‘We must rid ourselves of the delusion that it is major
events which most determine a person. He is more
deeply and lastingly influenced by the tiny catastrophes
of which everyday existence is made up’
Siegfried Kracauer1
Some firms might worry about the working time wasted through office gossip. But few workers spare a thought to how much of their day is taken up by unpaid labour, from the hard graft of commuting to the routine tasks that fill up our lunch breaks. Of these, perhaps the most tedious is queuing. Waiting in line is a universal routine of daily life, and the peak hour for doing it is lunchtime. It is then that many of us queue at cafés, snack bars, post offices, banks and holes in the wall. There is an obvious reason for long lunchtime queues, a classic problem of synchronisation in a consumer economy: workers are only able to queue up in their lunch hour, which is precisely when there are less likely to be servers or cashiers, who have inconsiderately decided to take their lunch break at lunchtime as well.
Queuing is never just experienced and endured, it is loaded with meaning – especially for Britons, who are supposed to be so wonderful at doing it. Where does this myth of the British (or, more particularly, the English) as virtuoso queuers come from? The orderly queue seems to have become an established social form in the early nineteenth century, a product of more urbanised, industrial ised societies which brought masses of people together in one place. But in 1837, when the historian Thomas Carlyle referred to the new habit of waiting in line for service, he was praising not his own countrymen but the French for their ‘talent … of spontaneously standing in queue’.2 It was not until the end of the Second World War that a number of writers on the English character turned their attention to queuing. In his essay ‘The English people’ (1944), George Orwell envisaged an imaginary foreign observer who would be struck ‘by the orderly behaviour of English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues’.3 The Hungarian émigré George Mikes claimed in his bestselling book How to be an Alien (1946) that ‘an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one’. Queuing, he claimed, was ‘the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race’, the daily embodiment of our eternal sense of fairness and civility.4 Writing a year later, the historian Ernest Barker commended the English urban crowd for its ‘good sense, a species of self-discipline and a tactic of “fitting in” neatly on a little space … there will be some bad manners and a little thrusting; but the institution (for the queue is of that order) will be made to work.’ 5
For all these writers, queuing is essentially apolitical: it may rely on the threat of legal enforcement but, as Barker puts it, any policeman who is on hand to preserve order ‘melts easily into the general system of voluntary tactics’.6 The queue is seen as an organic formation, a series of semi-improvised, tacit understandings between ordinary people. Its self-regulating aspect allows it to be allied with a certain kind of English liberalism which values the compromises of everyday life as a guarantor of social solidarity. Waiting in line is not a technique to be learned; there are no guides to ‘queuing for beginners’. The queuer is simply supposed to draw intuitively on British traditions of decency, fair play and democracy.
It is no coincidence that the myth of the British as patient queuers developed during the Second World War. In this time of rationing and shortages, there was nothing trivial or decorous about queuing etiquette. Waiting in line was a fraught, politically charged activity rather than the minor irritation in daily life that it is today. Housewives would join a queue without knowing what was at the end of it, in the expectation (not always fulfilled) that it must be for sought-after goods. Queues, far from being celebrated as egalitarian, were widely seen as inequitable. People queued for unrationed but scarce foods like fruit, vegetables and fish, or rationed food like meat when they wanted better cuts. Working women, the elderly and mothers with babies thought this unfair because they were less able to queue for long periods. The government was sufficiently worried about the health consequences of women standing in line for long periods that it introduced a scheme to give priority to expectant mothers, by affixing a label to their ration books saying, ‘Queue priority, please.’ In one Second World War joke, a shopkeeper says to a young woman, ‘Excuse me, miss, are you pregnant?’ She replies, ‘Well, I wasn’t when I joined the queue.’ A Mass-Observation survey reported in September 1948 that there was ‘no other current topic that arouses such immediate and fierce reaction … as the subject of queues … which clearly to many is the symbol of all the frustrations of this post war era.’7
The Conservative leader Winston Churchill exploited these popular frustrations, symbolically identifying queues with the Labour government. During a 1949 by-election in South Hammersmith, he insisted that ‘the queues of housewives outside the shops are the essence of Socialism and the restrictive system by which it and its parasites hope to live’. In an election radio broadcast of January 1950, Churchill invented the term ‘Queuetopia’ (a word which is still in the Oxford English Dictionary, although now rarely used) to describe a Britain under Socialist rule. The Labour Party Women’s Organisation clearly blamed disgruntled housewives for the party’s defeat in 1951, complaining that ‘the last election was lost mainly in the queue at the butcher’s or the grocer’s’.8
