page_title: Arthur Fell
section_title: In Parliament
hierarchical_section_title: Arthur Fell / Career / In Parliament
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Gravure sur le tunnel sous la Manche
context_page_description: Sir Arthur Fell was an English solicitor and Conservative Party politician. After a notorious legal case in 1906 where a biased judge dismissed an election petition against him, Fell sat in the House of Commons from 1906 to 1922 for Great Yarmouth. He was noted as an opponent of free trade and as a persistent advocate of a Channel Tunnel.
context_section_description: In Parliament, Fell was a noted protectionist, and an outspoken critics of free trade who published a series of pamphlets both on trade and on food supplies in wartime, including The Fallacy of Free Trade, The Failure of Free Trade and John Bull's Balance Sheet.
  Fell was also a long-standing advocate of building a rail tunnel under the English Channel between England and France. He presented a paper The Channel Tunnel to the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) on 17 December 1913 
  and by February 1914 he was the chairman of the House of Commons Channel Tunnel Committee, an all-party parliamentary group (with 100 members in 1914) which he chaired until 1922.
  The tunnel's advocates included the Duke of Argyll, Lord Glantawe, Joynson-Hicks, Will Crooks, Hamar Greenwood, Sir William Bull and Arthur Conan Doyle. At a public meeting in London in February 1914 they made the case that the tunnel would increase commerce in peacetime and improve communications in wartime.
  During World War I, Fell and the committee continued to press the case for a tunnel, leading a delegation of MPs to the Prime Minister H. H. Asquith in October 1916. Asquith responded that the idea had been considered back in 1883 by a committee of both Houses of Parliament, who had recommended against a tunnel, and a long series of bills brought to Parliament since then had failed. When Henry Campbell-Bannerman became Prime Minister in 1907, he had commissioned a review by the Committee of Imperial Defence, which opposed the scheme. In 1913 Asquith had asked the Committee to decide whether to review its decision, and although it declined to do so, there had been a dissenting minority. Asquith said that the experience of the war had shown that a tunnel could have had an important role in supplying the British Expeditionary Force, and that a full review was now needed.
  By 1917, Asquith had been replaced as Prime Minister by David Lloyd George, and Fell told the National Liberal Club that he had "a very shrewd idea" what Lloyd George's attitude would be to the scheme,
  and that if a review reported in favour of a tunnel the coalition government would support it. In June of that year, 110 MPs supported a request for a debate on a tunnel.
  On 13 June 1918, Fell presented another paper to the RSA. In London and the Channel Tunnel he argued that a railway connection to other major countries was essential if London was to retain its place as a world city, and that leaving London cut off from continental Europe by "a stormy sea" would condemn it to isolation.
  In November 1919, Fell led another delegation to 10 Downing Street, which included the Irish Parliamentary Party MP Captain William Redmond and the Labour Party leader William Adamson. when Lloyd George told them that the government no longer had a political objection to a tunnel, but that its final position awaited a report on the military issues from the General Staff who in 1916 had been too busy with the war to consider the project. He noted that the major change over the years was that France was now an ally rather than an enemy, but that it was still necessary to consider the risk of an enemy seizing the tunnel and mounting a surprise attack.
  Little progress appears to have been made, and in July 1920 the Channel Tunnel Committee passed a resolution urging that government approval for a tunnel "no longer be postponed". In July 1921, the Annual General Meeting of the Channel Tunnel Company Limited was told by its chairman Baron Emile d'Erlanger that despite all the hard work of Fell and his committee, the company had "not yet received any intimation that the government was prepared to entertain the question seriously".
  In March 1922, Fell gave notice on behalf of the Committee of his intention to move a motion in the Commons calling on the government to give permission for the resumption of work on the tunnel, experimental tunneling having begun two years earlier. In August he presented a request signed by 217 MPs for a debate to be held during the autumn session of Parliament. However, Parliament was dissolved in Octobe
caption: Channel Tunnel as depicted in 1885
exif: {}