As a direct-entry EO, I crossed the threshold of St Andrew's House (SAH) for the first time on 1 May 1963. The Civil Service Commission had assigned me to the Scottish Home and Health Department, so I was directed to the third floor where SHHD Establishment Division was located.
I had a short interview in Room 364, when I was invited to sign the Official Secrets Act among other things, and I was told that I would be posted temporarily to the Central Registry in Room 26 until a permanent assignment was arranged.
For three weeks I worked in Room 26. I discovered that the registry was "central" only in the sense that it was located in the middle of the ground floor of SAH - it stored only the files for the Health Divisions and not the entire Department. Of course, it was a legacy of the merger between the Department of Health for Scotland (DHS) and the Scottish Home Department (SHD) in 1962.
During those first three weeks I was tasked with clearing out the old Health Circulars in the basement store and keeping six copies of each for the archives. I recall thinking that no-one had reviewed these old papers for a long time, since they went back to the 1930s. In between stints in the basement, I helped the registry staff answer the telephone, which rang constantly, usually Health Division staff asking for a "marking" for a file - in other words, where the file was supposed to be, according to the card index. But the card index worked only if staff told the registry when a file was passed to someone else.
I have warm feelings about SAH in those days, the grand marble washrooms, the dining room with waitress service, the messengers, paperkeepers and the rest. I concur with the vivid descriptions provided by others. However, towards the end of May 1963 I received a letter from Establishment, to tell me that I had been assigned to Finance Division 4, SHHD at Saughton.
In 1968 I was assigned to Establishment Division (Room 365) where I helped to look after the (almost 300) Professional, Technical and Scientific staff in the Department. Solicitors Office and the Scottish Information Office were on the strength of SHHD at that time, despite providing a service to the other departments too.
In 1971 I was assigned to Civil Defence Division at 12-14 Carlton Terrace, Edinburgh - one of many small outstations. That division was also responsible for civil emergency contingency planning. The difficulty then (and at other outstations) was remoteness from Ministers and lack of communications, apart from the telephone and the inter-office van service. I recall that the only fax service existed on a fixed private line from SAH to Dover House, using Muirhead equipment popular with the Meteorological Office. The colloquial term in use then was to send a paper by "mufax". One forgets that compact fax machines, for use on the public telephone network, were not developed until the 1980s. There was also a fixed-line teleprinter link from SAH to DH with ungainly teletype machines at each end, similar to those used by the Post Office telegram service.
Around the time of the first Miners' Strike (Jan-Feb 1972), an "Emergency Duty Room" was established by Civil Defence Division in the basement of SAH in Room 032. The idea was that key staff from the lead Division would be close to Ministers; would have easy access to the "mufax" and teleprinter to Dover House; and would be able to concentrate on the immediate work of any emergency, including the preparation of SITREPs for the Cabinet Office. Each desk in Room 032 was provided with two ten-line "key-and-lamp units", which gave access to three ex-directory telephone lines and seven telephone extensions. To help reduce noise when a call was received, a lamp flashed beside one of the keys instead of a bell ringing. This kit enabled anyone in the room to answer a call on any direct line or any extension, simply by pressing the appropriate key; calls could be transferred within the room; callers could be put on hold; and more than one person could take part in a conversation. With hindsight, it might be described as an early manifestation of the call centre! Apart from that, furnishings were basic and a large blackboard filled the end wall with a clock above.
Among the many industrial disputes in the 1970s, the Duty Room was manned on several occasions, most notably the Oil Crisis and second Miners' Strike (1973-74) which included the "three-day week" when enforced power cuts were introduced to save fuel; and the Fire Service Strike (1976) when the stockpiled Civil Defence water pumps known as "Green Goddesses" were used by the military to provide an emergency fire service. During December 1973, I recall this message written on the Duty Room blackboard "Happy Crisis and Complaints of the Season".
Shortly after the Oil Crisis, the office at Carlton Terrace was closed and Civil Defence Division moved to SAH, at first located in the basement beside the Duty Room but later moved upstairs to the first floor. When the Division was searching for extra storage space, I remember being shown two cells from the former jail, which had been incorporated into the west end of the basement during construction of SAH!