It is easy to miss the obvious sometimes, like when you cannot find your glasses because they are sitting on your nose — or when you don’t see the large military facility that’s hidden within one of the world’s most famous landmarks. After years of passing it by, I have finally visited Fan Bay Deep Shelter, a curious place with a serendipitous history.
We arrive in Dover on a warm morning of June, one of those early summer days when the grey sky stretches past the horizon. The Channel crossing has been so easy on the mirror-like sea that it felt like leaving the entire world behind. Not many people seem to take the ferry on Mondays, and we’re out of the port in less time than it takes to say “Remember to drive on the left.” The picturesque road that meanders uphill takes us by the Castle and its impassive sheep, then to the White Cliffs of Dover Visitor Centre.
“Wear sensible footwear”, says the National Trust website. Ah! But I always wear sensible footwear, I think, while still putting on my hiking shoes, sitting on the edge of the open boot of our car that overlooks the sea. One can never be too careful. I’ve wanted to see Fan Bay Deep Shelter for ages, but it never seemed to be open to the public. This time, I checked the opening hours and asked the volunteer at the entrance booth for confirmation.
It’s a short walk that separates the car park from the site of the shelter (about 1.5 miles, 2.5 km) — one that I have taken dozens of times when I needed to clear my head, exhaust my body or bid a proper goodbye to the isle of Britain. Up and down Langdon Hole, then a short stop to admire the view of the harbour on the right. France and the entire continent have disappeared in the distance and the clouds seem to be slowly vanishing on England. What a lovely day to discover yet another uniquely British place.
Legend has it that in July 1940, Winston Churchill was standing on the White Cliffs of Dover and looking at the sea with his binoculars. After a short while, the Prime Minister allegedly turned to one of his aides and asked him what those ships were, as he couldn’t make out any of the Royal Navy classes from afar. The aide awkwardly answered that they were in fact German ships.
I haven’t found any reference to this conversation in Churchill’s war memoirs, but I did find a letter to the First Lord and First Sea Lord that he wrote while he was surveying the coastal defences:
I cannot understand how we can tolerate the movement at sea along the French coast of any vessels without attacking them. It is not sufficient surely to use the air only. Destroyers should be sent under air escort. Are we really to resign ourselves to the Germans building up a large armada under our noses in the Channel, and conducting vessels through the Strait of Dover with impunity? This is the beginning of a new and very dangerous threat which must be countered.
Further on in Their Finest Hour, Churchill describes how the German army had installed 35 heavy and medium batteries, as well as seven captures batteries along the French coast (France had fallen and the collaborationist Vichy government had seized power by then). In response, the British Prime Minister had given the order of arming the Dover promontory with guns that could fire across the Channel, among which Clem and Jane, two 15-inch guns with a firing range of 42,000 yd (38,000 m) at Wanstone Battery, and three 6-inch MK VII Guns with a range of 25,000 yd (23,000 m) at Fan Bay Battery.
Because of its location at the narrowest point of the Channel, Dover was of strategic importance. If the Germans were to attack by sea, that’s where they would do it, and now they even were able to bombard Britain without even leaving the French shores. Arming the White Cliffs was a clever defensive idea, but it came with one specific challenge: due to the escarpment, there was no way a garrison could be stationed up there, and in case of attack, no way for the soldiers to climb to the promontory fast enough to fight back.
As often, the solution to this problem was both extremely simple in its design and extremely complex in its execution. Since it was impossible to station the forces on top of the promontory, and highly impractical to have them on the shore, 350 feet (110 m) below, then you had to put them inside the White Cliffs. Which was obviously easier said than done, for you see, the White Cliffs are made of chalk and flint, two sedimentary rocks that are not particularly amenable to mining.
