Young James Herriot

by John Lewis-Stempel

  Yet Alf Wight was never likely to go completely off the rails. He was too conscious of his own desire to become a vet and the sacrifices of his parents for that. A bad result in a term test administered a corrective jolt: he got only 40 marks in ‘Stables’, when the pass mark was 45. The exam was not an important one, but ‘I don’t like failing’, he wrote in his diary.

  * * *

  The veterinary syllabus had remained essentially unchanged since M. Claude Bourgelat set up the Lyons veterinary school in 1762. The most important animal to study at Glasgow in 1933 was still the horse, followed by the cow, then the sheep, the pig, and the dog, in that order. If Alf was disappointed by find that dog-doctoring was so low down the list, he was pleasantly surprised by how beguiling was the equus. After an introductory lecture by Weir on the points of the horse, Alf felt a ‘thrill of fulfilment’, as though he had ‘undergone an initiation and become a member of an exclusive club’. He was, at last, in the veterinary fraternity. Or so he thought. As he famously recounted in If Only They Could Talk, when he left that lecture, he noticed a horse between the shafts of a coal cart, and he decided to give the beast the benefit of a professional examination. Stepping onto the road to give Dobbin a friendly pat on the neck:

  Quick as a striking snake, the horse whipped downwards and seized my shoulder in his great strong teeth. He laid back his ears, rolled his eyes wickedly and hoisted me up, almost off my feet. I hung there helplessly, suspended like a lop-sided puppet.

  A crowd gathered to watch the free entertainment. Girls giggled. After what seemed like an eternity, the coalman emerged from a tenement block, and bellowingly ordered the horse to drop Alf, which the horse did, into the gutter, ‘like an obedient dog dropping a bone’. Alf made his embarrassed escape, the coalman shouting after him, ‘Keep your hands of my bloody horse. Dinna meddle wi’ things ye ken nuthin’ about.’

  Horses let Alf Wight down in other ways too. Animal Husbandry included afternoon horse-riding lessons out at Motherwell (for which the college, naturally, charged extra), to which students went out by charabanc. After a pleasant afternoon buying breeches and a roll-neck sweater in the city centre (‘I look really horsey’), Alf had his first riding lesson, which was ‘great fun’ and consisted of cantering around an enclosed bit of field. All the fresh air and exercise built up a formidable hunger, so afterwards the students all ‘got some grub out of a wee shop’ and stuffed their faces on the bus back, to the amusement of their fellow passengers. On 7 November Alf told his journal:

  Well, I had my first experience of being thrown from a horse today. Paddy had not been out for a fortnight with the result that he was just too fresh & full of beans. We had jumping – I stuck on the first time, but the second time Paddy went clean off – bucking like a bronco & I described a beautiful curve in the air & landed on the back of my neck.

  This left his neck ‘rather stiff’ and his left arm and wrist sprained.

  In his diary for Tuesday 5 December 1933, there is a single word: ‘Concussed.’

  He was brought home from Motherwell in a car, and the doctor prescribed bed rest. By all reports, Paddy had thrown Alf onto his ‘dome’. Alf could not recall anything of Tuesday at all. Still, every cloud has a silver lining: doctor’s orders meant missing the upcoming Chemistry exam.

  When you fall off a horse, the maxim has it, get back in the saddle. A month after his de-horsing Alf was riding ‘his fiery steed’ again:

  In the afternoon we went out on the old nags again – we had a wonderful ride and a tremendous [rag] in the bus. Stewart and Thomson did me up but I managed to leave my mark on both of them. I had the satisfaction also, of seeing Stewart leaving Dainty’s back and describing a graceful semi-circle, finally ending up on a nice hard spot of road.

  He would enjoy ‘plenty of tip-top gallops’ out at Motherwell, and almost warmed to riding, but he would never describe himself as a horsey person again. In practice in Darrowby, James Herriot always preferred to leave the nags to Siegfried Farnon.

  At Buccleuch Street, the stables theatre was next-door to Anatomy, and for a dog-lover the sound-effects were not always pleasant: ‘When I was at stables,’ he wrote, ‘they were cutting a couple of greyhounds’ throats in the anatomy lab next door, and did they yell! I felt I wanted to charge in and sock the blighters who were doing it but that’s just not done of course.’ The greyhounds were rejects from the Shawfields racing track on the Rutherglen Road. Alf himself was getting his hands bloody because the first-year course at Glasgow included some dissections in the Zoology component of Biology, with the scalpel being wielded on such lesser creatures as pigeons and rabbits. The bunnies, Alf noted, were ‘a trifle high but one gets used to it’. As for frogs, they were ‘most unpleasant. Most of us sneaked out of the lab whilst old Andy’s back was turned.’

