The Real James Herriot

by Jim Wight

  But still, Walsh gradually became aware of a pulsing life, warmer and more vivid than anything he had known before. The dilapidated little college was an unlikely stage for the host of colourful characters who thronged it but they were there all the same: rich, vital, outrageous and beguiling.

  The college was indeed full of fascinating and often unruly characters. In 1949, it became affiliated to Glasgow University, but in Alf’s day it was not answerable to such a high authority – a fact displayed more than adequately by its high-spirited students. He appeared surprised at the character of his fellow students. A few weeks after he began his veterinary education, he went to the college ‘smoker’ – a kind of introductory welcome for the new boys – and wrote about it in his diary. ‘The boxing was a new experience and very interesting. The lightweights were especially natty. I was a bit amazed at the character of the various songs and anecdotes which were rendered on the platform. There was a good violinist doing his stuff. They are a queer crowd here, all types and kinds, but decent enough.’

  Up until this time, Alf had been brought up in a home where drinking and swearing hardly existed, and some of the songs he heard that night must have come as a bit of a culture shock. A more vivid example of the unruly students of his day occurred at the annual prize-giving that November. Prize-givings are usually well-ordered and dignified occasions, but this one was different.

  This remarkable ceremony was reported the next day in the Glasgow Evening Times:

  A human skull decending suddenly on a cord from the ceiling to within a foot or so of his face was one of the shocks sustained today by the chairman at the prize-giving of the Glasgow Veterinary College, Buccleuch Street. The platform party was met by thunderous applause and banshee shrieks when they entered the hall in which the students were assembled. The opening remarks of the chairman, Mr Alexander Murdoch, were punctuated by loud interruptions and the speaker was threatened with early hoarseness. He was diffident, however, about having recourse to the water carafe because it looked suspiciously like an aquarium – a goldfish having been inserted there by some ‘person or persons unknown’. After his first half-dozen sentences, he raised his head and was confronted by a dark brown skull revolving slowly on a cord in front of his face. After a ‘look round’ at the platform party, the skull slowly rose to the ceiling again, from which it descended, ‘spider fashion’ at intervals, finally dropping with a loud bang on the table much to the alarm of the chairman. The students seemed to enjoy the command performance.

  Alf had obviously appreciated the occasion, as his diary entry shows: ‘The prize-giving. What a rag! They hissed the unpopular profs, cheered the doctor, and sang ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, and bawled remarks at the big-wigs as they entered. I enjoyed it, I can tell you!’

  Alf threw himself willingly into this new way of life. A few weeks after the prize-giving, he went, in the company of seventy other students, to the Empress Theatre in St George’s Road. The students, already having had a drink or two, were intent on having a good time. The police were soon on the scene. One student kicked in the door of the theatre as he left, later receiving a fine of two guineas – a punishing sum for a student in those days. Alf made good his escape by running into the jungle of nearby tenements; his athletics training at school stood him in good stead that evening.

  Riotous behaviour was not confined to ‘extra-curricular’ activities outside the walls of the college. Some of the lectures within bore more resemblance to wild parties than periods of study and in those early weeks at the college, James Alfred Wight was beginning to realise that life at Buccleuch Street was going to be a little different from that at Hillhead. In his unpublished novel, he later wrote about the teachers whose lot it was to teach these tearaway students:

  Some of the staff 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.

  Professor Andy McQueen, who taught biology in the first year, read his notes out from papers in front of him and if he ever turned over two pages at once by mistake, he just carried on as if nothing had happened. Alf later wrote about one of his lectures in his novel and it illustrates the atmosphere at the college very accurately. He gave his old teachers varying noms de plume, and refers to Andy McQueen as ‘Professor King’.

  The difference from school life first became apparent in the lecture rooms. Professor King, who taught biology, was an incredibly old and frail man who conducted his classes with total detachment. Stooping over a sheaf of yellowing notes, he mumbled almost inaudibly down at his desk and whether the students listened or not, was a matter of no concern to him; it was entirely up to them.

  The class took their cue from the considerable number of failed men left over from the last year and stamped and cheered as though they were at a football match. This rowdiness started right at the beginning of the lecture when the roll was being taken. When the name of the only female was being called, there was an uproar of shouts and whistles while the poor girl, who was naturally shy by nature, coloured deep red and sank lower in her seat.

  The other outbursts came at the jokes. Professor King, at the beginning of his teaching career in the later years of the nineteenth century, had decided that his lectures would be racy and full of wit, so he had pencilled in a comical allusion for each lecture. For nearly fifty years, he had not changed a single word of his lecture notes, so that successive generations of students knew exactly which joke was coming and where.

  For instance, when he was discussing the snake Dasipeltis shedding its skin, he would clear his throat, pause and say ‘for Dasipeltis always returns the empties’. This was the signal for more stamping, wild yells and hysterical laughter from the class.

  The only time he ever looked up from his papers was at the end of his lecture when he invariably drew a large watch from his waistcoat pocket, gazed around the students with a smile of childlike sweetness and said, ‘I see by my gold watch and chain that it is time to stop.’ Pandemonium then broke out again.

