In seeming contrast, bow tie-wearing Professor Andy McQueen eschewed reading from a textbook in favour of reading from his own notes. Unfortunately the notes, yellowing and fragile, had been composed decades before. With a glorious, serene detachment, McQueen stooped over his pages and mumbled away, not caring a jot whether the students arrayed in front of him listened or not. Like Begg’s classes, McQueen’s descended into riot, as Alf described in The Art and the Science, in which McQueen is given the pseudonym King:
The class took their cue from the considerable number of failed men left over from last year and stamped and cheered as though they were at a football match. This rowdiness always started right at the beginning of the lecture when the roll was being taken. When the name of Miss Debenham, the only female, was 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 19th 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.
Stuck on automatic, Professor Andy McQueen was unable to cope with any variations in routine or advancements in knowledge. ‘Carmichael caused a laugh by asking old Andy a question,’ Alf noted in May 1934. ‘Andy of course was beat to the wide and started to hedge – with humorous results.’
Not all the lecturers were geriatric has-beens, though. Professor Andy Duncan, who taught Chemistry and Zoology, was a stern, authoritarian taskmaster. In the confidence of his diary, Alf called him ‘Herr Duncan’ and complained about his ‘colossal cheek’ in making them attend an extra lecture. When Duncan once let Alf and his fellow students leave a lecture early, they were ‘startled’ and ‘couldn’t think what was the matter’ with him. Geordie Weir, who taught Alf Anatomy and Animal Management, had an inventive streak, and designed a horseshoe with a lug in it to prevent it getting stuck in the tram lines. For his services to the city of Glasgow, the Corporation named an avenue after him. Medicine and surgery, meanwhile, were in the capable hands of ‘Professor’ John Soutar – almost everyone who taught at Buccleuch Street ended up with that illustrious title – and his son Alexander, who were local working vets who could only devote an hour a day to teaching.
Then there was Professor J. W. Emslie. His hook nose and sallow complexion made Emslie look like a funeral director, which was appropriate because his subject was Pathology, taught in the fourth year of the course. Emslie left an indelible impression on Alf, a Brothers Grimm-like figure to inhabit nightmares for years afterwards. ‘Pathology’, Emslie boomed at his new students. ‘From the Greek! Pathos – suffering! Logos – discourse!’ But he was brilliant and absolutely passionate about his subject. Alf disguised Emslie in the The Art and the Science as Muldoon:
The name was like a knell – like the tolling of a great bell in an empty tower and the students heard its warning echoes from their first days…
Quentin Muldoon, Professor of Pathology, was a dedicated and in many ways brilliant scientist in the prime of life and though he may have questioned the justice of divine providence in selecting him to disclose the breathless secrets and supreme wonders of his subject to the shaggy creatures who shambled before him through the years, he did his duty as he saw it.
That duty was to teach Pathology and anything or anybody getting in the way of his teaching was mercilessly crushed. Pathos. Logos – the science of disease, the answer to all the questions, the brilliant light bursting suddenly on total darkness, the steady pointing finger of truth and hope. That was how Muldoon saw Pathology and made some of his students see it too. The others just learned the facts of it or he crucified them.
Walsh learned about him in whispers from the older students. He hadn’t been at the college for a week before the mutterings started. ‘Aye it’s all very well just now, but wait till your fourth year. Wait till you get Muldoon.’ When he asked these grizzled students to explain, they turned pale, looked at him from the corners of their eyes and sidled away. Indirectly he heard strange tales of healthy young men blighted in their youth and doomed to languish for years under the spell of the ogre. Over the first three years a picture was gradually built up of a pitiless, omniscient presence which had to be faced one day. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll know all about you before you get into his class. Mark my words, every single thing you do, good or bad, from the day you enter this college, Muldoon knows. He’s got you taped, laddie, right from the word go. Every mark in every exam in every subject. Every time you skipped out of the anatomy lab to go to the pictures. Every time you got drunk at the dances. It’s all there in that big black head.’ And the ancient mariner would shiver and look over his shoulder…
When the first three years went by and Walsh’s class finally filed into the pathology classroom, the tension was almost unbearable. For a long time they had been romping into lectures, laughing and joking and the chatter hadn’t abated when the lecturer came in, but this was different. The students took their place in comparative silence. There was an occasional nervous giggle but nothing more.
Muldoon was late and the minutes ticked by as the class sat looking up at the empty platform, the desk and blackboard, the rows of specimens in glass jars. Then the door at the back clicked. Nobody looked round but a slow, heavy tread was coming down the central aisle … The feet, splayed and flat, were put down unhurriedly at each step, and under one arm was a thick wad of notes.
