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0 As a soldier in the Royal Engineers, Laidley Nelson met Elizabeth II three times. The second time she recognised him. “She said, ‘Aren’t you that corporal?’ Her memory was fantastic. She didn’t talk down to you.”
Nelson, 71, was in a lucky minority. Most of those queueing alongside the river Thames last week had no direct experience of the Queen they adored. Seeing her lying-in-state in Westminster Hall would be the closest they came to her. It was all they had left.
The queue, which at times snaked so far that it had to be closed, will disappear entirely early on Monday, with the lying-in-state due to end at 6.30am. But it is likely to endure in the collective memory as a pilgrimage for a nation that does not do pilgrimages, a spiritual interlude in a rapidly secularising country.
It helped provide closure not just to the Queen’s reign, but also to the Covid era when health restrictions prevented shared experience of grief, most visibly at Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021.
Was it, as some said, the most British thing ever? At its peak, the queue grew to 4.9 miles and waiting times exceeded 24 hours. There was an unofficial queue to join the queue. It was an appropriately mild form of group frenzy: while many Americans were once swept up by QAnon, Britons merely queued on and on.
Yet on the banks of the Thames, the queue often felt un-British. It was not like the grey, tight-lipped lines found outside post offices and train stations. People talked with strangers and swapped phone numbers. “Would anyone like a fudge? Or a humbug?” someone shouted near Westminster Bridge.
After seeing the coffin in Westminster Hall, queuers hugged each other farewell. “I don’t want to say see you next time, but the world is really small!” one woman said to her companions of the preceding 13 hours.
Indeed the queue’s appeal was that it felt so unlike the Britain of recent years: ungovernable, hurried, individualistic. “We are passing through a really bad patch — the energy crisis and so on — but we should never lose hope,” said Kiran Patel, a hospital volunteer, who was born in Kenya the day after the Queen’s coronation in 1953.
The queue could be irreverent. In the hours of waiting, there was chatter about the exact cause of the Queen’s death (Buckingham Palace has not specified). There was spread betting on how long it would take to get in. Later some queuers sold their used wristbands on eBay, until the company banned them.
Queueing is an exercise in faith — faith that following the rules is sufficient, that the system will deliver. There are alternatives. In 1952, several people died in Argentina, as crowds crushed to see the body of the late first lady Eva Perón. Britain has had its own tragedies, but this queue — with its Portaloos, and its civil servants and scouts repurposed at crowd marshals — inspired confidence and patience.
Economists would identify the sunk cost fallacy: after an hour’s waiting, no one was prepared to quit. Psychologists saw something else: people with a variety of motives for queueing, some projecting their own lives on to the Queen’s passing.
“At the start, the processions were the story. The crowd itself became the story,” said Stephen Reicher, a social psychologist at the University of St Andrews. And so people’s “fear of missing out” became a major motivation.
The queue was diverse: 60 per cent were Remain voters, reflecting the predominance of Londoners, and 53 per cent voted Conservative, according to polling by Rob Johns, a professor at the University of Essex. In one section on Wednesday were a supermarket checkout worker, a solicitor, an anti-immigration politician and a one-time Financial Times journalist.
All queuers were not precisely equal: MPs could visit without waiting, along with four guests each. But a sense of fair play took hold. TV presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby were accused of queue-jumping, although a statement said that they had visited “in a professional capacity”. In contrast ex-footballer David Beckham was praised for queueing 12 hours.
Why were the people willing to wait to experience what could be seen free on an internet stream? By the Thames, the question quickly flipped to: why not? “If I can’t give 12 hours of my life for someone who’s given us 70 years, it’s a bit sad, isn’t it?” said Amanda, a careworker from Folkestone.
It helped that news bulletins have talked of little else but the Queen’s funeral, providing blanket publicity not even granted to top-level football. The weather was also mild. In contrast, George V and George VI died in winter: some of the 305,000 who saw the latter lying in state had to put up with light snow.
There have been comparable moments in modern Britain: the condolence books for Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997; the Queen Mother’s lying-in-state in 2002; and the platinum jubilee this summer. But many queuers saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. One woman, seven-months pregnant, was looking forward to telling her baby that he had been there.
Not everyone made it. Between Wednesday and Saturday, ambulance services provided medical attention to 1,078 queuers, 136 of whom were taken to hospital.
Inside Westminster Hall itself, what hit home was the silence, disturbed only by the sweeping of soles on the carpet and the clicking of an attendant totting up the numbers. Was it worth it? “Oh yes. Oh goodness me,” said Tim Wood, an engineer on the inland waterways. Do not ask if it was worth the wait: it was the wait that made it worth it.
Meanwhile, around Parliament Square on Sunday, crowds had begun to arrive for the next phase of mourning: the procession of the Queen’s coffin. There were tents, foldable chairs and a loudspeaker playing the football anthem Three Lions. Is there a name for those Britons who will do almost anything for a glimpse of monarchy? “Mad!” laughed one woman, who was herself preparing to camp out.
