Young James Herriot

by John Lewis-Stempel

  The Highlanders and the Islanders had no money to spare on such fripperies as clothes. In The Art and the Science Alf recounted being in the same Zoology dissecting group as soft-voiced ‘Donald MacLeod’ (actually George MacLeod):

  Donald marched briskly in every morning wearing a shiny, celluloid collar with broad black stripes and after a bit it became obvious that this was probably the only collar Donald had – a sort of family heirloom which was handed down from his grandfather. Walsh used to pull his leg about it and say ‘Well, now Tonald, that iss a peautiful collar you have on this…’ and Donald would grin with delight and thump Walsh playfully on the chest. It became a pass-word between them but one morning one of the other members of the group made a crack about the collar and Donald, without hesitation or fuss, kicked him with all his force on the shin.

  The Highland contingent came from crofts, and were usually on bursaries from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. The Trust had been founded in 1901 by Andrew Carnegie, the loom-maker’s son from Dunfermline who went to America in 1848 with his parents and made a vast fortune through grit, self-education, wise investments, and the ken to see that the future was made of steel. The richest man in the world, Carnegie possessed the soul of a Samaritan as well as the Midas touch. He was one of the first entrepreneurs to state that the rich have a moral duty to use their fortunes for the benefit of the community, the motif of his 1889 book The Gospel of Wealth.

  Carnegie financed, among many other philanthropic projects, the building of 3000 public libraries across the world (660 in Britain) and the establishing in the bonnie land of his birth an educational trust, upon which he settled an endowment of $10 million. The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland was to use half the income from the endowment for the improvement and expansion of Scotland’s institutions of higher learning, and the other half was to pay towards the fees of students of Scottish birth or Scottish extraction undertaking degrees at a Scottish university.

  Like the Highland boys and every Scottish boy and girl going to university, Alf Wight had the minimum £18 a year grant from the Carnegie Trust; he also received a £10 grant from Glasgow Education Authority. The rest of the fees (which totalled £33/18s per annum), plus Alf’s upkeep, had to be provided by his hard-working parents. Other students at Buccleuch Street had a tougher financial time still; for Eddie Straiton, all his parents could provide in the way of pocket money was ‘tuppence ha’penny a day, five days a week’. Two and half pence was also the cost of a bus ticket to the college, nine miles from home. Most days he walked those nine miles to college in the morning, and nine miles back in the evening.

  For those struggling to make ends meet, one of the perks of being a veterinary student was taking home the odd joint and cut from a post-mortem. There were also other less embarrassing student economies. Students shared textbooks which, even secondhand, were expensive. Eddie Straiton’s book mate was ‘Wee Harry’ Donovan, whose staple diet, like many a Clydesider, was bread and dripping. Donovan used to supplement his grant by stepping into the ring as a flyweight in ‘Premierland’. Alf’s friend Pat O’Reilly gambled at the dog track (he eventually qualified nonetheless), while Andy Flynn played in an orchestra to top up the grant.

  As with Straiton and Alf, the majority of Glasgow vet students were actually from Glasgow or its environs, not the wild exotic Highlands and Islands. Possibly as many as 75 per cent of the students came from within 25 miles of Glasgow’s Central Station and lived at home. Still, rare birds did sometimes arrive on the train. Hugh Lasgarn came from a rural Welsh village and was perplexed by the Glasgow smog, ‘green, evil and penetrating’. However, he found the Victorian architecture of the city centre and the university (which had moved out to Kelvingrove in the 1850s) inspiring and the people warm, and after five years could understand why Sir Harry Lauder could sing with such feeling ‘I belong tae Glasgow’.

  Rarer yet than Welshmen were students from Britain’s overseas empire. Frederick Hempstead from Cape Town joined in Alf’s year, as did the turban-wearing Qasuria Ashiq Mohd from North West Frontier Province, India, whose qualifications were a cut above everybody else’s: he held a BA from Punjab University. Another Indian, BNS Chowdharry, was in the year above. Just one of the 50 students in Alf’s intake was a woman. Margaret Cecilia Stevenson, always known as Stevie, had formerly been a pupil at Aberdeen High School. In the 1930s vetting was not regarded as a suitable job for a woman, and Britain’s first woman vet, the legendary Aleen Cust, had been registered as a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons a mere decade before.

