I'm Helena Bonkarter and this is history's secret heroes.

In this series we'll hear stories of daring secret missions and

re-

re-emptic high-ranking codebreaker

and Riemont the escape artist

interned in a German camp.

Tales of danger, dynamism and downright determination.

The new series of history's secret heroes.

Listen first on BBC Sounds.

Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service. It's 30 years since the Channel Tunnel

linking England and France was opened in 1994. We're taking you back four years

earlier to the moment the two halves of the tunnel

were finally connected. In 2010, Lucy Williamson spoke to the man who made the

breakthrough. It's December 1st, 1990, and deep beneath the English Channel, tunnel worker Graham Fag

is about to make history.

We've driven a small tunnel through the side of the tunnel and the French had come through partly from their side and there was maybe, I don't know, maybe half a meter of rock left chalk left to be taken out.

Graham and his French counterpart, Philippe Cosette, are about to open the first land connection between their two countries since the

last Ice Age 8,000 years ago.

What we had to do was to break this out using air hammers or jiggers as we call them to make the passageway through

from France to the UK.

And that's the kind of sort of pneumatic drill is it?

That's it, that's it.

...