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of propaganda in times of national emergency and
need. Is this the case for the great British queue?
The line that formed to board Noah’s Ark is possibly
the first queue to be written about but by and large
for the greatest part of the history of mankind there
has simply been no reason to queue. Until relatively
recently there just wasn’t anything to queue for and
with a tiny population, relatively speaking, until the
spurt brought about by the industrial revolution there
just weren’t that many
people either.
In Pompeii graffiti has survived scratched into the
stonework by people waiting to use the public latrines
but we don’t know how or indeed if they organized
themselves while waiting. Here in Britain possibly
the earliest evidence of queuing is related to obtaining
fresh water in the growing mediaeval towns and
cities. At the public water conduits when demand
outstripped supply for the first time it doesn’t seem
that the orderly queue came naturally to the English.
In 1390 in Ipswich and Bishops’ Lynn the Mayor
passed an ordinance to impose an orderly queuing
system to deal with outbreaks of disorderly conduct
at the public conduit.
choose a super alter-ego I would be
Litter Lady
with
the ability to shoot short but painful electric shocks
from my fingertips through the very selfish core of
the litter lout. But are we Brits really the champions
of the queue? We the nation that invented five-day
cricket matches and then settled back to listen to them
on the wireless?
David Stewart-David a lecturer in logistics and
transport at the University of Northumbria is an expert
in queues but he says the idea that the queue is an
expression of our national culture is a myth.
"In the post-war years, when the government was
trying to cope with shortages, the queue was positively
promoted so that it wasn't seen as necessarily bad -
but the 'British way of doing things'."
Ah, if you remember my fish & chip article from the
June 2012 issue of
The Kettle
you might recall that
“
they”
pulled off a similar trick with fried fish in the
1940s. Pre-war fish & chips bad, wartime fish & chips
good, post-war bad again. This is quite a common
discovery – that things we assume to have been the
way of our world since time immemorial turn out, in
fact, to be relatively modern introductions spawned