by Ivor Smith
I scanned the job advertisements in the back pages of the Veterinary Record while recovering from the extraction of my tonsils at Cirencester’s cottage hospital. I had been on the ‘sick list’ for a week following my operation. Taff eventually paid a social visit to see me at home and cheered me up by saying that he had never known anyone to take so much time off. To be honest, I had at times been forced to take to my bed for a few days on several occasions in the previous six months.
The tonsillitis I developed seemed to recur almost on a monthly cycle. It was a bit more than a nasty sore throat. My temperature soared and I quickly developed a fever that I sweated out for a day or two to the extent that Angela was removing soaking bedding and replacing them with freshly laundered sheets several times a day. The local ENT consultant had suggested an early tonsillectomy and I heartily agreed with him. My throat problem could have been resolved many months earlier had the operation taken place when it was first arranged.
‘Well now, unfortunately Ivor’, Taff had pontificated, ‘That won’t really be convenient you see.’ And for some reason that I have now forgotten I was instructed to cancel the operation.
The second operation coincided with Sheila’s seasonal absence. This was the time she took off from the practice to assist with haymaking on the family farm. Taff took it upon himself on that occasion to call at the hospital while he was in Cirencester and cancel the operation on my behalf. Come rain or shine I was determined there would not be a third cancellation.
The Cheltenham veterinary partnership of Hull & Eaton’s advert in the back pages of the Veterinary Record caught my eye. As professions go, ours is a small one, and names and reputations travel quickly along the vet grapevine. Their practice premises were based in St George’s Terrace, an older part of Cheltenham that we were unfamiliar with. The professional reputation of the practice was well known. In fact it was very well known, and one that a cavalier young vet today might say, ‘It’s worth a look at’. I thought so too, but once more it was a practice requesting and anticipating that the successful applicant would have a lot of experience tucked under his belt. I forwarded my CV but I felt it would not be prudent to enlarge too much on the experiences of my first two years in practice. I received a courteous reply to my application and an invitation for an interview from vet Tim Eaton, who at that time was the junior partner in the practice.
It was a warm August evening when we drove into Cheltenham. The sun was setting and we could not resist a drive along the famous tree-clad Promenade before our veterinary meeting. We parked near Tim’s elegant home and rang the bell of his Montpellier Terrace residence. He opened the heavy decorative door and stretched out his hand. It was a firm but gentler first-meeting-handshake compared to the Crudwell introductory grasp. We sat in the luxurious lounge of Tim’s house and chatted over a crystal glass of sherry, which seemed to be obligatory on these occasions, before we left for a tour of the practice premises.
Everything I had observed so far, from his shiny brown leather shoes to his immaculate brown leather briefcase, reflected efficiency and affluence. I could not help noticing with envy his brown hide medical bag sitting on the rear leather seats of his car. We followed Tim’s sporty blue Alfa Romeo to his surgery premises in St George’s Terrace and entered the surgery through a small green-painted door, dwarfed by the large surrounding wooden green boards, which opened on to a large cobbled yard.
At one end on the right-hand side was the practice office, a small room that was mainly taken up by a large oak table. That was clearly where the senior partner sat. Tucked away at one end behind a long black curtain was a little closet, ‘for making coffee’, Tim explained. He could have added that it was also the busiest room in the building. The ancient water closet was also a small room on the right off the cobbled yard. This was the second busiest room in the house. We next visited Tim’s consulting room, which doubled as the operating theatre. By today’s standard it was primitive, but it was also practical, clean and hygienic, and bore all the hallmarks of efficiency. I felt that I could enjoy working here.
The icing on the cake was the presence of a gaseous anaesthetic machine, something every vet takes for granted today, but at that time was like manna from heaven. This allowed operations to be carried out with the patient fast asleep in a controlled manner. Creaking rickety old stairs led from the room to a first-floor area that had once probably been a hayloft. The practice pharmacy was here and there seemed to be a drug available to treat any animal illness that you were ever likely to come across. Back on the cobbled ground floor a sliding door led to a second consulting room, an X-ray machine and a darkroom. Hull & Eaton appeared to have all the essentials that any vet could wish for. The very old buildings had the sort of appeal that perhaps today could be opened up as a veterinary museum, but at this time in history the old premises were being put to excellent use for animal welfare.
