Young James Herriot

by John Lewis-Stempel

  And their inevitable lows:

  8 March 1933: Eheu! I am plunged into the very depths of despondency. Life to me dark and gloomy and the future looms up, forbidding and hopeless – Sunderland have been defeated by Derby County at Roker Park in the cup-tie before the semi-final … Oh, it is sickening!

  There was also going to the cinema. Since Pop was still playing piano in the intervals at cinemas, Alf got complimentary tickets, particularly for the 2000-seat art deco Commodore at 1297 Dumbarton Road, which opened on Boxing Day 1932. The programme for the first evening, attended by the Wights, was:

  Our Managing Director, Mr GEORGE SINGLETON,

  has a few words to say.

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  PARAMOUNT NEWS – A Pictorial Review of Daily Events

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  MICKEY’S ORPHANS – Mickey Mouse at it Again!

  ********

  PATHETONE WEEKLY – To interest, to educate and to amuse

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  SLIPPERY PEARLS

  A real novelty with over twenty well-known artistes in the cast including Laurel and Hardy; Wheeler and Woolsey; Joe E. Brown; Buster Keaton; Norma Shearer; Joan Crawford; William Beery; etc

  ********

  THEN and NOW

  Remember the good old days? This is the kind of film we used to entertain you with around 1912 and the musical (?) accompaniment is as near to the real thing as we care to remember.

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  MESSRS. PARAMOUNT FILM SERVICE LTD.

  PRESENTS

  MARLENE DIETRICH: CLIVE BROOK

  Supported by

  Anna May Wong: Warner Oland

  And Eugene Pallette

  In

  THE SHANGHAI EXPRESS

  Based on the story by Harry Hervey.

  Directed by Josef von Sternberg

  ‘A’ Certificate

  There were continuous performances each evening from 6.15 until 10.45, and on Saturday from 2.30 until 11 pm. In the manner of the medieval London apprentices who were fed so much salmon that they tired of the luxury, Alf surfeited on cinema, writing in his diary: ‘Oh! Pictures again.’ He didn’t like Grand Hotel with Greta Garbo, who he thought should be ‘put in a lunatic asylum and kept under close observation’. Otherwise, 1933 was a good year for the movies: Popeye made his spinach-slurping bow, the Marx Brothers were in Duck Soup, Laurel and Hardy pretended to be Sons of the Desert, and Mae West put her best chest forward in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, both with Cary Grant. But even Glaswegians without ‘comp’ tickets went to the cinema, on average three times a week; everywhere else in Britain, the average was once a fortnight. The warmth of the cinema, and that touch of luxury in a hard life, was no doubt as big a draw as the escapism shown on the silver screen.

  Just after his fourteenth birthday Alf asked a girl out to the cinema; on the way into Glasgow on the tram, he asked for a penny ticket and handed over a half-crown piece (2/6d). Annoyed at being given so large a coin for so small a fare, the conductor took revenge by giving Alf the change in 58 halfpennies. This left Alf at the cinema kiosk, to his red-faced embarrassment, laboriously counting out the two shillings for the tickets in the conductor’s ha’pennies, thus holding up the queue. Alf claimed that it was four excruciating years before he plucked up the courage to ask another girl for a date. And so, thwarted in puppy love, Alf was back to hanging around with his mates.

  Like many of his Yoker friends, Alf was a member of the Boys’ Brigade, then in its heyday. The Boys’ Brigade was formed in Glasgow in 1883, when William Alexander Smith surveyed his pubescent unruly pupils at the Sabbath School of the Free College Church in Hillhead. About to finally despair of his inability to interest or control the class, Smith had a notion: He was also an officer in the 1st Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, so why not use military methods (principally drill and discipline) and values (obedience and self-respect) to run the church Sunday youth club? As Smith expressed it later, his object was ‘the advancement of Christ’s Kingdom among boys and the promotion of habits of Reverence, Discipline, Self-Respect, and all that tends towards a true Christian Manliness’.

  The Free College Church’s minister, Reverend George Reith, gave his enthusiastic backing. (Reith was the father of John Reith, who became the first Director-General of the BBC – thus Glasgow gave the world the inventor of the television in John Logie Baird, the overseer of television’s most famous station, and the creator of one of television’s most successful series.)

