The Real James Herriot

by Jim Wight

  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.

  Donald Sinclair’s practice, at that time, covered a very large area. Within the part of Yorkshire which stretches some sixty miles from Helmsley in the east to Hawes, a town at the far end of Wensleydale in the west, there were very few practices and Donald’s and Frank Bingham’s were two of them. Frank, having no desire to undertake the TB Testing work, offered it
some years later to Donald who, naturally, grabbed it with both hands. They entered into a tenuous partnership, one which for a few years was known as ‘Bingham, Sinclair and Wight’.

  When Alf first started work in Thirsk, his days were very long. He travelled across to Frank Bingham’s Leyburn practice in the mornings to test endless cows before returning to Thirsk in the afternoons to deal with the work that had accumulated there. He covered vast distances but in doing so he had a wonderful introduction to the Dales, an area that was a revelation to him the first time he set eyes upon it. He was totally captivated by the wild majestic fells sweeping down to the green valleys, with the stone walls winding down from the high tops to the sturdy grey villages and farmsteads. He loved the sweet, clean air punctuated with the sounds of birds – curlew, lapwing, skylark and grouse. It is no surprise that, many years later, he would set his books in the Dales; he would see many beautiful places in his lifetime but there was nowhere he would love more than the Yorkshire Dales.

  Another bonus resulting from this arduous regime was that he became well acquainted with Frank Bingham. Frank, a distinguished-looking man with fair hair and blue eyes, was almost twenty years older than Alf, and was a man who had travelled widely. He had been a Mountie in Canada and had spent time in Australia riding the rabbit fences, enduring many long hours in the saddle, with the result that he was an artist when it came to dealing with horses. This elegant and soft-spoken man was someone to whom Alf Wight took an immediate liking. He and his Swiss wife, Emmy, enriched his first years in the Dales with their wonderful kindness and hospitality.

  Alf was always hungry in those days. He would set out from Thirsk in his basic little car, with just a pack of cheese sandwiches to last him the whole day, but there was more than cheese waiting for him whenever he walked into the Binghams’ house in Leyburn. Emmy was a magnificent cook, and she fed him like a king. Delectable stews, apple pies and cakes passed his willing lips, while Frank would sit back and talk quietly as though there were all the time in the world.

  Frank, who went about his work calmly and methodically, was one who would never be hurried. His great saying was ‘Always set your stall out first’, and he would never embark upon any job unless he was thoroughly prepared. To a young, eager-to-learn veterinary surgeon like Alf Wight, he was a joy to watch. Some of the principles to which he adhered in his work – great care combined with scrupulous cleanliness – are just as valid today as they were fifty or more years ago. Alf used to be amused when he saw Frank boil up his instruments and wrap them in clean brown paper before every operation, but he noticed that Frank’s surgical wounds always healed rapidly and cleanly.

  He was a real horseman who could rope and throw wild colts with effortless ease, and on one remarkable occasion, Alf watched fascinated as Frank cast an unbroken young horse with one hand while rolling a cigarette with the other. He was equally at home when dealing with cows. One of the most daunting challenges to a veterinary surgeon is the replacement of a prolapsed uterus in the bovine. This involves the returning of an enormous pink mass of tissue through the vagina, a task rather like trying to stuff a large cushion up a drain pipe. It can be a demoralising and exhausting job. Frank, as usual, made little of such a challenge, and young Alf Wight watched in amazement on a Dales farm one day as he covered the huge mass with sugar before rolling the cow onto a small stool to stop her straining the uterus back out. The sugar sucked the moisture out of the tissues, reducing it to a fraction of its size, while Frank, gently, replaced it – a freshly rolled cigarette dangling from his lips as he worked. As the young vet watched, he reflected that such things are not taught at veterinary college; they are acquired over years of experience.

  Frank Bingham appears in the third of James Herriot’s books, Let Sleeping Vets Lie, under the name of Ewan Ross, and the admiration Alf felt for the man shows clearly in his writing. Perhaps not everyone shared his opinion, however. Frank was regarded by most as a fine veterinary surgeon – when he made himself available.

  Frank Bingham had a problem common to many veterinary surgeons of the day. He liked a drink – and he liked more than one. Numerous are the tales of his long sessions in the inns and public houses of the Yorkshire Dales, sessions that could last for days. Frank worked only when he felt like it, and once he was comfortably seated beside a warm fire with a drink in his hand, it was a persuasive man who could winkle him out. As many of the Dales folk were from strict Methodist families, such drinking habits may well have been frowned upon, but it was not this aspect of his character that Alf remembered. The warm friendship that this easy-going and charming man had extended to him, ensured that Alf’s early days in the Yorkshire Dales were ones that he would always recall with happiness and nostalgia.

