Young James Herriot

by John Lewis-Stempel

  A veterinary surgeon’s dispensary would contain as many as 200 different chemicals, to be mixed precisely, the dosage dependent on the type of animal. To the fear and loathing of veterinary students, they were expected to know mixes and dosages off by heart for their professional examinations. When they qualified and were in practice, they could consult a posological table (see below).

  A vet in the Thirties was as much animal chemist as animal doctor. Vets weighed out powders, measured liquids, rolled pills, all from ingredients bought in bulk. Standby medicaments included liquid paraffin, castor oil, turpentine, aloes, common salt, iodine, soap-water enemas. Carbolic acid was the usual disinfectant.

  On the top shelves in the dispensary, the heart of the surgery, would be ‘Winchesters’, large containers of raw material, brought by the drug salesman who came every three months. Poison bottles were always blue, bottles for castor oil usually brown. There were tea chests and demi johns at floor level, and in between, row upon row of brightly coloured liquids in glass bottles, red and blue, green and purple, with daunting Latin names written on them: Potassi Acetas, Sodii Hydrophosphis, Hydrastani Hydrochlor, Amylum Iodatum … Alf the student and Alf the young vet would spend a lot of time in the dispensary, with these ‘noble names’ and beautiful bottles looking down at him. It was an alchemist’s exotic dream.

  The label on the bottle had the name of the surgery and the instructions for administration, which were always picturesque:

  ‘A wineglassful to be given in a pint of old ale, morning and night.’

  ‘Mix thoroughly in a pint of gruel.’

  ‘Dilute with a quart of spring water.’

  ‘Two tablespoons to be added to a pint of water and given as a drench twice daily.’

  Every practice also had its recipe book of tried and trusted treatments, which would be passed down through the owners. The speciality of Nigel Carter’s veterinary practice in Herefordshire was a concoction named after one of his predecessors, Barling’s Mixture, a colic drench to treat diarrhoea and stoppage in horse and beast. ‘It stops those that are going and starts those that have stopped.’

  It was a mixture of aloes, turps, spirits, ether nit., etc etc and you gave it in a pint of warm water – or tried to give in a pint of warm water but you can try to drench a horse, but you’re not necessarily going to get him to swallow it. And I used to get quite a lot of it on me and I would be smelling of aloes and turps for sometime afterwards. I can remember that in 1958 one of our assistants rang me up and he said was treating a horse for colic. He’d given it this injection and that injection, and said what else can I do? I said, ‘Well have you tried Barling’s?’

  He hadn’t. He then did. And it worked.

  Unfortunately, many vets’ recipes were often no more effective than those of the quack’s, and were given more in hope than expectation.

  Near the dispensary in the veterinary surgery was a back cupboard containing the instruments of the job. Clippers, shears, castrators, fleams, probangs … Some of the tools were medievally grotesque and already on their way out in favour of the hypodermic syringe. Some of the most unlikely would linger on in a strange half-life; the probang, a four to five feet long bendy leather ‘stick’ with brass ends, was used to push stuck pieces of mangel-wurzel or turnip down a cow’s throat down into its first stomach. (The leather stitching is perfect all the way along, so it does not scratch the cow’s throat.)

  Siegfried Farnon once used the century-old lancet-like fleam in the cupboard at Kirkgate to bleed a Gypsy pony with laminitis.

  If the veterinary profession of the Thirties was still using fleams, rolling pills and making potions (or even dispensing the same red drench as the quack and the veterinary chemist), was the vet a practitioner of a ‘black art’? After studying veterinary science at Glasgow College, Alf would indeed conclude that his chosen profession trailed ‘the faint miasma of witchcraft’. He would be equally certain that he also learned art and science of the whitest hue.

  PART TWO

  THE WORST VETERINARY COLLEGE IN THE WORLD

  ‘A momentous day! This morning, I started in the Veterinary College. Crowd of new fellows waiting outside; seasoned veterans swaggering in; stamping of feet in lecture room; big thrill when I went into a room full of dead animals; there’s some queer fish here. Those were my first impressions.’

