Young James Herriot

by John Lewis-Stempel

  In Scotland, so the saying goes, the weather is so variable that you can have four seasons in one day. In veterinary surgery, equally, you can have all the emotional seasons in the space of 24 hours. On the very same day McDowall and Alf revisited a Bull Terrier bitch that had been scalded, her skin turning badly eczemous, a fortnight before. Time and McDowall’s treatment of a spirit dressing (metholated spirits, antiseptic powder and a little iodine) had worked wonders, with the vile crust falling off to ‘leave mostly normal skin’. Of course, such spirits-raising victories were all the better when they came quickly, as with a one-year-old Sealyham bitch, which was refusing to eat and showing evidence of pain. McDowall carefully palpated the dog’s stomach, at which the ‘bitch showed pain on pressure exerted’. McDowall’s diagnosis was that the dog had ‘swallowed a long piece of bone which had become lodged, probably in pyloric end of stomach’. The next day, after being prescribed a stomach mixture, made up principally of calcium magnesite, the bitch vomited up said bone. ‘Recovery followed.’ McDowall’s dexterity with his hands, which was typical of vets in the Thirties, was then demonstrated in the whelping of a Scotch Terrier bitch, with McDowall exploring the bitch’s vagina ‘by means of one finger carefully inserted’, and discovering a pup with an abnormally large head. This was extricated with forceps, and the rest of the litter popped out to round off another successful case.

  The nearby South Shields greyhound track, where McDowall was ‘veterinary surgeon in attendance’ provided many of their patients, some of them hapless, including one dog that had stubbed its toe and another that ‘had been running & collided with another dog’. Modern greyhound racing, with an oval track and a mechanical hare, was a new sport in Britain. The first meeting of the Greyhound Racing Association had taken place at Belle Vue Stadium, Manchester, on 24 July 1926, when 1700 people watched six races of seven greyhounds. A year later Belle Vue was attracting 70,000 per meeting and the GRA had stakes in 18 tracks around Britain. ‘Going to the dogs’ was firmly established as a proletarian spectator sport. With all the money exchanging hands in betting on greyhound racing, the potential for malpractice became evident. In 1928 the National Greyhound Racing Club was set up to establish and enforce a set of rules for racing – which is where the vets came in.

  Aside from tending to injured dogs, the course vet had to ensure that dogs were fit to race, and had not been doped, overfed or otherwise nobbled. Alf’s experiences at South Shield’s dog track were later transposed to Yorkshire in Vets Might Fly. Villains in camel coats with bottle-blonde girlfriends, crooked officials, George Formby blaring on the speakers, abuse from owners whose dogs he rightly disqualified, shifty-eyed punters staring at the race card, loitering local gangsters in black suits with their overdressed girlfriends in tow – such were the joys of a day at the dog races for a young vet. The only friendliness Alf found was a pitying bookie, who saw his frayed shirt and tossed him half a crown.

  Alf did not spend all his time at 1 Thornhill Terrace merely assisting Jock McDowall. The Veterinary Surgeons Act, which prohibited the practice of veterinary medicine by the non-qualified, was a full decade away, so J. J. McDowall MRCVS frequently went off, leaving plain J. A. Wight Esq. to run the shop. All by himself. Alf wrote to his parents in 1938 from Sunderland:

  Down at the clinic (where Wight is in charge) I had to remove a tumour from a dog aged 12 years and after hacking away for a bit found it was attached to a testicle – so I had to remove the testicle too … I can tell you, I wished Mac had been by my side. I sent the dog away with a horrible wound and never expected to see it alive again. Strange to say, it turned up for dressing two days later, bright and frisky and the wound beautifully clean. I felt immensely bucked up about it.

  The ‘clinic’ was the downstairs of McDowall’s house; like almost all vets he lived above the shop. Aside from cutting overheads, living on the premises cut the distance from bed to the dispensary when patience-trying calls came at two in the morning.

