Major J. E. Platt, a manufacturer from Manchester. However, Fell held the seat with a slightly increased majority of 461 votes (5.4%), and was returned again in December 1910 with a majority of 373 votes over Platt. He was knighted in February 1918, and returned for a fourth and final time at the 1918 general election, as a Coalition Conservative and stood down from the Commons at the 1922 general election, having announced his retirement in early 1920. In Parliament 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