  Alf Wight, diary, Tuesday 26 September 1933

  THE GLASGOW VETERINARY College was conceived in the city’s Sauchiehall Lane in 1862 when James McCall FRCVS started giving formal classes in veterinary medicine for Edinburgh students living locally. The student roll numbered ten. McCall had formerly been Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Edinburgh school, but had profoundly disagreed with William Dick on what to do about the Rinderpest cattle plague sweeping lowland Scotland. Dick believed that Rinderpest could be treated, telling the Cattle Plague Commissioners, ‘I commence … by the administration of mild purgatives, followed by stimulants, and after that, tonics … where the disease has been a little more advanced … a dose of oil … lime water and tincture of opium.’ He added that, with a change in the weather, the disease would disappear.

  McCall, meanwhile, believed the only valid option was the destruction of infected cattle. To literally distance himself from Dick’s views (which, as McCall divined, were fallacious), McCall moved to Glasgow where, in between acting as surgeon to the area’s railway contractors, he was unable to resist founding his own veterinary school. Unlike Dick, McCall allied himself to the RCVS; McCall’s school and ‘The Dick’ were ardent, and sometimes tetchy, rivals henceforth. No mean politician, McCall found friends in useful places, including Joseph Lister, who held the chair of surgery at Glasgow University and who reputedly conducted some of his early experiments in antiseptic surgery in McCall’s premises.

  In 1863, with a Royal Warrant in his hands, McCall moved the now formally established Glasgow Veterinary College to premises at 397 Parliamentary Road, off Buchanan Street. Here McCall lectured for three hours a day, sometimes by evening gaslight, and the facilities included a surgery, shoeing forge and rudimentary hospital. The first two vets received their qualifications in April 1865, with the examining body being the Highland and Agricultural Society.

  With the job description of veterinary surgeon increasingly extended to include the duties of inspector of meat and milk, the demand for vets grew and the school thrived, with student numbers reaching over fifty. The college attracted a number of distinguished teachers, notably Professor George Armatage. Dissatisfied with the ‘grovelling mediocrity’ of the veterinary profession, Armatage was an early enthusiast of the longer training of students, together with rigorous examinations. He also believed that entry into the schools needed to be by proper selection procedures, telling the first veterinary congress in Britain, held in the Freemason’s Tavern, London in May 1867, ‘I hold it to be indispensable that the veterinary surgeon should always be the gentleman … by education and training.’ Within a decade, Armatage’s desires had become realized, and the RCVS had organized preliminary and practical examinations for students, with the latter being done at McCall’s own farm. It was a way of raising the profession clear of the quacks. (Armatage had another claim to veterinary fame, being the author of The Thermometer as an Aid to Diagnosis in Veterinary Medicine. Before the 1860s, veterinary surgeons diagnosed disease in the same way as farriers and quacks, by assessing an animal’s eyes, skin and mouth. A cold, wet nose was good, a hot, dry nose was bad. The clinical thermometer inserted into an animal’s rectum, Armatage suggested, was a more ‘infallible test of approaching contagious disease, its gradual progress in intensity, or the more welcome approach of convalescence’. Armatage’s other treatises included The Sheep Doctor and The Horse: How to Feed Him, Avoid Disease, And Save Money.)

  In 1873, the college went on the move again, this time to 83 Buccleuch Street, a former water-pumping station in the Garnethill district. Following refurbishment, the new college opened its arched do
or on 28 October 1874.

  Sixty years later when Alf Wight tipped up at Buccleuch Street, both the college and Garnethill were fading glories. In The Art and the Science, Alf’s unpublished try-out for what would eventually become If Only They Could Talk, he recounted his feelings on first approaching number 83. He disguised himself as ‘James Walsh’ and wrote in the third person:

  His first sight of the college had been a shock – a low, seedy building covered half-heartedly in peeling yellowish paint crouching apologetically among the grime-blackened, decaying tenement houses. In Victorian times the district had been the residential quarter of the prosperous city merchants and many of the houses had imposing frontages and pillared entrances but now it was a forgotten backwater, the haunt of broken down actors, purveyors of dubious trades, and pale, stooping women … It was rumoured that the college had once been the stable for the horses which drew the first tram cars and there was no doubt that the outside appearance of the place lent weight to the theory.

