The Real James Herriot

by Jim Wight

  Jimmy Steele had, in fact, been receiving the princely salary of £100 per year. Although the availability of jobs in the veterinary profession was gradually improving, primitive working conditions for recently qualified assistants were still commonplace. Alf, considering himself to be a lucky man, was determined to make the most of his position in Thirsk. He had soon realised that treating farm animals, especially cows, was what interested him most. In some of the letters to his parents, he expressed his feelings for his job:

  It’s funny how one gets a reputation in certain branches of the work. Nowadays Donald is the horsey man and I the cow doctor. I am also firmly established as the small animal surgeon of Thirsk. All the ladies now ask for Mr Wight to see to their dogs and cats. Donald can’t be bothered much with them and my Sunderland training stands me in good stead – but in my heart I am a cow man. When I started this game, I thought I’d never get to like those seemingly dull and uninteresting creatures, but I really have a great interest and affection for them now.

  My dream of the future is a practice of my own in a nice country town, bigger than Thirsk, with enough to provide a decent small animal practice and, outside the town, a good dairying district with cows for ever. Of course, it seems impossible ever to save enough dough to buy a practice.

  This illustrates Alf’s ambitions – ones which he was to realise in the years to come. His work never failed to enthral him and, even in the wondrous years of his world-wide fame as an author, he would repeatedly maintain that he was ‘ninety-nine per cent vet and one per cent author’. This statement might be hard to believe, but there is absolutely no doubt that he was one of those who was blessed with a genuine love for his job throughout his working life.

  Although James Herriot endeared himself to so many of his fans through his caring and thoughtful approach to his small animal cases, the real man – Alfred Wight – was, first and foremost, a large animal veterinary surgeon. It was not until well into the late 1960s that the treatment of family pets would become an important contributor to the practice finances.

  That is not to say that he was disinterested in the small animal work; he enjoyed it. During those early, tough years when he was tuberculin testing, castrating and dehorning, when he was spending long hours stripped to the waist, calving cows and lambing ewes, the treatment of dogs and cats made a welcome and civilised variation to his day’s work. He also realised, from his earliest days as a qualified vet, that the establishment of a thriving small animal side to the practice would become ever more important as the years rolled by.

  In the 1940s, however, with the large animal work dominating the veterinary surgeon’s day, Alf used to gaze longingly westwards to the green dales of Frank Bingham’s practice. They contrasted sharply with the prime arable land around Thirsk, with its fields of sugar beet, barley and potatoes outnumbering those full of grazing animals. He regarded the Dales as the veterinary surgeon’s paradise – no ploughed fields, just grass and cows everywhere. He relished his frequent trips to do the TB tests for Frank Bingham. He loved the work but it was hard and, in the winter, it was cold.

  One of the first things Alf noticed about Yorkshire was that it was much colder than Glasgow. There is very little shelter on the vast Vale of York, and howling north winds were commonplace, bringing with them heavy falls of snow. Just getting to cases could be a feat in itself. With his primitive little car adding to the discomfort, by the time he had driven the thirty or so miles up into the Dales, he was often numb with cold. On arrival, he had the near stupefying prospect of handling frozen syringes with fingers that had lost all feeling. The first item he put in his car in preparation for these comfortless journeys was a shovel. He was continually digging his car out of huge snow drifts but this, at least, had the effect of thawing him out. He considered himself to be an expert in the art of digging – the garden in summer, and the snow in winter. In a letter to his parents he wrote:

  The snow has dominated everything for the last few weeks. What weather! I performed great deeds in battling round the Dales for the first two weeks of the storm and it was some experience, believe me. In the mornings, by the time I had driven to my first farm up in the hills at the top of Wensleydale, I was literally frozen stiff and had to thaw out over the farmer’s fire before starting. Then away up the hillsides from barn to barn, trudging through the snow with head down against the blizzard. And so on all day. The first week was a bit too much for me and I found I couldn’t eat my dinner when I got home at night – just frozen miserable. But the second week was OK; I must have got tougher.

