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Crucial etiquette of British queueing

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date17 June 2022
Publication titleHuddersfield Daily Examiner
UMPING a queue comes top of the anti-social behaviour list in Yorkshire. This is understandable as queuing is a national trait that is usually observed by everyone. Get it wrong, even in error, and you could be in trouble

My wife and I got it wrong. New to the system in one town centre store, I ignored the queue for the busy till and went straight to the front of the second till where someone was just paying, only to hear a lady say: "He's pushing in." To which her large husband said: "I'll push him in."

I realised the one long queue was being serviced by both tills and I had, indeed, committed a retail faux pas. Whoops. I returned to the back of the queue and, after being eventually served, made sure the large gentleman was not waiting outside.

Mortified? I could well have been.

We are, in the main, a polite nation and queuing is part of our island DNA. We all know the rules. It is probably one of the reasons why the next most obvious national trait is chatting about the weather. What other subject is safer when you are stuck in a queue of strangers?

The practice of standing in line to wait your turn, is said to have started in Britain in the late 18th century as a result of the industrial revolution but was probably perfected during the Second World War. That was when we had very little but the RAF, the Home Guard and a stiff upper lip to deter Hitler, and we used politeness as a weapon in the face of doodlebugs and adversity, particularly in queues which became the norm...

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