* * *
When Alf Wight graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939, he did so with a diploma that allowed him to be a Member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. The vet’s governing body was founded in 1844; by the terms of its Charter and the 1881 Veterinary Surgeons Act, the title of ‘veterinary surgeon’ was limited to persons who possessed the membership diploma of the RCVS (and for a brief period in Scotland the Highland and Agricultural Society) and forbade anyone else to
take or use any name, title, addition or description implying that he practises Veterinary Surgery or any branch thereof, without being liable to punishment; nor can such person recover payment for performing an operation, giving veterinary attendance or advice, or acting in any way as a Veterinary Surgeon or practitioner.
Every ‘quack’ who could stumble through the legalese of the Charter and Act rubbed his hands in glee. Horse-doctors, cow-leeches, castrators, and Uncle Tom Cobbly and all could continue in the animal-doctoring business – just as long as they did not style themselves ‘veterinary surgeons’.
And so, when Alf Wight entered veterinary school in 1933, the quack was still going strong, and the veterinary surgeon had climbed up the pole of social respectability. He had not quite reached the dizzy heights of the human doctor, though; some clients still expected the vet to use the tradesman’s entrance.
* * *
Alf’s father did not want his bright boy to be a vet. Mr Wight suggested medical college instead. The social standing of the vet did not trouble him – other things did. Doctors were never out of work, never poor, never begging for work. One only had to step out through the door of 2172 Dumbarton Road to see that the veterinary profession could have no such comfortable certainties. The horse was the mainstay of the veterinary profession. And the horse was disappearing off the streets, to be replaced by the car. And in the countryside, the horse was being superceded by the tractor. In 1897 a Mr Locke-King bought one of the new fangled vehicles from the Hornsby firm, Lincolnshire – the first recorded sale of a tractor in Britain. The kingdom’s farms would never be the same again.
The man who killed the horse was Nicholas Cugnot, a French inventor who, in 1769, built a three-wheeled vehicle with steam propulsion to bowl around the boulevards of Paris. Cugnot’s fardier a vapeur carried four people at 4 mph. The age of independent transport with a mechanical, non-animal, power source had begun. Over a century of steam ‘traction’ engines followed in Cugnot’s tracks, but they were mammoth-sized and tortoise-slow. Only with the development of an effective petrol-fuelled internal combustion engine by Belgian J. J. Étienne Lenoir in 1859 could relatively small and fast vehicles be made. Karl Benz received a patent for his car on 29 January 1886, and began the commercial production of vehicles after a trip in his car by his wife from Mannheim to Pforzheim proved that the horseless carriage was absolutely suitable for everyday use.
For two glorious centuries, the Shire, the Suffolk Punch and, in Scotland, the Clydesdale, had strode magnificently over the farming landscape of Britain, from valley to hill top. But if Cugnot killed the horse, the Kaiser and Henry Ford kicked it when it was dead and down. During the Great War, the German U-boat campaign, which targetted supply ships en route to Britain, brought the country close to starvation and it became a case of grow more food at home or die. The obvious answer was to bring more land into cultivation. However, since many of Britain’s farm horses had been co-opted as war horses, tractors had to be imported from America to take their stead. To avoid putting British patriotic noses out of joint, US tractors were often rebranded for the Blighty market: the Parret tractor was rebranded as the Clydesdale. By 1918, Britain’s wheat harvest was 50 per cent bigger than it had been in 1916.
The usefulness of the tractor to the land had been proved. Numerous small tractor companies were formed, such as the DL Company in Glasgow, which produced its ‘Glasgow’ tractor in a leased munitions factory. Car manufacturers such as Vickers and Austin also entered the tractor market. All struggled, however, to compete with the Model F and Model N tractors of Henry Ford of Dearborn, Michigan, the US of A. Although early models were expensive, Ford’s assembly line methods of production brought tractors, as they had brought cars, within the financial reach of every farmer. Ford’s Model T car cost a modest $440 in 1915, and his ‘Fordson’ Model F tractor was a bargain at $750 (about $14,300 in 2010 prices). Between 1917 and 1925, Fordson built 500,000 tractors at its Dearborn plant, taking 70 per cent of the US market. With stiffened competition from other US tractor manufacturers, Fordson moved production to Dagenham in England in 1933. Thereafter, blue and orange Fordsons became indelible sights in the British countryside of the 1930s. A Fordson in 1935 cost £150 for the basic model, £195 with low-pressure pneumatic tyres. The Fordson won a place in the heart of the farmer, congenitally keen on saving money. A US government test in the Thirties concluded that farmers spent $0.95 per acre ploughing with a Fordson, whereas feeding eight horses for a year and paying two drivers cost $1.46 per acre. Tractors, as the early advertisements gleefully pointed out, only ‘ate’ when hungry. A tractor put in the barn for night consumed nothing; a horse had its head in a nose bag or hay rack for hours. By 1939 there were 50,000 tractors on British farms.