  Last week, however, capped everything. We woke up on Tuesday morning to find snow about four feet deep even on the main roads. It took Donald and me over an hour to dig the cars out of the garages and even then we couldn’t get to our local cases.

  The Dales were notorious for snow in those days but the high ground of the Thirsk practice was just as bad. When it was raining in Thirsk, villages such as Cold Kirby or Old Byland on the top of the Hambleton Hills could be experiencing sweeping blizzards. Alf got to know, only too well, the high-pitched buzz of his car tyres as they spun wildly on the frozen roads, or the sight of the exquisitely shaped snow drifts sweeping across the road, beautiful but deadly as they relentlessly erased his tracks in the snow. Many times, as he struggled with tough cases on remote farms, Alf would wonder whether he would be able to return home safely over the white, snowbound roads. The less severe winters in Yorkshire today bear little resemblance to those weeks of freezing blizzards that Alfred Wight experienced so many years ago.

  His introduction to the county that he would grow to love was, indeed, a cold one, but the summers in Yorkshire could be as sublime as the winters were unrelenting. During those long hot days, as Alf drove from call to call with his car windows and sunroof open, he would continually marvel at his good fortune in working in such a beautiful area of Britain.

  However, summer or winter, he had to contend with one of the major difficulties facing veterinary surgeons years ago – the dearth of effective drugs with which to combat disease. Alf, Donald – and, when he was present, Brian – spent many hours concocting mixtures like colic drinks, bloat drenches and stomach powders. Some of the names of the ingredients, such as sweet spirits of nitre, sublimated iodine and flowers of sulphur, had a magical ring to them. Today’s drugs do not have the same charisma but there is no doubt that they represent a tremendous advance in the treatment of disease.

  When presented with a cow suffering from acute toxic mastitis, the modern vet has an armoury of drugs with which to treat the overwhelming shock to the system. In those early days, before the discovery of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs, the vet survived on his wits. A common treatment was to cut the cow’s teat clean off to allow the infected material to drain away. Large sacks were put over the animal to keep her warm and she was drenched with an exotic variety of stimulants. For cases of pneumonia, mustard plasters were slapped onto the animal’s chest, while skin conditions received gruesome attention in the form of liberal application of such substances as tar and diesel oil.

  A very serious condition in young cattle at pasture was parasitic bronchitis, or ‘husk’ as it was commonly known. This was caused by a worm that invaded the lungs of the unfortunate animal, and often resulted in death. Nowadays, there is a vaccine to prevent this disease, and modern drugs to treat it, but the old vets had to resort to the only treatment of the day – injections of turpentine and other savage liquids directly into the windpipe in the hope of destroying the worms. Some animals dropped dead on the spot while others, with a bit of luck, survived.

  It is not surprising that the farmers in those days developed a stoical approach to treatment of their ailing stock; in many cases, it was an acceptance of the inevitable. ‘Only them as ’as ’em can lose ’em!’ was the final epitaph for many an animal – and one that Alf heard many times. Some of the old Yorkshiremen may have been dour, which is unsurprising considering the hard, unyielding life they
faced, but a dry sense of humour was never too far away.

  One of Alf’s favourite stories concerned two old farmers who met one day at the cattle market. One of them, Albert, was a man of few words.

  ‘Now then, Albert,’ said his friend, ‘Ah ’ave a beast wi’ husk.’

  ‘Oh aye?’ replied Albert.

  ‘Didn’t thou ’ave one wi’ husk a while back?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Didn’t thou inject it wi’ turpentine inter its windpipe?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘I think Ah’ll try summat like that.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  The two men met again a week later.

  ‘Hey, Albert,’ said the farmer to his friend, ‘yer know that beast o’ mine Ah told yer about last week?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘That one that ’ad husk?’

  ‘Oh aye.’

