Queuing rules

‘And the Lord said unto Moses, “Come forth!” And he came third, and got sent to the back for pushing.’

In 1946, the Hungarian humorist George Mikes described queuing as our ‘national passion’. ‘On the Continent,’ he said, ‘if people are waiting at a bus-stop they loiter around in a seemingly vague fashion. When the bus arrives they make a dash for it . . . An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’ In an update over thirty years later, in 1977, he confirmed that this was still the case. After nearly another thirty years, nothing much seems to have changed – but English queuing is not quite as simple as Mikes makes it sound.

I saw a headline recently in a Sunday broadsheet, bemoaning the fact that the English had ‘lost the art of queuing’. Puzzled, as this was not what my own observation fieldwork had shown, I read on. It turned out that the author had been in a queue, someone had tried to jump the queue, and both she and the other queuers had been outraged and disgusted – but no-one had had the courage to tackle the queue-jumper in a sufficiently forceful manner (they just humphed and tutted), so he had got away with it. Far from constituting any sort of evidence for its loss, this struck me as a perfectly accurate description of the English art of queuing.

The Indirectness Rule

The English expect each other to observe the rules of queuing, feel highly offended when these rules are violated, but lack the confidence or social skills to express their annoyance in a straightforward manner. In other countries, this is not a problem: in America, where a queue-jumper has committed a misdemeanour rather than a cardinal sin, the response is loud and prescriptive: the offender is simply told ‘Hey, you, get back in line!’ or words to that effect. On the Continent, the reaction tends to be loud and argumentative; in some other parts of the world, queue-jumpers may simply be unceremoniously pushed and shoved back into line – but the end result is much the same. Paradoxically, it is only in England, where queue-jumping is regarded as deeply immoral, that the queue-jumper is likely to get away with the offence. We huff and puff and scowl and mutter and seethe with righteous indignation, but only rarely do we actually speak up and tell the jumper to go to the back of the queue.

Try it yourself if you don’t believe me. I had to, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t suffer as well. Sorry to sound so grumpy, but my queue-jumping experiments were the most difficult and distasteful and upsetting of all the rule-breaking field-experiments I conducted during the research for this book. Far worse than bumping, much worse even than asking people the price of their house or what they did for a living – just the thought of queue-jumping was so horribly embarrassing that I very nearly abandoned the whole project rather than subject myself to such an ordeal. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I hesitated and agonized and procrastinated, and then even when I thought I had managed to steel myself, I would lose my nerve at the last minute, and slink humbly to the back of the queue, hoping no-one had noticed that I had even been considering jumping it.