The Real James Herriot (12 page)

‘My name is Donald Sinclair. You must be Alfred Wight!' he said, as the two men shook hands and, at that moment, the association between Sinclair and Wight was born. It would have a very shaky beginning, and there would be times when Alf would doubt his judgement in hitching his life to such a singular man, but it would survive.

The description of Donald in the first Herriot book fits him perfectly: ‘He was just about the most English-looking man I had ever seen. Long, humorous, strong-jawed face. Small, clipped moustache, untidy, sandy hair. He was wearing an old tweed jacket and shapeless flannel trousers. The collar of his check shirt was frayed and the tie carelessly knotted. He looked as though he didn't spend much time in front of a mirror.'

James Herriot's last sentence of that paragraph is very true. Donald was the archetypal gentleman, very much the ladies' man, but over many years in his company, I never saw him comb his hair, let alone admire himself in a mirror. Perhaps he had become bored of the image of himself, as he seemed to remain unchanged with the passage of time. Alf said once, describing his partner, ‘When Donald was thirty he looked fifty and when he was seventy he looked fifty.'

Donald exuded charm. Everyone liked him, but he was also a most erratic and unpredictable man. ‘Eccentric' is almost too mild a term to describe him but, above all, he was a warm, humorous and interesting person. As ‘Siegfried', he would be the pivotal character in the Herriot books, and a heaven-sent personality around which Alf was to set so many of his stories.

Many people believe that the character of Siegfried was grossly exaggerated in the books. ‘Surely he was not really like that?' is a question that has been put to me many times.

‘You are right!' is my usual reply. ‘He was not like that at all. His character was considerably toned down.'

This opinion was shared by those who knew him best, specifically the Yorkshire farmers who observed him for years, hurtling impatiently into and out of their farmyards. ‘By gaw, yer Dad's got old Sinclair right in them books!' was something I heard more than once during the early years of my father's literary success. There was never a man quite like Donald Sinclair and no one knew him better, or portrayed him more vividly, than that great observer of human character, James Alfred Wight.

Alf first observed Donald's impulsive nature during the course of that interview in 1940. Donald suggested they should go to see a few of the farms in the practice. He allowed Alf about two seconds to get into the car before hurtling off down the road. The two men roared round the country roads at breakneck speed while Alf concentrated on maintaining his composure in a seat that moved freely backwards and forwards on the floor of the car. They were accompanied on this hair-raising ride by six dogs who seemed to enjoy every minute of it.

It was not only the speed that alarmed Alf as they shot round the practice; Donald had a rather unorthodox method of holding the steering wheel – steering with his elbows while his chin remained cupped in his hands. This disturbing habit, which he maintained until his old age, was one that was observed with disbelief by many more rigid passengers.

Alf soon realised that he was in the company of a man very different from the average human being and he was to receive another surprise when, after a lightning tour of the surgery premises at Kirkgate, Donald offered him the job. There had been other applicants but this impulsive man, who had taken an instant liking to the young vet, did not wish to waste any time. Not only was he about to join the Royal Air Force
himself, but his then assistant – a young man called Eric Parker – had informed Donald that he, too, would soon be leaving the practice to join the Air Force. Donald, who urgently wanted someone to run his practice while he was away, warned Alf that it would be hard work as he would be running the business single-handed for an indeterminate length of time. His head reeling, Alf thanked him and returned to Sunderland to ponder his future.

Events had moved so fast he could hardly believe his luck. He had been offered a job while hundreds of other hopeful applicants were being turned down all over the country, but what would the future hold for him in Thirsk? Donald Sinclair was quite obviously an extraordinary man and he had only had a glimpse of the practice on the whirlwind tour. An unknown world with a different way of life lay before him, but there was one aspect of Donald's offer that he knew he could not refuse.

In those difficult days for young veterinary surgeons, the acquisition of some job security was, for most of them, little more than a dream. Alf was, astonishingly, offered a salaried partnership before he had even accepted the job. Rather than receiving a salary while Donald was away in the Royal Air Force, Alf would receive five-eighths of the profits of the practice – helping himself to any cash that he could generate in the course of his work. After Donald's return, Alf was promised a salary of four guineas per week in addition to a share in the profits made while doing extra work for the Ministry of Agriculture.

Alf knew he would have a busy time ahead if he accepted. As well as doing the work of two men while Donald was away, he would also be balancing the books and running the Kirkgate premises, but it all added up to a tempting financial carrot for a penniless young man.