  Realizing that a full uniform would be beyond the pockets of most of the boys’ parents, Smith developed an 18d outfit of a ‘pill box’ forage cap, a belt, a haversack and a badge, on which was struck an anchor and the motto ‘Sure and Steadfast’, taken from Epistles to the Hebrews, chapter 6, verse 19 (‘Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast’). In this minimalist uniform, Smith’s volunteers drilled, prayed, sung hymns and studied the Bible each Sunday at the Woodside Road Mission Hall. In pursuit of the ‘manliness’ in ‘Christian manliness’, Smith arranged swimming sessions, cricket, gymnastics with dumbbells and Indian clubs. It was intrinsic to the age that a healthy body and healthy mind were symbiotic. A Club Room supplied board games, religious readings, as well as Boy’s Own classics, many of them supplied free by Glasgow publisher Blackie and Son, including Kidnapped, The Black Arrow and Ben-Hur.

  Fifty-nine boy volunteers attended the inaugural parade of the 1st Glasgow Company of The Boys’ Brigade on 4 October 1883. Some 20 dropped out when it became clear that Smith was a stickler for discipline – any boy even a minute late for 8 am parade was not allowed to ‘fall in’ – but the Boys’ Brigade became a wild success in that sector of Glasgow working-class society that believed most soberly in ‘getting on’. People like the Wights of Dumbarton Road.

  One of the prime attractions of the ‘BB’ for boys was the annual summer camp in the same week as Glasgow’s Fair Holiday, when the entire city’s heavy industry shut down for the duration. The general routine for the day, which did not change for decades, was:

  In between the parades and prayers, there was plenty of time for sport and recreation. BB camps were one of the places that Alf improved the backhand that allowed him in his twenties, armed with a Slazenger tennis racket, to reach the West of Scotland men’s doubles final with his partner Colin Kesson.

  By 1933, the Brigade’s jubilee year, the movement had spread across Britain and the globe; in Britain alone 111,871 British boys were enrolled, plus 52,219 in the associated Life Boys. The Brigade’s jubilee Conventicle, held at Hampden Park, was the largest open-air service held in Britain, with 130,000 inside the stadium, and 100,000 without. The sun shone all day.

  For many city boys, the ‘BB’ summer camp, which was usually at Loch Fyne or North Berwick, was their one and only holiday. Not for Alf Wight. At Easter 1933 he attended a camp organized by Yoker church’s Sunday Club (at which an inspiring speech by the commandant left him and his friends ‘with a new determination to be decent fellows to the best of our ability’) and during the summer he enjoyed a holiday at West Kilbride, staying alone with friends of the family. After several days purely in the company of Dorothy Ash and Evelynne Sorley, Alf’s diary is filled with Wodehousian comic detail:

  18 July:

  Allah be praised! This afternoon, Dorothy introduced me to a lad by the name of Monty Gilbert – he seems a decent spud. We went down for a bathe immediately. He’s interested in all the things I like – sport, athletics, physical culture, and besides can talk seriously too. If I hadn’t met him, I’m sure my reason would have broken down under the strain of gallivanting around with a couple of females.

  19 July:

  In the morning, Monty and I had a glorious swim and sunbathe down at Ardneil Bay. It was the life. In the afternoon, we went into Saltcoats for a swim in the pool. There we met Do [orothy] and went afterwards to Mrs Duncan’s house for tea. After tea, we went into the drawing room to see Mr Duncan’s cine-kodak films. One of them, which was
taken last year, showed Dorothy acting the goat. It was a scream and Monty and I just lay back and howled…

  Friday 21:

  Another day of sunbathing and swimming, very like yesterday. Monty is a great lad. I wish he lived in Glasgow for I believe he’s the sort of fella I’d like for a friend. David Sommerville seems to be cracked over Evelynne, the poor fish; he mopes about and can’t go anywhere without her. He’s the laughing-stock of the place, and I believe he knows it. I was at a garden party with Do. And I won the tennis tournament. Beat Dorothy in the final – it took me all my time too. D. Also won the treasure hunt, so we more or less cleared the board between us.

  Tuesday 25:

  Knocked out of the [tennis] tournament alas! I was beaten 6-3 – anyway I’ve nothing to bother me now. I bathed with Monty in the afternoon. I had the usual evening – a walk and then listened to the wireless. I haven’t much to say tonight so I’ll conclude the entry with a few remarks on various people. Evelynne has dropped down to zero in my estimation as I have found she is a tale-bearing, petty and deceitful little wretch. In short, a nasty bit of work. As to Dorothy, although she exasperates and irritates me terribly with her headstrong childish ways, she appears to be very straight and open. So Monty and I regard her as a fairly decent spud.

