Young James Herriot

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Some of the notables in ‘the Athletic’ teams included Bobby Finan (later Blackpool and Scotland) and Sam English (Rangers and Northern Ireland). Jim would also take Alf to see Partick Thistle – just down the road – where one day Alf’s Yoker schoolmate, Jackie Husband, played and eventually managed. There were also excursions to Rangers at Ibrox and Celtic at Hampden Park.

  Inside the high-roomed flat at 2172, switching on the science-fiction phenomenon of electric lights, Alf played with Meccano and read books. Charles Alden Selzer’s Wild West novel “Drag” Harlan, about a vigilante cowboy with ‘the snakiest gun hand’, was an early favourite to read by himself. And, of course, while Alf read, there would be the sound of music. Jim liked classical music, but also jazz and popular tunes (‘Life on the Ocean Wave’, ‘Meet Me on the Back Porch’), which he would play on the grand piano he had shipped from Sunderland. There was also a wind-up gramophone in the kitchen-cum-sitting-room at 2172 Dumbarton Road, and on the turntable Jim would lay thick 78s of Caruso singing ‘Vesti la Giubba’ from I Pagliacci and listen again and again to the great tenor’s voice ringing out through the ear-shaped speaker. When the player ran down, he would leap up to crank the handle. Not for Jim a raucous evening in the bar of the Auld Hoose pub getting ‘legless’; instead he sat before the piano and gramophone, losing himself in music. Mrs Wight’s musical tastes were no less deep, but they were more austere; she liked classical music and hymns. Together the Wights would attend musical concerts far and wide, the boy in tow (‘Mother carting me in a shawl through railway barriers so that I could go for less fare’).

  From the age of six Alf had piano lessons – from his father, alas, which proved a rare source of friction between them. Alf failed to practise regularly and Pop set high standards, making the boy play Scarlatti’s sonatas. Indeed, Pop hoped that Alf might make the grade as a professional musician.

  At the age of 13, J. A. Wight made his debut as concert pianist, playing at the Clydebank Town Hall. The piece performed was ‘Polish Dance No. 1’ in E-flat minor by the Polish-German composer Xavier Schwarenka. It was the beginning … and also the end. Alf never again performed on such a grand stage, his father apparently giving up the struggle with the lesson-resistant teenager. However, Alf carried on playing the piano for his own amusement, and music would interest him for the rest of his life. One consequence of growing up in a house of music was Alf’s exotic choice of the pseudonyms Siegfried and Tristan for the Sinclair brothers in the Herriot books. In If Only They Could Talk, Alf surely writes with his own father in mind when he attributes the names to the pater’s love of Wagner. Alf also betrays the home-steeping in Wagner by his ability to make the knock-on jokes about Wagnerian names:

  ‘Anyway, it could have been worse. Wotan, for instance.’

  ‘Or Pogner.’

  One day during Alf’s boyhood in Glasgow, his cousin Stan Wilkins from Sunderland came to visit, and to see the sights of Glasgow town. Alf recalled:

  …in the afternoon we paid a visit to the art galleries and had a most enjoyable time. After that we had tea at Cranstons and then we popped into the Playhouse. We saw an excellent show and got home about ten o’clock.

  Alf’s day out says everything about the fine face of Glasgow and a great deal about the Wight family. The ‘art galleries’ were the Hunterian and the Kelvingrove, astride Kelvingrove Park. Aside from being two of the buildings that led John Betjeman (with his architecture-critic hat on) to describe Glasgow as ‘the greatest Victorian city in Europe’), they also housed between them a world-class art collection. ‘Cranstons’ was a Glasgow institution, being one of the avant-garde ‘art tea-rooms’ of Miss Kate Cranston that she had decorated by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Neil Munro (1863–1930), creator of ‘Para Handy’, was a journalist before he was a short-story writer. About Cranston’s tea-rooms he wrote:

  They were deliberately conceived as houses of light refreshment most obviously for the pleasure of women and run wholly on ‘temperance’ lines…

  Miss Cranston brought to light the genius of a Glasgow architect, Charles Mackintosh, who died only in recent years and was the inspiring influence of a group of Glasgow artists, men and women, who made her tea-rooms homogeneous in structure, decoration and furnishing. They were strangely beautiful the Cranston tea-rooms; women loved them, and ‘Kate Cranstonish’ became a term with Glasgow people in general to indicate domestic novelties in buildings and decorations not otherwise easy to define.