Money, however, was not everything. Alf knew he wanted to work in an environment that he could enjoy, and his first glimpse of Yorkshire had been an eye-opener. Instead of a drab, industrial landscape, he had seen rich, green fields and attractive little villages nestling at the foot of the Hambleton Hills. The thought of working in such pleasant surroundings appealed to him. Thirsk, with its collection of uneven buildings clustered around the cobbled market place, had an atmosphere of friendliness and charm. It was in marked contrast to the grey, windswept streets of Sunderland.

The unusual character of his prospective employer did not mar these positive thoughts. Donald Sinclair may have been a little eccentric in
his behaviour but Alf had instinctively liked him from the moment they had first shaken hands. He had an honest and open face, together with a sharp sense of humour and an appealing personality.

The dearth of available jobs in 1940 decreed that Alf needed to make his mind up quickly, and he did. He informed McDowall of Donald's offer and then wrote immediately to Donald advising him that he would accept the job.

Mac was sorry to lose his young colleague, but he knew that Alf would not have stayed in Sunderland for long. He understood why the ambitious young man had been looking for a permanent post, with better prospects than he could ever offer him.

Alf travelled down to Yorkshire with his meagre belongings, arriving in Thirsk on 18 July 1940, and took up residence in one of the upstairs rooms of 23 Kirkgate. After spending a few days travelling round the practice with Donald and Eric Parker to acquaint himself with the area, he signed his contract as a salaried partner on 24 July, and began work two days later. As he set off on his rounds on that July day, little did he know that, many years later, he would turn Donald Sinclair's business at 23 Kirkgate into the most famous veterinary practice in the world.

In the early years of his literary success as James Herriot, Alf Wight wrapped a cloak of secrecy around the true location of Darrowby, revealing to no one the identity of the people on whom his characters were based. His portrayal of Darrowby was deliberately altered and is described in the books as being in the High Dales country, surrounded by wild fells and green valleys, with drystone walls snaking down towards the little town. His efforts to insulate himself, his friends and this area of Yorkshire from the explosion of publicity in the early 1970s were not very successful. It was not long before the media publicity had revealed that he lived in Thirsk, and it was his experiences in this Yorkshire market town that provided the greater part of the material for his books.

The vast majority of the incidents recounted within the stories happened in and around Thirsk, not in the Yorkshire Dales over twenty miles away. Thirsk was Darrowby and Alfred Wight, despite his enormous love for that area, could never be described as a Dales veterinary surgeon.

A postcard from Thirsk, sent by Alf to his parents on the day he arrived there in July 1940, shows that the town has not really changed a great deal in appearance over the years. There is a refreshing absence of motor vehicles in the old picture, but the unevenly roofed buildings surrounding the cobbled market place are very familiar. It was in this rural environment, far removed from his city upbringing, that he was to lay the foundations of a successful career as a veterinary surgeon. 23 Kirkgate, that he would years later make famous as ‘Skeldale House', would be his home for the next twelve years, and his practice premises for the whole of his professional life.

Alf's feelings for the house and garden are clearly expressed in chapter 2 of his book
If Only They Could Talk,
where he describes seeing it for the very first time:

I liked the look of the old house. It was Georgian with a fine, white-painted doorway …. The paint was flaking and the mortar looked crumbly
between the bricks, but there was a changeless elegance about the place….

I was shown into a sunlit room. It had been built in the grand manner, high-ceilinged and airy with a massive fireplace flanked by arched alcoves. One end was taken up by a french window which gave on a long, high-walled garden. I could see unkempt lawns, a rockery and many fruit trees. A great bank of peonies blazed in the hot sunshine and at the far end, rooks cawed in the branches of a group of tall elms….

Sunshine beat back from the high old walls, bees droned among the bright masses of flowers. A gentle breeze stirred the withered blooms of a magnificent wistaria which almost covered the back of the house. There was peace here.

Although there may have been peace at 23 Kirkgate, he had little time to sample it. During those first months in Thirsk, Alf discovered that the life of a country veterinary surgeon was fascinating, challenging and extremely hard. The ‘free' salaried partnership into which he had entered with Donald Sinclair was a two-edged sword. Although he did not have to find the money to buy his partnership, he repaid Donald's gesture with something he had in abundance – a willingness to work hard – and his repayments got off to a flying start during that summer of 1940.