Muldoon mounted the platform and moved without haste to his desk where he began to lay out his notes methodically. He took a long time over this and still he hadn’t even glanced up. When he had arranged his papers to his satisfaction he took some pencils from an inside pocket and laid them out too. Still looking down at the desk he straightened his tie, adjusted the handkerchief in his breast pocket then raised his head slowly and gazed at the class.
It was a broard, fleshy, pale-jowled face and the eyes, black and brilliant, swept the students with a mixture of hatred and disbelief. After a trial run the eyes started at the beginning and began to work their way slowly along the packed rows in an agonising silence. As the smouldering stare fell upon each member he seemed to shrink against the back of his seat and Walsh wouldn’t have been surprised if his colleagues had begun to scream and fall senseless to the floor.
Muldoon, having finally finished his scrutiny, thrust his tongue into his cheek – a characteristic gesture with a God help us this is the end touch about it – sighed deeply and began to address the class.
He began suddenly with an abruptness which made some of his charges jump nervously by throwing out one arm and shouting, ‘You can put those away for a start!’ The students who had been fumbling with notebooks and pens dropped them hurriedly and Muldoon spoke again. ‘I’m not going to lecture you today – I’m just going to talk to you.’
And he did talk, for over an hour in a menacing, husky monotone. He told them what he expected them to do during the coming year and what would happen to them if they didn’t do it. The time for the end of the lecture came and went but nobody moved a muscle.
Afterwards Alf went down to the common room for a cup of tea, feeling as though ‘somebody had drained a few pints of blood from him’. For the first time in his life, h
e had encountered ‘an overwhelming personality’.
Alf would end up grateful to, as well as scared of, Emslie. In his early days as a practising vet, seeing animals with pneumonia, renal and cardiac conditions, the training Emslie had given him in pathology ‘was like the lifting of a veil’.
* * *
When Alf joined the college on that September morning in 1933, 188 students were enrolled, including his intake of 50. No less than the staff, the students – ‘rich, vital, outrageous and beguiling’ – were a colourful host, and they were the perfect foil for the staff. Alf’s first impression was that ‘they didn’t look like students at all; at least he couldn’t see any fresh faced young men with blazers and bright scarves round their necks. Later he found that many of them were countrymen, farmers’ sons from the valleys of the Forth and Clyde and a large sprinkling from the Northern Highlands and it probably explained the tendency towards dun-coloured hairy tweeds and big, solid boots.’
And what did Alf Wight’s fellow students see when they looked at him? Eddie Straiton, the fellow student who would become Alf’s friend for more than fifty years, described him well:
James Herriot was a well-built athlete with fair curly hair, laughing eyes, good teeth and the tanned complexion of one who has spent most of his available time outdoors. Invariably dressed in a well-worn Harris tweed sports jacket and grey flannels, he could tan the hide of most of the lads at table tennis. He was also adept on the keyboard of the ancient out-of-tune piano stuck in the corner of our far from clean common room.
Alf’s wardrobe extended to a plus four suit, bought ‘under mother’s persuasion’. ‘I chose a rather alarming green check.’ His ‘signature tune’ on the common room piano was Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust’, which he played to roaring approval at freshers’ night dances, followed by Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’ and Duke Ellington’s ‘Mood Indigo’.
Alf made an early splash at Buccleuch Street by being elected to the Student Representatives Council, polling the highest number of votes in his year, 23, adding, ‘I do not know how it happened at all’ in his diary entry that night. The self-effacement was characteristic, but it was not difficult to see why he was chosen. He was too mischievous to be a goody goody, but had the solid values of his family, his church, his school, and was therefore dependable and decent. In photographs his face is always an open book. What you saw was what you got.
Like veterinary students the land o’er, Glasgow’s contingent were a high-spirited lot, as the prize-giving ceremony, when the awards for achievement were handed out, demonstrated annually. In November 1933, the Glasgow Evening Times reported on the prize night’s shenanigans:
A human skull descending 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 ‘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.
None more so than Alf Wight, who wrote enthusiastically in his diary: ‘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.’ At the following year’s prize-giving, the chairman, Lord Provost A. B. Swan, was greeted with the singing of ‘Swannee River’ and the descent on a string of a bottle of beer and tumbler from the heavens. Not to be outdone, the audience at the prize-giving in 1936 went for a pantomime theme, in which ‘a horse’ gave an impromptu performance, and a student dressed as a cat sat on the chairman’s table. A ‘Stop. Caution. Go’ signal was used by the students to indicate when they had tired of the speaker.
