I was intrigued when talk of the queue began. The country seemed in such turmoil anyway, and now people were adding to the pressure on themselves.
Were they really spending so long in line for such a brief moment? Through the night? So often alone? And some at such an age?
Hours later, I had my chance to experience the queue through that time-honoured medium: the family WhatsApp group.
While a sibling queuing along the Thames posted photos and updates for 12 hours, I started to reconsider. Maybe my scepticism had been misplaced. Perhaps this was just as much about community as it was about one woman.
Then came the interviews, the sightings of celebrities and the hours I spent on the night of 17 September watching social media updates from queuers.
Crowds queue near Tower Bridge (lit up in purple in tribute) to view Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin, 17 September 2022
By then it was too late for me to make it – I have a son old enough to sleep amenably in a buggy, though too young to queue through the night – but I remained transfixed.
There was no one type of person in that queue, and queuers were clearly experiencing something deeper than just ‘paying their respects’.
All those people, all their stories, all that shared grief. Surely there was a novel in this?
So I started inventing a ‘queue family’: Suzie, a 69-year-old, still grieving her husband; Mike, 42, in the queue out of a sense of duty; and Abbie, a 19-year-old, who’s not sure how she ended up in the queue at all.
Before publishing my book, I decided to interview some real queuers. Why had they done it and what had it meant to them?
And, a year on, did they still feel that the decision to stand in the cool September air among a crowd of strangers for all those hours was the right one?
I began asking around – friends of friends, friends of family and on social media.
Within hours, people were replying with their stories from the queue. I could have spent all week talking to them. Almost every response made me cry.
King Charles chats with the crowds waiting to walk by the Queen’s coffin in Westminster Abbey to pay their respects
On my first morning of interviews, someone told me they were still in touch with their fellow queuers and had regular dinners with them.
Another revealed they had finished queueing, then joined the line again, this time to keep a friend company.
A third said she remembers how struck she was by seeing the coffin and the crown jewels, ‘so small in that enormous hall’.
Queuers were clearly experiencing something deeper than just ‘paying their respects
Abigail Bird, 52, a nurse from near Salisbury, queued through the Saturday night on 17 September having come straight from a day working at her village flower show.
She and her daughter had been awake for almost 30 hours by the time they made it to Westminster Hall and they only spent three or four minutes inside. But Bird doesn’t regret it.
It was one of history’s ‘I was there’ moments, she says, and she still finds it emotional to think of seeing Tower Bridge lit up in purple in the middle of the night.
Bird remembers arriving at Westminster Hall and the security guard telling her: ‘This is it. You’re here now.’
‘Awesome is an overused word,’ she says, ‘but for the first time, I experienced true awe.’
Members of the public file by the flag-draped coffin in Westminster Hall, with most people spending three minutes inside
Michelle Emmerson-Grey, 44, a communications manager from Suffolk, had reservations about queuing.
She had recently been diagnosed with a heart condition and the doctors had told her she was morbidly overweight.
She worried whether she could manage to walk the route at all, but she and her daughter decided to try anyway.
The pair quickly made friends with three other queuers – a mother and her son, and a woman studying for a PhD in music.
One person has regular dinners with their fellow queuers
By the time they approached Westminster Hall, Emmerson-Grey was struggling.
‘My back hurt, I had heart palpitations and suddenly we were moving very fast. As we crossed Lambeth Bridge, people were speeding up and I couldn’t keep up.
‘These three strangers [the mother, son and PhD student] grabbed my arms and walked with me, saying: “We’ve come this far together, we are not leaving you now.”’
Eight days later, Emmerson-Grey was hospitalised with a slipped disc. In December, after three months of battling pain and depression, she began to reflect on the queue.
‘Those people waited for me that day,’ she says. ‘If strangers could believe in me that much, why couldn’t I believe in myself?
‘I got out of bed. I slowly returned to work. I got off the painkillers and I made a plan.
THE QUEUE IN NUMBERS
250,000
People who queued to see the Queen lying in state.
24 hours
Longest time people queued.
3
Average number of minutes queuers spent inside Westminster Hall.
6
Number of days the Queen’s coffin lay in state in Westminster Hall, from Wednesday 14 September to the day of her funeral on Monday 19 September.
7C
Lowest temperature experienced by queuers on the night of Saturday 17 September.
10 miles
Length of the queue at its peak.
£3 billion-£5 billion
Estimated value of the crown jewels which sat on top of the Queen’s coffin.
25,782
Number of days the Queen ruled for – the longest of any monarch. The shortest was Lady Jane Grey who reigned for only nine days in 1553.
1,502
Number of people who had to be treated by paramedics while queueing.
Every 20 minutes
How regularly the guards surrounding the coffin switched over.
8
Number of London’s bridges the line passed when it was at its peak.
13
Hours David Beckham spent queueing. The footballer wasn’t the only celebrity who waited in line – Tilda Swinton and Sharon Osbourne were also spotted.
‘I’m now four stone lighter and loving life. I often think I couldn’t have done it without the knowledge that those people could be so kind.’
As for her daughter, she changed her university subject choice from science to music, because, after 14 hours chatting with the woman studying for a music PhD, she decided she ought to ‘follow her passion’ and ‘forget what everyone else expects’.
For others, the impact of the experience was more about looking backwards than forwards.
Paul Abraham, 62, is an ex-naval officer who met the Queen on several occasions. He remembers her ‘great smile and wicked sense of humour’.
She was ‘a constant for over six decades of my life’, he says. ‘She was my sovereign, my commander in chief for 37 years, and she epitomised duty over self-interest.’
But, as was the case for many of those I spoke to, there was a personal point, too.
‘When I think of her, I think of my parents, their generation, our standards as a country and what we believe in.’
Not queueing was never an option for Abraham.
‘I felt she deserved my respect and I wanted to represent all my family who could not be there. If I hadn’t gone, I would have always regretted it.’
The crowds were more inspiring than he expected. People who lived along the route let queuers inside their houses to use the bathroom.
When Abraham passed some waterside flats in Bermondsey, a couple who lived there came out and offered tots of brandy to queuers ‘to offset the cold’.
Abraham declined the drink and ‘regretted it afterwards’, mostly because he was wearing a ‘totally inappropriate’ outfit for walking through the night.
He was dressed in a three-piece suit, smart coat and polished shoes; it left him ‘freezing, with aching feet’.
Still, the experienced military man does not regret queuing. When I ask Abraham to describe what it was like inside Westminster Hall, he replies: ‘I cannot really explain what it felt like, other than peace, respect, warmth, stability, love.’
Perhaps that is what we were all looking for in the queue, whether we were there or not. Qualities so treasured in the Queen, yet, it turns out, still there in so many of us.
The Queue by Alexandra Heminsley is published by Orion, £8.99*