of the stock at the time this book was written was about twenty-two shillings, and the company's cash in hand