Donald left to join the Royal Air Force within days of Alf's arrival and Eric Parker departed four weeks later. Alf was left to run a strange practice entirely single-handed in an area with which he was almost totally unfamiliar. Having had most of his experience with small animals, he now had to transform himself into a large animal vet – and pretty quickly, too. The days were long and tiring but he managed to enjoy them as well as learning an enormous amount.

It is interesting to study the old practice ledgers which reveal how different the nature of the work was from the present day. Much of Alf's time was spent visiting individual animals on small family farms and, of course, his patients received very different treatment in those days before the arrival of modern drugs. He was continually drenching bovines with strange concoctions such as ‘Stimulant Stomach Powders' or ‘Universal Cattle Medicine'. He washed out cows' stomachs with these quaint mixtures, and irrigated their genital tracts and their udders with Acriflavine to combat infertility or mastitis. Acriflavine, an antiseptic, was a great standby for the veterinary surgeon; it was syringed up just about every available orifice that needed cleaning. In those days, the veterinary surgeons spent many long hours mixing medicines to
their own ‘recipes'. These seem so outdated now but many of them were actually quite effective. The more dramatic side of the work was never far away – the calvings, foalings, castrations and various stitching jobs that have always punctuated the veterinary surgeon's day.

The enjoyment of tackling his new job was heightened by the surroundings in which he found himself. Thirsk is situated in the Vale of York on some very fertile, flat arable land, but a few miles to the east is the western boundary of the North York Moors. At the foot of this great escarpment are numerous picturesque villages and Alf derived great pleasure from driving around this beautiful area, revelling in his visits to Boltby, Thirlby, Kilburn, Coxwold and other charming places. He was equally entranced when he coaxed his little car up to the top of the Hambleton Hills, where he would spend a large part of his working life in the years to come. This area of the practice, 800 feet above the flat land around Thirsk, was the domain of the hill farmer and the sparse landscape was dotted with grey, stone farmsteads, standing defiantly in the face of the howling north-east winds that whipped across the plateau in winter.

In the colder months, he experienced a harsh and forbidding place with no protection from the elements, but in the summer he saw a land of sunlit heaths and moorland, bisected by deep wooded valleys, the silence broken only by the bleating of sheep and the plaintive cries of curlew and golden plover. It was a wild and unspoilt area, the type of country that Alf always loved, and he felt at home in those airy surroundings.

The access to this high land is via a steep hill, Sutton Bank, from the top of which there is a fine panorama across the Vale of York to the distant Pennines. Alf, who always called this view ‘the finest in England', never tired of stopping at the top for a moment or two to drink in the scene laid out before him. A mile or two further east, he could look across thirty or forty miles of unbroken moorland towards the Yorkshire coast and the towns of Whitby and Scarborough.

He had not been many days in Thirsk before he knew that he would be happy here, and he was to develop a lasting love for the surrounding countryside in which he was to spend his entire working life. Many times, he and Donald would remark that they considered themselves to be lucky men, driving around such a lovely area – and getting paid for it, too.

Alf was not only sampling a new sort of work. He was getting to
know a different community of people, a way of life far removed from his urban upbringing. He was beginning to mingle with the Yorkshire country folk about whom, one day, he would write with an authority born of half a century in their company. At first, he was very unsure of them. The average inhabitant of rural Yorkshire could be difficult to get to know, and he had to work hard before he was finally accepted into the community. He was an incomer, a ‘furriner', one to be regarded with suspicion until he had proved himself. It would be years before he felt he was completely accepted in the local area, as an extract from a letter to a friend illustrates: ‘For some reason, the local farming community regards Wight with some asperity. I cannot understand the reason for this as I have a most charming method of approach!'

He found their attitude towards him very different from that in Glasgow. In the big city, everyone aired their opinions openly, while in Yorkshire, people kept their feelings to themselves. He did not know whether they liked him or thought him a complete idiot. They remained inscrutable. Another great difference between city and country life was that, in the country, everyone seemed to know all about him. Stripped of the comparative anonymity that he had enjoyed in Glasgow and Sunderland, he had the feeling that he was under the microscope. He felt that he was being watched.