The end of the horse was bewilderingly swift. In August 1911, The Veterinary Record reported that in London, a city in which there were over 300,000 horses, the London General Omnibus Company was ‘selling off horses at the rate of 100 a week’. By the end of the month the company was expected to have withdrawn their last horse-omnibuses from service.
In 1914 there were 25 million horses in the UK; in 1940 there were 5 million, of which only 600,000 were on farms. Some breeds, such as the Norfolk Roadster, pride of nineteenth-century England, disappeared forever. The Clydesdale, which had only been developed by the Duke of Hamilton in the 1920s, went down to hundreds. There was hardship for those who lived by the horse.
In fact, down on the farm in Britain in the Thirties, there was hardship all round. A serious decline in agriculture from 1922 was hitting farmers’ profits, while electrification and mechanization, both of which reduced labour costs, was making the labourer redundant. Whereas in 1926, 200 farms had electricity, in 1936, 6500 did. One pennyworth of electricity fed into a new fangled milking machine would milk 40 cows – a man’s work for a day. And a man cost more than 1d a day to run, so the man had to go. In the Thirties, unemployment rose in the countryside just as surely and bleakly as it did in the towns.
The British countryside in the Thirties was on the very eve of the ‘agri-business’ revolution. But in 1933, the farms of Britain – the farms on which Alf would start his student veterinary practice and observation – would have been eminently recognizable to John Constable, even Jethro Tull. Nearly three-quarters of the holdings in Britain were under 100 acres, they were run by one family, chickens scratched on a muddy yard, and barns were low and stone and supported by uprights that looked exactly like the tree trunks they were. The rural year was based on an ancient calendar of spring lambs, summer shearing, summer hay, late summer wheat and autumn calves. Cattle were generally ‘in wintered’ (put in barns) from October to May, to be fed hay or straw, or specially grown forage fodder such as mangels, swedes or kale. Since nearly every farm had a least one milch cow, the day was dictated by twice a day milking, at 5.30 am and 4.15 pm.
The major jobs on the farm were mass communal enterprises. When Welsh mountain farmer Thomas Firbank’s flock of 1200 sheep required shearing, 40 men sat on benches, hand-shearing, sorting, carrying, putting on the owner’s marking (with pitch), dabbing picric acid on the cuts on the sheep’s body. The people helping were fellow farmers, their sons and daughters, villagers in want of a day’s work. It was ‘a social event of the greatest magnitude’. Firbank’s wife provided the endless cups of sweet tea that kept the human shearing-machine lubricated. Any lambs still in need of de-bollocking might be done at the same time. ‘The old method of castration was crude,’ Firb
ank wrote. ‘One man would sit on a bench, the lamb held between his knees, while his partner, using a sharp penknife, slit the bag and drew out the two testicles one at a time, severing the cords that held them.’ Luckily for lambs, the bloodless Burdizzo castrator had just been invented.
Like most farmers Firbank liked to do his own animal-doctoring, and had a number of ‘home-grown’ cures, which included a treatment for intestinal worms in pigs:
A ground-up root called Snotin is effective when sprinkled in the food, but costs nearly a shilling a dose. So I used a mixture of castor-oil and 5 per cent oil of chenopodium. Great care has to be taken in the dosing, because the pig has a peculiar gullet. The foodpipe and the windpipe are very close together, and if in its excitement the pig takes the dose into the windpipe, instant suffocation follows. I once killed a six-score porker in a moment by careless dosing… However, as long as the pig can chew at something he seems to produce the correct oscillation of the gullet to swallow safely, so we thrust a thick stick in the same position as a horse’s bit. In the middle of the stick was a hole through which we poured the worm dose.