  Even the college’s official history, Records of 80 Years’ Progress, published in 1941, was obliged to admit that ‘the college premises are far from inspiring’. But not, as generations of students discovered, uninterestingly located. In the tenement opposite the college was a brothel, where the endeavours of the prostitutes with their clients were eye-poppingly clear to students on the first and second floors. However, the college did provide its share of visual intrigues for the denizens of Garnethill. Animal bodies for necropsy were trundled along the streets to the college on the backs of carts and lorries, and overflow dissection classes were done in the entrance yard, in full view of passers-by. Since the college had the amenity of receiving the dead beasts from Glasgow Zoo for post-mortem and dissection, lions, zebras and an elephant all had their surreal hour on the stage of the yard.

  The veterinary college at 83 Buccleuch Street was as unprepossessing inside as outside. ‘There were no frills,’ Alf recalled, ‘no cool cloisters to pace in, no echoing picture-lined corridors, no lofty, panelled dining hall. There was a common room with a few rickety chairs and a battered grand piano which was used mainly as a card table and a hatch in the corner which served tea, meat pies and the heaviest apple tarts in Scotland. This was the social nerve centre of the whole building and all functions were held there.’

  On the ground floor a single arch led into a quadrangle covered by a glass roof, around which were grouped the general office, a shoeing forge, library, staff room, the pharmacology lab with its bales of the sedative cannabis, Dr Whitehouse’s anatomy department, male lavatories, a single female lavatory, the ladies common room, the ladies locker room, a board room and stables. Throughout the ground floor lingered the stench of formalin, used to preserve the beasts being dissected in Anatomy. Horses, cows and dogs were kept in open tanks of the chemical, to be hauled out by chains when needed for more dissection by students’ scalpels. The first time Hugh Lasgarn, a young Welsh vet who attended a few years after Alf, entered the anatomy room at Glasgow, he was ‘silently shocked’:

  I knew that, in order to discover how animals were built, they were best studied by taking them apart, piece by piece. After all, I’d done it with dogfish, frog and rabbit [at school]. But I wasn’t prepared for the sight of large animal cadavers arranged in peculiar poses like plasticine models, grey, stodgy and in various stages of undress.

  There were horses, skinned and lying on their backs, feet pointed rigidly to the ceiling; cows of indeterminable breed stripped of muscle so that the light shone through gaunt frames; from assorted tables sheep and pig heads gazed forlornly into space and, at the far end of the Hall was positioned a large preserving tank – when I cautiously peered over the rim I discovered it to be full of failed greyhounds. Above, ran great gantries with pulley chains to assist the manipulation of the bodies, while fixed upon the walls were gaily coloured gazetteers of nerve pathways, blood vessel patterns and bone structures.

  That ubiquitous, pungent aroma of formalin made Lasgarn’s eyes smart and his stomach uneasy.

  The common room, which would soon resound to Alf’s piano playing, and where he would regularly lose money in card games, was on the first floor. The grand piano in question, made by Collard and Collard, was inventoried by the college’s insurers as being in ‘very bad order’ and worth no more than £1. Still, the rosewood top made a terrific poker table. A 9′ x 5′ ping-pong table, pine benches, three photo portraits, a pine cupboard and a single coal stove with a stuffed moose head with antlers above completed the furnishing.

  On the landing were two noticeboards and a telephone box. Off the landing were the students’ canteen, the four rooms of the Chemistry department and the caretaker’s store rooms. Clanging steel stairs led up to the top floor, which accommodated two lecture theatres, the examination room, a kitchen, two laboratories, and the departments of Pathology, Zoology, Parasitology, Physiology, Botany and Bacteriology. Conspicuously lacking from the facilities was a clinic. ‘Lecture rooms were basic, some laboratories were sunless,’ recalled Roddie Campbell, a student of the time. Floors were covered in worn brown linoleum or cork, and walls covered with cheap, dark vertical tongue-and-groove pine planking. Even in summer, the building was cold. Over everything lay an atmosphere of damp and decrepitude. The value of the frayed 180 books in the library came to a paltry £2/10s. Almost symbolically, the circular oak clock in the examinations room did not work. And eight metal rat traps were strategically placed round the floor.