I wanted this job and couldn’t wait to get started. All I needed now was the offer. I was shortly to meet the real boss and we were just a few minutes drive from his house in Charlton Kings. Like me, Peter Hull had qualified at Liverpool Vet School, and had spent nearly all of his professional life working in the Cheltenham practice. He had started his career working as a young assistant for veterinary surgeon Mr Brain in these same premises in 1945, shortly after the end of the Second World War. Peter’s expertise, in keeping with most of his contemporaries, mainly revolved around farm animal medicine and the treatment of horses. I knew that he was a very experienced equine vet and an interview with him seemed daunting, as my practical work with horses, and just as importantly their owners, had been rather limited. Any fears that I might have had were unnecessary and his warm manner quickly put me at ease.
Naturally he wanted to know what I had been doing since I qualified, and the extent of my experience with farm animals and horses. I could have told him that I had stuffed four years’ worth of experience into the previous two, but thought it might have sounded arrogant and would not have impressed him. So instead I related accounts of some successful cases of equine colic and lameness that I had attended and began to describe a recent and ongoing case of a lame two-year-old thoroughbred in which I was involved. Following an untimely stumble, this filly had received a deep wound to a knee and as a result of inadequate treatment by well-meaning attendants; a large granulomatous lump had developed at the wound site. For the last couple of weeks I had seen the horse at regular intervals to cauterise the lesion and to re-dress the leg. I was more than pleased with her progress.
Mr Hull looked as though he was struggling not to look too bored by my account. I had quickly suspected that we shared a similar taste in humour and undoubtedly he would have been more interested in the blarney of the Irish jockeys who assisted me in this case. I was itching to tell him that during one of the re-dressing sessions we had all downed tools to admire an attractive lady riding by on her way back from hunting. One of the Irish lads had called to her in a polite but jocular manner, ‘Yer haws ’as got a real sweat on there, Madam, do you think the vet should take a look at him?’
‘Don’t worry, young man, it’s nothing to worry about’, the lady replied, ‘if you had been between my legs for the last three hours you would be sweating too!’
I resisted the temptation. Messrs Hull & Eaton offered me the job, and very soon Angela and I said goodbye to Crudwell.
The three of us were on the road again. Yes, three: the third member of our family was Ginny. The stork had not visited us yet and Ginny was the beautiful yellow Labrador that we had bought from a local breeder. She was one of a litter of seven where the black labrador mum was owned by a local solicitor. He had done his homework well and chosen for their pet’s mate a multi-award-winning champion dog owned by a breeder from Stow-on-the-Wold, known to most people in the dog world as Labrador Lee. Our legal breeder’s home was next door to the Wild Duck at Ewen, a well-known pub/restaurant a few miles from Cirencester.
We went along to their cottage
one sunny Sunday morning when the litter was about three weeks old. The breeder escorted us to the outside kennels and called to the lovely black mum who leaped around the garden before jumping over to us. Dogs and smart Sunday clothes really do not go together. The litter of black and yellow pups seemed to leap everywhere and over each other too in their enclosed run. We spotted an inquisitive yellow female pup that seemed to take a special interest in us. Within minutes and after a vet check-up, of course, by mutual agreement we said, ‘That’s the one for us.’ A month later pup Ginny was running around our Crudwell home and would be a very important member of our family for nearly sixteen years.
Before taking up the post in Cheltenham, letters of terms and conditions had been exchanged, and surprisingly some things had changed since our first meeting. The partners had decided to take on two new vet assistants and they were pleased to tell me that the other assistant would be Wynn Walters. By good fortune he was one of my pals from Liverpool Vet School. Things were getting better by the day, for the vet assistants anyway.
