It is summer about a century ago, and the Registrar General for Scotland has arranged a special occasion for his smartly-dressed staff. 71 men and women of the temporary Census Office, who have been working on the returns of the Scottish Census held on 19 June 1921, are gathered outside George Heriot’s School in Edinburgh.
This striking photograph captures a unique group of workers who were employed on the highly technical challenges of converting vast quantities of raw census information into usable statistics. Although the staff were not a crosssection of Scottish society, they reflect the state of the public service after the Great War, and they fall into four distinct groups, each with an interesting story to tell.
Front and centre sits the somewhat