Firbank’s treatment for ‘husk’, a parasitic worm infestation of an animal’s bronchioles and sometimes lungs, was linseed and turpentine, which was poured by the teaspoon into the infected beast’s nostrils.
To the annoyance of the ‘vi’tnry’, home-grown cures and folk remedies sometimes worked, either by accident or design, a classic being Alf’s own experience in It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet, when he is stumped by a reclining cow with a broken pelvis. The farmer, Mr Handshaw, happens to remember an ‘old trick’ of his dad’s, which was to get a fresh-killed sheep skin from the butcher and put it on the cow’s back. It probably acted like a giant poultice and annoyed the cow – so the cow got up.
Although there were more beasts-per-acre on the land than in the Middle Ages, the stocking rate was still ‘extensive’ rather than ‘intensive’; a Scottish 140-acre dairy farm in the lowlands would have 28 Ayrshires, with 34 female stock coming on. The farm labour force would be, typically, the farmer, his wife, a ploughman, a cattleman, ‘a lad’ (a teenager on his first job), two male or female milkers, with the wife of either the ploughman or the cattleman acting as a reserve.
The most intensive farms were small dairy establishments on the edge of cities, such as Mr Stirling’s in Scotstoun, next door to Yoker, which Alf visited many times in his college years due to the syllabus-demanding need to gain knowledge of bovines. Such farms carried more than one cow per acre, the beasts being fed ‘concentrate’ of imported feed (often linseed) mixed with millers’ offals from nearby mills to produce a gallon of milk for every three and a half pounds fed. Demand was high and transport costs low, because they were situated next to a major urban area.
In Britain in 1933, it seemed almost everyone out in the country kept livestock. There were 6,770,000 cows, 17,986,000 sheep, 3,515,000 pigs and an extraordinary 56,426,000 chickens. The young wife with a few hens for eggs or the old man fattening a pig for bacon would be among the typical clients of the vet going around a rural practice in his reluctant, protesting car.
And if you had livestock, you lived in fear of disease. One farmer wrote in his diary in 1935: ‘All our 4 cows passed TT [tuberculin] test – Maria-Dolly-Beauty-Carole. Vet – Mr de Garys from Reading.’ Aside from listing his purchases of cattle (including 10 Ayrshire heifers from Mr Kirkwood for an eye-watering £192) and equipment, it was the only event he thought worthy of recording in his diary, save for major bust-ups in the House of Commons.
There were 13 ‘Notifiable Diseases’, outbreaks of which needed to be notified to the police and local authority by the terms of the Diseases of Animals Acts, 1894–1922. These included cattle plague, foot-and-mouth, anthrax, bovine tuberculosis, rabies and swine fever. Sheep-dipping orders, formulated to control sheep scab, laid down that all sheep in England be dipped once in the summer, and in Scotland up to three times. In some scheduled areas, sheep had to be ‘double dipped’, that is dipped and then dipped again at a period not before 7 but not after 14 days. The process was overseen by the local policeman, who bicycled to the farm.
The owner of a sick animal had a number of options. Nature could be left to take its course, or one could administer any number of proprietary cures, all widely available, all widely advertised. A Handy Book of Reference for Farmers in Scotland, published in 1920, advertised ‘Robertson’s Terebene Balsam for Horses, Cattle and Sheep’ as ‘The Most Famous Veterinary Remedy in the World, Equally Efficient for Internal, External Use’. Meanwhile, a page in The Country Gentlemen’s Estate Book & Diary, 1935, extolled ‘Tippers Cow Relief, made at The Veterinary Chemical Works, Birmingham. SAVES THE UDDER – your source of income.’ The Cataline Company of Bristol, in the same venerable publication, claimed that its drench ‘For All Chill and Inflammatory Udder Trouble is Unsurpassed’. Six bottles of the medicine would treat 24 cows. It was also a balm for all farm animals, and could be dosed to sheep and pigs at one eighth of a bottle per head.
