On this day in 2022, Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, aged 96. Her reign had lasted 70 years and 214 days, the longest of any British monarch. Her eldest son acceded the same day as Charles III.
The machinery of state had rehearsed that day for decades, under plans revised and re-revised across a dozen governments. Rehearsal only takes you so far. Officials still had to establish, in the plain way that such things must be established, the hour of the death, and the words of the notice, and who would be told in what order, and how long the flag would stay where it was. Much of the work of that week was clerical, and was done by people who had never expected to do it.
In the days that followed, several hundred thousand people queued along the Thames to file past the coffin, some of them through the night, most of them for many hours. They were not, on the whole, demonstrative. They queued, and shuffled forward, and when they reached the front they paused for a moment and moved on. The photograph below is of an ordinary street with an ordinary small crowd standing on the pavement, waiting for cars to pass. A good deal of that week looked like that.
Marguerite, the bells that week were rung across cathedrals in muffled peal, and prayers were said in synagogues, mosques, gurdwaras and temples up and down the country, many of them composed in the space of a day or two. A great deal of that mourning was written quickly, by hand, and read aloud once.
That evening the West End dimmed its front-of-house and marquee lights before curtain-up, and some houses stood for a minute with the audience already seated. Then the play went on, which is what those buildings do.