LAST weekend, I was up in Yorkshire for the Scarborough Jazz Festival, three days of music in a glorious Victorian venue down by the seafront. In between acts on the Saturday afternoon, I queued up for refreshments. As we patiently waited in line, a second barman appeared. Rather than the line splitting in two, those behind made forward for the new queue to get served quicker. For those who had been waiting longest, this led to much syncopated grumbling and Art Blakey-style Moanin’.

That disgruntlement comes from a sense that queuing and fairness go hand in hand (if not jazz hand in jazz hand). One of the intriguing fallouts following the Queen’s death has been the ongoing pillorying of This Morning presenters Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield for purportedly jumping the queue to see her lying in state. Schofield and Willoughby claimed they were there as accredited journalists: tens of thousands signing online petitions argued they were using their celebrity status to skip a twelve-hour wait.

What seemed to exacerbate was the feeling that such entitlement went against the very essence of Englishness itself. In his book How to Be An Alien, George Mikes famously described queuing as ‘the national passion of an otherwise dispassionate race’, suggesting that ‘an Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’

Yet queuing being emblematic of the British psyche is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon. In his fascinating book Queuing for Beginners, social historian Joe Moran suggests that queuing only really began in the nineteenth century when growing industrialisation and urbanisation brought larger groups of people more regularly together (whisper this quietly, but the new phenomenon was as observable in France as in the UK). It was only during the Second World War that we British really began to claim the concept of queuing as somehow ours: rationing and shortages creating a patriotic sense of everyone pulling together, rather than pushing in for themselves. The culmination of that, perhaps, was what was known as ‘The Great Queue’, when 305,806 filed past the coffin of George VI in 1952.

In the post-war years, queuing became synonymous with economic difficulties: Winston Churchill coined the term Queuetopia to define a Britain under socialist rule. When Margaret Thatcher sought power in 1979, her ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ posters showed (mocked up) queues outside the dole office. The visual shorthand for life behind the Iron Curtain, meanwhile, was people queuing for food.

As powerful as the symbolism of the ‘Elizabeth Line’ was, it was another Russian line that really tugged my heartstrings this week – the ten mile wait at the Georgian border for those avoiding Putin’s mobilisation. A call up that became their cue to leave.