I first entered St Andrew's House (SAH) on 6th April 1964, the day before I appeared in front of the final Selection Board. As a Scot entirely educated in England. It seemed a good idea to find out at first hand something of the Department of State, which I had selected as my first choice. I was received by Gerald Wilson, then an Assistant Principal in the Scottish Home and Health Department (SHHD) and about to start a stint as Private Secretary to the Minister of State. He showed me the ministerial corridor on the fifth floor-" the Corridor of Power" - and first to be separated by internal doors so that, like the characters in C P Snow's novel recently published at that time, we never actually entered the rooms. Still, I owe Gerald a good deal for assisting me to talk sensibly as to what was distinctive and attractive about the SHHD - often described as a "pantomime horse" of a department. He subsequently became my boss as Principal in the Civil Law Division and finished up as Secretary of another two-headed monster: the Education and Industry Department.
By the time I learned that I had been successful in the competition, I had also been accepted for a graduate degree course at an American university so my entry to the Scottish Office was deferred till 19th July 1965. I then made my second appearance in SAH where I received the usual induction treatment as described by others. This culminated in an audience with Mr Martin Fearn, the SHHD Establishment Officer, formerly of the Indian Civil Service, whose shaggy eyebrows and quizzical expression gave him a strong resemblance to the actor Alastair Sim. He took me to meet the Head of Department, REC Johnson, who sported a beard - not so common in those days - and played the organ in St Columba's-by-the-Castle.
I had been assigned to Division IA which dealt with civil law matters and my principal was one W K Fraser. He shared room 372 with an able HEO and pillar of the Free Kirk, Alastair MacDonald, and there was no separate room or desk for me. I, therefore, spent my first few weeks working at a side table in this cramped little room surrounded by files and legal tomes and occasionally shrouded in tobacco smoke from Kerr's pipe. This meant, however, that I was privy to the performance of their duties of two very gifted colleagues - each in their own way- and I naively thought that the whole Civil Service must be like that.
Some weeks later I was moved to the "horse boxes", a group of glass and hardboard partitioned rooms at the rear of the building. Across the dismal inner courtyard where coal for the boilers was noisily delivered, I could see the windows of the rooms occupied by the Under Secretaries and above of the (then) four departments and speculated what effect a machine gun attack on my part would have on the Scottish Office seniority list. I was restrained from a mass assassination attempt by the fact that Kerr Fraser could see my every move from the window of his new room on the corridor at right angles to mine. Now in those days we did not have dial tone telephones so all internal calls had to be connected by the operator and the tie line to Dover House had to be booked in advance. To avoid delay in summoning me to his room for consultation, therefore, Kerr would catch my eye through the windows and wave his handkerchief. This implied, of course, that I spent my days looking out of the window in expectation of a summons from my superior officer.
Civil Law was a ragbag division which got landed with subjects or cases for which no home could be found anywhere else. One of these cases concerned a poor wretch with mental health problems who fancied himself as official historian to the United Nations to whom he sent a history of the Second World War on two pages of a jotter. Some well meaning but innocent individual in New York sent back a profuse acknowledgement in an envelope bearing several special UN stamps. The "historian" immediately copied the document to the Secretary of State demanding recognition by HMG of his status of a UN official to which I sent a tactful refusal. Undeterred, our correspondent appeared unannounced at the reception desk in SAH one fine day bearing the framed original of his letter and envelope for safe keeping by Mr Secretary Ross. I was sent downstairs to explain to him that in all this vast building the Minister had no wall space to accommodate his generosity. I prevailed on the day but some time later we received an invoice for fees at a nursing home in the Bruntsfield area to which this person had discharged himself after a hospital operation, claiming that, as the recognised official historian of World War Two for the UN, his bill should be sent to the Scottish Home and Health Department. The matter passed swiftly to our Solicitor's Office since he obviously wasn't so daft after all.
The next room I occupied was room 106 in the east wing when I moved to the health side of SHHD. This I shared with two HEOs quite comfortably apart from Don Ferguson's habit of lighting a cigarette and then leaving it to smoulder on the edge of the ashtray. This seemed to cause the smoke to cling to our clothes more pungently than if he had inhaled it as we encouraged him to do.