  Another of the elderly teachers was Professor Hugh Begg who taught parasitology. He was a well-liked man, full of good advice to the students, but he was hard of hearing and so was only dimly aware of the tumult that characterised his lectures. He would raise his head, peer around him and say, ‘Wha’… what’s that noise?’ One would need to be totally deaf not to hear the response from the assembled students. Hugh Begg did, however, have a piece of advice one day that Alf never forgot. He was a wise old man, with many years of experience behind him, and he was talking about the kind of life that awaited the veterinary surgeons of the future. On this occasion he had the ears of the class, and his theme – a vitally important one – was that they would learn by their mistakes.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said solemnly, ‘ye’ll never make veterinary surgeons until every last one o’ ye has filled a forty-acre field full o’ carcasses!’ Prophetic words.

  When I talk to some of the young graduates in our practice in Thirsk, hearing of the pressure they were under at University, I cannot help casting my mind back to my father’s stories of his student years. The card games in the common-room, the time spent sitting happily in the cinemas rather than in lessons, and the riotous scenes in the lecture theatres when they did attend, paint a very different picture of veterinary education from that of today. However, despite the rather unorthodox lectures, the material given to the students was sound and, providing they worked and read the text books, they had every chance of qualifying within a reasonable time.

  My father, well aware that the cost of his education was b
eing borne largely by his parents, was determined to do well. He bought the necessary text books such as Sisson’s Anatomy and Animal Husbandry by Miller and Robertson, and spent many hours studying in the huge Mitchell Library which was near the college. He obviously found the atmosphere in the big library somewhat daunting and wrote in his diary: ‘That place depresses me. You can almost hear the brains throbbing.’

  He was taught Animal Husbandry, Chemistry and Biology in the first year, and made a steady start. He passed his Chemistry and Biology, although he only just scraped through in Biology, attaining a mark of 46%. This led to a conversation with a fellow student that he repeated to me many times.

  ‘What’s the pass mark?’

  ‘45%.’

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘46%.’

  ‘You’ve been working too hard!’

  Another of his friends used a different approach in following this rather risky attitude to study. He was being examined in Anatomy and was presented with a large bone. ‘What is this?’ asked the examiner.

  ‘A femur,’ replied the student.

  ‘Correct,’ continued the examiner, ‘a femur of what species? Is it the femur of a cow or a horse?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said the student dismissively, ‘you can forget that one. I’m not looking for honours!’

  During that first year, Alf’s teachers seemed quite pleased with him. His chemistry teacher, Professor Duncan, wrote in his report: ‘Is quite a fair average, not likely to be brilliant but I expect him to be steady.’

  In his next year, 1934–5, he started to slip back. He failed his Physiology and Histology examinations, together with Animal Husbandry. Very poor marks of 36%, 25% and 37% respectively were attained and his teachers were not pleased. Remarks such as ‘not in attendance’ and ‘does not work; very poor’ are evident in his report.

  This is rather surprising. Alf was a responsible and ambitious young man. He wanted to get out into the world, earn his living, and cease to be a burden upon his parents. In addition, he was not one of the band of students who played cards in the common-room all day with the intention of extending their carefree college life well beyond the allotted five years. After a few sessions round the card table in his first year when he lost heavily, the appeal of that enjoyable but expensive pastime died very quickly. In his report of Autumn Term 1935, Dr Whitehouse wrote that he was ‘not in attendance’ for his Anatomy classes. This seems strange behaviour for a well-adjusted young man. While Alf was never a brilliant student, carrying off little in the way of distinctions during his time at the college, this does not fully explain his poor showing.

  There was, however, a serious reason. In his last year at Hillhead School, he had experienced severe pain in his rectum that developed into a discharging anal fistula. He recovered from the initial attack but this debilitating condition, which resurfaced in his second year at the college, would be one that would dog him intermittently for the rest of his life. He was so ill in the summer of 1937 that he was admitted to hospital where he underwent a minor operation to clean up the affected area. It was a failure and he was back in the Western Infirmary in 1939 for another attempt at resolving this persistent complaint but, as before, it was not successful.

  This acutely painful affliction, inevitably, affected his ability to concentrate fully on his studies. Without the help of antibiotics in those days, it was not only the pain of the condition that weakened him, he had to endure bouts of severe septicaemia brought about by multiple fulminating abscesses. The only treatment was to go to bed, often with a raging temperature, and bathe the area with hot water in an attempt to keep the infection under control.

  Alf was very philosophical about this blot on his otherwise good state of health and always managed to put a humorous slant into any discussions about it. ‘I may not be an expert on many things,’ he was to say years later, ‘but I consider myself to be an authority on the subject of “Arsology!”’ He spoke from bitter experience, going on to say, ‘I’ve had several operations on the old posterior, all of them agony, but I’ve had enough! No one else is going to have a go at remodelling my backside. This lot is going into the “box” with me!’