  Eleven of the 77 cases Alf saw with McDowall involved horses, most of them working animals. Although McDowall’s practice covered some of the small dairy farms on Sunderland’s outskirts, the horses on the list were mostly pullers of milk floats, beer wagons and coal carts. And most of the damage done to them was human-inflicted. In his casebook on 12 April 1938, Alf recorded a visit to a heavy draught gelding that ‘had strained himself over a heavy load & had been since lame’. On examination, the stifle and hip appeared to be swollen, and when pressure was applied to the hip ‘the animal evinced pain’. McDowall considered that the injury was so severe that it ‘would be useless to attempt heat treatment or massage with liniment’, and the only possible cure was ‘a year at grass’. Three days later Mac and Alf visited another lame draught horse. This time the injury had been caused by ‘bad driving’. Fortunately, the injury was not severe and McDowall’s advice was to hose the shoulder with cold water and get a better fitting collar. And ‘to change the driver’.

  But J. J. McDowall was a man of eminent sense and practicality. Attending a farm, Mac was asked to insert a ring in a bullock’s nose. Alf’s casebook noted that the animal was ‘restrained by means of a rope round the horns’, this held by a farmhand inside the stall with the bullock. Meanwhile, McDowall ‘standing on the other side of the gate’ – out of harm’s way, in other words – stuck pincers into the bullock’s nose, removed a piece of cartilage and placed in the ring. And left the farmhand and the sore-nosed bullock to it.

  Alf did not enter everything he learned with McDowall in his student casebook of 1938. McDowall’s second unofficial motto was: ‘Never make a job look too easy.’ Because the client always likes to feel he or she is getting their money’s worth. When a calving was going too easily, he admitted to Alf, he sometimes held the calves in.

  Such was the Art of Veterinary Medicine.

  DEAR MR FARNON

  FOR ALF WIGHT AND his fellow survivors at Buccleuch Street in 1939, the final professional examinations loomed at least as large, and almost as frighteningly as the gathering clouds of war.

  The finals consisted of two papers: first, the Principles and Practice of Veterinary Medicine, of which the written part was three hours and the oral/practical two hours; and second, the Principles and Practice of Veterinary Surgery, of which the written part was another three hours and the oral/practical another two. At least one hour of the final practical exam was devoted to surgical applied anatomy, operative surgery and anaesthesia.

  The only way to get through the necessary revision was a monkish regime of self-discipline, although Buccleuch Street student Ian Cameron perhaps took this too far. According to Eddie Straiton, Cameron

  was reputed to sleep four hours in the twenty-four and start his swotting at 4 a.m. every morning. I well remember the laughter in the common room when James Herriot burst in one morning and loudly announced, ‘You’ll never guess lads, but how’s this for conscientious swotting? Ian Cameron has cut his lavatory time down to two minutes every third day!

  Straiton thought they needed Alf’s humour in the spring of 1939. Glasgow Corporation had begun the distribution of anti-gas protective helmets for babies, and had taken on 1500 men to erect Anderson steel air-raid shelters in back gardens in city housing schemes. Unfortunately, when Glasgow’s air-raid sirens were tested, citizens had difficulty hearing the warbling note over the traffic din.

  In this final year of the course, there was only one lecture per morning, and an afternoon every second week at Glasgow meat market. Every spare second was spent at the Mitchell Library or studying at home. Eddie Straiton found the finals a ‘nightmare’ of stress, which left such an indelible wound on his mind that he would still awake 50 years later in a cold sweat convinced he had to re-sit them. ‘When we foregathered at the Maclay Hall in Glasgow University where the written part of the examination was to be held,’ he recalled,

  We were a ‘wabbit’ looking lot. Harry Donovan had shrunk to under six stones, and another pal, a tall, wild re
d-haired Highlander called Maurice McMorran hadn’t shaved for two months.

  During the first week we faced two three-hour papers on each of four subjects – surgery, obstetrics, medicine and meat inspection – in all, forty-eight questions covering the whole of our last two years’ work and a considerable portion of the other three. The papers were tricky and very difficult; it seemed obvious they were out to plough as many of us as possible.

  But the worst was yet to come: ten days of orals and practical tests. In the words of the ‘referred’ students (those who had previously sat and failed), ‘The examiners tore you to shreds in the first five minutes of the oral.’ We had to endure one hour of intensive interrogation on each subject.

  As we waited our turn the loos were overworked; some lads were sick. How we managed to survive is a mystery. I moved automatically from one examiner to another in a mental haze as I tried to answer the endless stream of questions.

  The stress in the exams was palpable, and after the exams, there was the excruciating wait for the result, hanging around the notice-board like convicts awaiting the rope. In July 1939 Alf joined the wan, worn-out students outside the ground-floor office to find he had passed Medicine but had been ‘R(eferred). S(urgery)’.