During the summer months we could keep the windows open except when drowned out by the Royal High School Pipe band, which practised in the playground across Regent Road. One afternoon I was just getting through on the phone to the Ministry of Health when the band struck up. "This is the Scottish Office", I shouted into the receiver to which my interlocutor replied," You don't need to tell me, mate. I can hear it for myself"
The junior Assistant Principal in the Department was expected to act as treasurer for the SHHD branch of the First Division Association. This was the trade union of the (then) Administrative Class and reputed to be the only union in the country which negotiated wage claims with its own members. The perk from this arrangement was that you did not actually have to join or subscribe to the Association yourself so long as you collected the subs and diary money from those who insisted on paying in cash. As a junior officer it was an embarrassing task to demand money from your seniors most of whom never seemed to have change or had to be reminded several times. By then a new AP had arrived to whom this chore could pass.
A similar role was invented for me by David Bayes, then Controller of Office Services and Chairman of the Departmental Efficiency Committee (sic) and later Director of the Scottish Office training Unit at the Botanic Garden way along Inverleith Row. David was a born enthusiast for anything he touched and cooked up the idea of an SHHD staff magazine to be called "The Grapevine" or unofficially "The Grapefruit" by some of the wags. I was an obvious victim for membership of the editorial board, as we were grandly called, and was dispatched to interview each head of division in SHHD and commission a one-page article on the highlights of current business for their staff.
Establishment Division regarded the Bayes initiative with deep suspicion so this was a fast track to becoming the most unpopular member of staff as many of those who bothered to see me at all treated the interview as akin to the Wailing Wall. When asked by the Head of Police Division what the exercise was in aid of, I foolishly muttered something banal about "improving departmental sprit". He retorted that you could only hope to improve that by a generous application of real spirit with which he may have had some acquaintance.
I still have my copies of the first three editions of "The Grapevine" which did not last for very long. The October 1967 edition carried an article I wrote "Of mice and pigeons" about an invasion of vermin self-inflicted by staff who left snacks and other food items lying on their desks. There had apparently been a complaint from George Pottinger, one of the Assistant Under Secretaries of State, that pigeons fed by staff were fouling the window ledge outside his room on the fifth floor. My researches into this weighty affair of state revealed a long history e.g. that 577 mice were caught in the year 1944 and six rats were caught in one night but not before they had chewed right through several copies of the Post Office telephone directory.
Much of this infestation affected the West Shelter, a storage area in the basement of the West Wing of SAH dating from the prison and then air raid shelter previously on the site. For its last 25 years, the Edinburgh Civil Service Dramatic Society stored its props, furniture and costumes. Free storage and rehearsal accommodation (in conference rooms and the basement coffee lounge) were a great privilege and hidden subsidy to an amateur dramatic society for which we remain very grateful. This arrangement eventually collapsed and, for lack of new members, the Society was wound up in 2005. Before then, however, I had inadvertently precipitated an expensive crisis in the West Shelter. People who are clearing out houses always turn to their local am dram club to take black bags of old furs, morning suits and other "period" costume off their hands and the West Shelter proved a useful, if rather untidy, dumping ground. On one occasion we acquired a clutch of large unwieldy shades for standard lamps for which there was no floor or shelf space. I noticed a rack of heating pipes lagged in what looked like plaster at head height. I pushed the lampshades on top of the pipes leaving some slight scratches on the surface of the lagging. Some time later we were ordered to evacuate the Shelter since traces of asbestos had been found in the air there, which had probably emanated from the lagging material of the overhead pipes. I told Accommodation Branch about the lampshades but they were more concerned with eradication than the blame game.
Other contributors have mentioned the Staff Dining Room on the sixth floor when it had uniformed waitress service, tablecloths, cake stands and a cupola. - rather reminiscent of the saloons of the "Queen Elizabeth" or the "Queen Mary". Not only could you get afternoon tea there, but you could also order high tea - bacon and eggs, tea and toast, the lot - if you were working late or staying for a play rehearsal. There was even Youngers export on sale at lunchtime. Sad to say, all this was swept away in 1970 when the Dining Room was converted to a self-service canteen with its sixth floor windows permanently boarded up! The then Permanent Under Secretary of State, Sir Douglas Haddow, was quoted as saying that "it wasn't even fit for taking a County Clerk for lunch." However its egalitarian aim was partly achieved after the election of that year when Teddy Taylor, MP lunched upstairs on arrival as Joint Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health Education and Social Work in the Conservative administration. The preceding Labour ministers had always had sandwiches brought to their rooms.