Hi-jinx and high spirits were not confined to prize-giving. In the dissecting room of the veterinary colleges, pitched battles known as ‘muscle fights’, in which lumps of discarded meat were used as missiles, were common entertainments. Students with cricketing inclinations liked to bat the fascia, the membraneous covering of muscles, for six with a handy forelimb and scapula. Although strictly forbidden, ‘muscle fights’ went on clandestinely well into the 1930s. Sensible students put their pens and watches in the corner for the duration.
One of Alf’s classmates, D. Byron Galloway, camouflaged in a blazer and plus-fours, was on a never-ending mission to bring anarchy to lectures of the elderly professors. He liked to fix an enormous nail file in a crack in the seating and pull it back so it ‘vibrated with a startling boing-oing-oing-ning’. He peppered the elderly professors with paper pellets fired from a catapault. And if all else failed to unnerve the professors Begg, Whitehouse and McQueen, Galloway threw down an iron bar on the wooden floor.
Galloway got his comeuppance. Almost inevitably, doler out of his humiliation was Professor Emslie. One day, Alf wrote in The Art and the Science, where Galloway was pen-named as ‘H. Crammond Dunblane’, the class was
discussing the Clostridia and the professor was going at full pressure, rapping out questions, snarling and barking at the stumbling answers. Then, quite suddenly he relaxed and twisted his features into a rubbery smile. ‘We now come to a rather abstruse point, gentlemen, so perhaps we had better consult one of our more advanced and enlightened students. Now who shall it be?’ He darted glances here and there with a horrifying skittishness. ‘Ah yes, of course, we have the very one here.’
He pointed roguishly and, with a lilting, rising inflection ‘Dunblane, perhaps you would be so kind as to tell us the sequence of events following upon the invasion of a tissue with Clostridium tetanus…
At this, Dunblane turned very red. Then the colour ebbed slowly from his face. Eventually he found a voice:
His lips trembled again and a hoarse croak came out. ‘A gas is formed.’
Muldoon became very still. Nobody moved.
Then, terrifyingly, Muldoon threw up his arms and, eyes closed and mouth gaping, bellowed at the ceiling. ‘A GAS IS FORMED! A GAS IS FORMED!’ Then he rounded on the cowering Dunblane and sticking a trembling finger almost into his face, roared. ‘Yes, thank you, you useless clown, every time you open your mouth that is what happens – A GAS IS FORMED!’
Not quite everyone was subdued by Emslie. A certain Brian Sinclair was moved to the Glasgow college from Edinburgh in the hope – of his brother Donald, at least – that it would buck up his performance. Instead, he got thrown out of Emslie’s class for laughing, and had to go back to Edinburgh.
Some of the students at Buccleuch Street in Alf’s time were near permanent fixtures. Since lack of money ruled the college, no-one got thrown out save for the non-payment of fees. George Pettigrew, who overlapped with Alf, spent ten years at Buccleuch Street but never got further than the second year of the syllabus. Almost all Pettigrew’s time was spent in the common room playing poker on top of the grand piano; the only lecture Pettigrew attended regularly was Anatomy, out of respect for old Dr Whitehouse whom he revered. The affection was mutual, so that when George Pettigrew eventually left, either because it had dawned on him that he would never pass his exams or his parents’ patience or purse had run dry, Doc Whitehouse was grief-stricken. Pettigrew became a vacuum cleaner salesman. Edward Gorman, in Alf’s intake, spent ten years at the college, failing examination upon examination,
until giving up in December 1943. Gerry Anderson served for 14 years, but did eventually qualify.
Farmers’ sons, however, were some of the staple students in veterinary colleges in the first decades of the century. (Britain’s most influential vet in the early twentieth century, John McFadyean, President of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, was a farmer’s son from Barrachan, near Wigtown in Galloway.) They were not regulars at the pool and card tables. Their times at college were of frugality and hard work. Looking at their names on the college register, Alf found it hard to read the names of their homes ‘without smelling the heather and bog myrtle and hearing the screaming of the sea birds. Ullapool, Portree, Barra, Benbecula, Islay, Stornoway – they had all sent earnest, tweed-clad young men with nothing but health and ambition to see them through. They were scattered among the black tenements where they lodged usually with grim-faced women from the North who fed them on porage, sheep’s head broth and salt herrings.’
Despite everything, they thrived: ‘The only times the Highland boys looked really miserable was when they were enjoying themselves. At the college smokers [freshers’ nights], they were inclined to sit together in a corner drinking impossible quantities of neat whiskey while one of their number paraded unsteadily up and down playing the bagpipes.’ They ended these evenings green-faced, ‘crooning their nasal gaelic songs’.
Young James Herriot Page 11