'Udderly magical!'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2071496/Young-James-Herriot- New-drama-documents-legendary-vets-unruly-college-days.html


Udderly magical! A new drama documents James Herriot's unruly college days and his son says the legendary vet would approve


By Jim Wight




My father would, I think, have been secretly pleased with Young James Herriot, the new three-part drama based on his student days. He was a shy and unassuming man who was almost embarrassed by the success of his books and the TV show All Creatures

Great And Small, which was based on them. But I’m sure he would have approved of this latest adaptation, which portrays his life as a veterinary student in Glasgow in the 1930s.

Although people always assume James Herriot was a Yorkshireman, he was born in Glasgow and lived there until he was 24 – he kept his Scottish accent until the day he died. A huge part of his soul was always in Glasgow.


The whole show is a slice of history, and many of the storylines come from the notebooks and diaries he kept back then. He’d originally fancied himself as a writer or a journalist, and although he never actually published anything about his student days, many of his books allude to them.

He’d always loved animals, and when he was 15 he read an article in Meccano Magazine about vets and decided that was what he wanted to do. While still at school, he phoned Glasgow Veterinary College and the Principal himself, Dr Whitehouse, answered. Dad said, ‘I fancy being a vet.’ The answer was, ‘Great, when can you start?’

It didn’t matter that he was studying English, French and Latin – nowadays students must have A grades in three science A-levels. My father was lucky because he had enterprising parents who helped fund his studies. His father, my grandfather, was a shipyard worker who was often out of work, but supplemented his income by playing the piano in cinemas.


My grandmother was not only a talented singer, but she also earned money as a seamstress, making wedding dresses for the rich people of Glasgow. She was the main breadwinner, and between them they made enough money to send my father first to the fee-paying Hillhead High School and then on to college.
When my father arrived in 1933, Glasgow Veterinary College was a strange place. The Government had decided to close it down in 1925 because there was another college in Edinburgh, but the governors wanted to keep it open, so they had to survive on their wits and on funding from philanthropists. Many of the teachers were retired vets with no teaching experience, and it was a culture shock at first for my father who had come straight from the strictly regimented Hillhead.

He found it a wild and unruly place where nobody seemed to care whether you passed your exams or not. No one was forced to attend lectures and he wrote about students throwing paper planes around during classes – it sounds fantastic. Nowadays, if students fail their exams twice they’re out; in my father’s day there were students who had been there for years.


There’s one such character in the show called McAloon, played by Ben Lloyd-Hughes, who keeps failing his exams. It’s a fictitious name, but Dad wrote about a friend just like him; he’d been there 14 years and only got as far as the second year, but as long as his parents were happy to keep paying for him he was allowed to stay on. Partly because it had no money, the college would farm students out to practices where they would be given a tremendous amount of responsibility. It gave all the students a feeling of pride and a lot of practical experience.
When my father started he had plenty of enthusiasm but very little confidence. The young actor who plays him, Iain De Caestecker, actually went to the same school as Dad and really gets across how keen he was. We chatted a few times and I told him how my father always used to say people who are full of confidence often aren’t too bright – it’s intelligent people who realise their shortcomings.

Back then, trainee vets made up all their own medicines; they had to learn about a huge number of drugs and the dosages for different animals. My father writes about an endless list of treatments that aren’t used any more; nettles, acids, carbons, vegetable extracts. It was a frightening catalogue and the ingredients were all categorised under their Latin names with every description of their actions on horses, cows, sheep or dogs.


It’s a joy for me to see his student days recreated because I know there’s still so much interest in my father, and many people have told me they want to know more about his younger days. The idea initially came from Johnny Byrne, the main writer on All Creatures Great And Small. I handed over all the archive material and my biography of my father, and we talked about his plans for a script. It’s taken ten years to finally make it to the small screen.
Although he always kept notebooks, Dad didn’t start writing his stories until he was in his 50s. By then he was settled in Thirsk in North Yorkshire, the place he went to almost directly after finishing veterinary college and which is now known as Herriot Country. His real name wasn’t James Herriot. He was born James Alfred Wight, but to his friends and family he was always Alf. In the late 1960s professional etiquette decreed that to put your name to your writing would be construed as advertising, so he had to find a pseudonym.

Many of the names he thought of belonged to real vets, but one night he was watching football on TV and there was a Scottish goalkeeper playing for Birmingham City called Jim Herriot. There was no vet called Herriot, he liked the name and that was that. His first attempt at a novel, called The Art And The Science, was actually about his student days, but he couldn’t find a publisher. He revised and revised it, and made it more about his life as a Yorkshire Dales vet, until it became If Only They Could Talk, which was published in 1970.
This and all the following books became global bestsellers, and it is estimated that, to date, he has sold more than 80 million worldwide. His writing changed his life, although it never changed his lifestyle and he remained Alf the vet to everyone who knew him. It gave him financial security, but he only wanted enough money to feel comfortable and after that he wasn’t interested.

He wasn’t greedy – that’s another contrast with a lot of what goes on today. His great skill was to make an interesting story out of an everyday event. Or, as one of the local farmers told him, ‘I think yer books are all about nowt.’ But his books were therapeutic – many people wrote to tell him how they’d helped them get over depression or bad times in their lives. If he were still alive, I think he’d have been proud to see his college days depicted and he’d have thought the acting tremendous. But he would have kept quiet about it. That’s the way he was.

Young James Herriot, BBC1, 18, 19 and 20 December, 9pm.