  Born in 1868, Aleen Cust was the daughter of the aristocratic Sir Leopold Cust, a gentleman usher to Queen Victoria. She enjoyed a free-range, horse-riding childhood in Tipperary, Ireland, and when asked what she wanted to be as an adult, ‘a vet was my reply ever and always’.

  Like Alf and a hundred thousand other vets, she took up the vet’s scalpel and potion bottle because she was an inveterate animal lover. But plumping for a career as a vet showed a disregard for the gender conventions of Victorian Britain that dismayed her Society family. Luckily for Cust, she enjoyed a small inheritance from a relative that allowed her independence, and in William Williams FRCVS, she found a progressive veterinary professional prepared to champion her cause. Williams was the sometime principal of the ‘Dick’ Edinburgh college, but had since set up a rival establishment, the New Veterinary College, Edinburgh (which later moved to Liverpool University). It was Principal Williams of the New Veterinary College who, in 1895, accepted Cust as the country’s first female veterinary student. At the New College, Cust did conspicuously, diligently well, first in nearly all her classes, despite initial barrages of jeering hostility from fellow students and staff. Cust was iron-plated against male joshing; she had spent her childhood with four brothers. Eventually, recalled a fellow student Major F. J. Taylor, Cust ‘gained the great respect of everyone’.

  Respect, but not acceptance. Despite a woman sitting on the throne of Empire, men ruled Victorian society absolutely. No woman had the vote, no woman sat in Parliament. And there were few bastions of male privilege more reactionary than the governing bodies of the professions, chief among them the Council of the RCVS. At a meeting of the Council of the RCVS on 14 April 1897, the chairman of the Examinations Committee reported that they had been asked to consider an application from Aleen Cust, ‘she having produced the necessary education certificate for admission to the first professional examination’, but the Committee did not consider they had the power to admit women to the profession. They were backed in this by the RCVS’s solicitor. In his considered view, while there was no logical reason why women should not be admitted to the profession, the fact that no women had been admitted to the profession since the Veterinary Surgeon’s Charter of 1844 meant that ‘usage will now preclude her’. Once more, the doughty Professor William Williams took up his lance on Cust’s behalf, pointing out that women had recently entered the medical profession and that the Council should be guided by this precedent. Again the Council voted against letting Cust join; again they sought legal advice. The advice of the RCVS’s learned legal counsel, Morton W. Smith, was published in the Veterinary Record of 1 May 1897:

  Although the word ‘student’ is applicable to both sexes, I am afraid the intention is manifest everywhere in the Act of qualifying only men. Having regard to this fact, and the fact in the case of the medical profession it was deemed necessary to pass a special Act, viz., 39 and 40 Vict., C.41 to enable women to become registered practitioners, I think the case is too doubtful to justify the Council to take the important step of admitting women without the authority of a court of law…

  In other words, Cust needed to take the RCVS to court to show why she should be admitted. This Cust tried to do in the Scottish courts, but the RCVS insisted the case was heard in London. At this Aleen Cust baulked – possibly she did not have the money – but probably she feared that a legal suit in London would embarrass her mother (h
er father now being dead), who had risen to being Woman of the Bed-Chamber to Queen Victoria. The ever-willing William Williams tried to ride to Aleen Cust’s rescue by suing the RCVS for refusing to examine his candidate, but the RCVS succeeded in getting the action declared null and void by stating that they were not domiciled in Scotland, therefore could not be charged over an affair north of the border. This was a blatant lie; the RCVS had an office in Scotland, complete with notepaper bearing the address. An old guard on the Council of the RCVS was prepared to commit perjury in order to bar women from the profession.

