The Real James Herriot (3 page)

Jim Murray, a Scottish cowman working in North Yorkshire, presented a small, wiry bundle of displeasure as he stood, his jaw set like a vice, staring into my face. His sharp little eyes were about an inch from my own. I was still in my early years in Thirsk as a fully qualified veterinary surgeon and thought I had performed a good professional job in delivering a fine calf out of a pedigree Beef Shorthorn cow but I could sense that he did not share my feelings of satisfaction.

‘You young vets are all the same!' he growled. ‘Always leavin' the soap in the watter!'

Having been so engrossed in my task, I had completely forgotten about the nice, clean bar of soap that the cowman had provided for me; I had left it simmering gently in the bucket of scalding hot water. Jim was now fingering a small, green, glutinous ball that had previously been his soap.

‘Yer faither never does this!' he barked. ‘He never wastes onything. A guid Scotsman never wastes onything!'

This was not the first time I had been unfavourably compared to my father, but I had an ace up my sleeve. ‘I'm sorry about this, Jim,' I replied, ‘it won't happen again. But I must tell you that you're wrong about my dad. He's not a Scotsman. He's an Englishman.'

‘Awa wi' ye!' was the sharp reply as the little figure stumped indignantly out of the cowshed. Another successful visit from J. A. Wight junior had drawn to a close.

Jim Murray was not alone in his belief that Alf Wight was a Scotsman as he never lost the soft Glaswegian accent he developed over his twenty-three years in that great Scottish city. Long after he had become James Herriot, newspaper articles still often referred to him as the ‘Scottish vet who adopted Yorkshire as his home'. Indeed, he is described on the inside jacket of his third book,
Let Sleeping Vets Lie,
as being born in Glasgow and practising all his life in Yorkshire. He was not a Scotsman, nor did he spend his entire life as a practising veterinary surgeon in Yorkshire. He was an Englishman born of English parents in an English town.

James Alfred Wight was born on 3 October 1916 in the industrial north-eastern town of Sunderland. He did not remain there long. Aged just three weeks, he was moved to Glasgow where he was to spend the formative years of his life. Although he left his birthplace as such a tiny creature, he retained close connections with Sunderland and visited it regularly throughout the years when he lived in Glasgow.

Although Alf was an only child, he was, in effect, part of a very large family. Both his parents came from large families so he inherited a host of uncles, aunts and cousins, and he kept in close touch with them throughout his life.

Alf Wight was born at 111 Brandling Street, a modest terraced house in the Roker area of Sunderland. The name of the house was ‘Fashoda' and it was owned by Robert Bell, his maternal grandfather who was a printer by trade. His parents, James Henry Wight and Hannah Bell, had married on 17 July 1915 in the Primitive Methodist chapel in Williamson Terrace, Sunderland, where his father had been the organist. Following the wedding they had moved to Glasgow to live, but Hannah Wight returned to the family home in Sunderland fifteen months later, especially to have her baby.

Alf's father, Jim Wight, was by trade a ship plater, like his father before him. The major sources of employment in Sunderland were ship-building, coal-mining and steel-working and in those early years of the century the Sunderland shipyards were booming. The onset of World War One ensured that there was plenty of work, with one third of the adult male population employed in the shipbuilding industry. Despite holding down a steady job in the Sunderland shipyards, Alf's father had left his home town for alternative employment in Glasgow in November 1914 – eight months before he was married. This seems surprising but there were good reasons for his doing so. He enjoyed his work in the shipyards but, unlike the majority of his workmates, Jim Wight was more than just a ship plater; he was also an accomplished musician – one of the qualities that appealed to his future wife during their courtship in the years before the war.

He had been playing in cinemas in Sunderland, partly to supplement his earnings but also to satisfy his great love of playing the piano and the organ. Hannah, too, loved music. Her parents were well known in local Sunderland music circles, within which she, herself, was an accomplished contralto. She sang at many minor concerts but she longed to improve herself, and Sunderland, despite its many good
qualities, was not really the cultural centre of the north. Where else in Britain could she go that would ensure that her husband could carry on earning his living in the shipyards, and where both of them could further their musical aspirations? Glasgow fitted the bill perfectly. Hannah always wanted to better herself, and her determination to move in cultured circles resulted in her acquiring the title of ‘Duchess' from her more down-to-earth relatives. However, behind the rather ‘superior' front she displayed to the world, there were fine qualities. She was a dedicated wife and mother, and this determination to achieve the best for her family would, in the years to come, contribute substantially to the future success of her son.

In 1914, therefore, this forceful young lady sent her future husband off to the big, vibrant city that teemed with cinemas, theatres and concert halls – one that reverberated not only with the clatter of shipyards and steel, but with the sound of music. There, Jim Wight was able to find work among the cinemas and theatres as well as in the great shipyards on the River Clyde.

In a photograph of Jim and Hannah's wedding in 1915, the large families of the Wights and Bells are there for all to see. The quality of the photograph, in which many of Alf's favourite uncles and aunts feature, is still very good despite being taken over eighty years ago. In the back row of the wedding group are two young men, Matt and Bob Wight, both of them brothers of Jim. They were two uncles with whom Alf would spend a great deal of time in his youth. Matthew Wight was barely thirteen years older than Alf who regarded him more as a brother than an uncle. He was an open-faced, jolly man with a mischievous smile, a natural practical joker who spent a large proportion of his life laughing. The other young man, Robert Wight, was far more serious-minded. He shared the same acute sense of humour common to most of the two families but, in addition, he was a deep thinker and a man of great principle. Uncle Bob was an enthusiast and an optimist, one who regarded the world as a place of opportunity. It was these qualities that would appeal so much to the young Alf Wight during his formative years. Robert Wight was the uncle upon whom he would model himself.