  Friday 28:

  The weather was a treat so the ‘gang’ spent morning and afternoon at Ardneil Bay. It was marvellous! In the evening Monty and I went to Saltcoats and visited a cinema. We saw a really first-class show – a British picture called ‘Sherlock Holmes’. We had a good blether on the road home.

  After nearly three weeks at West Kilbride, Alf’s mother, father and Don came to take him home to Dumbarton Road. There he suffered ‘a holiday ache’, a nostalgia for West Kilbride. But not for long; a day later, he went with his parents to Sunderland for the marriage of his cousin Stan Wilkins. (Sunderland, incidentally, offered more than kin to the Wights; the Roker and Fullwell areas were the seaside, bathers and cafes, sand and hot pies, and the Wights often holidayed there.) After Sunderland, Alf was off with his mother to Arran on the Firth of Clyde, where well-to-do Glasgow liked to spend the summer, before attending the BB camp at Loch Fyne. And then back to West Kilbride.

  But Alf’s life was not all one long holiday.

  * * *

  The year before, 1932, Alf had contracted diphtheria. One reason for the sheer exhilaration he felt – and communicated in his diary – on his holiday in 1933 was the sheer relief of being alive.

  Caused by the bacteria Corynebacterium diphtheria, the disease produces a grey film (diphtheria is Greek for ‘a piece of leather’) that can block the airways. Meanwhile, the toxins produced by the bacteria produce skin boils and lesions, as well as infiltrate the bloodstream to reach the organs.

  Queen Victoria’s daughter Alice and granddaughter Marie of Hesse both died from diphtheria, but it is mainly a disease of the crowded city street, not the spacious palace, because it is spread by droplets. Tenement Glasgow, with the highest population density in Western Europe, bred diphtheria as though it was some maniacal laboratory; during the period 1934–42 alone, 1210 Glaswegians died from the disease. Alf suffered from diphtheria abscesses over his body for two years after contracting the disease.

  Inevitably, the brush with death affected Alf. His decision, whether taken consciously or unconsciously, to keep a diary in 1933 was a life-affirming gesture, a young boy’s bid for immortality. His natural enthusiasm for life was increased; a prime new enthusiasm, unsurprisingly, was keeping fit. Along with many a boy in the 1930s, he turned to Lieutenant J. P. Muller for guidance on how to keep the body beautiful and healthy.

  The name of Jurgen Peter Muller is now forgotten, but before the Second World War he was a major – and perfectly toned – figure on the cultural landscape of Europe. (The principal of Glasgow School of Art, where Muller appeared during a lecture tour in 1911, declared Muller’s body the most perfect he had ever seen.) Born in 1866 in Asserballe, Denmark, Muller had been so small as a baby that ‘I could be placed in an ordinary cigar box’. He almost died of dysentery at two and ‘contracted every childhood complaint’ thereafter. During his teens, however, he improved his health by a strict regimen of exercises. In other words, he triumphed over puniness and sickliness by his own efforts, and not by the benefit of inherited genes. Eventually, in 1904, Muller put down his regimen in words. With its distinctive cover picture of Apoxyomenos, the Greek athlete, naked and towelling himself, My System: 15 Minutes’ Exercise a Day for Health’s Sake went on to sell 2 million copies and to be translated into 25 languages. Muller himself eventually settled in London, where he opened the Muller Institute at 45 Dover Street and dropped the umlaut from his name in order to make it seem less German. Business boomed. The Prince of Wales gave Muller his official imprimatur, the British Army adopted his fitness regime, and Muller added to his catalogue with My System for Women, My System for Children, My System of Breathing, The Daily Five Minutes and My Sunbathing and Fresh Air System, among others. The cult of ‘Mullerism’ swept Europe, and the man himself became the Dane more famous than Hans Christian Andersen. In recognition of his services to physical health (and to raising Denmark’s international profile) the King of Denmark conferred a knighthood of the Order of the Dannebrog on Muller.