  If the Council of the RCVS hoped that the ‘problem’ of women vets had disappeared, they were to be severely disappointed. Aleen Cust decided that if she could not be an official veterinary surgeon, she would be an unofficial one. For three more years she studied at New College, departing in 1900 with a testimonial from Williams in her bag, certifying that she had attended the full course of studies and been found competent in all subjects. On Williams’ recommendation she even obtained a post as assistant to William Byrne MRCVS, of Roscommon in Ireland, and so began a career in general practice.

  In 1905 Cust was appointed Veterinary Inspector by the Galway County Council, with the task of administering the official orders and acts concerning animal diseases. As she was not on the Register of Veterinary Surgeons, the RCVS opposed the appointment and requested its overturning. Galway County Council maintained that they could find no other suitable candidate. The pages of the Veterinary Record, the independent Veterinary News and the monthly Veterinary Journal were soon aflame with arguments for and against Cust. To the annoyance of the RCVS Council, Galway County Council proved altogether slicker operatives, and neatly headed off any lawyerly challenge by simply titling Cust ‘Inspector’, not ‘Veterinary Inspector’. As ‘Inspector’ in Galway, Cust thrived. She also took over Byrne’s practice upon his death, riding her Arab stallion to do visits or, if she needed a lot of equipment, taking her back-to-back gig.

  Meanwhile, advertisements for ‘The Cust Release Rope Hobbles’ (her patented temporary shackles for a horse) appeared in the Veterinary Record, and she read papers at conferences, which were reported in the RCVS’s own magazine. De facto Cust was a vet. Moreover, women were now being trained as vets in France, Australia, America and Russia, and there were increasing inquiries from the colleges in Britain as to why, exactly, women could not be admitted to veterinary courses. The RCVS Council was beginning to look ridiculous.

  The Great War was simultaneously the saviour and the destroyer of the chauvinist die-hards on the RCVS Council. The vexed question of women was put into abeyance for the duration because the overwhelming concern of the profession was finding, maintaining and if necessary ‘repairing’ the hundreds of thousands of horses need for Britain’s martial effort. On the other hand, the war brought women into public life as never before, with women taking on jobs previously a men-only preserve. (Cust herself drove off to France in her car to work for the YMCA, providing spiritual and material comforts for soldiers, before enlisting in Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps, in which she worked as a veterinary assistant.) It was the 1914–1918 war, more than the campaigns of the suffragettes and the suffragists, which brought a revolution in women’ rights in Britain: having been asked to do their bit against the Kaiser, women could hardly be asked to go back to the kitchen with no vote; neither could they be expected to accept legal barring from occupations they had so willingly, and ably, taken up in the nation’s hours of peril.

  All women over 30 were given the vote in 1918 and all women over 21 in 1928. On 23 December 1919, Parliament passed ‘The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act’, which provided that a person shall not be disqualified by sex from ‘assuming or carrying on any civil profession or vocation, or for admission to any incorporated Society (whether incorporated by Royal Charter or otherwise)’. At last, it was no longer allowable by law for the Council to bar women as veterinary students or practitioners. In October 1922 Aleen Cust applied to the RCVS Examinations Committee for permission to present herself for the final examination, Class D, under the four-year course. In light of Miss Cust’s four years of training in Edinburgh and the testimonials she forwarded, the Examinations Committee judged that she only need to sit the oral examination. The Veterinary Record on 28 October, in an outbreak of generosity, welcomed the decision ‘as a matter of plain justice’ and wished Cust ‘our best wishes for her final success’. Two months later the London examination results were published in the Veterinary Record, and in the results for the final year were the names of seven successful men. And Aleen Cust.

  Cust’s graduation was not followed by a flood of women seeking a veterinary diploma. By 1934 there were just 31 women on the Register. One prime reason for this low number was that Professor John McFadyean at the Royal Veterinary College and Dick in Edinburgh did their damndest to keep women students from enrolling, the very first step on the road to registration. Indeed the RCVS, although legally obliged to admit women as members, passed a motion in 1929 stating they were ‘bound to disregard the sex of students who present themselves for the diploma of membership, but they feel they would be doing less than their duty if they did not make public their opinion that, in competition with men, women in the veterinary profession will always be under the most serious disadvantages’.

