The Queue and I

Reflections on the lying-in-state

Andrew paid his respects in person at Westminster Hall after queuing for 12 ½ hours

 

We are witnessing events unlike anything seen in this country for 20 years. I was a young university undergraduate in March 2002, when Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, known almost universally as ‘The Queen Mum’, passed away at the very grand old age of 101.

She was the widow of King George VI and the last Empress of India and her death triggered Operation TAY BRIDGE, a full ceremonial State Funeral, including a lying-in-state at Westminster Hall. The queue stretched for over a mile and an estimated 200,000 people marched past the coffin. As I said in my recent blog about the Queen, I was already a convinced monarchist by then and yet I was not among them. Because I was also 20 years of age and lazy! I just couldn’t be bothered. I watched the Queen Mum’s magnificent funeral on television from my uni digs but have regretted not attending the lying-in-state ever since.

With the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Operation LONDON BRIDGE has commenced. As a local councillor, I have signed the Books of Condolence at both The Basildon Centre and also at the Chantry Centre in my Billericay East ward and I attended the Accession Proclamation ceremony in Basildon Town Centre but I was determined not to repeat past mistakes and miss the opportunity to pay my respects to Her Majesty in person.

"We are told ‘the British love a queue’ and all our collective expertise was in evidence that night. It was as if this was the queue that we had all been training for: like the final boss in a computer game."

The queue for this lying-in-state is not just a queue. It is ‘The Queue’. It has completely dwarfed the queue for the Queen Mum. It has generally been between 4 and 6 miles long at any given time, stretching all the way to Southwark. At times, they had to stop allowing people to join the queue because it was at capacity and there was a queue to join the queue (which some wag christened ‘The Queuey 2’). It was, therefore, not without considerable trepidation that I decided to join. Indeed, I pretty much resigned myself to not doing so until Friday, around midday, when I found out that my wife’s aunt and her daughter were going with a friend. I messaged my ‘cousin-in-law’, Emily, to ask if I could tag along and the decision was made.  

I had completely forgotten I was being interviewed by Johnny Jenkins on Gateway F.M. at 3:30 p.m., so after that it was a mad dash to log off work, get ready, get provisioned, meet up with Emily, ‘Aunty Lou’ and their friend Yvonne at Shenfield and then head up to London. By coincidence, it was around this time that one of my Facebook friends posted “Surely people joining The Queue now have got to be verging on the clinically insane?” I replied “Very possibly. I shall let you know when my psych evaluation comes back.”

We initially had a job finding the end but, eventually, hailed a black taxi and, without further explanation, said to the cabbie “Take us to the back of the queue!” and, with a weary roll of his eyes, he drove us to Southwark Park, where we joined the Great Queue at almost precisely 6 p.m. and began a 12 ½ hour marathon through the night.

The tales of The Queue will be something recounted by myself, Emily, Louise and Yvonne for the rest of our lives and, indeed, by everybody else who was in it. It was a thing in and of itself. It probably has its own rating on TripAdvisor. We are told ‘the British love a queue’ and all our collective expertise was in evidence that night. It was as if this was the queue that we had all been training for: like the final boss in a computer game. Possibly because we elected to queue through the night, there was not that almost carnival atmosphere some have reported. I was rather happy about this. One of my Facebook friends had referred, rather acidly, to the queuers as “grief junkies” and I would not have approved of any boisterous nonsense.

The mood was mostly good-natured and good-humoured; jolly and chatty. The British entrepreneurial spirit was there, with some locals having set up makeshift tables from which they were selling cups of tea or coffee for a quid. The mix of ages and ethnicities in evidence was quite striking. There were two young families immediately behind us, both with relatively young children (the children were variable in their levels of enthusiasm for being there, it must be said). We befriended a lady in front named Michelle, who had come alone. There was a family with a young lad in his 20s, who had special needs and whose infectious enthusiasm kept up our spirits. There was a particularly funny moment when, it having become quite dark, he mistook Aunty Lou for his mum and tried to cuddle her (much laughter ensued). There was an elderly lady named Sylvia, I’d guess in her late 70s/maybe early 80s, who was cheerful throughout despite clearly finding it a bit of a struggle. We thought she was with her very attentive daughter, only to discover that Sylvia had travelled all on her own from Southampton and the girl we thought was her devoted daughter was in fact just some kind person she had met in the queue, who had ‘adopted’ her. It was the most incredible mishmash of people I have ever been amongst.  

