A tunnel complex that formed Britain’s first line of defense in World War II opened to the public this week after six decades buried as a forgotten time capsule.
The underground labyrinth is inside the White Cliffs of Dover, an iconic symbol of England on its southeastern tip and a natural coastal defense at the closest point to continental Europe.
Standing at the clifftop entrance, tour guide Gordon Wise looked across the busy English Channel.
Photo: AFP
“You can actually see France, 21 miles [34km] away, just 70 seconds flying time for a shell,” he said as he surveyed the lights, buildings and beaches visible on the other side. “You get some idea that this was really the front line. This was where the defense of Britain had to start.”
The tunnel network, 23m down inside the chalk cliffs, supported 185 troops and four officers who manned three gun batteries and slept in bunks.
The digging began after then-British prime minister Winston Churchill visited Dover in July 1940 and was enraged to see enemy German ships sailing unopposed through the strait between Britain and Nazi-occupied France.
The Fan Bay Deep Shelter tunnels were constructed within 100 days.
The 325m2 of tunnels were abandoned in the 1950s and filled in with debris in the 1970s. Only a metal cover plate on the grassy clifftop gave any clue as to what lay beneath.
The National Trust conservation body rediscovered the shelter after purchasing this section of the cherished cliffs in 2012 and began a mission to revive the tunnels.
Fifty volunteers — Wise among them — spent about 3,000 hours over 18 months removing by hand the 100 tonnes of rubble tipped down the surface entrance.
“It’s an important piece of wartime heritage and it’s also a piece of forgotten history,” site project manager Jon Barker told reporters.
“The story of the cross-Channel guns was largely forgotten,” he said.
About 125 steps down, the tunnels are damp with condensation due to the moist, warm summer air. They smell of the creosote on the wooden support beams.
The tunnels are lined with rusting corrugated steel arching, some of which was removed for scrap in the 1950s, revealing the fossil-filled pristine white chalk behind it.
The temperature remains a cool 12oC all year round.
“Today the tunnels are abandoned, they feel quite spacious and they’re very quiet, but during the 1940s, it would have been an extremely busy place,” Barker said. “It would have been quite hot, noisy and smelly.”
The project’s volunteers found many traces of the long-forgotten soldiers’ lives.
Cigarette packets, telegrams, improvised clothes hooks, soccer betting coupons and rifle rounds were discovered, while a copy of The Shadow on the Quarterdeck, a 1903 naval adventure, had been stashed on top of an air duct.
The chalk walls are etched with graffiti, usually the names of troops, such as “Nobby Clark 7/11/42.”
Elsewhere there is a game of noughts and crosses, a tiny carved face and some bawdy graffiti on bricks from the latrines, making light of the lack of toilet paper.
“Parade is due I dare not linger, here goes I’ll use my finger,” one example says.
Later graffiti carvers left their mark, including adventurous cavers and locals.
“Nick and Julie” snuck inside for many visits in the 1970s.
“It was very difficult and dangerous to get in. Because of that, it’s kept the tunnels in fantastic condition, which is why they’re a time capsule from the 1940s,” Barker said.
The dig also uncovered two rare acoustic mirrors built into the cliff face.
Before the advent of radar, the 4.6m diameter concave sculptures concentrated sound waves and gave an early warning on the direction of incoming aircraft, shipping and enemy fire.
Hosted by volunteer enthusiasts, a torchlit guided visit down the tunnels costs £10 (US$15.5).
Telephones from the 1940s connect the shelter to the surface. The handset in the tunnel suddenly rings and a jovial volunteer answers: “Hello? Winston?”
HAVANA: Repeated blackouts have left residents of the Cuban capital concerned about food, water supply and the nation’s future, but so far, there have been few protests Maria Elena Cardenas, 76, lives in a municipal shelter on Amargura Street in Havana’s colonial old town. The building has an elegant past, but for the last few days Maria has been cooking with sticks she had found on the street. “You know, we Cubans manage the best we can,” she said. She lives in the shelter because her home collapsed, a regular occurrence in the poorest, oldest parts of the beautiful city. Cuba’s government has spent the last days attempting to get the island’s national grid functioning after repeated island-wide blackouts. Without power, sleep becomes difficult in the heat, food
U-TURN? Trami was moving northwest toward Vietnam yesterday, but high-pressure winds and other factors could force it to turn back toward the Philippines Tropical Storm Trami blew away from the northwestern Philippines yesterday, leaving at least 65 people dead in landslides and extensive flooding that forced authorities to scramble for more rescue boats to save thousands of terrified people, who were trapped, some on their roofs. However, the onslaught might not be over: State forecasters raised the rare possibility that the storm — the 11th and one of the deadliest to hit the Philippines this year — could make a U-turn next week as it is pushed back by high-pressure winds in the South China Sea. A Philippine provincial police chief yesterday said that 33
The space rock that slammed into Earth 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous Period caused a global calamity that doomed the dinosaurs and many other life forms, but that was far from the largest meteorite to strike our planet. One up to 200 times bigger landed 3.26 billion years ago, triggering worldwide destruction at an even greater scale, but as new research shows, that disaster actually might have been beneficial for the early evolution of life by serving as “a giant fertilizer bomb” for the bacteria and other single-celled organisms called archaea that held dominion at the
PROPAGANDA: The leaflets attacked the South Korean president and first lady with phrases such as: ‘It’s fortunate that President Yoon and his wife have no children’ North Korean propaganda leaflets apparently carried by balloons were found scattered on the streets of the South Korean capital, Seoul, yesterday, including some making personal attacks on the country’s president and first lady. The leaflets attacking South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and first lady Kim Keon-hee found in the capital appear to be the first instance of the North Korean government directly sending anti-South propaganda material across the border. They included graphic messages accusing the Yoon government of failures that had left his people living in despair, and describing the first couple as immoral and mentally unstable. The leaflets included photographs of the