Queue here to show you are British . . .
This week in Edinburgh, the queue of those wishing to pay their respects to Queen Elizabeth ii stretched back a mile. some estimate that the queue in London may take up to 30 hours.
it’s something of a paradox. Although the Queen took part in any number of activities during her long and varied life, she was never allowed to queue.
Yet queuing, along with the Beatles and taking milk in our tea, and, of course, the Royal Family, is something for which we Britons are known throughout the world.
The hungarian humorist George Mikes arrived in Britain in 1938. he immediately noticed our propensity for queuing. ‘ An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one,’ he observed.
Food shortages during World War ii meant that queuing became less of a pastime than a necessity. Yet people were still happy to queue for items that, in other countries, might well have seemed inessential.
During the Blitz in 1940, Winston Churchill was driving through a London slum when he noticed a long queue outside a shop. he stopped the car and sent his detective to find out what the shortage was. The detective came back with the answer: birdseed.
Mikes celebrated the English queue in his first and most famous book, how To Be An Alien, published immediately after the war in 1946.
‘At weekends an Englishman queues at the bus stop, travels out to Richmond, queues up for a boat on the Thames, then queues up for tea, then queues up for ice cream, then joins a few more odd queues for the sake of the fun of it, then queues up at the bus stop, and has the time of his life.’
There have, of course, been times in the post-war years when some people sensed that our propensity for queuing was on the wane.
in 1954, a clergyman from Burnley wrote a strong letter to The Times. Proper queuing, he claimed, had become a thing of the past.
‘There is some order until a bus arrives at a stop, but that little goes then. if two arrive together, the situation is worse. it is true there is no violence, but a lot of people sidle on the buses out of their turn with great skill and an appearance of distinterestedness.’
A year later a Londoner wrote a similar letter to the sunday Express. ‘ What has happened to the shape of the bus queues? i recall their neat and orderly double-file formation during the war. Today they straggle and lack not only their former paradeground precision but also bonhomie,’ he complained.
But, for the most part, we remained a nation of obedient — even enthusiastic — queuers.
in April 1960, the writer Christopher isherwood arrived from Los Angeles to spend a fortnight in London. he was greatly impressed by ‘the utter fantastic patience of everyone when a line has to be formed or a train or bus waited for. You feel the wartime mentality still very strongly.’ A year letter, a Mr D.L. of Orpington wrote to the Daily Mirror saying that German friends taking a holiday in Britain had been particularly impressed not just by ‘ the orderly queues at bus stops’ but also by ‘ people taking newspapers from unattended stands and leaving the correct money’.
sixty years on, for all the recent reports of our social fabric coming under stress, i sense there is still something about a queue that acts like a magnet on the British psyche.
in London, there is always a queue outside the hard Rock Cafe in Park Lane, even though their burgers taste exactly the same as everyone else’s. When Britons spot any queue, they can’t resist the temptation to join it.
QUEUES breed like rabbits. in my seaside town, there are two fish and chip shops, a hundred yards apart. Though they are both under the same ownership, people are naturally attracted to whichever one happens to have the longest queue.
You might have thought that modern technology would have done away with queuing. in fact, it has served only to expand it.
These days, we can even queue by ourselves, in the comfort of our own homes. if ever a phrase captured the spirit of our times it is: ‘You are being held in a queue.’ i used to think it a deterrent; but in fact it’s a lure.