London Under (11 page)

William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, the fifth Duke of Portland in the middle of the nineteenth century, is best known for his obsessive desire to build a system of underground tunnels beneath his estate of
Welbeck Abbey so that he could travel unobserved. He never wanted to be seen; he did not wish to speak to anyone, or even be noticed by his own staff. The underground world represented for him safety and invisibility. The moment of birth must have been deeply troubling for him.

In more recent times
William Lyttle has built a system of tunnels, some of them 60 feet in length, beneath his property in
Hackney. He had been at work upon this underground project for forty years, completely unknown and unobserved, until residents’ complaints of inexplicable earth movements led to its discovery in 2003; the power of the adjacent street was one day terminated when he damaged a 450-volt cable. The tunnels and caverns radiate in all directions from his house in a subterranean web, but the meaning and purpose of the enterprise have never been discovered. “Tunnelling,” he said to journalists, “is something that should be talked about without panicking.” But that is precisely the response to someone who loves to inhabit the underworld—panic at the unknown. His nickname itself, “the mole man,” indicates the deep fear of transformation. This was the anxiety that created
the Minotaur, half man and half bull, with his own kingdom beneath the earth.

It was reported in the press that Mr. Lyttle’s face “lit up” when discussing underground chambers and secret tunnels, but it is hard to understand the origin of the fascination. It may be the comfort of being hidden, as in the case of the fifth Duke of Portland, and of somehow being safe from the depredations of the world. It may also represent a fantasy of power, whereby material or even spiritual strength is increased by being unknown and unseen. Before his retirement Mr. Lyttle was an electrical engineer, harbouring the secrets of invisible power. To entertain the fantasy of the tunnel may represent the fear of being seen; and the power of being unseen.

When asked if he was an inventor Mr. Lyttle replied that “inventing things that don’t work is a brilliant thing.” This is itself a brilliant answer, capturing the sheer facticity of much human activity. It is not purposeless. It has all the fascination of making art. The obsession, the act of digging out the earth, is enough. He went on to say that “there is no secret,” thus helping to demolish the fantasy that the underworld is somehow a secret place, a place of “secret treasure.” He was simply creating more space, itself an instinctive human activity. He was creating a burrow.

One of the greatest of the mole men is
Marc Isambard Brunel, whose dream of tunnelling beneath the Thames was eventually achieved at the expense of much cost and suffering. There had been two previous attempts to slay or undermine the deity of the river. In 1798 an engineer
proposed to excavate a tunnel between Gravesend and Tilbury with “a grand uninterrupted line of communication”; but the workers soon discovered quicksand, and the enterprise was abandoned. Four years later two Cornish engineers, accustomed to finding treasure under the ground, began to carve a tunnel out of the Thames clay between
Rotherhithe and
Limehouse; but their miners also found quicksand. They persevered, and the tunnel came within 120 feet of the shore before the river burst through.

The secret of Brunel’s success lay in the humble mollusc, the
Teredo naturalis
or ship-worm. It is not clear whether he observed it in a prison cell, where he had been briefly consigned for debt, or in the naval yards at Chatham. Yet he did understand its life force. It eats the timber of a ship, instinctively creating more space like the mole man of Hackney, and then passes the wood through its body; its excreta are then used to bolster the fabric of the tunnel it has created. Brunel realised that the same process could be used on a much grander scale, with the invention of a massive
Teredo naturalis
made out of iron. As the engine advanced, the workers, in thirty-four separate “cells” at the front, would carve out 4½ inches of clay at a time; a team of men in the rear would then line the newly uncovered piece of tunnel with brick and stone.

There was only one precedent. In 2180 BC the Babylonians built a tunnel beneath the Euphrates to unite the
royal palace of Babylon with the temple to Jupiter Belos; after an interval of 4,000 years, the great work was about to begin again.

The chosen route beneath the river united
Rotherhithe on the south bank with
Wapping on the north. The work began on 2 March 1825 with the building of the first shaft to link the surface with the mouth of the tunnel. It was the shaft that claimed the first fatality when, four months later, a workman fell down through it and was killed. He was the first propitiatory sacrifice. The shaft descended gradually, through the force of its own weight, and nine months after its inception it reached the required depth of 75 feet beneath the surface of the river. This in itself was an extraordinary achievement of engineering. Work on the tunnel itself could now begin. The men were divided into two shifts, working for eight hours at a time and then resting for eight hours before beginning once more. They drank beer laced with gin, and they slept in what one miner called “a feverish doze.”