Another obstacle was the learning of a new ‘language'. Words like ‘felon', ‘garget', ‘marra' and ‘wick' bombarded his brain as he attempted to unravel the mysteries of the Yorkshire dialect. This old way of speaking is less common today but it was a problem for anyone new to the area in those days. He used to tell a story about a visit to a farm at which he had to attend a young heifer with a growth on her teat. The farmer was worried that the growth, if not treated, would cause severe inflammation of the udder, probably leading to mastitis. The farmer was not one to speak in hushed tones; a life among bellowing cattle and squealing pigs meant that a loud voice was often a necessary aid to communication on a Yorkshire farm.

‘Na then, Mr Wight!' he bawled, his red face about six inches from Alf's.

‘Good morning, Mr Musgrove,' he replied, his ears ringing.

‘Ah 'ave a beast wi' a waart i' ya pap!' shouted the farmer.

‘Oh, I see.'

‘Aye! Thow'd better gitten tiv'er afower she's segged i' yower! Ah doubt she'll a' cripple felon afower long!'

Alf had shown a gift for learning foreign languages but it was severely put to the test in his early years in Yorkshire.

Alf particularly liked the Yorkshire country people's honesty and fairness. They were hard-working, lived a tough, exacting life, and while some of them could be dour and unsmiling, they were just in their attitude to anyone who did their best for them. This Alf did, and he soon made many good friends among the farming folk. His accounts of that country community are affectionately written, and with good reason. He was fascinated by the ways and traditions of the people, uncovering warmth, humour and other qualities that belied the impenetrable front they often displayed to the outside world. The country folk around Thirsk may have been studying the young Alf Wight but he, in turn, was studying them – and he was going one better. He was filing it all away at the back of his mind until, years later, he would reproduce it in print for thousands the world over to share.

Donald Sinclair had bought the practice from an elderly veterinary surgeon, Mr Wood, and although he had greatly improved the profitability, it was still not a very lucrative one at the time of Alf's arrival. The farmers were very reluctant to call the vet; money was in short supply, and extracting it from them required a mixture of firmness and diplomacy. Some of the entries in the old practice ledgers seem to indicate that working as a veterinary surgeon was not a formula for becoming a rich man. A typical entry is as follows:

To: Mr Smirthwaite, Topcliffe Parks, Topcliffe
       25
November 1940

Visit, calve cow 6 hours

Pessaries, 1 bottle UCM, 1 injection strychnine

£2 os od

Unlike today, there was limited small animal work to help maintain cash flow through the practice. Alf learned a little about the financial side of life in the practice in those first months, Donald having asked him to keep an account of all the money coming into the business. At the end of every day, he had to sit down to write up the books. He soon began to see where the most lucrative work lay. Driving around the countryside attending to various sick animals was certainly not going to fatten his employer's purse but Tuberculin Testing herds of cattle presented a very different picture.

One of the veterinary profession's greatest achievements has been
the virtual eradication of tuberculosis from the national herd. This disease was the scourge of the dairy industry in the 1930s and 1940s. Very few young veterinary surgeons today have ever seen a cow infected by TB, thanks to the efforts of the profession fifty years ago but, in those days, stricken animals presented a sorry sight – gaunt, emaciated creatures, with the giveaway soft cough that Alf got to recognise so well. It was not only cows that succumbed; countless people died through drinking the milk from these infected animals. Jean Wilson, his old girlfriend from his Yoker days, died through contracting it as a young woman, and Donald Sinclair, who had married while still a student at Edinburgh Veterinary College in the early 1930s, lost his young wife to the disease. Veterinary surgeons were paid to help eradicate the disease by carrying out intradermal tests on the animals, after which any reactors would be slaughtered. It was tough and tedious work, involving the injection of many thousands of uncooperative beasts, but it was a lifeline to cash-strapped practices.

A typical day's work in Donald's practice ledger at that time would amount to around £2–3 per day whereas a couple of days' TB Testing could earn the practice £20–30. No wonder veterinary surgeons snatched eagerly at any testing that came their way.

There was one notable exception to this. He was a veterinary surgeon who lived in Leyburn, twenty-five miles from Thirsk, in the Yorkshire Dales – a beautiful area which teemed with cows. This vet did not want the tedium and paperwork associated with TB Testing; the acquisition of money meant less to him than the preservation of his steady, enjoyable lifestyle. His name was Frank Bingham, an unambitious but very capable Irish vet, described by Alf as one of the finest veterinary surgeons he ever knew. It was Frank's easy approach to life that was largely instrumental in introducing Alf to the Yorkshire Dales.