  Alf’s father, who had never of course wanted Alf to be a vet, was devastated. No-one, however, was surprised by Alf’s failure; he had just undergone a second operation at the Western Infirmary for his fistula. Jock McDowall wrote a consoling letter from Sunderland:

  I fully expect you will have had your operation by this time and you’re possibly not feeling too good. I expect the surgeon would make what is commonly called a few heroic gashes in your tender spot. You were unfortunate in getting asked all those questions about the Corpus luteum and Graafian follicles in your oral. I couldn’t have said much myself about the subject. However, it says a whole lot when you sailed through Medicine. By Jove, you must have put in some graft despite not feeling too well; you deserve a medal.

  And so Alf settled down for more months of ‘graft’, revising Surgery over and over again. On the morning of Sunday 3 September, he took a break to listen to the radio to hear Chamberlain announce that ‘this country is at war with Germany’. For the second time in Alf’s life, Glasgow had a black-out at night.

  In December, Alf sat Surgery again. Up went the results outside the office. Once more Alf pushed forward and scanned the list – and once more found he had failed. As he turned leadenly away, wondering how to break the bad news to his parents, the staff room door opened and Professor Whitehouse reappeared, with a piece of paper in his hand.

  ‘My apologies, gentlemen,’ said Whitehouse, as he pinned the paper to the board. ‘There has been a clerical error. Another name is to be added to the list.’

  The name was that of the immensely relieved J. A. Wight, dizzily gone from hope down to despair up to the very elated top of the world.

  Six months later, it was Eddie Straiton’s turn to await the worst. Or the best. The frail Principal Whitehouse limped from the staff room with the all-important piece of paper and gave it to Straiton to pin up.

  My hand shook visibly … I glanced down the list and saw opposite my name the letter P. My knees turned to jelly. I was a veterinary surgeon at last.

  His joy was cut short by the cries of anguish around him; of the 127 students who had started with Straiton, only five had got through in the prescribed five years. It was the worst ‘plough’ in the history of Glasgow Veterinary College.

  On reaching home Straiton felt ill, ‘the worst reaction to acute stress I have ever known’.

  Alf, before he left College, went into the office to read what the teachers had scribbled about him in the now-released confidential student reports. To his pleasurable surprise, he found that Emslie had written: ‘Lacking in brilliance but showed a perception of the subject which I personally found rewarding. A pleasant-mannered, likeable boy of transparent integrity.’ Alf read the lines several times, closed the book and went out through the arch of the college. He did so with a lump in his throat. ‘When I qualified and walked out of the door of the college for the last time,’ he wrote decades later in the introduction to James Herriot’s Dog Stories, ‘I felt an acute sense of loss, an awareness of something good gone for ever. Some of my happiest years were spent in that seedy old building and though my veterinary course was out of date and inefficient in many ways, there was a carefree, easy-going charm about that whole time which has held it in my mind in a golden glow.’

  In The Scotsman, there appeared a notice of some pleasure and pride to Alf, Hannah and Pop Wight:

  Glasgow Veterinary College (Incorporated).

  The following students passed the Final Professional Examinations and Qualified MRCVS in December 1939.

  Dominic Boyce. Clydebank: J. S. Deane. Glasgow: J. D. Dunn. Bearsden: A. V. Farrell. Dumfries: G. Macleod. Glasgow: M. Maclellan. North Uist: A. O. Merry. Glasgow: J. B. Milligan. Chrystom: D. J. Munro. Skye: Miss Elspeth Parker. Glasgow: Alex Shaw. Glasgow: R. T. Smith. Strathneffer: D. B. Steele. Larkhall: Miss M. C. Stevenson. Glasgow: J. I. Tulloch. Kilmarnock: Miss M. B. Weir. Glasgow: J. A. Wight. Glasgow: R. K. Meiklem. Bishopbriggs. Wm. Burrows. Troon.

  When Alf walked out into Buccleuch Street, he left some good friends behind him, some of whom would take a while yet to qualify. Although fast Eddie Straiton qualified in 1940 and Aubrey Melville passed MRCVS in a respectable December 1941, Donald McIntyre was ‘Referred Surgery’ five times, not finally passing MRCVS until July 1942. On failing to get his diploma in July 1939, December 1939 and July 1940, Robert Nisbet of Alf’s year ‘Left for HMF’ (His Majesty’s Forces) but came back after the war. He passed MRCVS in 1949, by which time he was 36.

