People queued up even during the Northern Rock banking1 crisis

Foreign students visiting Britain are to be educated in the etiquette² of queuing for buses, after local users complained about them not observing the conventions of standing³ in line.

Southern Vectis, which operates buses on the Isle⁴ of Wight, off England's south coast, said it was to contact local language schools following several complaints about the behavior of young students over the summer vacation.

"On the Isle of Wight we get lots of foreign language students staying with families," said operations manager March Morgan Huws.

"In their cultures, they do not queue for buses where they live and there is a scrum every time a bus turns up, while in British culture there is a nice orderly queue.

"We have had quite a few complaints from residents who queue up in an orderly fashion then all those foreign studentspush past them.

"We will work with the language schools to provide some instructions on the etiquette of queuing. We won't be marching the students up and down showing them how to queue, we will just leave it up to the group leaders to pass on the information."

Orderly queuing -- as seen during the recent Northern Rock banking crisis -- is seen as a quintessentially British convention. One social anthropologist⁵ believes Britons are even capable of forming one-person queues at bus stops.