Great state occasions inspire an elevated kind of journalism, which does its best to match the mystical rituals of the ceremony and reflect or shape what it perceives as the national mood. “Two rivers run silently through London tonight and one is made of people,” the Daily Mail’s Vincent Mulchrone wrote – memorably, as it turned out – in January 1965 of the queues to see Winston Churchill’s lying in state. “Never safer, better guarded, lay a sleeping king than this, with a golden candlelight to warm his resting place, and the muffled footsteps of his devoted subjects to keep him company,” the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby told his radio audience in February 1952, when the coffin of George VI lay in the same ancient hall.
The Guardian has often taken a less Shakespearean approach. Its reports of George VI’s lying in state, witnessed by nearly 300,000 people over three days, are lively with detail. Some aspects of queue behaviour still apply: there are ways of jumping it. In 1952, the jumpers honourably included “nurses who had been on night duty” and, perhaps less forgivably, “the boys and masters of Westminster School”, who had been led in through a side door. Other things belong to history. Telephone boxes overflowed with pennies from husbands taking “a minute to explain that they would be home late”. A party from a girls’ college in Berkshire had arrived through the snow by taking an early morning “workmen’s train”, evidence of their enterprise in an age when “workmen” travelled early and the middle class came late.
Other newspapers carried similar details. What marked out the Guardian was its wryness, its refusal to get carried away. It was a Manchester paper, after all. On the night before the king’s funeral, the London correspondent toured the streets twice to gauge the kind of people who were prepared to wait for hours in the cold to have the best view. At 10pm, he noticed the groups that had set up camp in the Mall were mostly elderly women – “some were old women and some were very old women with memories of Queen Victoria’s funeral”. At 2am, he saw the last of the queuers emerge from Westminster Hall to ponder “whether to wait for the procession or go home to bed. Bed is winning.” In the meantime, Whitehall had filled with one-night-only pavement dwellers using old blankets, mackintoshes and in-memoriam editions of that morning’s papers to protect themselves against a bitter wind.
“Everybody was stoutly clad but everybody was cold,” the London correspondent wrote, and the question naturally arose, as it has naturally arisen several times in the 70 years since, more pressingly since the whole affair can be watched at length without leaving home: why? Why freeze in the cold overnight for a fleeting sight of a gun carriage; why queue for 16 hours to walk past a catafalque in 60 seconds? The Guardian’s correspondent observed that when a reporter asked the question, he was “disconcerted to find that the kind of people who sit up all night … answer in cliches or in headlines that were considered the latest thing in Northcliffe’s day. ‘It’s cold but we shall see it through.’ ‘I’ve seen every royal procession since …’ or ‘Been waiting three hours – feels like three days.’”
By “Northcliffe’s day”, he meant the first 20-odd years of the newspaper Lord Northcliffe founded, the Daily Mail, and when I visited the queue last week I have to admit that a part of me wanted to discover that the relationship between the Mail and the royal crowd persisted. In fact, so far as I could tell, it didn’t. People spoke articulately and sincerely and freshly, in the sense that their words seemed unborrowed. They nearly always mentioned the fellowship that had been created by the act of walking and stopping – walking and stopping again and again – on the four or five miles along the Thames to Westminster. “It’s like a kind of pilgrimage,” one woman said, and that was how it often looked: a pilgrimage with Essential Waitrose and Pret a Manger carrier bags, takeaway pizzas and coffees, and the occasional beer. A pilgrimage without self-flagellation or any major discomfort beyond sleeplessness, tired legs and sore backs. As the Guardian said in 1952, “mourning” wouldn’t be the right word for a crowd that was “cheerful but decently subdued”.
At Southwark Park on a warm Saturday afternoon, the pre-queue queue set off at a cracking pace, tramping along a chicane of rubber mats and temporary fencing that folded back and forth across the grass, a kind of treadmill in which we were the only moving parts, the distance between us and the bandstand hardly wider after 15 minutes’ brisk walking. The estimated time of the journey in prospect was 14 hours, but despite this a young woman kept shouting at us like a friendly sergeant major. “Move along now! Keep it up! Well done!” I think she was south Asian, or of south Asian heritage. There have been estimates of the multicultural nature of the crowd (mine is: a lot less multicultural than the average London bus), but none so far as I know of the police, stewards and marshals who directed and channelled the crowd from A to B.
The police were almost entirely white; the stewards and marshals with very few exceptions black or brown. Most were from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and their languages included Hindi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and Bengali, as well as English. Private security firms pay them the standard living wage of £9.18 or £9.50 an hour, depending on their age. Many held the recently created post-study work visa that enables them to stay in the UK for two years after their graduate or (more usually) postgraduate studies have ended. In 2020-21, UK universities attracted more than 84,000 students from India alone.
In Southwark Park, I asked a few of them what they made of the crowd they were guiding towards the dead queen. They estimated that most were over 50, that 10% were African or African-Caribbean and another 10% south Asian or Chinese. They were all very friendly. There had been no trouble.
“Why is England so crazy about the Queen?” a student from Hyderabad asked. Her companion, from Ahmedabad, had an answer. The Queen was clearly popular; leaders became popular when they did good for their people; ergo, the Queen must have done good for her people. “She was a great woman, she deserves the respect.” It was tremendously logical, needed no poetry, and will do for the time being.
Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist
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