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.