  The top note in Miss Cranston’s lunch-tea-room was struck by the one in Sauciehall Street, which was popularly known as ‘the room de luxe’ from the chamber which was its most admired and exciting feature. There, even the cutlery and glassware had a character of their own, and thirty years ago no children’s visit to the Circus was complete without a meal in this entrancing room de luxe, where everything was ‘different’ and the whole atmosphere was one of gay adventure.

  Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s ‘Room de Luxe’ for the Willow tea-rooms in Sauchiehall Street was inspired by a Rossetti poem, ‘O, Ye, all ye that walk in Willow wood!’

  A visit to art galleries, high tea at Kate Cranston’s, an evening at the cinema. Only in dear old Glasgow town.

  Taking tea at Kate Cranston’s was also a middle-class rite of passage. Very few working-class people in Glasgow would have had either the money or the gall to visit such a bastion of the bourgeoisie. The Wights were socially aspirant. And, as parents, they also wanted the very best for Alf. Aspiration and devotion came together in their choice of secondary school for their much loved and only child.

  Alf Wight left Yoker Primary in the summer of 1928. Nearly all his friends, among them Alex Taylor, went to the local state school, Victoria Drive Higher Grade School, but Alf went elsewhere. He had sat and passed the stiff entrance exams for Hillhead High School. A fee-paying co-educational school in the city’s West End.

  HILL TOPS

  ‘I took the afternoon off [from school] and went to the veterinary college for a consultation with the principal. He said I would be O.K. going in without any Science as they taught all that was necessary there.’

  Alf Wight, diary, 28 April 1933

  ALF WIGHT TOOK the Corporation tram car across Glasgow to Hillhead High School on 3 September 1928; in more ways than one, he was going up in the world. The Hillhead area in the West End of Glasgow is aptly named. Geologically, it is a series of post-Ice Age clay deposits forming a series of small hills or ‘drumlins’. On top of one of these drumlins sat Hillhead High School; from the school’s windows the view was all downhill to the flatness of the Clyde riverside three miles away.

  Hillhead was a shining example of the adage that the rich people live on the hill; since the 1850s the area had been one of Glasgow’s most fashionable suburbs, following the exodus there of the middle class from the inner-city’s smoke and poverty. They went westwards, as the better off did in every British city, to avoid the prevailing west to east wind blowing the diseases of the poor over them. By the turn of the nineteenth century, 80 per cent of Hillhead’s residents were the professional classes, many of them employed in the neighbouring university; most of the rest of the inhabitants were their servants. To tempt the migrating bourgeoisie, canny property developers built honey sandstone tenements and terraces of Greco-Roman elegance; some of the tenement flats in Hillhead contained ten rooms. Visitors to the leafy streets and green spaces of Hillhead were reminded of Bath. Unlike roker, with its industrial din, Hillhead was a world of church quiet, interrupted only by the rustle of leaves and the occasional hansom horse cart. In Hillhead, children played in gardens; when they did play on the street, they did so in muted games of hopscotch and skipping to polite songs, such as Glaswegian William Miller’s famous ‘Wee Willie Winkie’.

  Opening on Monday 13 April 1885, Hillhead High School stated its educational aspirations in stone. A forbidding four-storey building fronting Sardinia Terrace, Hillhead High School promised those about to pass through its gates (with separate
gates for boys and girls) Calvinistic hard work; indeed, the building was built almost to the parameters of its street-corner plot, leaving small recreational space for its pupils. Inside, the building overran with austere classrooms, so many of them that headmasters numbered the rooms so that they, let alone the pupils, did not get lost. The school’s motto was that of the Burg of Hillhead, Je Maintiendrai (‘I Shall Maintain’), an oath promising to keep high standards of industry and discipline. But the grandiose Doric and Ionic classical columns on the building’s façade, the portico, and the date of construction in Roman numerals – MDCCCLXXIV – advertised the importance the school attached to the making of gentlefolk. As the school’s official history put it, the first headmaster, Mr Edward Macdonald, ‘made his School a centre of learning; but he was still more intent on making it a building place of character, a training-ground for his pupils to fit themselves for the duties, responsibilities, and privileges of citizenship’.