  When Alf walked out of the college for the last time, he also stepped into a profession on its uppers. ‘Being a newly qualified veterinary surgeon … was like taking out a ticket for a dole queue,’ he recalled in If Only They Could Talk. ‘Agriculture was depressed by a decade of government neglect, the draught horse which had been the mainstay of the profession was fast disappearing. It was easy to be a prophet of doom when the young men emerging from the colleges after five years’ hard slog were faced by a world indifferent to their enthusiasm and bursting knowledge.’

  Each week, the Veterinary Record could muster only two or three situations vacant, and there were an average of 80 applicants for each one. Most veterinary surgeons simply could not afford an assistant. Deciding that there was no near or realistic chance of working as a vet, some Glasgow veterinary graduates went to the shipyards – once more booming due to an order book from the Admiralty – as labourers, or signed on as dustmen or street cleaners. One bright lad in Straiton’s year went to teach in a typing school. Straiton tried to join the army but the authorities were adamant that veterinary surgeons were a ‘reserved occupation’ and said a resounding ‘No’ to a career in khaki for Edward Straiton MRCVS.

  Students lucky enough to get posts found themselves working for the chicken feed of £1-10s a week. Or less. Some qualified vets placed ‘Will Work for Keep’ notices in the Record, until an embarrassed profession asked the editor to cease publishing them.

  And anyone taking a post as an assistant could expect to be little more than a dogsbody. ‘Assistants were just little bits of dirt to be starved and worked into the ground by principals who were heartless and vicious to a man’, Alf wrote in If Only They Could Talk. ‘Dave Stevens, lighting a cigarette with trembling hand: “Never a night off or a half day. He made me wash the car, dig the garden, mow the lawn, do the family shopping. But when he told me to sweep the chimney I left.” ’

  However, there was one veterinary graduate in the cold month of December 1939 who did not have to worry about getting a job in the profession. Mr J. A. Wight MRCVS had already been offered a post: he was going back to the town of his birth as assistant to none other than Jock McDowall, at the kingly wage of £3-3s a week. As to his board, he could stay with Auntie Jinny around the corner at
Beechwood Terrace. He had to leave Don behind, though.

  Arriving at McDowall’s familiar surgery for his first day’s work, Alf was greeted with a hearty welcome by McDowall. ‘Welcome to Sunderland, Fred! [For some reason McDowall always called Alf ‘Fred’.] These small animals are the things that pay.’

  The rise and rise of the pet was one of the changes that would turn the world of James Herriot upside down. Although today around 80 per cent of veterinary time is spent with small animals, with less than 5 per cent of veterinary surgeons involved full time with farm animal work, in the Thirties the proportions were almost exactly reversed.

  By some cruel humour of the Fates – or of their new employers – newly qualified vets always start in at the very deepest end. Thus Alf’s career began with an emergency: almost as soon as McDowall had uttered the words ‘Small animals pay!’ he was taken ill with virulent flu, leaving Alf to run the practice solo. As Alf had not yet passed his driving test, a doddery friend of McDowall’s had to be hired as chauffeur for farm visits. Running McDowall’s show, however, turned out to be the very least of Alf’s problems. The reason McDowall could afford to pay Alf was because of his post as ‘veterinary surgeon in attendance’ at South Shield’s dog racing tracks. He had warned Alf that the finances of the stadium were parlous, and should it close Alf would have to go.

  Less than a fortnight after Alf arrived in Sunderland, McDowall learned that the stadium faced closure. Lacking the money to pay Alf, he had to advise his new assistant to seek work elsewhere. An unusually subdued Alf Wight wrote to his parents on 14 January 1940:

  My dear Mother and Dad,

  I’m afraid I have some bad news and I may as well get it over with. I didn’t get the job at Guisborough. McDonald, the vet there, received an application from a man from Skye and as he is from Skye himself that was that. Don’t be too despondent about this; it’s a big disappointment but remember that fellows like me are being turned down all over the country. Mac’s ill and won’t be up for a few days so I’ll be OK for another week’s pay, but after that, what?