Radio

Mark Thomas

If there was ever a written constitution of Britishness then ‘queueing’ would have its own chapter titled #TheQueue with an image of humble mourners lining the streets of London to see Queen Elizabeth II lying-in-state. As Mark Thomas reveals through the archive though, the ‘humble queue’ may in fact be nothing of the sort. Instead, it’s a microcosmic minidrama - a place of shifting alliances, shame, anger and sometimes love and reconciliation - that speaks volumes about who we are and who we think we are.

Mark talks to Angie Hobbs, Professor of The Public Understanding of Philosophy at Sheffield University, who suggests that the queue for the Queen was the queue Britain had been training for all its life. Our queuing prowess is all part of our self-mythology, she suggests. We really aren’t the only nation who can queue.

Archive reveals queuing to be a bit like a classroom for grown-ups. Adults take on improvised roles: the queue joker, the queue grumbler, the passive-aggressive queuer. Mark finds that in truth the Brits are the most grumbling of all the nation’s queuers because they expect things to be done more efficiently than they are. He recalls the ‘passive competitiveness’ in his favourite Eddie Izzard sketch - ‘The Supermarket Queue’.

Mark talks to Stephen Reicher, Professor of Psychology at St Andrews University, who describes a rehashing of tropes from the war-years and how queueing became a shortcut to “Britishness”. He points to the way in which patience in queuing can be seen to be a bit like the Blitz spirit, fair play, stoicism - employed when a country needs to affirm a sense of national identity during national crisis.

Mark joins David Lammy MP during his constituency surgery to discuss how he observes the queues in his constituency in Tottenham North London. What’s poignant is the reality that queueing often means things aren’t working properly.

The real question Mark asks is not why we queue, but why we think we’re so good at it?

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“The Cossacks could have lynched me. Instead they didn’t want to believe me. They continued trusting me. That was horrible. I remember all of it with true horror. It was truly a diabolical plan.” (Rusty Davies, British Liaison Officer for the Cossacks in 1945)

At the end of the war in 1945, the Yalta agreement provided that Prisoners of War were returned to their home country. The Cossacks, bitterly opposed to Stalin, had joined the German forces to fight against Stalin.

Stalin insisted they be returned to their “homeland” in the USSR. All parties knew this would mean certain death.

In this fictional dramatisation of true events, Major Christopher Graham and Sergeant Wilson are in charge of a Cossack prisoner of war camp. The prisoners comprise whole families including women, children and young babies. The two officers, struggling with a lack of resources and manpower, work with the Cossack generals to run an orderly camp. The Cossack generals believe the British to be trustworthy and, although deeply concerned at the prospect of a forced return to the Soviet Union, accept the two officers’ assurances that this will not happen.

When the British government acceded to Stalin’s demands, the army felt obliged to break it’s word and organise the enforced repatriation to the Soviet Union.

Jean Binnie’s original stage-play, dramatised for radio by Stephen Wyatt, examines the dilemma of ordinary army officers ordered to betray the people whose trust they had gained and whose welfare they had been in charge of. Running through this play is the 2022 testimony of survivors of these events, voiced by actors from the Teatr Napadoli in Kyiv, and the testimony provided to the subsequent enquiry by Major Rusty Davies, the British Liaison office of the time.

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