Sitting in front of Jim Wight in the old photograph is a young man in army uniform. This was Alfred Wight, Jim's younger brother and the only one of Alf's uncles whom he was never to know. He was a sergeant in the 19th Battalion of the Durham Light Infantry and tragically lost his life on the terrible Somme battlefield only one year after the
photograph was taken. The family was devastated by this sad waste of a young life but his name lived on. Alf, who was born fifteen months later, was named after the uncle who had sacrificed his life on that fateful day.

The relatives on the Bell side of the family were a crowd of extroverts; they spoke their minds and did not care what the rest of the world thought about it. Two faces looking out from the wedding photograph, belonging to Stan and Jinny, Hannah's brother and sister, epitomise this effervescent quality of the Bell family. Uncle Stan, a great favourite with Alf, was a small, dapper man with a smiling face that oozed friendliness. In common with Alf's other uncles, he was a fanatical football fan and attended the home games at Sunderland producing a running commentary for all to hear, his head bobbing in every direction whilst giving his forthright opinions. What proportion of the game he actually saw was open to question. Jim Wight (or ‘Pop' as he was always called by Alf and the rest of the family) was just the opposite. He was no less a devoted follower of the fortunes of the club but apart from, perhaps, a satisfied smile or an agonised spasm of the facial muscles, he betrayed little emotion.

On later visits to Glasgow, Alf always derived a great deal of amusement from watching his father – a quiet, reserved and very gentlemanly man – attempt to merge into obscurity when in the company of his high-spirited relatives. Pop never forgot a visit to Ibrox Stadium in Glasgow where Stan, despite being surrounded by glowering Glasgow Rangers fans, vociferously delivered his forthright opinion of their team, describing the players as ‘Duck Eggs!' This was a common old Sunderland expression and one did not need to be a native of the north-east of England to appreciate its finer meaning. Pop was thankful to leave the stadium alive.

Stan was not the only Bell to send Pop scuttling for cover. He endured many embarrassing situations while in the company of his sister-in-law, Jinny, who would loudly voice her opinion in public places, often instigating an equally noisy response. Jinny was quite happy with this; she quite enjoyed a scene, but she rarely received the support of her brother-in-law. Pop learned one thing quickly following his association with the Bell family – the art of effecting a swift and silent disappearance.

Late in the October of 1916, at the age of barely three weeks, baby Alfred Wight left Sunderland to take up residence in Scotland's largest city –
one that would be his home for the first twenty-three years of his life. His happy and fulfilling childhood days spent amongst the outgoing and friendly people of this big, noisy city, resulted in Alf Wight forever regarding himself as a Glaswegian at heart.

His feeling for the city is displayed in the dedication that is at the beginning of his fourth book,
Vet in Harness.
It reads simply, ‘With love to my mother in dear old Glasgow Town'.

He was not alone in his great affection for this charismatic city. Many Glaswegians reminisce about their origins with great pride, despite the city having, over the years, developed something of an unenviable reputation. Between the wars, many of the big cities of Britain had a poor image but Glasgow's was the worst of all. Later on, Alf used to observe, with ill-concealed anger, television programmes portraying it as a sordid mass of filthy slums inhabited by gangs that would slit your throat first and ask questions later. ‘No one bothers to speak of Glasgow's finer qualities,' he would exclaim. ‘There is no mention of the warm and friendly people, nor of the splendid buildings, parks and art galleries. And what about the wonderful country all around that can be reached so easily?'

Glasgow used to be described as a ‘dirty picture in a beautiful frame'. Many parts, admittedly, were not particularly edifying but where else in Britain was there a massive city with such magnificent scenery so close at hand? The residents of Glasgow are fortunate indeed to have such a beautiful playground on their doorstep and this was not lost on the young Alfred Wight. When he was older, he would escape the bustle and grime of the city whenever he could to head out for the hills and glens that were so accessible. Those happy hours he spent in Glasgow's ‘beautiful frame' were to instil in him that great appreciation of the wild and unspoilt landscapes about which he would write with such feeling so many years later.

One of the most dominant features of the architecture of Glasgow are the tenements. These gaunt, multi-storey buildings stand over the city streets like giant sentinels and have been the epitome of Glasgow's appearance since well into the last century when huge numbers of immigrants flooded into the city to find work. Glasgow, known at that time as ‘The Second City of the Empire', was a booming city, and the tenements provided the answer to the housing problem; they were, in effect, one of the earliest examples in Britain of the high-rise blocks of flats.

Yoker is a suburb of Glasgow, on the east bank of the River Clyde, and it was here, in a ground-floor flat of a tenement in Yoker Road (later re-named Dumbarton Road), that the Wight family had their first of three homes in the city.

The tenement buildings of Glasgow have a terrible reputation of being the embodiment of all that is to do with poverty and squalor. In fact, they varied widely in their degrees of respectability. The black tenements of the Gorbals, on the other side of the River Clyde, were undeniably some of the most depressing buildings imaginable, both outside and in. There was a central passageway, the ‘close', through which access was gained to the dingy flats on either side – with dark, forbidding stairways snaking up to the higher levels of the building. These tenements were often damp, dirty and appallingly overcrowded. Many families in the slum areas of Glasgow, like the Gorbals or Cowcaddens on the other side of the city, lived squashed together in one or two rooms. Toilet provision was rudimentary, with up to twenty or thirty people sharing one privy which, commonly, was not even within the building. Poverty and disease were rife. Many children developed rickets through malnutrition and I can remember a young woman who worked for my grandmother, having the bowed legs that betrayed a childhood of deprivation and hardship. No wonder the people living in these awful conditions would often turn to violence and drink to seek some escape from their squalid existence.