The Great Queue of 2022 had, for me and many others, all the hallmarks of a mediaeval pilgrimage. It was long, at points tedious – we were held behind the old County Hall at 3 a.m. and, in the absence of any alternative, sat upon the cold pavement for over an hour – and painful; my right foot, which after years of political campaigning, has long given me gip with plantar fasciitis and seemed determined to make a martyr out of me! It felt a bit like how I imagine the Camino de Santiago must feel. The purpose of that long walk from the south of France to northern Spain is not just the payoff of seeing the tomb of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela. You could just as easily drive there! There is something about that physically demanding penitential walk that is fundamental to whole thing and so too queuing for the lying-in-state. As gruelling as The Great Queue was, I do not think I would want to sacrifice that part of the experience. One particularly memorable moment came just before we were held at County Hall. Yvonne went to avail herself of the porta-loos but returned saying “There’s a massive queue”. I replied, “The past few hours have made me radically revise my conception of what constitutes a ‘massive queue’…”. We all had a toilet break.

"The one other thing I have to commend is the extraordinary organisation and the unflagging cheerfulness of the volunteers." 

Finally, at a little after 4 a.m., we crossed Lambeth Bridge and began our 2-hour ‘snake’ through the Victoria Tower Gardens. This winding monstrosity alone was, we were told, the equivalent of 3 miles condensed, trudging back and forth, up and down, walking on large plastic flooring (that just about finished off my poor foot). The one other thing I have to commend is the extraordinary organisation and the unflagging cheerfulness of the volunteers. They were lined all along the route, dispensing the coveted wristbands that meant you could leave the queue occasionally without losing your spot, offering support and encouragement to those who were flagging (albeit often disingenuously telling us we were ‘nearly there’ when this was very much not the case!). At Victoria Towers Gardens, they offered blankets and food and refreshments but, while it may sound cloying, their sunny dispositions were more warming than any cup of tea or coffee. They were simply amazing.

Finally, we reached the end and, having donated my uneaten food to the foodbank set up nearby (a particularly brilliant idea, I thought), passed through security in Old Palace Yard. There was a moment of mirth when the security guard, whilst searching my now mostly emptied bag, said “I’m going to assume that’s sugar and not cocaine”. My packet of Jelly Tots had spilled out.

At around 6:25 a.m., we entered the Palace of Westminster via the great imposing archway of St. Stephen’s Entrance, the large, vaulted portal that takes most members of the public into Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin’s 19th-Century Gothic Revival masterpiece. But Westminister Hall is not part of Barry and Pugin’s palace, which was rebuilt following a devastating fire in 1834. No, no. Westminster Hall is the last remaining part of the old palace and one of the oldest structures in the country. Once the largest hall in Europe; built for William Rufus – son of the Conqueror – over 1,300 years ago. The first thing that hits your eye is the exquisite hammerbeam roof – the greatest creation of timber architecture from the Middle Ages left anywhere in Christendom. We started to file through, down the steps into the great hall. All the chattering jolliness that had characterised the past 12 ½ hours was gone. We entered in almost sepulchral silence, yet the room was humming with a thousand years of history and tradition.