The abolition of rationing in 1954, and the introduction of self-service supermarkets like Sainsbury’s around the same time, finally put paid to endless shop queues. Government advisers, seeing the importation of this American retail method as a way of coping with labour shortages, cutting costs and increasing sales, energetically promoted ‘the gospel of self-service’.9 But many housewives were sceptical about this new form of shopping, worried about the loss of personal service, the temptation to overspend and even being accused of stealing goods bought in other shops. Drawing on memories of rationing, self-service advocates reassured them with the promise of queueless shopping: they would only have to queue to pay, with no time-consuming weighing and wrapping of food, and ‘those requiring few items could obtain them speedily, while others could shop at their leisure’.10 One upbeat newspaper article of 1959 claimed that self-service ‘saves thousands of hours of queuing time every day’, and that even a queue was now only ‘a queue in one store as opposed to queues in four or five shops’.11 This optimism proved to be premature. By 1964, the Consumer Council was reporting that the most common complaint of supermarket shoppers was the length of queues at the checkouts.12
If queuing slipped off the political agenda in these years, it still remained a significant annoyance in everyday life. For a long period from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, for example, readers of The Times complained endlessly in its Letters page about the queues in branches of high street banks and post offices. The main complaint was their restricted opening hours, which meant that customers had to form long queues at peak periods such as lunchtime. Many were also frustrated at the series of multiple queues for different cashiers, so that unlucky people might be stuck for ages behind a child paying in all the small change from a piggy bank. Since a queue forms when there is a failure to match supply with demand, its stubborn visibility in daily life could be seen as another symptom of the ‘British disease’ of badly trained, poorly motivated employees and mediocre management. The queue had become a symbol of national decline, a recurring issue for political and cultural commentators at the time.
It did not help that, in the 1960s, more information began to filter out about the daily lives of people behind the Iron Curtain, so that long queues became metaphorically linked to the inefficiencies of command economies. In Eastern bloc countries, people still had to queue up for scarce items that westerners now regarded as essential. Russian shops had an infamous three-queue system which required customers to line up firstly to view goods, secondly to pay for them and finally to obtain them. In East Germany, this experience of waiting was justified by the principle of deferred gratification: if ordinary citizens made sacrifices now and lived up to revolutionary ideals, it was argued, they would be rewarded later with a more equal society. During the last years of the GDR, though, the attempts by the regime to suggest that waiting was a practical lesson in collectivity – describing a queue, for example, as a Wartekollektiv (waiting collective) or a sozialistische Wartegemeinschaft (socialist waiting-associa-tion) – came to seem like the laughable death-knell of an increasingly ineffective thought police.
In Britain, it became a journalistic cliché to say that the queues in banks and post offices were longer than anywhere ‘this side of the Iron Curtain’. Correlli Barnett, chronicler of national decline and a favourite historian of Thatcher-ites, was still making this analogy in the mid-1990s as part of his argument that Britain’s post-war problems stemmed from the ‘New Jerusalemism’ of the liberal idealists of the 1940s who committed the country to a welfare state. ‘In the emptiness of its shops and the length of its queues,’ he wrote, ‘Britain in the late 1940s much resembled Russia in the 1990s.’13 The Churchillian idea of the queue as the quotidian manifestation of meddling socialism had proved remarkably persistent.
In the 1970s and 1980s, one particularly compelling symbol of national decline was the dole queue. This image was immortalised in Saatchi and Saatchi’s famous Conservative Party poster of 1978–9, which was widely credited with helping Margaret Thatcher win her first general election victory. It was a photograph of a long, snaking queue leading to an unemployment office, accompanied by the slogan: ‘Labour isn’t working’. This long line was actually made up not of jobless people, but of various members of Hendon Young Conservatives and their parents.14 They were asked to assemble at a north London park for the photo shoot, but only twenty loyalists turned up. So the photographer used a rope to mark out a meandering line and the volunteers gradually moved along it. These images were then brought together in a composite photograph, with the faces out of focus to conceal the duplication.15 The poster’s memorable image and its caption’s clever double meaning – referring to both unemployment and a more general national malaise – once again equated queues with government incompetence and socialism.