  ‘Why be weakly?’ asked My System, before answering with a regimen that involved a suitable diet, sensible underclothes (less was best, contra the Victorian fashion for corsets), moderate indoor temperatures, eight hours’ sleep a night, and a quarter of an hour of exercises daily. These exercises were preferably undertaken whilst wearing few clothes and deep-breathing fresh air (outdoors or in front of an open window were the best locations for the System). The first eight exercises advocated by Muller were essentially gymnastic or balletic stretches, including Slow Trunk-Circling, Quick Leg-Swinging, Quick Arm-Raising, and were ended with a cold bath and a vigorous towelling. Then followed ten exercises of muscular stretching whilst simultaneously rubbing the body. Muller wrote:

  The rubbing is done with the palms of the hands, and should be a simple stroking or friction to begin with; later on, as one’s strength increases, it should be so vigorous that it becomes a sort of massage … After you have followed up my System for some time, the skin will assume quite a different character; it will become firm and elastic, yet as soft as velvet and free from pimples, blotches, spots or other disfigurements.

  Like other early twentieth-century physical culturalists such as Joseph Pilates, Muller believed that his gymnastic exercises had definite medical benefits and could treat everything from acidity to writer’s cramp, including the devastations of old age. In an era of rampant infection, Muller’s insistence that anybody could best disease by exercise, fresh air and sunlight was engaging. Before antibiotics, Muller’s prescription for fresh air was one of the few preventative measures people could take to ward off TB. (Muller had once worked as an inspector at the Vejlefjord Tuberculosis Sanitorium and he went on to become one of Denmark’s leading athletes.) But there was more to Muller’s system than mere physicality; philosophically, it was aimed at the individual and was open to anybody. In an age of rampant political extremism, other gymnastic movements were tinged with nationalist or Communist tones. The Muller method needed neither expensive equipment nor membership of a political organization. Other ‘Mullerists’ included the arch-individualist of the twentieth century, Franz Kafka.

  Alf Wight did his Muller regime even on school mornings in winter:

  Diary, 9/1/33:

  Back to the old school routine again. Up at 7.45. BRR! Exercises and cold bath and a final exhilarating dash after my car [tram].

  Diary, 12/1/33:

  It took a bit of willpower to get me into the cold bath this morning as it was cold enough to freeze the whiskers off a monkey.

  It was also too cold, Don decided, to leave the kitchen couch. After months of ‘Mullering’, however, Alf was able to report in his diary on 20 April 1933:

 
I’m feeling as fit as the proverbial fiddle. I put it all down to the exercises and cold baths. I am much brighter and healthier than I was last year before my illness and I seem to be on the upgrade.

  He also ‘set down my figures’ in his diary with the intention of improving on them:

  He thought the diphtheria cost him a place in the rugby first XV, but there was always summer sports to shine at, and he decided that ‘I am going to enter everything within my scope at sports day, that is, the 100 yards, 220 yards, broad jump … discus, javelin, hurdles, cricket-ball, and place and drop kick. I’m leaving the long distances alone.’

  A certain McKechnie was slated to win everything, but Alf decided ‘I am going to do something about it. I used to be able to beat him in the 100 yards and last year I did 19 ft. in the long jump so I start training tomorrow, full of hope.’ A pulled muscle put paid to Alf’s intended track and field glories, but he kept up the Muller regime for years. When his own son, Jim Wight, went to Glasgow veterinary school, he gave him a copy of My System.

  Alf’s illness affected his academic performance at school – he lost more than a month of lessons in the Michaelmas (autumn) 1932 term – but fortunately only by degree, not by kind. His final marks on his record card show ‘Eng. 67, Hist. 52, Latin 48, French 53, Maths 40’ and in the ‘School Honours’ column his award of ‘Leaving Cert [ificate]’ is noted. Alf Wight left Hillhead High on 30 June 1933 with Higher Passes in English, Latin and French and Lower passes in History and, miraculously, even Maths. He wrote in his diary:

  What a day! What a day! I awoke this morning a poverty-stricken youth, and am going to bed a rich man. This morning, we had the prize-giving and I got 4/6d for being runner-up in the championship and then took my departure from Hillhead, and all the pleasant things connected with it but on the other hand, I’m glad to have got my higher at the age of 16 yrs and 8 months and to be able to get on with my job. I’ll join the F.P. [Former Pupils] Club of course, and keep up my connection with the school. In the evening, Curly and I went to the Commodore with the complimentary ticket, and saw an excellent programme. Afterwards, Mother presented me with ten bob for getting my highers.