  Hillhead was self-consciously modelled on the English public schools and had accordingly suffered an extraordinary toll of its old boys in the Great War, only a decade before. In the axiom of the era, an officer was a gentleman who had attended a fee-paying school, and an officer had the most dangerous job in the trenches of the Western Front; leading the men over the top. No fewer than 178 Hillhead alumni had died in the 1914–18 conflict. The school’s Officer Training Corps continued to be active, as were all the societies that public schools commonly enjoyed, from a debating society to a literary society to a drama club.

  Sport was also an essential component in building the character that Edward Macdonald and successive heads wanted. Initially the cramped confines of the Sardinia Road site restricted sports to cycling and running – both of which could be done on Hillhead’s roads – and Physical Training with moustachioed Colour-Sergeant William Walker, late of the Northumberland Fusiliers. The quintessential public and grammar schoolboy team games of rugby and cricket – soccer being regarded as suspiciously ‘infra dig’ in such circles – had to wait until the renting of a pitch at Glasgow Agricultural Society’s showground at Scotstounhill.

  Tucked away on the curriculum was the all-important lesson in the making of a gentleman: Elocution, twice a week. Later in life, Alf would refer to his own voice as ‘glottal Clydeside’; maybe it was so when he first walked, wearing his cap, blazer and shorts, through Hillhead’s boys’ gate, but it wasn’t when he left. It was a soft Scottish burr, refined at Hillhead. (Elocution lessons, unintentionally, did Alf the nascent writer a favour. By drawing an attentive ear to dialect, speech patterns and rhythms, it actually made them easier to reproduce. So when Alf transmogrified into James Herriot and wished to reproduce the dialogue of Yorkshire farmers and characters, he already had his ear in.)

  In the Second City of Empire, only Glasgow High School rivalled Hillhead for its academic standards. A report by the Scottish Education Department in the summer of 1928 found that Hillhead’s head of modern languages was ‘outstanding’, while the teaching of Latin was ‘excellent’ (a knowledge of the Classics being a sine qua non in the making of gentlemen and gentlewomen), Maths of ‘a very high standard’, and English ‘thoroughly sound’.

  Hillhead’s list of literary luminescence did not end with Herriot. The future Daily Express editor Ian McColl – who 50 years later would serialize Herriot’s books in his newspaper – was in the same class. Bestselling author Alistair Maclean also attended from 1937 to 1939. And perhaps a brighter star still in Hillhead’s firmament was Robert W. Service, the ‘Canadian Kipling’ and the ‘Bard of the Yukon’, who had been a pupil in the 1880s. Service’s ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ is probably the best-selling poem of all time. Service wrote in his autobiography, Ploughman of the Moon: An Adventure into Memory, that ‘At home it was a struggle to make frayed ends meet, yet each day we trooped off to what was then the Finest School in Scotland.’ Forty years on, Alf Wight also set off to the fine school from a home worried by money. Most of the boys and girls were from very well-off homes on the doorstep, but there were others like Alf whose parents were hard pushed to pay the bill for the school on a hill.

  It was quite a bill. When Alf started at Hillhead in 1928, the fees were £2-10s-0d a term; in April 1930 the fees were raised to £2-16s-0d a term so that the school could build up its clubs and societies. On top of the basic fees there was all the uniform, kit and caboodle to pay for: a boy’s navy all wool blazer, with ‘HHS’ badge, cost 14/6d from Hoey’s (‘For Value’) at 449 Dumbarton Road, or 18/6d for the tailor-made version; a cap with badge was 2/11d; the striped school tie 1/6d. If Alf’s parents had been tempted to shop for school colours at Rowans on swish Buchanan Street, the prices were grimacingly expensive: a basic blazer was 21 shillings, a cap was 3/6, stockings (long socks to wear with shorts) were 2/6, a tie 2/6. A pair of ‘Anniesland’ rugby boots was 19/6d. In 1930, Alf’s second year at Hillhead, his parents would have spent around £13 in fees, uniform and extras.

  And this at a time when the Depression was raging. By April 1930, the number of shipyard workers on the Clyde had dropped to 29,000; in 1931 the most vivid proof of the Clyde’s shipbuilding troubles came at John Brown’s yard with suspension of work on the Cunard liner Queen Mary, the biggest ship in the world. A year later 125,819 people were unemployed in Glasgow. Porage and thin soup became the sole diet of thousands of the city’s children, who would forever bear the mark of deprivation in stunted growth. But even those who had work found things tough; following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the average wage for a 47 hour week for a tradesman in Britain fell to £2-4s-0d. Even when Pop was in work, he was earning less.