  ‘Well, Ah injected it wi’ that turpentine, just like thou did wi’ thine.’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘Aye, Ah did – an’ it died. Right on’t spot!’

  ‘Aye? So did mine!’

  What strides the profession has made in its fight against disease. Alf often stated that it was more fun in those old days, but it must also have been very frustrating. Today, it is sometimes possible to diagnose a condition without even touching the animal. Blood samples, X-rays, ultra-sound and other ancillary aids have made the job easier, but the modern vet must never lose his ability to use his basic clinical skills. Alf did not have these modern advantages in his formative years as a vet; he had only his eyes, his hands and his brain. Perhaps this fact contributed, in no small way, to his emergence as a first-rate clinician. In all the years that I worked with him, he seemed to have a natural ability to accurately diagnose and treat his cases. Those hard, early days had stood him in good stead.

  To survive his physically demanding job, Alf needed to be well ‘fuelled’. In Joan, he had a wife who made sure that his energy levels were well maintained as a succession of fine meals kept heading in his direction. One of the big differences about married life was the superb variety of sandwiches he discovered each day when he was away working in the Dales. Formerly, he had survived on an interminable succession of cheese sandwiches but now it was different. To open every lunch pack was a gastronomic adventure as he bit into succulent pies, delicious cakes, and sandwiches made with homemade bread. As Alf tasted the wonderful food produced by Joan (the deprivations induced by wartime rationing seemed to have little effect upon her ingenuity as a cook), his mind would frequently stray back to his bachelor days in 23 Kirkgate when he, Donald and Brian often had to cook for themselves. On the occasions when the housekeeper, Mrs Wetherill, was away, Donald would roast huge pieces of mutton which would last the men for days. Alf, who was never keen on either lamb or mutton, experienced a dull, leaden sensation in his stomach as he remembered those endless slices of cold, grey meat, with their thick white slabs of fat.

  It was not only Alf who realised that he was on to a good thing in his early married days. His college friends, Jimmy Steele and Bob Smith, who had procured jobs in the nearby towns of Knaresborough and Boroughbridge, visited Alf in Thirsk on several occasions. The three men not only had the enjoyment of swapping their tales of triumphs and disasters, but they had the pleasure of sampling Joan’s cooking. Jimmy assured Alf that the experience had convinced him that it was time he looked out for a wife for himself.

  The daily consumption of such culinary delights had its downside. Alf, for the first time in his life, began to get fat. His intake of food was so high that even the hard exercise up and down the hillsides in the Dales, or the energy-sapping calvings, rolling about on cow byre floors, were not enough to burn away the calories. Donald was the opposite. He was built like a string bean, with long thin arms and a spare waistline. As one client commented: ‘Ah’ve seen more fat on a fork shaft!’ Another client, Jim Fletcher, remarked to me one day, while recalling Messrs Sinclair and Wight of years ago: ‘When your dad stripped off we used to say, “Where’s ’e come from?” and when Mr Sinclair took his shirt off, we’d say, “Where’s ’he gone?’”

  One thing, above all others, that benefited from Alf’s life as a country veterinary surgeon was his health. The active outdoor life – calvings, foalings, the miles of exercise hiking to the high barns in the Yorkshire Dales – made him feel better than he had done for many years. Alf was deeply appreciative of his good fortune in this respect. He looked back to those pain-wracked days in Sunderland, hardly able to believe that, in so short a space, the healing hand of time, together with the clean, fresh air of Yorkshire, had effected such a remarkable transformation.

  Alf’s happy state of mind reached new heights in July 1942 when he learned that Joan was expecting their first child. He was soon to be a father as well as a husband, and the idea of becoming a family man was one that thrilled him. He had a job that he loved, a wife with whom he was exceptionally happy, and a baby was on the way.