  As Alf’s diary makes plain, he managed to squeeze in as much life at vet college as he had at school. Here is a week in the life of Alf Wight, first-year veterinary student:

  Monday 19 February 1934

  Stables and botany as per. Afterwards I had a few games of ping-pong and then walked down to Renfield St with Turner to get some cigarette coupons. While waiting for the bus to take me back I met Flo going into Skerrigs. However, she was with [unclear] with whom, I have been told, she is going steady so everything was very polite and formal. In the afternoon, not much doing and in the evening I wrote up some practical chemistry. Mother phoned late on to say all was O.K. in W[est] K[ilbride]. Had a walk with pup [Don] of course.

  Tuesday 20 February:

  I was rather fed up at Chemistry this morning and was glad when it was over. I had intended going to the Mitchell [Library] in the afternoon, but as I was leaving Hunter nailed me and said there was an SRC [Student Representive Council] meeting. So that filled in the afternoon. The SRC adjourned to Crounstonhill baths afterwards. In the evening I took Don out and wrote up some Chemistry.

  Wednesday 21 February:

  Geordie Weir had a horse in this morning and we had quite an interesting (and amusing) lecture. After that – Andy [McQueen]! In the afternoon, we beat Skerry’s – not a bad game. In the evening I got down to it and got my Practical Chemistry up to date. Also had Don out. I am going to get into bed early as I was sleepy today. Adios!

  Thursday 22 February:

  Went to the Mitchell for a wee swot and then into Duncan’s [lecture]. The poor man had a sore throat and could not give us a full lecture. Said he wouldn’t be in tomorrow on the afternoon for practical chem. In the evening, feeling the pangs of conscience, I did the old work instead of boxing. Got to get down to it as the chem. exam comes off in 3 weeks.

  Friday 23 February:

  After lecture, MacIntyre and I had a game of ping-pong and then drifted down to the Mitchell and did a big swot till about 4 o’clock. It’s a wonder we weren’t given the order of the boot as I am afraid we were rather boisterous. In the evening, Jock and I improvised a ping-pong net and played till we were fed up.

  Saturday 24 February:

  Slept in this morning and felt rather seedy as a result. However, I trotted Don out and felt better. In the afternoon – the dancing class. I’m progressing fairly well and I think I could now swing a not ungainly shoe if called upon. Later I listened to Jim Catler [?] making his rugger debut for Scotland v Ireland in great style. Evening – Commodore ‘College Humour’ – very good. Walk later.

  Sunday 25 February:

  Delightful morning so Don and I got out in the wide open spaces at Bearsden for a few hours. In the afternoon and evening I ‘plied my books’ with commendable industry.

  Alf acquitted himself with, if not glory, a decent showing in his first year. He passed the professional examinations in Chemistry and Biology (just, with 46 per cent, the pass mark being 45 per cent). Professor Duncan, his Chemistry teacher, wrote in his report: ‘Is quite a fair average, not likely to be brilliant but I expect him to be steady.’ As for Biology: ‘I think this lad has the making of quite a good studen
t.’

  Things started to go awry in his second year, though. Sitting the professional examinations on 16 July 1935, he failed Physiology (with 36%) and Histology (25%), together with Animal Husbandry (37%). The clue to his decline is in his report from his Physiology teacher: ‘Attendance Irregular.’ Alf had been ill with a literal pain in the arse, a fistula, which, aside from its intrinsic discomfort, brought on bouts of sapping septicaemia. Over the years, the condition required several hospitalizations (including in 1937 and 1939, while he was still at college) and explains why ‘steady’ Alf would take a year longer than the set five to get his diploma. The same complaint also put paid to his progress as an RAF pilot in the Second World War.