  I hardly remember Frank Bingham, since I was only eight years old at the time of his death in 1951, but I do have a recollection of a visit to a café in the Dales shortly after he died. The waitress was none other than Emmy Bingham who was working there to earn a little extra money. My father, deeply upset to learn of her financial misfortune, could not finish his food. He was unable to come to terms with the situation of being waited on by the lady who had been so kind to him during those first years in the Yorkshire Dales.

  It was not unusual in those days for veterinary surgeons to die leaving their wives in penury. They worked so hard that survival was a priority, with thoughts of pensions and insurance policies hardly crossing their minds. In due course, the profession became aware of the number of veterinarians’ families who were struggling financially, and a fund known as the Veterinary Benevolent Fund was established, its aim being to provide such families with assistance. Alf Wight contributed generously to this fund during the years when he was making money as a writer, but he was in no situation to help Emmy Bingham all those years ago, at a time when he, himself, had to account for every penny.

  During those first four months in Thirsk, the practice was fully stretched. He wrote to his parents about the kind of life he was leading.

  Dear Folks,

  I’ve been trying to find time to write for ages but just recently I have been working harder than I’ve ever done in my life. There is far too much for one man to do and, frankly, I don’t know how I ever get through all the work. I’ve been rising at 6.30 am and working till dark for ages and then there’s all the writing to be done on top of that. And bills! Oh boy, I never realised how things could pile up and how much it would cost to live. I can’t believe I’ve been here for four months. Time slips past when you’re working and, apart from my weekend in Sunderland at the beginning, I’ve never had a day off, never been out with a girl, never played a game. It’s enough to age anybody!

  Today, the young veterinary surgeon leads a far more civilised life, with better working facilities, an arsenal of modern drugs to combat disease, and comfortable cars to ride around in – but whether they are happier than those slaves of yesterday is debatable. The modern veterinary surgeon is beset by rules and regulations while the demands of his clients become ever more exacting. The stress associated with the job is high, both financially and emotionally, with threats of litigation lurking around every corner. Young Alf Wight worked hard, but it is likely that his unbridled, outdoor way of life, set in one of the most beautiful parts of the country, is one that is now looked on by many with more than a touch of envy.

  Following Donald’s and Eric Parker’s departure for the Royal Air Force, a deep sense of isolation began to descend on Alf. He was not only trying to establish himself in a new job in an unfamiliar environment but, apart from Frank Bingham in Leyburn, he had no one to turn to for advice, nobody with whom to share his hopes and fears as he drove the long and lonely miles. The Yorkshire farmers did little to bolster his confidence; many had developed a great deal of faith in Donald and Eric, and few could conceal their disappointment upon beholding the unknown and inexperienced vet driving on to their farms. Never had Alf felt the need of moral support as fervently as he did during those first f
ew weeks in Yorkshire.

  It was not long before he did something about it. He suspected that his friend Eddie Straiton, having recently qualified, may not have got a job. He was right; Eddie was desperate to find some work and when Alf offered him the chance to join him in Thirsk, the young man leapt at the opportunity. Alf could not pay him but he would put a roof over his head and feed him, in return for which Eddie would be able to gain some practical experience while helping Alf in his everyday work. Eddie was doubly grateful, as he knew, when applying for jobs elsewhere, that to be able to say that he had had some weeks working in practice, would stand him in good stead.

  Eddie was a great help to Alf in more ways than one. Not only was he good company during the long drives up into the wildest reaches of the Dales, but he was an able assistant. He was put to work early almost every morning as the old Ford car often needed a good push before it could be persuaded to start, but it was up on the bleak hill farms, helping to catch the animals, that Eddie came into his own. The TB Testing was tough work as the two young vets were thrown about by rough, hairy cattle who had no intention of making the job any easier. Eddie was not a big man but he was strong and fearless, and Alf had abiding memories of the small figure with the jet black hair bobbing around in a throng of angry, steaming cows and being hurled around like a cork on the ocean. Once Eddie had his fingers in a beast’s nose, he hung on like a terrier.

  Many years later, Eddie Straiton would reminisce about the time he spent working with his old college friend in the hills and dales of Yorkshire. He went so far as to say that they were among the happiest weeks of his life – hard and penniless, but carefree and full of fine memories.