I was a pupil at the Harris from 1942 to 1944.

I had spent my first three secondary years at Rockwell School, going there in1939 just before the beginning of the war. On the day before war was declared, my young brother and I, with thousands of other children, were evacuated. Complete with name tags and little suitcases, we were packed off on special trains leaving tearful and anxious parents behind. We were not told where we were going. It seemed to be treated as some kind of an official secret. We landed up in Banchory and spent the first few weeks of the war there. But when nothing in particular happened, the Germans did not invade us and there were no bombs falling, like most of the other children we went back home to Dundee.

This was before the days of comprehensive schools. Rockwell was a junior secondary. To get to the Harris it was necessary to take a bursary examination at primary school. I had not taken the exam and so went automatically to Rockwell. Once there, the ten or twenty percent of pupils who were considered the brightest took a commercial course, along with French. The rest of the boys took technical subjects and science. The assumption was that if you were a little bit cleverer than the rest, you should be looking forward to a nice clean office job. Working with your hands or anything connected with science was looked upon as somehow second‑rate. It is an attitude which we have not completely lost even to this day.

I was very much encouraged by the headmaster and teachers at Rockwell to go on from there to the Harris to take my highers. So my time at Harris was in the fourth and fifth years. My choice of subjects had already been determined. To this day I am still scientifically illiterate, a matter which I very much regret.

The kind of transfer that I made was very unusual at that time, so I suppose that in the early days I felt a bit of an outsider at Harris. But that feeling did not last very long. I cannot say that I was a very enthusiastic scholar: I did enough to get by but had a certain facility for boning‑up subjects very rapidly just before the examinations, so I always did well at the exams.

I was an indifferent sportsman, fond of football but very much second eleven material and perhaps even lucky at that since Harris at that time was full of very good footballers. At Rockwell I had joined the Army Cadet Force and still played for their team. I took part in a match against my new school and Harris defeated us 12 nil. My contribution was an own goal. I took some time to live that down.

I suppose Harris in the war‑time years must have been very different from what it had been in the 1930s. There were certainly fewer male teachers around and very few young male teachers, since young men were in the Forces. The scope for extra‑curricular activities was extremely limited. Any present day pupils, if they could go back to those days, would find it all very different and no doubt restricting, but my recollection is of the sheer ordinariness of the school routine, considering what was happening in the outside world.

The war was raging in different parts of the globe. There were casualty lists in the newspapers. But the horror of war was not so immediate as it would be today. There was no television to give us a daily reminder of the suffering and brutality ‑ or of the heroism. In Dundee we were fortunate in being very rarely bombed, unlike so many other parts of the country, and of course no one in Britain passed through the special hardships of enemy occupation. The casualties were not on the scale of the first world war where virtually every family was stricken. There was plenty of individual tragedy but somehow life went on. If there was little in the way of luxury, many people in Dundee had not enjoyed much in the way of good living in any case in the years before the war.

There was certainly a tremendous sense of purpose. No one doubted the outcome of the war. For those of us at school there were no worries about getting jobs when we left school ‑ that is if we were not going on to university. The idea at the time was to leave as soon as you could after the examinations so that you could put in a bit of time before you got your call‑up papers. I left in May 1944 and had about eighteen months' training to be a chartered accountant before being called up on my eighteenth birthday. But by then the war was over.

I cannot remember whether there was a school debating society. I do not think there was but if there was one, I certainly was not a member. I would not have dreamed of making a public speech, although I had firm left wing views at that time, very much a reaction to the conditions in Dundee during the slump years of the 1930s.

I certainly never thought of a political career and in fact had not thought about that until I was asked to stand for Parliament in 1951. That was in West Renfrewshire and I lost. It was not until 1959 that I was elected for the Glasgow Craigton constituency, but from 1951 politics were what I wanted to do.

Apart from a short spell at the Ministry of Defence, all the rest of my ministerial jobs have been in the Scottish Office, in the three years from 1976 to 1979 as Secretary of State.

As it happens, we are also celebrating in 1985 the centenary of the post of Secretary of State for Scotland.

There had been a separate Scottish Minister before, but the post was abolished in 1745 at the time when Bonny Prince Charlie landed in Scotland to lead the last Jacobite uprising. The post was then abolished as an act of spite justified on the grounds of national unity.

However, the special needs of Scotland were again ultimately recognised by the new post created in 1885, although at first there was very little for the new Minister to do, and indeed there were five different occupants of the post in the first two years.

The Office has of course grown steadily in importance since then, so that nearly everything now that happens in Scotland is one way or another the concern or the responsibility of the Secretary of State. He is the Education Minister for Scotland. The National Health Service is his responsibility. He is responsible for local government as recent controversies have very forcibly reminded us. He is the Housing Minister for Scotland. Much of transport falls to him to deal with. Scottish farmers and fishermen look to the Secretary of State as their Minister. He is responsible for the law and home affairs. More and more, industrial and economic matters are his concern. He is, in fact, looked upon as Scotland's Minister in the fullest sense, and Scotland's voice in the Cabinet. If things go well he is not slow to claim the credit but if things go badly, the blame rests, fairly or unfairly, with him.

The Scottish Office is in fact a Government within a Government. The job of Secretary of State, therefore, is a very challenging one and it is a privilege to have held that position.

The range of responsibilities make it an almost impossible job to cope with ‑ it is certainly very burdensome. I do not myself believe that the present arrangements can continue for ever. Sooner or later, I think we shall have to have some kind of devolution in Scotland.

As a Minister and as a Member of Parliament, I have had the opportunity at different times to see a good deal of what goes on in Scottish schools. I am always impressed by the high level of commitment I see in so many schools, from pupils and teachers alike, and sometimes in very discouraging conditions.

I am not one of those, therefore, who believe that there was at some time in the past a golden age of Scottish education and everything that has happened since has been for the worse. More personally, I am not one of that minority who can claim that schooldays were the happiest days of their life. Nor am I one of that other minority who hated every minute of it. I have more in common with that much greater number who I am afraid do not very frequently now think of their schooldays. In any case, memories do fade with the years.

Yet I must say that when I meet, as I sometimes do in the most unexpected places, another former Harris pupil, I always feel a special bond of friendship and common interest. And when I occasionally pass the school itself, I must say that I have a real feeling of affection both for the school and for all its pupils past and present. May the Harris flourish well into the next hundred years.

The Rt. Hon. Bruce Millan, PC, MP. Labour Secretary of State for Scotland 1976‑79.