Institutions lend perspective. Coronavirus is not the first national emergency in the institutional life of the WS Society (for 500 years) and the Signet Library (for 200 years). The government measures of recent days have been described as the most draconian since World War Two. While perhaps only of limited comfort, it is worth reflecting on the threatening atmosphere in which people had to go about their daily lives during that conflict, with the ever-present risks of air raids, bereavement, shortages, and restrictions.

At the point when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s stricken voice crackled out of Edinburgh radio sets to announce the outbreak of war on the morning of 3rd September 1939, the city had just undergone a month even more extraordinary than the one we have all just experienced. August had seen the armed forces reserves and civil volunteers placed on notice. A very large proportion of fighting age Writers to the Signet would have begun folding up their business affairs at this point, in preparation for full mobilisation. At the beginning of September, from Edinburgh Waverley railway station, from Haymarket, Morningside, and Leith, the children of the city boarded trains and left for the Borders and the Highlands.

In the quietened city, emptied of its youth, the older men, their minds alternating between warnings of air raids and memories of Gallipoli, made different preparations. At Parliament House, the lawyers and court staff who would this time serve out of uniform divided themselves into shifts of firewatchers who would spend the next five years on the roofs at night, waiting. Guide wires were installed on the top walks and around the chimneys. The Signet Library ones are still there.

A large van arrived in Parliament Square to be filled with crates containing the Signet Library’s most valuable books. It pulled out shortly after, bound for a Writer to the Signet’s home in the Highlands where it was hoped they would be safe. Maps, plans, charts, and key documents were transferred into an underground safe beneath the Court of Session. Some paintings were too large to move: they would spend the war alone on the wall, seen only by the firewatchers and those few lawyers who continued to practice as the long years of fighting war on.

There would not be long for the watchers to wait. On 16th October, the first German air raid on Britain took place in the Forth. The ensuing air battle was visible from within the city, recorded laconically by the Signet Library Hallkeeper in his working diary. 16 sailors died on the water that day, including the commander of HMS Mohawk, who remained at his post despite a severe stomach wound, to which he succumbed moments after seeing his vessel safely back into port.

But it was not a time of withdrawal and retreat: far from it. The Second World War was Edinburgh’s great international moment, and as the first year of war drew to a close, the city found itself home to men and women from every culture and every corner of the globe. Scottish presses began to pour out newspapers in the many languages of our visitors and allies, with the main Polish language newspaper being printed at the works of Oliver and Boyd in Tweeddale Court.

Polish troops were installed as the first line of defence on much of the Scottish eastern coast, but as their home country was first split in two and then obliterated by the twin invasions from Nazi and Soviet forces, they would soon lose all news of home and family. Their isolation was acute, and in an attempt to help these soldiers through, Signet Librarian Charles Malcolm helped lead a huge befriending operation that found new Scottish “families” for these soldiers. Now there would be letters, parcels from “home”, gifts of woollens and cigarettes, a place to go to on leave, photographs and a sense that someone still cared.

For the Poles in Scotland, the war would be an affair of more than six years, and many would spend the rest of their lives here, marrying Scots and enlarging on the warm relationship that has endured between the two countries over many centuries. When putting a brave face on things, it can be better not too think too far ahead: frequent amongst the reflections collected from ordinary people by the Mass Observation movement is the thought that ‘had we known at the start how bad it was going to be…’ .

There was much to endure, and it was endured. Afterwards, those who had suffered and survived took their experiences and built a new world around them: the same Scottish lawyer who prosecuted the Nazis at Nuremberg, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, also drafted the post-war European Convention on Human Rights. Writer to the Signet Robert Bertram Laurie, whose service with the French Resistance in 1940 is still hung with mystery, was an early secretary and driver of the new Law Society of Scotland.

Now once again, under the pressure of a pandemic this time, the world is being remade around us and Scottish people are stepping forward to help in their tens of thousands: countless more are watching and caring for neighbours and friends. People are adapting. This time it is an invisible virus and not other human beings that threaten. That is some consolation and a big difference from what it must have felt like in 1939. The question is, how will the world have changed after the present crisis is over?

Next time… Cholera and typhoid ravage nineteenth-century Edinburgh