Introduction
In the 1880s, when the idea of a Channel Tunnel was being seriously considered in Parliament, senior ministers warned anxiously and apparently seriously of the dangers of encouraging a French invasion. John Bright, who as President of the Board of Trade had been strongly in favour of the project, made no attempt to conceal his scorn when he spoke to constituents in Birmingham on June 15th, 1883.
NOW, recollect what this Tunnel is. I do not know what is the width of this room, but I suppose it would not be much more than half its width; it might be something over twenty feet wide. It is at least twenty miles long. A Tunnel a mile long of that size looks a long Tunnel if you look at one end of it, or pass through it in a railway train. But twenty miles! You can form no idea what it is, and yet there is a superstition — I should have supposed it was necessary to have gone to Bedlam* to discover any man who could have entertained it (loud laughter) — there is a superstition that with 35,000,000 of persons in Great Britain and Ireland, of whom 8,000,000 are grown men, they could not defend a hole in the earth (loud laughter) not much more than about twenty feet wide. Now, I don’t know what number of trains would pass in a day through that Tunnel, but I should say — I thought, ten or twelve, but I saw in some of the evidence given before the House of Lords and Commons Committee the other day that — I think the calculation was that passenger trains and luggage trains, probably twenty, would pass through the Tunnel in the course of the day.*
* The popular name for the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, a priory in Bishopsgate, London, that was converted into a mental asylum in 1547. The hospital completed a move to Moorfields in 1676, and another to St George’s Fields in Lambeth in 1815; in 1930 it relocated to Monks Orchard in Beckenham, Kent, and was absorbed into Maudsley Hospital, where it remains part of the NHS to this day. Until 1770, it operated also as a profitable if profoundly distasteful tourist attraction.
* The figure in November 2023 was nearing 500 freight and passenger trains daily.
Précis
In 1883, John Bright MP told his Birmingham constituents that some in Government feared a tunnel beneath the English Channel might hand the French an opportunity to invade England. To him, it was little short of madness to imagine that a fully-equipped army could pass through a long, narrow hole in the ground, busy with speeding trains, and not be detected. (61 / 60 words)
In 1883, John Bright MP told his Birmingham constituents that some in Government feared a tunnel beneath the English Channel might hand the French an opportunity to invade England. To him, it was little short of madness to imagine that a fully-equipped army could pass through a long, narrow hole in the ground, busy with speeding trains, and not be detected.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, besides, despite, may, must, otherwise, since, whereas.
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