To add to his workload Mr Hull had been appointed Secretary of the British Veterinary Association, a role which inevitably meant that he would be spending much time away from his Cheltenham practice, mainly in London. To get him there in the shortest possible time he had bought a green Volvo sports car, the type some readers may still associate with The Saint, the hero of the successful 1960s detective television series of the same name. The first time I saw his car pull into the practice yard I half-expected Roger Moore to get out.
The practice had found for us a comfortable house on a relatively new estate, not far from the famous Prestbury Park racecourse of Cheltenham Gold Cup fame. Not surprisingly, Mr Hull headed the group of veterinary surgeons responsible for the welfare of the horses on race days. I was also provided with another Ford Cortina, which was one of the most popular and reliable cars on the road at the time. It was now September 1968, and I was raring to go.
My first morning’s impressions in my new practice made me realise that this was how progressive vets should be doing things. I enjoyed my morning surgery, enjoyed my cup of morning coffee and looked forward to my first session of operating under modern conditions. Now there would be trained nurses to assist the surgeon. In fact they seemed to be there in abundance. Whilst preparing for my first cat spay operation, engulfed by aspiring nurses, Tim had popped his head into the operating theatre and remarked, ‘Everything going OK, Ivor?’ Before I could answer, he then asked, ‘But do you really need the whole bloody harem to help you?’ Two nurses shot off like bats out of hell. I was a little perturbed by the remark but shrugged it off quickly. There were more important things to get on with. It was the first time I had experienced his unusual sense of humour.
The silent answer to his question really was ‘No, I didn’t.’ I just needed one good one and preferably Nikki. This bright young nurse was in many ways ahead of her time. She was a RANA (Registered Animal Nursing Auxiliary) and the first one I had worked with since I had left my Vet School. Spelt out, the title perhaps was a little demeaning and did not reflect much to anyone really, particularly to the owners of the animals, the extent of her training, nursing skills and abilities.
Eventually the veterinary profession relented to the nurses’ profession’s request for a more prestigious name and now they are all known as Veterinary Nurses or VNs. But the vets knew precisely who the girls in the green uniforms were, and they were highly valued members of the practice team. The vet surgeon could entrust the anaesthesia of the animal to her, and only if she were concerned would she interrupt the surgical proceedings. Oddly, there was a special cause for me to impress this RANA: Nikki’s dad had been my geography master and a Crypt School athletic coach. It’s a small world!
Most Monday and Thursday mornings I would be found in my farm gear carrying out the annual tuberculin test on a herd of cattle somewhere within a 20-mile radius of Cheltenham. The routine was to check over the health of every animal in the herd, measure the thickness of the skin in the neck region and give two injections under the skin. Three day later you returned to the farm, a second inspection was carried out and any reactions at the injection sites were recorded, and in this way, depending on the degree of skin swelling, any cattle infected with TB could be identified. It was a tedious task and was, at that time, most unusual to find an animal that even suggested it had been in contact with the disease.
How things have changed. Forty years later there is a very high risk of animals in the herd being infected. The numbers of cattle affected have grown beyond imagination and the reason for this is now an ongoing argument among farmers, vets, DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), and wildlife conservationist groups speaking on behalf of the badger, which in one way or another is involved in the spread of the disease. The cattle testing continued on Tuesdays and Fridays; those were Wynn’s testing days. I particularly looked forward to these days, knowing I would spend most of my time in the operating theatre. But not before we had enjoyed the end of morning surgery coffee break.
The location of the surgery premises had an additional bonus; it was opposite Cheltenham’s long-established Locke’s Bakery and you arrived at work each morning to the wonderful aroma of freshly baked bread. Before 10 o’clock a nurse had taken the staff’s orders and returned to the surgery with a large bag of hot doughnuts oozing raspberry jam. It was an enjoyable start to the day. A cup of strong coffee and two doughnuts later it was time to begin the operating session. Back then, I could eat as many doughnuts I wanted back then and it seemed to make no difference at all to the old waistline. Today I daren’t eat any.