  Veterinary studies were unrelenting for students who wanted to qualify in the prescribed quintet of years. All veterinary students in Britain sat the same professional written exams, and the same examiner travelled around the country doing the orals. It was called the ‘one portal system’. There was no lowering of the bar for Glasgow students just because their lecturers were generally below par. And the professional exams were intentionally demanding, usually comprising a three-hour written paper and one- to two-hour oral/practical per subject. So Alf attended his classes in the morning, then staggered with a pile of textbooks to the cavernous Mitchell Library on North Street in the afternoons, to write up notes and study. The copper-domed Mitchell Library was founded with a bequest from one of the last tobacco barons, Stephen Mitchell. Alf never did like the place. ‘It has such a learned atmosphere; you can almost hear the brains throbbing.’ And the textbooks he ported and pored over were all heavy in weight and heavy in content. There was Caulton Reekes’ Common Colics of the Horse, Hobday’s Surgical Diseases of the Dog and Cats, Monnig’s Veterinary Helminthology and Entomology, Udall’s Practice of Veterinary Medicine, Dollar’s Veterinary Surgery, Hoare’s Veterinary Materia Medica Therapeutics, Hutra’s Special Pathology and Therapeutics of the Diseases of Domestic Animals, Miller and Robertson’s Practical Animal Husbandry … The Covent Garden publisher, Balliere, Tindall and Cox, who liked to dress their books with green hard covers, had the market pretty much sown up.

  Alf’s hours of study in the Mitchell with his Balliere, Tindall and Cox books was one clue to why Glasgow veterinary students did so well. Thrown back on their own resources, they developed independence and initiative. More, there is nothing like peer example to make a student succeed. Because some students toiled with their tomes, others followed suit. Underneath its ‘play hard’ skin, Glasgow Veterinary College had a ‘work hard’ body.

  In the summer of 1936, Alf passed Physiology and Histology. For Animal Husbandry, however, he had once more, to borrow the euphemistic words he later put in Tristan Farnon’s mouth in a similar happenstance – ‘done alright’. That is, he had failed with 41 per cent. He was in good company; almost all his year flunked the exam at least twice, largely because of the sheer diversity of subjects candidates had to show mastery of in the hour-long oral and practical, including manipulation, ageing, harness fitting, shoeing, herd management, the principles of horsemanship, recognition of principal breeds of domestic animals, and conformation.

  And so in December Alf Wight had to sit Animal Husbandry yet again.

  This time, though, he had a helping hand. Sitting in on the oral examination was the assistant lecturer in the Husbandry department, Alex Thompson, who perched behind the funeral-voiced examiner, puffing away on his pipe. Thompson was new, young and very sympathetic to the students.

  ‘How many orifices are there in the teat of a cow?’ asked the examiner.

  Candidate J. A. Wight pondered. Hesitated … then noticed a single finger sticking up beside the bowl of the pipe.

  ‘One,’ Alf replied.

  ‘Correct. How many orifices in the teat of a mare?’

  Out of the nicotine miasma emerged two pale digits.

  ‘Two,’ answered Alf nonchalantly…

  * * *

  By the time Alf passed Animal Husbandry at Christmas 1936, the Wight family had moved from 2172 Dumbarton Road, Yoker, to 724 Anniesland Road, Scotstounhill. It was a mile eastwards in distance, a continent away in atmosphere. Anniesland Road was leafy, quiet and distinctly middle class, and Hannah must have felt, as she entered her new rented semi-detached house with its front lawn, that she had arrived at her right place in life. The previous tenant had been a dentist. Her near neighbours were doctors, and the Scotstounhill Bowling and Tennis Club was a step along the road at number 633.

  At Anniesland Road, Hannah was able to spread out her dressmaking business, Alf had an upstairs bedroom with views – of the Kilpatrick Hills and the Campsie Fells – and Jim was nearer the fish and chip shop on Dumbarton Road of which he was the proprietor and which was now his main source of income. But that was the thing about Alf’s parents; they were always trying something to make money. ‘Ye olde shoppe,’ Alf called his father’s emporium, and sometimes lent a hand in the evenings and weekends. A few years later Pop Wight found Anniesland equally convenient for a job as a shipyard clerk at Yarrow’s.

  Aside from the money gathered from their own efforts, Jim and Hannah could afford the rental on 724 Anniesland Road because Jim’s father had died, leaving a tidy fortune of £7,366. Like his son with his music, Jim senior had long had another interest beyond the shipyard. His was property speculation, and when he died he owned no less than six houses in Sunderland, to be shared among his children. At this stage of the Thirties, two-thirds of the British deceased left an estate of less than £100.