  Following incorporation in 1909, the Scottish Education Department had declared the Glasgow Veterinary College to be a central institution and allocated it £600 per year in funds. However, with the decreasing demand for vets in the 1920s, the government decided that Scotland did not require two veterinary colleges, and either Glasgow or the Royal College (‘The Dick’) in Edinburgh must close. In March 1925 the matter reached the floor of the House of Commons and after ‘careful consideration’, the decision was taken: The Dick was saved, Glasgow was to go. However, instead of accepting death by financial cut, the chairman of the governors of Glasgow College, Professor John Glaister, and the principal, A. W. Whitehouse, decided to carry on teaching. For funds, the college henceforth relied on local authority grants, donations and, especially, fees from students. The money did not stretch and on occasion the college’s students had to ignominiously rattle charity tins on behalf of the impoverished institution at agricultural shows. One desperate college old boy, Alex Pottie, put a collection box in the waiting room of his Paisley surgery.

  It wasn’t only the building at 83 Buccleuch Street that was in need of renovation – so were the staff. As the college’s official centenary magazine remarked, with masterly understatement, the cessation of the government grant meant, ‘It was necessary to practice [sic] the strictest economy in the running of the college.’ This meant that most of the teaching was done by part-timers with little or no teaching experience; at one point Professor Whitehouse was the only full-time professional teacher.

  Some of these under-paid, part-time staff, Alf recalled

  were old men snatched from retirement and forced to spend their declining years in an unequal struggle with boisterous youth. Others were veterinary surgeons in practice in the city who combined their daily work with lecturing and, in the process, imparted a practical and commonsense slant to their instruction which stood their pupils in good stead in later years. They, like the older men, had a detached, fatalistic attitude to their job and took the view that if the students paid their fees it was up to them whether they gathered knowledge or acted the fool.

  Doctor Arthur W. Whitehouse, Principal and only full-time staff member, was a highly romantic American who had moseyed around the Far West in his long-gone youth, gold-digging and cowpoking. Somehow, he had also found time to earn an MA from Oxford, as well as veterinary degrees from British, American and Canadian universities. Before becoming Principal in 1922, Whitehouse had been Professor of Anatomy at the Fort Collins Veterinary College, Colorad
o. It was ‘Old Doc’ Whitehouse who interviewed the college’s prospective students.

  Aside from running the college and interviewing prospective students, Arthur Whitehouse put on his professor’s mortar board to teach Anatomy. While Whitehouse’s practical classes were enjoyable enough, his lectures were exercises in ennui. The Doc, Alf wrote, ‘had a quiet, droning voice’. This was quite enough to send students nodding off per se, but to make matters certain Whitehouse’s lectures consisted almost entirely in reading aloud from the late Septimus Sisson’s The Anatomy of the Domestic Animal, which was replete with riveting lines such as:

  The lumbo dorsal fascia (Fascia lumbo dorsalis) closely invests the muscles, but is easily stripped off the longissimus. It is attached medially to the supraspinous ligament and the spinous processes of the vertebrae; laterally, it divides into two layers. The superficial layer is practically the aponeurosis of the latissimus dorsi. The deep layer gives origin to the serratus anticus and posticus…

  And this was served up after lunch.

  The lectures of Professor Hugh Begg, the moonlighting veterinary inspector for Lanarkshire, also consisted of word by word reading from a textbook, this time Monnig’s Parasitology. Almost as venerable and genial as Doc Whitehouse, Begg was stone deaf, his hourly lectures not marked by sibillant snoring à la those of Whitehouse but decibel-rising riots. A notice instructing ‘Hum while he’s talking’ was hung under his desk. And everyone did. Rubbers and pencils pelted around the room. Occasionally the loudness would penetrate his shrivelled ear drums, causing him to look up from his textbook, squint around through his spectacles at the dim figures on the benches before him, and exclaim, ‘Wha’ … what’s that noise.’ If Begg was asked a question by a student, he’d reply, ‘Ye’ll find it in the book, son.’ (His faith in H. O. Monnig’s textbook – properly, Veterinary Helminthology and Entomology: The Diseases of Domesticated Animals Caused by Helminth and Arthropod Parasites – was well-placed. First published in 1934, it was still being issued in 2001.) Hugh Begg was doddery, but he was no fool, once retorting at his unruly students. ‘Aye, ye aw think you’re very clever but ah’ll tell ye this, and I want ye tae listen carefully: ye’ll never be a veterinary surgeon until every last one o’ye has strewn a forty-acre field wi’ carcasses.’