  By the summer of 1936 at the end of his third year, he had passed his Physiology and Histology exams, but failed yet again in Animal Husbandry. He sat that examination for the fourth time in the December of that year. This time, he received a little help. One of the assistant lecturers in the department was Alex (Sandy) Thompson – a man who also taught me twenty-six years later. He was a pipe smoker who, during the examination, was seated behind the examiner, in full view of Alf, contentedly puffing on his pipe.

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

  Alf hesitated, then noticed that one forefinger, accompanied by a puff of blue smoke, was pointing into the air behind the examiner’s back.

  ‘One,’ he replied.

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

  Two smoke-enshrouded fingers appeared, still caressing the pipe.

  ‘Two,’ Alf responded. The rest was easy.

  In 1937, Alf did much better and in July, he passed his Anatomy, Pharmacology and Hygiene exams although his marks were modest; he achieved 45% in Anatomy, which was just enough.

  Anatomy was taught by the principal himself, Dr Whitehouse. Alf found the subject interesting but, at the same time, it was a hard, grinding slog. With so many facts to assimilate, he felt at times that his brain was reaching saturation point. The students had to learn the detailed structure of several different domestic animals and the subject was not only hard work, it could also be very boring. Alf enjoyed Dr Whitehouse’s practical sessions in the anatomy labs where the students worked in groups dissecting an assortment of dead animals, mainly horses and cows, but the Anatomy lectures were a different proposition. These were much quieter than the riotous sessions under the elderly teachers. Instead of the wild shrieks and paper missiles that characterised Professor Begg’s lectures, a different sound predominated – the rhythmic and contented drone of sleeping students.

  This was understandable. Dr Whitehouse worked from the huge tome called Sisson’s Anatomy, the forbidding contents of which every student was expected to assimilate. The following extract is typical: ‘The great sciatic nerve (N. ischiadicus)… is derived chiefly from the sixth lumbar and the first sacral roots of the lumbo-sacral plexus, but usually has a fifth lumbar root and may receive a fasciculus from the second sacral nerve. It turns downward in the hollow between the trochanter major and the tuber ischii over the gemellus, the tendon of the obturator internus, and the quadratus femoris. In its descent in the thigh it lies between the biceps femoris laterally and the adductor, semimembranosus, and semitendinosus medially, and is continued between the two heads of the gastrocnemius as the tibial nerve. Its chief branches are as follows…’ There is little wonder that in the face of such a bombardment, the students’ minds either wandered on to subjects of greater interest or, more commonly, just descended into insensibility.

  In the Autumn term of 1937, at the beginning of his fifth year, Alf progressed to Pathology, Medicine and Surgery. With his failures in several subjects necessitating re-sits, he had fallen behind and was resigned to the prospect of taking more than the statutory five years to complete the course. He was not too downhearted. Not only were many of his friends in a similar position but, having reached a stage of his education where he felt that he was entering the nuts and bolts of his future career, he was more determined than ever to do well. Pathology, the study of disease: this was what it was all about. Pathology was a subject that both fascinated and frightened him, and at this stage of his education, a man entered his life who would remain vividly in his memory until the day he died. A man who would figure in his dreams for years to come – someone he told us about so many times that I almost felt I, too, had sat next to my father, quivering in the supercharged atmosphere of his Pathology lectures. A man by the nam
e of Professor J. W. Emslie.

  I am not one who is prone to nightmares. Once settled beneath the sheets, I spend, in general, a pleasant several hours in another world. I dream vividly and my dreams are usually a pleasant variation on my life’s activities. I do, however, suffer a recurring and disturbing dream. The orchestrator of these unnerving experiences is a nameless and shapeless individual who persistently informs me that I am not a qualified veterinary surgeon at all. I do not know this person but I have grown to dislike him intensely over the years. ‘You haven’t passed your Physics and Chemistry and you’ll have to take them again!’ he repeatedly tells me. I shrug this off, asserting that I shall re-take the exams and pass them without any problem, but he has his doubts – and so do I. As the dream progresses, I do nothing about swotting for the exams until finally I face the prospect of cramming the whole of the Chemistry and Physics syllabus into one day. At this point, to my intense relief, I wake up.

  My father, too, suffered a similar dream throughout his life but it was not Chemistry and Physics that were to frighten him in his nocturnal wanderings. It was a subject that he loved but found difficult to grasp, and one whose exam he failed at veterinary college. That subject was Pathology and, as with me, an alarming individual presided over his dream, bombarding him with bad news. There was one big difference: Alf Wight knew his tormentor well. He was none other than his old professor of Pathology, the menacing and unforgettable John W. Emslie.

  My father spoke to us at great length about his college days, and we heard much about the many friends he made there but, without any doubt, the number one character we remembered best was Professor Emslie. Quite simply, he frightened my father out of his wits.

  A rude shock was in store for the students when they began Pathology. The days of noise and laughter in the lecture theatres became a thing of the past as Professor Emslie burst into their lives and presided over the trembling students like the Demon King. He left such a deep impression on Alf that he was later to appear in Alf’s early attempt at a novel in the guise of a formidable professor by the name of ‘Quentin Muldoon’.