The operations invariably started with the neutering of cats. Cat castrations were quick and simple and that is why they were normally first on the list. Next came their female counterparts: cat spays were usually second on the list. Strangely this daily routine is the one I would still practise today. Perhaps it is the surgeon’s way of warming up. Dog castrations followed and finally the bitch spays. In the hands of a competent surgeon, this operation can justifiably be described as a routine procedure. It is nevertheless one of the most demanding operations that any vet is likely to carry out and the opportunities for surgical disaster are numerous – not to mention the all-important safe administration of a general anaesthetic for half an hour or so.
My mind frequently drifted back to the Crudwell operating theatre and Sheila steadfastly holding a young bitch patient about to receive her intravenous barbiturate injection that would induce general anaesthesia long enough to carry out a routine hysterectomy. There the anaesthetic of choice (in truth the only one available to me) was Nembutal – pentobarbitone sodium. It was recognised as being a reliable and ‘reasonably safe’ anaesthetic, whatever that meant. It was not recommended for use in aged animals but nobody ever seemed to know how old ‘aged’ was. My college notes reminded me that the dose was 1/5 grain per pound body weight, and that applied to healthy animals between 25lb and 35lb. In animals below 25lb the dose needed to be slightly decreased, and in animals above 35lb, slightly increased. Sometimes calculating the dose seemed to take as long as the operation itself, and at the start of every operating session I prayed that Taff’s scales and my maths were reasonably accurate. The hand-held calculator had yet to be invented. My confidence was boosted by experiencing only minor surgical and post-operative calamities, but it was not that unusual for an owner to ring up the next day asking if their drowsy, staggering pet should now have come round from the anaesthetic.
The Cheltenham experience was a little different to my Crudwell days. The nurse passed a syringe filled with a pre-calculated dose of a short-acting barbiturate and the sedated patient fell asleep rapidly as I gave the intravenous injection of thiopentone. I popped an endotracheal tube through the open larynx, connected up to the anaesthetic machine supplying a regulated amount of halothane gas, and, hey presto, we had an anaesthetic utopia, and it was all systems go. I enjoyed surgery and Tim obligingly gave m
e a free hand in what I did. The operations were numerous and varied and on most days there was a reasonable justification to delve into a cat or dog’s abdomen.
I am sure that almost every day one of the vets in the practice would remove a small rubber ball from a dog’s stomach or a chop bone that had reached the small intestine. The X-ray images, as you can imagine, were spectacular and we regularly returned to the owner an object retrieved from the digestive tract that had been missing for days or even weeks. Occasionally an owner would be totally adamant that they had no idea how their pet came across the foreign body in the first place. Top of the list in this department was the condom, which most vets will have removed from a dog’s digestive system at some time in their career. It’s amazing where the dogs find them. Fortunately pet owners today are much more aware of what their pet can safely eat and play with.
Gastric and intestinal foreign bodies are scarcer in cats, mainly due to their more fastidious eating habits. One of the more common objects removed from the cat’s digestive system was the sewing needle. Kittens love to play with cotton but do not know how to deal with the sharp thing attached at one end.
Cheltenham’s animals seemed to have at least their fair share of road traffic accidents (RTAs) and as a result almost every day we faced another distraught owner across the examination table. Our practice was as well equipped as most of the day to tackle these problems. Orthopaedic cases became a challenge and putting broken limbs back together by pinning and plating fractured bones, and removing damaged hips, was almost a daily routine. Every basic bone operation stimulated the desire and the challenge to do the next more demanding task. There is just one way to gain experience.
Not all bone fractures required orthopaedic surgery and there were numerous occasions when applying a Plaster of Paris cast under a general anaesthetic was adequate to immobilise a limb long enough to allow a minor fracture to heal satisfactorily. This was the case one day when I had applied a plaster cast to a young Boxer dog that had received a bump in a minor road accident. I discussed the treatment with the owner, who lived in the St Paul’s area of Cheltenham, and gave the appropriate post-op instructions, followed by the usual afterthought, ‘If you are worried at all about anything, give us a ring.’