  If the modesty of his Yoker background affected Alf Wight, he hid it well. Or, more likely, it simply did not bother him. Photographs of Alf in school uniform show a boy with an unfailing smile. In the privacy of his diary, Alf wrote about Hillhead: ‘Of course school in some of its phases is an excrescence on the face of the earth – getting up at 7.45, homework, etc, but nevertheless there is something about it which makes it OK.’ What made it OK? Larking with friends was one thing:

  My face is pretty sore tonight having been the target for a great number of snowballs during the course of the day. During the dinner hour, we had a great scrap on the hill behind the school – the janitor, who is an officious wee man tried to stop us but retreated in disorder under a veritable barrage of snowballs. Oh, it was great to see him trying to be dignified and then beating it for dear life. I had a few skirmishes on the way to the car [tram] and I spent the evening trying to absorb a spot of knowledge in readiness for the forthcoming exams.

  Then there was football at lunchtime. ‘Our dinner-hour would be torture without our wee game of footer,’ he told the diary. When the dreaded janitor stopped the playing of football at lunchtime because of a broken window, Alf bearded the lion in the den by going to the headmaster himself and asking permission to play. ‘I got it and was a popular hero in consequence.’

  Alf’s enjoyment of school was doubtless aided by the fact that he was conspicuously clever. And what he didn’t find easy, he worked at. Alf Wight, like his parents and grandparents, was a worker. ‘There’s no doubt about it – work is the thing to produce happiness,’ he wrote in his diary. Placed in Form IC, Alf studied eight subjects in his first year: Science, Drawing, French, Maths, Latin, Geography, History and English. From the outset, Alf was markedly good at English, achieving 72 per cent in his end of year exams, his best subject along with Latin. His second-year report card described his progress as ‘Very Good’, a step up from the ‘Good’ of IC. He excelled at French, English and Latin – he later mused that he read so much Virgil, Ovid and Cicero at home on Dumbarton Road that he ‘could have carried on an intelligent conversation with an Ancient Roman’. In his Intermediate Certificate (the Scottish equivalent of modern GCSEs) at the end of Form III, his performance was so outstanding that he was declared the school’s Intermediate Champion, the academic crème de la crème.

  Although Ja
mes Herriot would unaffectedly describe himself as ‘just a country vet’, he long had an alter ego that was a wordsmith, and at one early stage of his school life definitely harboured a desire to be a journalist. He read ravenously: Sir Walter Scott, John Buchan, H. G. Wells, Rider Haggard, G. A. Henty, and bought the complete works of Milton from a book barrow in Renfield Street for ‘a bob’. Pop was smoking Kensitas cigarettes, and with the coupons Alf sent off for a 14-volume set of Dickens in blue hard-covers. With another 350 Kensitas coupons – in the style of the time, Pop must have been smoking like a Clydebank chimney – Alf secured the complete works of Shakespeare. Also on Alf’s reading list was American short-story writer O. Henry (‘that man’s a joy to read’), Gothic detective novelist Wilkie Collins, and even Thomas Macaulay, the highbrow Victorian essayist and historian. He enjoyed Edgar Allan Poe, though only in small doses, because too much Poe left him feeling depressed and morbid afterwards. (‘I read some of Poe’s queer, queer yarns. That chap must have spent all his time sitting thinking till his thoughts twisted themselves into strange shapes.’) His indispensable reference source was Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia; he kept his set of volumes all his life, and even read bits to his grandchildren. The books now sit on the shelves of the sitting room in The World of James Herriot museum in Thirsk, in the house that was the original for Skeldale.

  But Alf’s favourite author as boy and man was P. G. Wodehouse, the creator of Jeeves and Wooster. One doesn’t need to be a Sherlock Holmes of the page to see some of the fingerprints of Alf Wight’s boyhood reading on James Herriot’s adult writing: the perfect narrative compression of O. Henry (the Herriot books being, if one cares to think about it, composed of loose-linked miniaturist autobiographical tales), and especially the comic heightening of character of Wodehouse. Both Siegfried and Tristan would be perfectly at home in a Wodehouse tale.