But these images of long dole queues were based more on folk memory than contemporary reality. The term ‘dole queue’ was coined in the 1930s, and references to it in the Thatcher era recalled earlier images of men in northern towns queuing up outside ‘the labour’ in cloth caps and overcoats – images which had become part of the collective national psyche. In his 1941 essay ‘The lion and the unicorn’, Orwell included ‘the queues outside the Labour Exchanges’ in his list of characteristic ‘fragments of the English scene’.16 (This was the same passage about ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion’ famously quoted in a 1993 speech by John Major, who strangely neglected to include the line about dole queues.) By the 1980s, though, unemployed people received ‘giro’ cheques in the post rather than cash handouts, and they sat down and waited to be called in ‘job centres’ rather than queuing up outside dole offices.
As the dole ‘queues’ lengthened in the Thatcher era, queuing in many other public spaces was transformed by queue management systems, which drew heavily on a new branch of statistics known as ‘queuing theory’. Queuing theory deals with situations in which customers arrive in ‘poisson distribution’: in unpredictable numbers, at variable intervals, and requiring different periods of service. This academic sub-discipline took off with the advent of computers in the 1950s and had been used since then to deal with large-scale waiting systems such as the rotation of hospital beds, airport runway control or urban traffic jams. In the 1980s, it was increasingly applied to the management of actual queues of people. This was all part of a much wider Thatcherite revolution which meant that both public and private sector companies had to respond more to the needs of the consumer. Managers set themselves the dual, sometimes conflicting, aims of serving the customer and cutting costs. Reducing queues was a painless way for firms to square this circle. Unlike some other aspects of customer service, queuing times were measurable, and the queue management boffins promised to design systems that both served people more quickly and minimised costs by cutting down on employee ‘idle time’.
The ‘thinking ticket machine’, for example, aimed to do away with lines of people altogether. It was developed in Sweden in the 1960s, and the British firm Lonsto sold its first model to Tesco and Green Shield in the 1970s.17 In the 1980s, it began to be used widely in places where people might have a long wait, like train booking centres or passport offices. Queuers took a numbered ticket from a dispenser and waited for their number to appear on an electronic display, thus saving them from having to stand in line for long periods. By the early 1990s, banks and post offices had introduced the ‘electronic call forward’ system for those who did still have to wait in line. Cashiers pressed a button when they were free, which activated dot-matrix displays and a recorded voice (‘cashier number one, please’) informing the person at the head of the queue where to go.
This cutting-edge technology was accompanied by a more mundane piece of queuing furniture: a metal pole with a rounded base and a strip of retractable webbed tape at the top, which was drawn out and attached to other poles to form queuing channels. In some hotels and cinemas, though, they had posher poles with a chrome finish and twisted, coloured rope – an altogether classier waiting experience. These queue barriers – what the sociologist Barry Schwartz calls the ‘ecological supports’ of queuing18 – transformed the activity of waiting in line into a marketing opportunity. Trapped behind these barriers, we could not escape invitations to impulse-buy from shopping baskets strategically placed in the channels, or those irritating videos informing us of new services from the Post Office that we didn’t want. Even the retractable tape on the queuing poles could be printed with promotional messages and logos. At around the same time, supermarkets began using assistants to pack bags for customers, and made pledges to open more checkouts by calling on ‘queue busters’, staff on the shop floor who would stop what they were doing and operate checkouts at busy times. Less publicly, they invested money in training checkout operators to work more quickly.19
But the Thatcherite queuing revolution was a very uneven phenomenon. At bus stops, where consumer satisfaction was not so easily measurable or highly valued, people still had to fend for themselves and work out their own shambolic queuing etiquette. The absence of a proper queue at bus stops could lead to near-anarchy, as hordes of passengers clambered on to already packed buses in no particular order, and drivers with half-full buses sped past stops teeming with angry commuters, because they knew they would have to let everyone board or no one at all. It was not that people who queued up for buses were ruder or angrier than those who queued up in shops or banks (they were, after all, often the same people) but that bus users had been left to improvise their own queuing discipline.
Perhaps because of its continued associations with unglamorous activities like waiting for a bus, the queue remained a symbol of national decline. In a speech in April 1994, the Conservative minister Michael Portillo invoked ‘the still small voice of Britain’s quiet majority’ which is ‘dismayed by much that goes on around it’, offering the example of hard-working citizens ‘standing in the post office queue watching handouts going to people who seem capable of work … In a world turned upside down, they ask where is the encouragement for self-reliance, where is the punishment for wrong-doing, where is the incentive to achieve?’20 The typical post-office queue was grist to Portillo’s mill because it brought together such an eclectic mix, of poor people cashing benefits and the more prosperous buying stamps, posting parcels, or depositing takings from small businesses. Portillo’s snap judgements about other people in the queue exploited the nature of the post office as a point of middle-class contact with the ‘giro economy’.