  It was true that 90 per cent of vets were in general practice and 99 per cent of their work was with horses and farm animals, thus the work was hard and farmers were by and large conservative in sexual politics. Yet, as Glasgow’s Professor Whitehouse informed the Council, some women at least could do all the usual work of veterinary surgeons absolutely competently. Doc Whitehouse and Glasgow were in the vanguard of the veterinary education of women. There may have only been one woman, Stevie, in Alf’s year but overall the number of female students at Buccleuch Street was to rise steadily over the six years that Alf attended. In 1933, 12 of the 206 students were women; in 1936, 17 of the 284 students; by 1938, 30 of the 321 students were female. The college’s special arrangements for the female intake were a loo, a locker room and a small ladies’ common room. (The female students did not fuss about their appearance; there was little point, since they spent much of the day in brown lab coats patterned with blood.) A ‘Women’s Union’ was founded to represent their interests. Towards the close of Alf’s time at Buccleuch Street, the college even instigated an annual two-guinea prize for the woman with the highest qualifying marks in the diploma examination.

  Alf’s friend Stevie qualified in 1939, the same year as Alf himself. Of their year, 32 others eventually qualified as MRCVS. For all its high life and low facilities, Glasgow Veterinary College was extraordinarily efficient at making vets, as Alf’s years of study there would show.

  THE ART AND THE SCIENCE

  ‘…found him fully qualified to practise the art

  and science of veterinary medicine.’

  From the certificate of the Diploma for MRCVS

  WHEN ALF JOINED Glasgow Veterinary College in 1933, the length of the MRCVS diploma had just been upped from four to five years. His new life as veterinary student began with a year of Chemistry, Botany and Animal Husbandry. He found Chemistry with Professor Duncan almost as trying as Maths at school, a typical entry in his diary running: ‘I found the Chemistry lecture very confusing this morning – it’s a blow not having had any science.’ His assimilation was hardly aided by the disruptive behaviour of some of his fellow pupils; only a month into the term, Professor Andy Duncan cancelled a morning Chemistry lecture due to misbehaving students.

  After the strict regime of Hillhead, the latitude of Buccleuch Street was a surprise. There were lectures in the sloping theatres in the morning, but the afternoons were generally free, due to the shortage of staff. (Or as the college’s official history glossed it, ‘Glasgow graduates have the reputation of entering the profession better fitted and less ‘Spoon-fed’… than most others. That is because in its studies practical knowledge is never submerge
d by theory.’)

  At Glasgow, it was sink or swim – it was the student’s own choice. Even for a hard worker like Alf Wight, the easy-goingness of Buccleuch Street was ‘wonderfully beguiling’, although somewhat eye-opening for a boy brought up in a strait-laced home. After attending his first college ‘smoker’ (freshers’ fair) in October he wrote, ‘It was like the Curate’s Egg – good in parts. The boxing was a new experience & very interesting – the light-weights were especially natty. I was a bit amazed at the character of the various songs & anecdotes which were rendered on the platform. There was a very good violinist doing his stuff. They are a queer crowd here – all types & kinds but decent enough.’

  Within a week Alf was pounding the ping-pong table within a few weeks he was in a gang of 70 students having a raucous time at the Empire Theatre in St. George’s Road, which ended with a student kicking the door. (The police were called, but rather than wait for the long arm of the law, Alf sensibly legged it.) He also, according to his own account in James Herriot’s Dog Stories, drifted into playing poker round the grand piano in the common room with the old stagers. ‘The only snag,’ he wrote, ‘was that I lost money. Not only that, but I ran into debt.’ To pay back the money, he saved his tram fare by walking part of the way to College and lunching solely on the apple cake the canteen purveyed for 1d a wedge, which settled so heavily in the stomach it effectively ended any appetite for the day.

  His succumbing to the temptations of college life was typical, and familiar to generations of students before and since. There’s a story told about Alf at this time, in which he asks a fellow student about an exam:

  ‘What’s the pass mark?’

  ‘40%’

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘41%’

  ‘You’ve been working too hard!’