  The Yoker the Wights had left behind was not the Yoker they had arrived in in 1916. It had become a world of quiet because shipbuilding had all but stopped on the Clyde; in the famous phrase from George Blake’s 1935 novel The Shipbuilders, the river had become a ‘high, tragic pageant’ of yards with empty berths, and weeds growing among the keel blocks and cranes. Nor had Yoker escaped the deprivations of the Depression in all their existential misery and violence, as one dramatic entry in Alf’s diary shows: ‘Mr Ballantyne cut Mrs Ballantyne’s throat tonight – she’s dead and he’s been taken away – It’s terrible for Bunt and Jack.’ The Ballantynes lived around the corner from the Wights. Less than a minute away. The murder made the nation’s paper of record, The Scotsman:

  Following the discovery on Monday evening of a middle-aged woman lying fatally injured in a tenement house in the Yoker district of Glasgow, her husband appeared at Glasgow Marine Police Court yesterday, and was formally remanded in custody for two days.

  The man, John Ballantyne (57), was charged with having on May 7, in a house at 10 Lady Anne Street, assaulted Christina Olsen or Ballantyne, his wife, residing there, cut her on the throat with a razor or other sharp instrument and murdered her.

  A grey-haired man of slim build, and neatly dressed in a blue suit, Ballantyne presented a dejected appearance during the brief court proceedings before Bailie Alexander McLean. While the charge was being read out he bowed his head on his arms, which were resting on the rails of the dock. His right hand was heavily bandaged.

  SCREAMS ALARM NEIGHBOURS

  About nine o’clock on Monday night screams and the sound of a struggle were heard in the Ballantynes’ house, and neighbours informed the police. When entrance was effected the woman was found lying in the kitchen in a pool of blood. She was rushed by ambulance to the Western Infirmary but died on the way to the institution. Ballantyne was arrested in the house of a neighbour.

  A coppersmith to trade, Ballantyne had been employed on the Cunarder at Clydebank, but had been paid off when work on the vessel was stopped. He found employment in another yard, but again had lost his position.

  For the Wights the move to Scotstounhill was an escape from a Yoker on the slide.

  There was something else about Scotstounhill apart from its social respectability; with its trees and relatively low-density housing it was an altogether healthier environment, and both Hannah and Pop had suffered illnesses beyond the usual sniffles and aches
of middle age. His mother’s health, in particular, worried Alf. When she was ill, he was sad. Conversely, he told his diary: ‘There’s Mother laughing just now. It is the world’s greatest tonic to me when I know she is happy.’

  * * *

  From his new home at Scotstounhill, Alf Wight returned to College in September 1936 in good health and mind. His marks soared. Doc Whitehouse, teaching Alf Anatomy, wrote happily, ‘Has improved greatly from his junior year. Very good progress.’

  Other students were not doing so well. Every term someone toppled by the wayside, to have the words ‘LEFT COLLEGE’ inked under their names in the college register. By the autumn term of 1936, nine of Alf’s year had quit, among them two of the Islanders, Norman Mackay and Bantyne Maclean, who both had attended Portree Secondary School on Skye. Homesickness possibly claimed them, or the need to be down on the family farm, since neither had been doing that badly. Alf was not going to join the fallen, despite the upcoming Materia Medica (Pharmacology), universally regarded as being one of the Beecher’s Brooks of the diploma course. As Alf recalled years later, passing ‘the vast and complicated subject of Materia Medica’ consisted of learning an ‘endless list of medicaments’ with Latin names, and actions on the differing types of animal. Doctors of humans ‘have only to learn one dosage rate for their patients, but a vet has to know five.’ That is, for the holy quintet of the horse, ox, sheep, pig and dog. Alf’s friend Eddie Straiton likewise considered Materia Medica a dreadful subject to study, ‘full of intricate facts about size and shape of drug crystals, odours and so on,’ and found it well nigh impossible to retain the details in his mind for any length of time. With the professional exams approaching and a whole book to learn, Straiton suffered nightly panics at what he had forgotten and what he had yet to learn. ‘Eventually time ran out’, he wrote, ‘and I went to sleep at ten o’clock the night before the exam, resigned to my fate. At four in the morning I woke with a start. My mind was crystal clear and a voice kept drumming in my ears, “Do morphine! Do strychnine! Do morphine! Do strychnine!” There and then I opened the textbook and read through the chapters on morphine and strychnine again and again.’ When he sat down in the Maclay Hall that morning and turned over his paper, he stared in wonder. All four of the compulsory questions were on morphine and strychnine. ‘The Good Lord had guided my mind,’ he concluded. ‘How else could this be explained?’