But who would let geology stand in the way of a strategic decision? Certainly not the British Army, who promptly dispatched the Royal Engineers, among whom a bunch of Welsh soldiers who had been coal miners before the war (and must have been extremely disappointed upon learning that their wartime job would be exactly the same as their peacetime job). In total, it only took them 100 days (between the 20th of November, 1940 and the 28th of February, 1941) to complete the task of building the 3,500 feet² (325 m²) of galleries, which were then lined with corrugated steel arching. Soon, 185 soldiers and 4 officers were garrisoned in the tunnels, whose facilities included a rudimentary hospital, toilets, a washroom, storage space, and bunk beds.
We meet our guide by a small building that looks like a bunker. He equips us with caving hats and informs us that the visit will start in five minutes, probably to give other potential visitors to join our group, which so far is made up of the guide, Jon, and me. No one else seems to be coming, so the three of us head to the side of the entrance to look at a map that shows the British, German and French positions across the Channel during the war. Our guide, a volunteer in his late fifties (whose name I didn’t write down and have now forgotten; I’m sorry) is passionate about the topic, and for a good reason; he was one of the 50 people who excavated the site between 2012 and 2015.
“Be careful. There are 125 steps,” our guide tells us after asking us to turn on the torches on our helmets. The stairs seem to go down forever, and the sensation of cold compared to the surface temperature is almost immediate as we reach the first landing. It’s about 28°c outside, but here, it’s 12°c all year round. The ambient humidity is such that one can actually see the droplets that are constantly forming on the structure.
When you ask former soldiers about their experience of war, which I have had the opportunity to do on a surprising number of occasions, they generally don’t tell you about the horrors they’ve seen or done, whether it be by shame, loyalty or humility. What they will gladly tell you about, however, is boredom. Most of their time seems to be spent waiting for something to happen, and when nothing does happen, monotony takes over until it fills their days and nights entirely.
At 75 ft (23 m) under the ground, and in a confined space, there isn’t much you can do in way of entertainment. So the men read, placed football bets, wrote, and drew on the walls. At the end of one of the tunnels, someone has sculpted a small head out of a block of chalk. It is a small, delicate thing, almost perfect in its simplicity. Here and there, noughts and crosses games have been played, leaving behind completed grids in the white rock. Just facing the officer’s bedroom door, a graffiti reads “Russia bleeds while Britain blanco’s,” written by a disillusioned soldier, no doubt.
I feel sympathy for those men who spent so much time there. I can easily picture them, with their feet hanging from the top of their bunk beds, trying to distract themselves from their ennui and from the inevitable mix of claustrophobia and restlessness that comes with living in such close quarters. The childish graffiti, the games, maybe a brawl from time to time… I am moved by the smaller details, the tiniest traces of the past that still show here and there as if the soldiers had left the shelter yesterday. Being here is like stepping through a miniature door to a History that is never as far behind us as we would like it to be, and that can easily repeat itself if we don’t pay close attention.
The German army never set foot on British shores — via Kent or anywhere else. The war finally ended. Since there was no use for the Fan Bay Shelter anymore, it was “decommissioned,” which is a rather nice way to say “locked and forgotten.” In the 1970s, in an effort to move on from its war memories, the city of Dover passed a decree that aimed at dismantling the complex. A local company was hired to collect the corrugated steel panels in order to reclaim them.
The project was soon abandoned as, it appeared, tonnes of chalk would collapse each time the workers attempted to remove the arching. I don’t know how much you know about chalk mining and deep shelters, but if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably missed the same detail as the craftsmen who were in charge of the dismantlement of the shelter.
Indeed, though the steel panels were shaped like arches, the chalk hadn’t been mined according to the same pattern. Instead, the tunnels, much like most mining shafts, had been dug according to a rough square section. And when you have to fit half a circle within a square, you inevitably end up with a lot of empty space in the top corners. The Royal Engineers, in order to avoid those voids and to fit the arching with more precision, had filled the sides as well as the corners with chalk rubble, which would inevitably fall down if you removed the panels.
“But surely the company that was awarded the contract must have been aware of that,” I say to our guide as we’re contemplating the rubble on the other side of the tunnel. “They would have if they had been a mining company,” he replies with a smile. “Hold on, what sort of company was it?” I ask, feeling that it’s the question he’s been expecting all along. “Oh, it was a local car workshop,” he answers with the typically deadpan Kentish tone.
