VE DAY 75: SCRAPBOOKS OF WW2 SERVICE

May 8th 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of VE Day - the end of the Second World War in Europe. During the six long years of conflict, the WS Society kept a scrapbook of news about Writers to the Signet in service at home and abroad. James Hamilton introduces this poignant resource.

One morning immediately following the outbreak of the Second World War, the Signet Library’s Librarian Dr. Charles Malcolm led his team of staff upstairs to a display case in the Upper Library. One by one, every staff member wrote their name and job title on the bare wood at the bottom of the case. Someone added the day’s date to the names. It is difficult to connect now with the apprehension and fear for the future that would have accompanied the staff’s actions that day. The absences created by the1914-1918 Great War were still fresh and painful, as were the battle memories of those members who had survived. Although no staff died on active service, all bar one would never work again. Assistant John Robertson, who joined the Library in 1919, had been at Gallipoli and ended his conflict in the war hospital at Southampton stricken with typhoid fever.  

When peace came again in 1945, it was Robertson who volunteered himself to compile the 1939-1945 Active Service Record, which the Signet Library has recently digitized and made available online. The sheer intensity of 1939-1945 meant that not every WS whose exploits were deserving of record made it into the scrapbooks, but the stories of those that do feature paint an extraordinary picture of bravery, tragedy, and selflessness. This is particularly the case in the incident that led to the awarding of the WS Society’s first George Cross to Lieutenant Alexander Hodge, solicitor of Rattray.

Like so many other Writers to the Signet, Hodge had been a member of the volunteer services in the years leading up to the War, his time in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve leading to his commission on board HMS Eagle. In August 1940, with the War still in its first year, there was an explosion in Eagle’s bomb-room. Hodge was on the main deck at the time, and immediately volunteered himself downstairs to a chamber “in darkness, full of heat and fumes” with injured and dying men on the floor. Hodge was “able to rescue and send up several badly-injured men” but in doing so realized that there was another, “trapped under two very heavy bombs.” With assistance, he freed this man and did not return to the deck until he was confident no one else in the room was left alive. “He saved all the lives he could though, for all he knew, further fatal explosions might have occurred at any moment.”

Not every exercise of courage could be recorded. An unknown number of Writers to the Signet worked in intelligence, and one, Robert Bertram Laurie WS, is believed to have been engaged with the French Resistance behind enemy lines an entire year before the declared, official date on his call-up papers. Ian Mackenzie WS is recorded merely as having been killed at Roumana in April 1943, but the memoirs of his commanding officer at the Battle of Wadi Akarit, Major Davidson of the Seaforth Highlanders, recalls that when the surviving dozen or so of the Company formed up in a final last-ditch defensive position,  “Ian Mackenzie had disappeared. He was afterwards found well forward. He must have been cut off but had fought to the last. There were three dead Germans lying near him”.

Not every story in the record ends this way. A worried piece in the Evening Dispatch of May 1943 records the disappearance in the Western Desert of Major Patrick Oliphant WS, a well-known cricketer in peacetime and the son himself of a Writer to the Signet. But Oliphant was alive and in the hands of the enemy. His imprisonment at Tunis would last less than a month before British forces overtook and freed the city, and he would fight on. Oliphant was wounded on the beach at Anzio in 1944 and survived the War, ending it an acting Lieutenant-Colonel. He would go on to become Deputy Keeper of the Signet in 1964.

Nor are the scrapbooks solely devoted to the WS Society’s fighting members. In December 1939, Dr. Malcolm pasted in a cheery photograph of one of the Society’s oldest members, William Ketchen WS, wearing an Air Raid Warden uniform and steel helmet in his 80s and beaming at the camera before a wall of sandbags. The photograph was signed with his warm Christmas wishes. In peacetime he had been election agent for Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Keeper of the Register of Sasines in Register House.

But losses were grievous and went right to the very top of the Society. Deputy Keeper Sir Ernest Wedderburn’s son, also Ernest, was a leading Scottish mountaineer and author of a book on the subject. He had badly weakened his heart in the execution of a daring mountain rescue in the late 1930s, but desperate to play his part he concealed this from recruiters and officers alike, serving in France and North Africa before joining the long brave Scottish slog northwards through Italy (commemorated by the great Hamish Henderson’s song “We Are the D-Day Dodgers”). He was killed in an accident in Aquila late in 1944 and a copy of his book was donated to the Signet Library in his memory.

These are just a few of the stories preserved at the Signet Library which continues as the place of record of the lives and service of Writers to the Signet and others. We are keen to hear receive recollections of lawyers’ service in any form.

