Damp clothes and Deliveroo: my night in the queue for Queen Elizabeth
Why would anyone want to stay up all night and risk hypothermia to spend a few moments witnessing Elizabeth II lying in state? Outside Westminster Hall I find the answer.
People say the darkest hour, the lowest point, comes before the dawn. Those people have clearly never woken, damp, to see a damp grey sunrise over a bank of damp portable toilets, beside an extremely damp line of dedicated royalists – in the knowledge that there will still be 12 hours of damp queuing to go.
At 6am on the South Bank, the Union Jack umbrellas are still up. Some of those waiting to see the Queen’s lying in state shiver under tarpaulins, some sit upright on camping chairs, still kidding themselves they can get some sleep. A scattered few emerge from tents, having ignored a stipulation to leave them at home.
Here, in a holding line opposite the Houses of Parliament, a mix of the curious, the dedicated and the obsessive have spent the night. Some 100 yards in – at a point that, at 2am, marked nearly the end of the queue but is now far from the back – there is a bedraggled Paddington Bear. I am in my 13th hour of queuing.
3.30pm, the day before
I am, I am told, 22nd in the line. How royalist does that make me? Put it this way: if I were 22nd in line to the throne, instead of 22nd in line to see the coffin of the previous resident of the throne, I’d be one of the Tindalls.
At the front, numbers 1 to 4 – the queuing equivalent of the Windsors – have a gazebo, camping chairs and the air of people who have done this before (as I will find out, they have indeed). They are already a day in.
The rain starts. It has the steady, determined air of rain that will not stop. Glyn Norris, a man with a well-groomed beard and a relentlessly upbeat air, sets up a director’s chair and looks cheerily at the damp grey sky. “She reigned for 70 years,” he says. “We can manage 24 hours of rain.”
4pm
Lisa Simms arrives with a flourish, two flags and a declaration to the press. “She did her duty by us … I’m here to tell Her Majesty her duty is done,” she tells CNN as she sits. Simms, from Reading, takes her place as 23 in the queue.
For now, the media outnumber the queuers three to one. Simms, of Scottish descent and draped in a saltire, is popular, especially for TV. We barely chat for the first hour as the world’s journalists conduct their interviews with her.
Queuer 21, to my right, is wary of the media. “They created division and treated the royals badly.” He looks out to the river. His theory on how to wait out the next day is that if you can fill time watching the sea, you can fill it watching the river. “I try not to look at Big Ben and see how slowly it’s going.”
As, slowly, more queuers arrive and dilute the camera crews, I get talking to Simms. “We will not see the Queen’s like again,” she says. She confesses that she doesn’t know how she will react when she sees the coffin.
9pm
People are getting hungry. Leaving the queue is possible – we all know each other well enough to save places now – but getting Deliveroo is not. The road beside us has double red lines and the nearest restaurant is across the river.
I have an idea. Over the road is Lambeth Palace. I see a man in a dog collar. “Can we use the palace for takeaway delivery?” I ask. “Yes,” he says. “And if anyone has a problem with that, tell them the Archbishop of York says it’s OK.”
The Most Rev Stephen Cottrell doesn’t need to queue in the rain. But then, he is receiving the body tomorrow. “It’s a beautiful and special thing,” he says.
11pm
There are mutterings, complaints that the rain has revealed the fake monarchists. Some have left. Some have snuck off for dinner.
Others are more resolute. Sarah Langley, sitting quietly and stoically in the drizzle, is an experienced queuer. Throughout the 1990s she would wait overnight wherever Bon Jovi played to be at the front. “Even for a bit of sweat to hit you on your face …” she says, tailing off wistfully as she remembers. Now, though, she is here for a more sombre purpose.
Midnight
Dick Ochampaugh, an American immigrant, is on security. In a break in the rain he watches as people gather in circles, chatting quietly. “It’s like a public wake,” he says. “That’s how I see it. We sit around, we talk about the Queen.” This is more than a job for him. He has lived in the UK for 25 years. “She’s the only Queen I knew. I had to swear an oath of fealty to her.”
Midnight to 6am
Having befriended security, it seems safe to try out a tent. I distribute all my waterproofs to royalists in need, ignore the envious looks and pull up the zip. It would be wrong to say my sleep is uninterrupted. At 2am there’s an argument when some passing Americans query why we are putting ourselves at risk of hypothermia for someone already dead.
At 3am I am awoken by angry shouting. “Off your phones! Have respect for the Queen!”
At 6am, drier than most, but still damper than I’d like, I emerge.
7am
The forecast says rain, but behind Big Ben there is a small patch of blue. With it come smiles, camaraderie – and hope.
“People think we are mad,” says Norris, 63, who has spent the night sitting up, wearing my waterproof trousers. “But we are proud. I am proud of somebody that has been in my life for 63 years: a mother, a grandmother, a great-grandmother, at the same time as dealing with everything that happens as Queen, from politics to death to scandal.
“We are here for everything she’s done. She did it for 70 years, and with the introduction of the new prime minister she did it two days before she died.
“We’re not mad, we are proud.”
10am
At last, a reprieve. There had been rumours throughout the night of yellow wristbands. These wristbands, it was whispered, bought special powers. They bought the power to leave. Like the golden ticket for Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, each was a pass to unimaginable riches: to being able to go for a shower and sit somewhere with a roof.
Now they are here, on our wrists. Each is numbered, to denote our position – to denote what, by now, has become our status. Some will, doubtless, become heirlooms. Mine says “30": a demotion that is a reflection of a certain amount of jostling. Even so, it puts me in what I am told will be the first batch to see the Queen. As I leave, told to return in a couple of hours, there is a small niggle. Will the members of this most British of events respect the only institution more British than the Queen herself: the queue?
3pm
We are bored. How bored, you ask? We have taken to unironically clapping the police as they come past. The queue, as feared, is an amorphous mass. But, although we have shuffled a bit, my fellow campers are still around me. I am still in the first group.
5pm
There is something about ritual, ceremony and pageantry that induces solemnity. As we walk, sleep-deprived, tired but triumphant, over Lambeth Bridge, there is a feeling of elation. As we, the first 120, whiz past the snaking cordons and banks of portable toilets that speak of hours of queuing to come, we joke and laugh: friendships born in the camaraderie of the night.
But as we enter Westminster Hall, the guards’ blades resting point-first on a catafalque on 11th-century flagstones, an honour guard of police, there is just silence.
To the right, dressed in crisp suits and black ties, the VIPs file past. To the left, dressed in the clothes we put on two mornings ago, come the public.
Perhaps it is the exhaustion, but I am suddenly struck by the absurdity of it all. The feathers, the tights, the carved stone dragons, the 26 hours of queuing, the monarchy itself. Why are we here? What is it for?
Outside, I find an answer. Outside, the black respectful suits of parliament pass by at speed. The assorted campers, in their assorted clothes – the people who, I suppose, would call themselves subjects – exit a little slower. They had each paused before the coffin a little longer.
One I see is Glyn Norris, my old queue buddy. He is a big man with a big beard. How was it, I ask? He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. He tries again, but cracks. Eventually, he says: “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I pat him on the back and move on. It was never about her. It was always about us.
The Times