But all this was changing: from the late 1990s onwards, most state benefits were paid directly into bank accounts. Telephone and internet banking also removed the need for high street banks to deal with their customers in person. Since these services were mainly used by the well-off, banks began launching online accounts that cream-skimmed their wealthiest clients and offered them preferential rates. Indeed, for those with access to money and technology, queuing is increasingly a personal choice. People still have to wait in line for service, of course, or this chore is displaced into other forms of waiting like queuing at ATMs and traffic jams. But there are more opportunities to opt out of the experience of queuing by buying online or shopping outside peak hours. Queuing is a way of rationing goods or services – and in post-Thatcherite Britain, the rationing is not necessarily done with the same egalitarianism as the wartime fish queue. In the future, for instance, those who want to queue up to be served by a cashier in a bank may have to pay a surcharge, because the favoured customers will all be logging on to their e-accounts. Only the poor will be queuing up for their money, and they will have to pay for the privilege.
But the mythology of the British as enthusiastic queuers, forged in wartime, has survived. In the millennial anthology British Greats, the writer Shyama Perera argues that the queue captures ‘the timeless essence of the British spirit’. The actual organisation of the queue might have changed, she writes, but the basic notion of egalitarian turn-taking has not. In London’s ‘multicultural hotchpotch’, we sometimes see ‘members of more assertive or less organised races trying either to test or to buck the system’. But they soon acknowledge that the queue is ‘a totem of patience, practicality and a sense of fair play’.21 For Perera, our national tradition of queuing exists outside of politics and history: the technology, method and personnel may vary, but the etiquette is never-ending.
At the same time, we often hear the claim that British queuers have become increasingly impatient in recent years, and that this is a more general sign of the decline of civility in public life. These accounts typically explain the phenomenon of ‘queue rage’ – the willingness to queue jump or to shout abuse at other people waiting in line – as an effect of an accelerated, time-poor society. As one management psychologist puts it, ‘The culture of queuing is changing in Britain. You’re becoming more like the Americans – more intolerant, more impatient. We lead increasingly frenetic lives and that freneticism makes us more driven, more time-conscious.’22 In the absence of any longitudinal studies of queuing behaviour, this claim is largely unverifiable. Unfortunately, we have no hard evidence of how well-mannered people were in bus queues in 1950. Politeness and stoicism are subjective qualities, improvised in the routine acts of daily life, and leave behind few historical traces. We do know, however, that people have been complaining about the disintegration of queue discipline for almost as long as they have been lauding the queue as the essence of British decency – perhaps because this myth carries such symbolic weight that it cannot be sustained by the necessarily messier reality.
How can all these different ideas about the queue coexist? Because not all queues are the same. Those who like to see the queue as an essentially British civic ritual can see their theories confirmed in those interminable lines of good-natured people waiting to buy tickets for Centre Court at Wimbledon, sign books of condolence or get pole position in the January sales. Some of these dedicated queuers even turn their little patch of pavement into a home from home, complete with tent, sleeping bag, flask and reading matter. These semi-domestic settings are a favoured subject of television vox pops, as reporters interview people in line, preferably in the rain which invariably fails to make them ‘downhearted’. The queue becomes an end in itself and queuers are rewarded with the amused attention of others and a sense of camara- derie. But the queues we experience in everyday life – like waiting for the bus or at the bank or post office – rarely have this recreational aspect and certainly do not give us the same warm glow of togetherness.
Britons who travel abroad may discover something rather surprising: other nationalities seem to have grasped the complex activity of queuing. These foreigners do not generally riot, push, jostle, harass or abuse those in front of them when forced to wait in line. Perhaps, on reflection, the ability to stand patiently in a queue is not so uniquely wonderful after all. And however much we elevate the queue as the embodiment of quintessential Britishness, it will remain tiresome and boring to stand in it – which is why the more privileged among us will go to such lengths to avoid joining it. So let’s hear two cheers for the carefully managed queue. There may be an infantilising quality to queue barriers and automated voices, like the condescending sign at the head of the queue in my local bank which says, ‘Nearly there: thanks for waiting.’ But when faced with the tedium of queuing, anything that makes waiting in line quicker and visibly fairer for everyone is surely a good thing. Long may we hear that singsong chant, ‘Cashier number one, please.’