The emotion of it I can hardly describe but I had a lump in my throat the moment I saw the coffin, draped in the Royal Standard, topped by the Imperial State Crown glinting in the candlelight. Also atop the coffin were the Orb and Sceptre, seldom seen outside the Tower of London since the Coronation in 1953, and the whole thing was raised up on the majestic catafalque. At each corner of the raised dais stood a guardsman; their hands resting on their swords, bearskins bowed. In front of each of them, one of the famous ‘Beefeaters’ – Yeoman Warders of the Tower and members of the Sovereign’s Body Guard – in their distinctive Tudor uniforms. Then, at the head of the coffin, stood two lofty Gentlemen-at-Arms in their gold helmets bedecked with huge white swan feathers, heads bowed, clasping their inverted battle-axes. It was an image of poignant, reverent, solemn splendour. I have had the good fortune to walk through Westminster Hall on many previous occasions and, even when completely empty, the sheer weight of history in the place bears down on you. The experience of passing through it yesterday will never leave me. We missed by some hours the ‘Vigil of the Princes’, during which King Charles III and his siblings stood around their mother’s coffin. But the scene could scarcely have been more touching or magnificent.

I consider myself fortunate to have been able to pay tribute to Her Majesty the Queen in this deeply personal way. Like probably almost everyone who walked past that touchingly small casket, my mind raced with a multitude of thoughts, feelings and reflections. In the end, however, there was not much to say or do. Under the watchful eye of those carved oaken angels on the great roof, I walked past the catafalque, paused to make my obeisance, bowed my head and then, in a hangover from my High Church Anglican days, crossed myself and, in a whisper as I exited, said “Thank you, Your Majesty”. And, just like that, 70 years and 12 ½ hours, all passed in a few mesmerising seconds. We emerged into New Palace Yard in a sort of moony state, sensitively but forcefully moved along by the police. Many people were sniffing and dabbing their eyes. Eventually, we walked out onto Parliament Square and somebody broke the silence with “Right, which way is the train station?” and that was the end of our odyssey.

The journey home was quiet and uneventful – we were all exhausted. Occasionally on the Underground, I recognised people from The Queue and acknowledged them silently with a nod as they alighted at various places along the way. My ‘queue buddies’ and I parted ways and, as I clambered off the train at Billericay and hobbled home, I thought about how glad I was that I had decided to do it and wondered at the sheer, fascinating oddity of it all. So exhilarating and improbable.

"We entered in almost sepulchral silence, yet the room was humming with a thousand years of history and tradition."

It has long been said that the British do ceremonial better than any other country on earth and we will see more of that when the funeral takes place, as it will doubtless be rich in that perfect marriage of colourful pomp and circumstance and deepest solemnity and reverence at which the British monarchy has become so incredibly adept.

That great hall in which our late Queen currently rests is very much like the monarchy itself – an antediluvian relic of a bygone age that miraculously still exists. Despite everything that has been thrown at it, from fires to the Luftwaffe’s bombs, it is still standing, proud and defiant. A large part of the reason for that miracle over the past 70 years has been down to the Queen and the impeccable way in which She conducted Her long reign. As we have seen throughout this period of National Mourning, Queen Elizabeth II has bequeathed to this nation a monarchy that remains stubbornly secure. Even in the cynical technological age in which we all live, in which social media and apps that should bring us closer together have tended to serve only to isolate and drive us apart, the monarchy has once more displayed its unequalled ability to offer a genuine mass collective experience. We see it every time there is a royal birth, royal wedding, jubilee and, yes, even a death. We saw it with the birth of Prince George, the death of Prince Philip and during the recent Platinum Jubilee. There is still nothing that unites us quite like the Crown. This is the human power of monarchy and a testament to the extraordinary personality of the Queen.

My final thought, as I limped through my front door, was to consider how many people under normal circumstances would be prepared to join a queue over 4 miles long, knowing full well they could end up standing in it for a day or more. Then, I considered how many of those would even be physically capable of doing so. I then mused over what would have to be at the end of such a queue to make people consent to putting themselves through such an ordeal. Certainly, one would typically imagine it would need to be more than a little old lady in a box. I read today an estimated 1 million people have taken part in this lying-in-state; queuing for longer than they have probably queued for anything in their lives to spend mere seconds with the Queen. I received many kind messages from friends and constituents alike, congratulating me on doing it, and my reply has been simple and thoroughly sincere.

It was the least She deserved.