Margaret Leigh’s experience of running an isolated farm in the Highlands, which she described in her famous book Highland Homespun, is typical of the small farmer’s experience of treating sick animals. When Leigh’s cow, Jessie, calved, Leigh could not wring a drop of milk from its ‘obstinate and rubbery teats’ for the bawling calf. So she sent for ‘the wife of Rattray’s shepherd, who had a great power with cattle’. She soon got Jessie donating milk, ‘in little spurts, then in a steady flow’. When her horse, Dick, started rolling around with symptoms of colic, she sent for her friend, the Laird. ‘He came at once, gave Dick a dose, and in two days the horse was back again at the plough.’
It was significant that Leigh did not call out any form of paid help. The rule of financial thumb was: the poorer the area, the poorer the farmer, the cheaper the animal, the less likelihood there was of calling out the ‘veet’. A chicken on a three-acre croft in the Highlands of Scotland was never going to meet a member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons unless that chicken was dressed, cooked and on a plate. A visit from a vet in the Thirties would cost upwards of 5 shillings, plus medicines. There were crofts in the Highlands of Scotland so poor that women went into the traces to pull the harrow because the family could not afford a horse or tractor.
The animal owner seeking ‘professional’ treatment for Fido, Dobbin or Daisy in the Thirties could try a ‘quack’, a veterinary chemist or the vet himself. A ‘quack’, the cheapest of the paid-for options, was an unlicensed, unregulated, and usually untrained practitioner of animal medicine. Unlike vets, quacks were allowed to advertise their services (‘D. J. Jones Esq.’ ran a typical one, ‘All Dog Ailments Cured – Your Dog’s Best Friend, Your Pocket’s Best Friend’). The paper qualifications of quacks often gave them many impressive letters after their name – any quack worth his Epsom salt gave himself more letters than ‘MRCVS’ – but were never from an institution of any repute. Quacks were somewhat constrained by law, notably the Animals (Anaesthetic) Act of 1919, which required that the farmer ‘must not allow a horse, dog, cat, or bovine belonging to him to undergo any of the following operations, unless the animal during the whole of the operation is under the influence of some general anaesthetic of sufficient power to prevent the animal feeling pain’. The list of operations covered nearly everything internal, together with amputations of the penis in animals above six months in age, and extraction of permanent molar teeth.
Some quacks sold their ‘recipes’ for the treatment of diseases, either to other quacks or direct to clients. One late nineteenth-century quack’s recipes included:
The Hampshire recipe for to cure the foot rot in sheeps feet Mixture for to make this Lotion
Get
A quarter of a Pound of ground alum and half a Pound of sugar of lead and half a Pound of light Blue Vitrol
Notice
Mix this all right well up together in one Pint of water and then apply itt [sic] to the sheeps feet with a feather a
nd you will find this to Be a splendid curative dressing for foot rot in sheeps feet has [sic] this Lotion softens the hoof it does not harden the hoof – always Be sure to keep this Lotion airtight when it is not in use and also Be sure to have itt right well mixed up together all the time when you are applying itt to the sheeps feet this has Been used with the very Best results.
Whether ‘cows not holding the Bull’ would be persuaded by the same alchemist’s suggested aphrodisiac of 1 pint of warm vinegar, 4 ounces of cattle salts and an ounce of ground alum is debatable.
Some quacks’ treatments were positively dangerous, and included ingredients such as arsenic. With proper dosage, arsenic can give a horse a glossy coat; of course, with improper and frequent dosage it can cause death.
Rarer than quacks were ‘veterinary chemists’ who tended to be chemists who doled out medicines for animals as a sideline. The veterinary chemists indispensable handbook was Veterinary Counter Practice, which, unwisely for veterinary chemists, could be bought by anybody for 2/6. This included savvy and educated farmers, who then promptly made up the required medicines from the instructions and tables therein, making the veterinary chemist redundant, and about to leave the scene as surely as the dinosaur. The vet was often the last port of call for the owner with a sick animal because the vet was the most expensive option. Called in as the last resort, the vet could not win. If the animal died, it was the vet’s fault. If the animal lived, the farmer or the quack would claim that their already-given diagnosis and potion was the cure.
The year Alf started veterinary college, 1933, was little different from 1903 in terms of what vets did. Vets diagnosed illness, then treated the symptoms. If an animal had a fever, the vet treated the fever by reducing it. Very few cures for animal diseases existed. And the treatment consisted largely of ‘posology’, the making up of medicines.
Young James Herriot Page 9