  There was something, however that loomed over him like a gathering storm. Some sixteen months earlier, just a week or two after meeting Joan for the first time, Alf had signed up to join the Royal Air Force. As a qualified veterinary surgeon – a profession rated as a reserved occupation – there had been little pressure on his serving in the armed forces, but at the time, fired up by the wave of patriotism that had been sweeping Britain, he had looked forward enthusiastically to serving his country at a time of need. As the months had flown by, with Alf beginning to wonder whether he would ever be called up for training, he and Joan had seen no point in delaying starting a family. When his call-up papers did eventually arrive on his twenty-sixth birthday in October 1942, they filled him with gloom. He was now in a vastly different position to that of the carefree young bachelor vet of sixteen months ago. He was a married man with a pregnant wife and responsibilities. Also, having begun to establish himself in the practice, he looked on his forthcoming call-up as potentially damaging to both his career and to the practice.

  Just over seven weeks later, on 16 November 1942, Alf Wight boarded the train at Thirsk railway station on the way to serving his country in the Royal Air Force. He was to assume a new identity – 1047279 AC2 Wight, J. A. On that day, he had graduated from the status of an insignificant specimen of the veterinary profession to that of a tiny pawn in the turmoil of the Second World War.

  Chapter Twelve

  Quite apart from wanting to serve his country at a time when Britain was virtually standing alone against the might of Nazi Germany, there was another good reason why Alf joined up. In March 1941, the German Luftwaffe had launched a savage air raid on the city of Glasgow. The area of Clydebank was a prime target, with the big shipyards on the River Clyde receiving special attention; hundreds of people had been killed. It had been an intensely worrying time for Alf because his parents lived very close to Clydebank. They survived but their house at 694 Anniesland Road, into which they had only recently moved, was badly damaged. Alf had been given leave by Donald to visit Glasgow to see his parents, from where he wrote a letter to Joan giving her an account of the grim conditions there.

  My dear Joan,

  I suppose you’ll have heard that my house was blitzed. After some searching around, I’ve found that there is no chance at all of finding another place around here as everyone is in the same boat. So, there’s nothing for it but to try to make the battered remains of the old house more or less habitable and to get a good shelter built in the garden in case of a second visit.

  Number 694 looks rather like Rievaulx Abbey on a smaller scale but we have managed to make two rooms at the back sort of half safe though it’s dangerous to bang the doors in case the ceiling comes down. It is all rather sickening but I am too pleased that my folks are safe to worry about material things. Mother sleeps at one of the few comparatively sound houses in the district and Dad and I kip down on the floor under a dining table, just in case the ceiling gets tired of staying up. We have reached the stage of laugh
ing at everything so we aren’t so bad. My beloved grand piano had a leg blown away but I’ve managed to get it shored up and, much to my delight, it still plays. I bet it’s queer for people outside to hear strains of music emanating from the ruins!

  Infuriated by this affront to his beloved city, Alf had signed up to join the Royal Air Force. Little did he realise that it would be a full twenty months before he would begin his training. One reason was that there was no shortage of young men applying to become fighter pilots; it was in maintaining the supply of planes, not those who could fly them, where the RAF felt its most pressing need. Moreover, the authorities did not regard a man in a reserved occupation to be high on the call-up list: veterinary surgeons were needed at home to contribute towards the well-being of British agriculture and the all-important food production line. To further add to the problems he faced endeavouring to serve his country, that old bugbear came back to haunt him – mathematics.

  He had to pass some fundamental mathematics exams before he would be accepted, and he attended night school in Thirsk to brush up on his slender knowledge of the subject. After a number of failures, he finally gained the necessary grades and was therefore clear to go when his call-up papers arrived.

  He described that day in November 1942, as he left Thirsk to begin his training, as the ‘blackest day of my life’. Driving away from 23 Kirkgate, and seeing his pregnant wife waving tearfully from the window, was a scene he would never forget.

  Alf’s time in the Royal Air Force was not particularly eventful, and he was only there for just over a year before being invalided out but, ironically, there is a mass of information about that disappointing part of his life. He and Joan wrote to each other almost every day while he was serving, and she kept literally hundreds of the letters that passed between them.