The Making and Working of a Channel Tunnel. Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution on Friday Evening, May 19, 1882. By Sir Frederick Bramwell, F.R.S. M.R.I.

This excessively-scarce work is little noticed: Bramwell's interest in the subject is not even noted in his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 28pp., 12mo. In original brown wraps. Good, on lightly-aged paper, with slight marking at head of wraps. The drop-head title reads: 'Royal Institution of Great Britain. | WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, | Friday, May 19, 1882. | WILLIAM BOWMAN, Esq. LL.D. F.R.S. Honorary Secretary and Vice-President, in the Chair. | SIR FREDERICK BRAMWELL, F.R.S. M.R.I. | The Making and Working of a Channel Tunnel. Bramwell confines himself entirely to the practicalities, explaining at the beginning of his lecture that he is presenting 'an abstract proposition; thus I do not ask you to consider with me whether the tunnel should be made at all, whether, if made, it would be a pecuniary success in the way of earning a large revenue, or whether, if made, it would detract in any appreciable degree from the safety of our insular position.' The first section of the lecture, on pp.3-20, discusses 'The Making of a Channel Tunnel'; the second, on pp.20-28, discusses 'The Working of a Channel Tunnel'. On pp.25-28 Bramwell describes a 'double-grated station' to combat smuggling. He concludes in the hope that an 'idle fear of invasion' will not 'stop, or even delay, the execution of one of the most useful works that even this nineteenth century, prolific as it has been in works of great utility, has seen proposed.' To put this item in context, May 1882 saw the abandonment of the exploratory work begun the previous year at Dover and Sangatte by the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company of the British railway entrepreneur Sir Edward Watkin and the French Suez Canal contractor Alexandre Lavalley, due to British political and press campaigns claiming that a tunnel would compromise Britain's national defences.