The river flooded the workings at the beginning of 1826, but the damp and darkness provoked symptoms that were variously described as “ague” and “dysentery”; one man succumbed to delirium, and died. This was the terror of the underworld. The miners truly believed that they might be buried alive. In the first days and weeks any unfamiliar sound echoing through the depths would send them running to the exit shaft. The temperature rose and fell alarmingly, sometimes swinging
30° at a time. One mistake, one faulty brick, might bring down the whole fabric. Explosions of gas occurred within the tunnel, also, so that the labourers lived in fear of fire as well as of water. The engineer in charge of the project collapsed from the strain of the undertaking. He was replaced by Marc Brunel’s son,
Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Building the
Tower subway, 1860s
(illustration credit Ill.24)

The younger Brunel took over the work only to discover that the tunnel was coming close to the bed of the Thames. That part of the river was then packed with bags of clay, but they were not enough. In the spring of 1827 the Thames broke through once more; one workman
died in the flood, and another died of fever and dysentery after the event. Marc Brunel was afflicted by the first of several strokes. The mythic horrors of the underworld had taken a large toll, and the elder Brunel himself considered that his men had been “sacrificed” in their work of defying the natural world; they had entered a part of the underworld that had never before been visited. There were sometimes outbreaks of panic among the workers that had no discernible cause. On one occasion screams of “Help!” were heard coming from the tunnel; a miner had fallen asleep and had dreamed of flooding.

At the beginning of 1828 the river once more inundated the workings; there were cries of “The Thames is in! The Thames is in!” It was said that the ground above the tunnel seemed to come alive. Two men died in the deluge, but
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was swept by the force of the water up the shaft to the surface. At the time of the calamity a parson from
Rotherhithe deemed it to be “a just judgment on the presumptuous aspirations of mortal men.” He might have repeated the words of God to Adam: “Cursed is the ground because of you.” It was wrong to go beneath the earth, closer to the infernal regions. The project was discontinued, and was not revived until the advent of government money in 1835.

On their return to work, at the beginning of 1836, the miners were confronted by another horror of the underworld. They were digging their way through old earth
that was heavily impregnated with foul gases, described by one of their number as “vomiting flames of fire which burnt with a roaring noise.” Bright flame would burst from the face of the excavation.

Marc Brunel’s diary is a litany of sorrowful mysteries. On 16 May 1838 he recorded the incidence of “inflammable gas. Men complain very much.” Ten days later he wrote that “Heywood [a miner] died this morning.… Two more on the sick list. Page is evidently sinking very fast …” The metaphor of “sinking” is interesting; Page was going down even further than the others. Brunel also noted that “the air is excessively offensive. It affects the eyes. I feel much debility after having been some time below.… All complain of pain in the eyes.” Some of the workmen in fact suffered from blindness, temporary or permanent, that became known as the
“tunnel disease.” Epidemics of diarrhoea added their own horror to the polluted air. On 10 August 1838, the foreman of the works was escorted to a lunatic asylum where he could not be left unattended.

“It is truly distressing,” Marc Brunel wrote to a friend, “to see those men of ours who are disabled, not one leading man left of the first shift. Williams just gone off, complaining of fever, depression of spirits attended with acute pains in the head. The next to him, after two relapses, is, I have no doubt, completely gone, an excellent man. The evil is increasing …” It was the evil of the subterranean depths. Eleven deaths occurred in the last
two years of the enterprise. This was truly an unknown world, filled with peril. Nobody really understood what was happening. There was no science of underground engineering. Brunel had merely copied the activity of a mollusc.

When
Fanny Kemble, the English actress, visited the work in progress she was much struck by the image of the miners, “all begrimed, with their brawny arms and legs bare, some standing in black water up to their knees, others laboriously shovelling the black earth in their cages (while they sturdily sang at their task) with the red, murky light of links [flaming torches] and lanterns flashing and flickering about them.” They have become the creatures of the underworld, dwarves or devils, and Fanny Kemble instinctively draws the landscape of Hades.

Yet the drive for mastery of the lower world was maintained. The mid-nineteenth century has been described as the age of heroic materialism, and the Duke of Wellington described Brunel’s enterprise as “the greatest work of art ever contemplated.” The first subaqueous tunnel of the modern world was completed in the spring of 1840, and opened by
Queen Victoria at the beginning of 1843. It was, for a time, the wonder of the earth. But the triumph was not what it seemed. The only entrance to, and exit from, the tunnel was by means of the vertical shafts on either bank. No room, or opportunity, existed for the vehicle traffic that had been
envisaged. Many people visited the tunnel in the early months, eager for the sensation of walking beneath the Thames, but the popularity of the tunnel did not last.

The Banquet in the Thames Tunnel
, by George Jones, 1827. This was organised by Marc Brunel’s son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to persuade people the tunnel was safe after the disastrous floods earlier in the year.
(illustration credit Ill.25)