Edinburgh’s epidemics of the 19th century

Enlightenment principles and the right of the state to constrain the rights of the individual in the interest of public health were prevalent in the typhoid and cholera epidemics that swept through Edinburgh in the nineteenth century. James Hamilton explores the challenges our ancestors faced.

They didn’t speak of it, so we do not know what the builders of the Edinburgh New Town thought would have become of their city a century later. Abandoning the Old Town was never foreseen or contemplated, and the idea that the 1840s would see their ancestors’ historic wynds and closes broken down, overcrowded and racked by typhoid and cholera would no doubt have horrified them. But they might have hoped that in the face of such adversity the new approaches and thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment could be brought to bear.

Not since the ‘ill years’ of the 1690s had Scotland experienced a health crisis of the kind that would mark the nineteenth century’s middle years, but the first signs of trouble in the Old Town had come earlier, with fever erupting in Edinburgh in 1816 as the last soldiers of the Napoleonic War came back over the hills to home. The response then had been twofold – an architectural one, with William Burn (later the WS Society’s architect) and Thomas Hamilton proposing the building of new access routes to open up the medieval core of the city that would lead in time to the building of Victoria Street and George IV Bridge – and a medical one, with Henry Pulteney Alison (1790–1859), physician, social reformer and philanthropist, opening the New Town Dispensary and introducing new approaches including the quarantining of the sick and the fumigation of fever-stricken properties.

The truth was that restraints remained on the reach of Enlightenment thinking and that there were debates still to be bypassed or won. Echoing the Covid-19 lockdown situation today, the argument over the rights of the state to constrain the rights of the individual to the greater good of society was an Enlightenment one, and core to medical approaches in a time of emergency. It was an argument at the heart of Edinburgh politics, and not truly settled until Sir Henry Littlejohn’s 1865 Report on the Sanitary Condition of Edinburgh.

Also pressing was the debate about the role of the Church of Scotland, which in the early decades of the nineteenth century remained the most viable source of relief for the poor and indigent in the city and country alike. Thomas Chalmers (1780 – 1847), the Edinburgh minister, campaigned for a church-led approach to the problems of poverty and ill health, but such an essentially agrarian approach had ceased to be viable in an age of rampant urbanisation.

Chalmers’ ideas were defeated not so much by debate as by circumstance. Edinburgh had had a terrifying first encounter with cholera in 1832 and was about to have another when the first fever epidemic broke out across the Old Town in the early 1840s. In 1843, the Church of Scotland, the main source of relief in Scotland, was utterly riven by the Disruption, the climax to years of argument over patronage and the right of congregations to choose their own ministers. It would mark the demise of the Kirk as a credible solution for nationwide long-term care for the poor and sick.

The next twenty years would be among the worst in the entire history of the Old Town. Typhus and typhoid became endemic. Because the New Town, with its relatively low density, good communications and its fresh air, was relatively unaffected, the social divisions between the two accelerated. In 1846, the Scottish potato crop failed, leading to an outbreak of scurvy in the potato-dependent Old Town the following year. With the Irish Famine underway, the Old Town’s overcrowding was reaching new heights. Pressure on an already inadequate water supply became acute. Edinburgh had declared herself bankrupt in the early 1830s, and for ten years there had been very little new housing even in the New Town districts. Nor would there be for a long time to come. This was the backdrop to a political argument about the role of the authorities and to a steady enlargement of experience and knowledge in the policing of sanitation and the procedure to be followed in times of epidemic.

But the 1860s saw the return of prosperity to Edinburgh and with it the real breaking of the endemic state of fever in the Old Town. New thoroughfares Cockburn Street and Chambers Street reduced overcrowding and brought new ventures to the Old Town, such as a museum, new businesses, shops, and even hotels.

It was the persistence of Sir Henry Littlejohn (1826-1914) to argue and to persuade, and his determination to back up his proposals with strong empirical research, that would make the greatest difference. His 1865 Report determined policy until the beginning of the First World War, and it was influential both across the United Kingdom and overseas. Littlejohn’s approach succeeded because it followed the Scottish Enlightenment grain, with close analysis of the situation, the driving through administrative reform and improved methods. By the early 1880s, the death rate in Edinburgh had dropped by a third in twenty years.

Littlejohn had learned from Henry Pulteney Alison. Through Littlejohn, the Enlightenment approach extended still further in scope and time, because present in his classes at the University of Edinburgh was a young trainee doctor named Arthur Brock. Two years after Sir Henry Littlejohn’s death, the old hydropathic hospital at Craiglockhart began to fill with shellshocked officers, devastated by their experiences in the Great War battlefields of France. One of those officers was a young poet named Wilfred Owen, and it was Littlejohn’s pupil Arthur Brock that would help him onto the road to recovery.

