The Great Queue

Under the reign of George VI, Britons learned to queue--tediously and inevitably--for food, for fun, for clothing, for travel, for life's necessities and life's rewards. Last week they queued for George himself. No one could measure or plot precisely the serpentine columns of human beings that formed and reformed, doubled, branched and coiled back again along London's streets and across chilly Thames bridges, to get a last glimpse of the dead King's coffin as it lay in medieval Westminster Hall. But before the week was out, Londoners had taken to calling it "the Great Queue," marking it as an epochal event, long to be remembered.

Three Flagpoles. There were few tears in Westminster as the endless line of 305,806 people shuffled past the high catafalque, flanked by guardsmen in gleaming cuirasses and Tudor-clad Beefeaters from the Tower of London. On the third night of the watch, majestic Queen Mary came with her eldest son, the Duke of Windsor, to stand stiff and erect for 20 minutes before her son's bier. Early the next evening, Queen Elizabeth, her granddaughter, slipped in with Philip and Princess Margaret. The widowed Queen came a few hours later, and remained for 20 minutes.

During the nine-day period between the King's death and his burial, most Britons had had their meed of public grief. "There is now a widespread feeling that the formal solemnity is being overdone," observed the Manchester Guardian. "Gloom, gloom, gloom drips forth from the BBC," complained London's Daily Express. But as the King's body lay in state at Westminster, Londoners felt a strong sense of history and a deep compulsion to share it. "I said to myself, Elsie, you put on your hat, I said, and take a bus and go up there," explained one member of the Great Queue. "I'm glad I came," said another.

From all over the world, other official mourners poured into London to play their ordained parts in the pageant. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and his wife arrived in President Truman's private plane, the Independence. At 3 that same afternoon, the Queen's husband Philip went to London Airport to meet his aunt, the Queen of Sweden, and her royal husband Gustaf Adolf. Exiled Prince Paul of Yugoslavia came, and was whisked off by his sister-in-law the Duchess of Kent--just in time to avoid meeting Yugoslavia's Communist President Ribar. Francisco Franco's Foreign Minister got in from Lisbon just before the Pretender to the Spanish throne. The King and Queen of Denmark steamed into Harwich harbor under an escort of British destroyers. The

Queen of The Netherlands came in a Dakota piloted by her husband. Fashionable Claridge's was so jammed with visiting royalty, ex-royalty and foreign representatives that the management was forced to send out for three extra flagpoles on which to fly their standards.

Thursday saw more celebrities arrive. NATO's General Eisenhower came unofficially, not to march in the procession, but to attend the funeral services as a friend of the royal family.*

Four Dukes. On Friday morning, as plain Britons jammed the curb and watched from rented windows along the way, the dignitaries lined up in another Great Queue, to escort the dead monarch to Paddington Station. Soldiers from the far reaches of his Commonwealth led the procession, followed by the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders from Scotland, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, the Irish Guards, and detachments of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. Britain's greatest soldiers walked with their men: Air Marshals Portal and Tedder, Field Marshals Alanbrooke, Ironside and Montgomery.

No animal has been trusted to draw a hearse in a royal funeral since a horse became fractious at Queen Victoria's funeral. Solemn lines of Navy ratings (enlisted men) in uniform blue hauled the gun carriage that bore the King's coffin. Behind them, in the bright red and gilt state coach, rode the bereaved women, dim, veiled, scarcely visible: Britain's young Queen, her mother, her sister Margaret and her aunt, the Princess Royal. Behind them, walking four abreast, came the Royal Dukes: Edinburgh, the Queen's husband; Gloucester, the King's younger brother; Windsor, who had once been King himself; and Kent, his 16-year-old nephew.

The slow procession passed Marlborough House, where all the blinds were drawn save one. In that window sat Queen Mary. When at last the gun carriage drew abreast, she stood, making a sudden, quick gesture of farewell to her dead son. The black-clad ladies in the coach bowed; the three elder Dukes saluted.

Ashes to Ashes. On wound the procession, the foreign dignitaries in the rear making a poor show beside the disciplined march of the military. Drab in topcoat and tophat they walked, wearing the abstracted look which the important learn to adopt under the pressure of staring eyes--neither marching nor sauntering, in a kind of compromise stiff-legged strut, along the weary three-mile route. At Paddington they broke ranks at last, milling and chatting discreetly as the coffin was loaded on to the funeral train amid the skirling of pipes. As the train pulled out, a blind in one coach was raised and Britain's new Queen peered out. Her breath fogged the window and she brushed the mist away with an impatient gloved hand.

Her impatience was reflected in many of the watchers. At Windsor, as another procession formed to escort the King to his last resting place, an irritated bystander muttered: "Stand still, please. Stand in one place so people can see." The Archbishops of Canterbury and York were waiting in the castle's Chapel of St. George to perform the last rites. The Primate spoke the old words from the Book of Common Prayer: "Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of His great mercy to take unto Himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." From a silver bowl, Elizabeth II took a handful of earth and dropped it on the coffin as it slowly sank to the vault below.

All over the Commonwealth, men & women who honored Britain's dead King observed two minutes of silence. Buses halted; miners stopped work at coal faces; passengers in British planes stood up. As Union Jacks fluttered to full staff once more, a tweedy British lady drew her breath in a quick sigh. "There," she announced, starting briskly for home, "the flags are up again. Life must go on."

* The warm wartime friendship Ike shared with King George was continued in an exchange of personal letters between the two in the last two months.

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