Pierre Matheron
Mining engineer who led a vast workforce in boring the Channel Tunnel from the French side
PIERRE MATHERON, who has died aged 94, headed the team of 4,100 workers who between 1986 and 1994 excavated and fitted out the French end of the Channel Tunnel.
A mining engineer who came to Europe’s largest construction site having delivered the first terminal at Roissy-charles de Gaulle airport and managed major projects in Egypt and Iran, Matheron saw the tunnel through to completion with paternal concern for his workers – and a certain panache.
He struck the tone at the outset. Discovering that the site for the French terminal at Coquelles included a farmhouse, Ferme des Sapins, Matheron delayed its demolition and had it converted into a restaurant for his engineers, installing an excellent chef. British veterans of the project remember it with relish.
He was a passionate follower of French rugby, and his gastronomic tastes also embraced matchday barbecues in the car park at Twickenham.
Matheron spent almost his entire career with the Société Générale d’entreprise (now Vinci). His official titles with the tunnel were French head of construction for Transmanche Link (the consortium of four British and five French contractors delivering it for Eurotunnel), a member of TML’S executive committee, and administrative head of the entire project.
Until breakthrough was achieved in December 1990, the British and French operations were entirely separate, and this was reflected in vastly different working environments.
The British end was run like a coal mine and Matheron’s French operation like a nuclear power station, from a gleaming terminal at Sangatte. British tunnellers were searched for matches before going down the shaft at Shakespeare Cliff; at the French end smoking was freely permitted.
Attitudes to alcohol also differed; the first parties transiting the tunnel were confronted at the undersea border with France by a cairn of empty champagne bottles.
More of the tunnel – 17 miles against 13 – was excavated from the Kent end, but Matheron’s tunnellers faced the more challenging task. More of their tunnel was actually under the sea, and geological conditions were worse, with damper rock to penetrate. For this reason the concrete tunnel segments used by the French had a different design.
Despite this greater difficulty, Matheron’s tunnellers had a better safety record than the 9,600 at the British end. Of the nine fatalities during construction and fitting out of the service tunnel and two running tunnels, two were to French workers. Injuries among Matheron’s team were half the industry average.
The first of the three tunnel breakthroughs was achieved by a British team, well inside French territory. Matheron bet Alastair Morton, the British co-chair of Eurotunnel, £20 that the French would beat their counterparts to the border with the other two; he collected, having stopped the boring machine (TBM) yards short “to avoid a diplomatic incident”.
Matheron managed the French end of the project for seven years, retiring in 2003 on reaching 65 with trial trains already running and his workers having expended 24 million man-hours. Interviewed when the tunnel opened the following May, he spoke of his “immense pride” in a project which had not only had extraordinary technical dimensions but had made a huge impact on unemployment in the Calais area, with 96 per cent of workers recruited locally.
He was largely at a distance from the clashes between Eurotunnel, its bankers and TML which beset the project. Powers of diplomacy Matheron had developed completing a power station for Tabriz as the ayatollahs seized power in Iran went largely unused; relations with his British counterparts were generally good, though the bargaining could be tough.
The great moments for him were the breakthrough in the service tunnel, French and British tunnellers touching hands, and the day four years later when he transited the completed tunnel by train at nearly 90mph. Matheron took quiet pride in the first of the French TBMS being named Brigitte, after his wife; he reckoned its christening “the point when we really began to believe in the tunnel”.
The low points were the two fatalities, teething troubles that delayed the start of tunnelling, and a time after the breakdown of one of the TBMS “when I had the whole world on my back”. Yet the bores were completed ahead of schedule.
Before work began, the construction magnate Francis Bouygues told Matheron that the worst problems he would encounter would be social, so he set out to make his workforce – 3,000 of them under his direct control – not just a team but a family. He took particular care over the way workers were released as the project ran down.
There was only one strike, at the tunnel segments plant at Sangatte – contrasting sharply with the 22 per cent of time lost to strikes while he was building a steelworks near Marseille. The French tunnellers formed an “amicale” which is still active almost three decades after their task was finished.
Pierre Matheron was born at Roche-lamolière in the Auvergne on February 9 1928, one of eight children of Georges Matheron and the former Andrée Lebrun. His father was a mining engineer, and Pierre decided to follow in his footsteps, enrolling at the School of Mines at Nancy in 1947.
Qualifying as an engineer in 1950, he spent eight years on site in central and southern France, and leading road and oil-related projects in Algeria and the Sahara.
In 1958 Matheron took charge of constructing the Étoile and Pont-de-neuilly stations on Paris’s RER suburban railway. He won for SGE the Roissy airport terminal contract, which he then oversaw, and was briefly seconded to the French team involved with the previous Channel Tunnel project, which was cancelled by Britain’s Labour government in 1975.
From 1970 to 1974 he led the construction of the Fos-sur-mer steelworks, with a workforce of 12,000. He went on to lead projects including Nice’s new airport, a road tunnel at Fréjus, and the Villerest dam on the Loire.
Following his spell in Iran he negotiated the contracts for constructing Cairo’s metro system, then headed the Franco-japanese consortium developing a deep-water port for Damietta in the Nile delta.
After Margaret Thatcher and President Mitterrand signed the treaty authorising the Channel Tunnel, SGE put forward Matheron to head the French effort; its partners readily accepted. He arrived as work began at Sangatte in March 1986, taking charge of the works both below and above ground.
Matheron held the Médaille du travail, and was a Chevalier of the Ordre national du mérite and of the Légion d’honneur.
He is survived by his wife Brigitte, four daughters and a son; a second son predeceased him.