The main tunnels were then intentionally collapsed and filled in with rubble, and the years went by. Fan Bay Deep Shelter, whose existence and exact location had long been forgotten, was rediscovered almost by accident in 2012, when a National Trust volunteer spotted a hole in the ground. It took three years, a £1.2 million public appeal and dozens of volunteers to evacuate the 100 tonnes of spoil, rubble and concrete that had been used to fill the tunnels, and restore them thanks to the original construction plans.
While they were at it, the National Trust volunteers discovered other priceless historical artefacts: two WWI sound mirrors, whose function was to amplify the noises coming from the sea. They made it possible for their operators to be informed of the path of an incoming plane twenty minutes before seeing it, which was quite the strategic achievement. Alas, with the development of radar technology in the 1930s, the sound mirrors were rendered useless and 600 tonnes of concrete were poured over them. The volunteers managed to restore them to their former glory, and they are perfectly functional, though they are exclusively used for illustrative purposes nowadays. Yet, standing there with your back turned to the Channel and hearing its noises come from the enormous disc facing you is quite the experience.
The tour ends as we climb the 125 steps toward the surface. “Is that the new generator I am hearing?” I ask our guide. “Yes,” he says, a new one had to be installed, but they have kept much of the old one for conservation purposes, as they have with most things that were found here. He shows us the small room where the volunteers keep their equipment, an economical affair with an old desk and a lot of maps. There, we spend a good ten minutes discussing the restoration of the tunnels with him and another volunteer. We finally say goodbye and promptly reach the White Cliffs footpath that will lead us to the lighthouse and a nice cup of tea.
Fan Bay Deep Shelter bears testimony to the incredible ingeniousness of WWII Britain, just like the propaganda campaign that claimed carrots improved eyesight (the Germans allegedly believed it and started to feed carrots to their own soldiers), Operation Mincemeat (probably the most bonkers plan in the whole history of counter-intelligence), decoy cities (also known as Starfish sites) and painting the mailboxes with a yellowish-green paint that was reactive to gas.
However, places like Fan Bay Deep Shelter and other WWII sites are places we must now approach with great care. I suppose that if I had visited the tunnels five years ago, my impression of them would have been a little different from what I experienced last June. As someone who is scared of seeing History take a wrong turn, I cannot help feeling concerned by the political exploitation of WWII imagery by nationalists who would like to re-write the past for it to fit the worldview that most benefits their personal ambitions.
It is a certain idea of England, of a Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On attitude that I have come to love and admire that is now being perverted by those who seek to divide and conquer. As an outsider, I can only lament the ease with which they make use of History to advance their own agendas as if they couldn’t see the irony of re-framing the indomitable spirit that made Britain such a beacon of hope during WWII to open the door to nationalist ideologies.
Visiting Fan Bay Deep Shelter is of dramatic importance as during 40 minutes you will get to experience the very concrete claustrophobic impression of being an isolated pawn in a grand game of chess over which you have very little control — besides that of escaping your ennui by carving graffiti in chalk walls. I hope that those who tour it will learn something beyond the technical prowess and that it will nourish their reflection on why we must not allow for circumstances such as those that led to the construction of the tunnels to ever arise again.
Practical information
- I am not sure I should insist on this since you’ve probably got that from the piece that precedes, but visiting Fan Bay Deep Shelter probably isn’t the best idea if you’re claustrophobic.
- Do wear sensible footwear. Hiking shoes are not necessary, but avoid flip flops and high heels.
- Check the opening times to avoid disappointment as they are bound to vary.
- There is no toilet at the shelter. The nearest facilities are located at the South Foreland Lighthouse, about ten minutes away.
- The tour is not suitable for small children.
- Price: £5/person, free for National Trust members. Bring cash, as it is impossible to pay by card.
- Check the National Trust Fan Bay Deep Shelter page.