College Wynd, Edinburgh (Archibald Burns, 1858. Reproduced with kind permission of the National Galleries of Scotland). The birghplace of Sir Walter Scott, College Wynd was typical of the historic but overcrowded and insanitary streets of pre-Littlejohn Edinburgh.

“We will meet again” — Homage to the Signet Library

For over two centuries and through two World Wars the Signet Library has never closed its doors, except for Christmas Day, New Year and other holidays. Robert Pirrie WS, Chief Executive of the WS Society, reflects on the temporary shuttering of this exceptional place in the time of the Covid pandemic.

Being an employee of the WS Society is a huge privilege as well as a great responsibility. There is an acute awareness of all the challenges faced and overcome through the years, the many people, some celebrated and some completely obscure, who have given their time and endeavour to the Society. There is nothing quite like working late at night alone in a monumental 200-year-old building to feel the presence of history. The sounds that the old building makes, the Edinburgh wind whistling through the sash windows, the smell of Brasso and polish, the lights in the Advocates’ Library opposite, the wide quiet space of Parliament Square with the crowds and the pipers long since headed home.

Those of us who work in the building often reflect that the air seems to behave differently in the Signet Library. It appears more at peace with itself, giving the atmosphere a serenity and grace that infuses even the busiest times. The quiet in the Upper Library minutes before the Society’s Annual Dinner, with the team making the last checks before the guests arrive. The ever-changing light in the Lower Library in the still morning moments before Colonnades opens. Bustling activity behind the scenes before a conference. Hundreds of people may pass through the door in a day. Evening events bring more people, staging, lights, flowers, decoration and fine hospitality. Before guests arrive, there might be a violin tuning up or a soprano exercising. Yet, early next morning, walking into the hum of the cleaners’ vacuums, with the party and performance long over, the building reveals again its own gentle yet enduring personality and brings an involuntary smile of recognition. Like the great city of Edinburgh, there is a sense of time and continuity rolling from one day to the next, down through the months and years and decades.

Perhaps there are some common expectations of what a Grade A listed building will represent. Somewhere to be visited once, to take the guided tour and hear its history, learn about the people who lived and worked there, or the family to whom it once belonged, who may perhaps still own it, living in an apartment in one of its private wings. Architectural character of exteriors and interiors is to be expected, examples of fashions, tastes, aesthetics and building techniques worth appreciating. But the Signet Library is so much more. It is a living, breathing, working building and this inheritance bequeaths its beauty with deeper meaning. It is a place where experiences take place, where memories are made. Where the past, the present, and the future reside.

A frequently voiced opinion in these strange times is, “Will we ever go back to office life the way it was before we had even heard of social distancing?” With IT allowing much legal business to carry on from people’s homes and Zoom enabling large meetings and even conferences to take place, it is not an unreasonable question. Working from home, the office bearers and employees of the WS Society continue to hold their regular meetings on Society business, charity and trust administration continues, library and research services are available and CPD planned to go virtual. The expert group working on the proposal for the Society to apply for registered charity status is also meeting online and its work is on schedule. A new Instagram account has increased our online reach beyond Twitter and the website. But there is a huge component of what makes the WS Society so special temporarily removed from the daily lives of so many people, from Writers to the Signet and other lawyers, to researchers, academics and students, to events and restaurant customers, to wedding celebrants, to employees, chefs and waiting staff: the Signet Library and a sense of time, space and life.

All those who know and love the building recognise why the Society and those admitted to the Society cherish this unique and enduring embodiment of its values. Frequently mentioned by those visiting for the first time is the fact that, despite the grandeur of the halls, the towering white columns, the vast spaces, the high ceilings, and the rows and rows of bookcases, the Signet Library is somehow not an intimidating place. This is due not only to the grace of its design, but also to the personalities that imagined it, built it, filled it with books and archives and through the years worked to ensure it would endure with its own unique personality and purpose. Understandably those charged with custodianship of such a building can become almost entirely preoccupied with worry about the costs of repair and caring for such a monumental piece of history. These are not duties the Society would ever overlook. Yet thinking about the library today, it has given the Society so much more than a duty, and in a currency so valuable it can never be repaid. That gift is there on the lustre of the portraits, the brown leather spines of the books, the patina of decades of use and polish, the wear of two centuries of footsteps on the stairs. It is the gift of an idea that seems to hang in the air, that history and learning and law are what made us and what binds us. Thinking about the Signet Library in these unprecedented times, and with the consciousness that it is home of the Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet, it is surely fitting to quote HM The Queen in her recent broadcast to the nation and assure all those who know and love the building: “We will meet again”.