‘His books are a terrific antidote to today’
With a new adaptation of the James Herriot books about to air, Claire Allfree looks back at the man behind the tales
‘Agrey character.” That’s how Alf Wight, aka James Herriot and the author of eight comic masterpieces chronicling life as a Yorkshire vet in the Forties, used to describe himself. “He always thought of himself as the quiet one, plunged in among all these extraordinary characters – Siegfried, Tristan, Mrs Pumphrey,” says his son Jim Wight, 77, who accompanied his father on visits from the age of two and joined him at the practice in 1967. “He was a modest man. Even when he became rich he still lived in a bungalow.”
Quiet he may have been, but for millions of people James Herriot needs no introduction. For those with a TV set during the late Seventies, this unassuming Yorkshire vet is indelibly associated with memories of Christopher Timothy lying on a cobbled barn floor with his arm stuck halfway up a cow’s bottom. The highly successful BBC adaptation, All Creatures Great and Small, which ran between 1978 and 1980 and then returned for another four series between 1988 and 1990, starred Timothy as Herriot, Robert Hardy as his irascible boss Siegfried Farnon, and Peter Davison as Siegfried’s endearingly feckless younger brother Tristan.
It was staple family viewing and full of stories about bulls with sunstroke, calves yanked from their mothers by rope and prankster Tristan terrifying farmers by driving cars into their yards with his head beneath the steering wheel. Yet Wight’s best-selling novels, the first of which, If Only They Could Talk, was published in 1970, were adored too – gently perfect tales suffused with unforced pathos and a keen eye for the absurd; softly plangent skits about a way of life that had all but disappeared.
Now the makers of a new Channel 5 adaptation, starring newcomer Nicholas Ralph as Herriot and Samuel West as Siegfried, are hoping a new generation will fall in love with the charming, antic world of James Herriot all over again.
What would Wight have thought of Ralph, whom we first see saying a tremulous goodbye to his anxious parents on a Glasgow platform?
“My father never wanted Christopher to be too dominant,” says Jim. “And I think Ralph has got it right, too. Not too spectacular or flamboyant.”
Alf Wight was always an improbable star: a man of reserve who wrote laugh-out-loud novels, cared more about his beloved Sunderland winning the FA cup than his stratospheric sales, and who, despite producing largely autobiographical books, had a horror of talking about himself.
Born in Sunderland in 1916, he moved to Glasgow with his parents when he was only a few weeks old. His childhood was happy but money was short. His father worked as a steel plater at the docks while his fiercely determined mother set up a seamstress business, making wedding dresses for the middle classes. Somehow the couple managed to scrabble together the money to send the animal-mad Alf to veterinary school in Glasgow, despite being anxious the industry was dying out with the decline of the working horse.
Newly qualified in 1939, Wight was lucky to get a job, yet his introduction to the profession was brutal, and not just because of Donald Sinclair, renamed Siegfried in the books and a boss so unpredictable, volatile and distracted he forgot Wight was even coming for an interview.
“My dad didn’t know one end of a cow from the other when he first arrived in Thirsk,” says Jim, of the pretty market town Wight renamed Darrowby.
“And, of course, Donald immediately upped and left as soon as my dad arrived, which is not in the books, leaving my dad to run the practice all by himself. The Yorkshire farmers didn’t know what to make of him. But it was the Battle of Britain, and Donald wanted to join the RAF.”
Wight soon wanted to join up too. In March 1941 the Luftwaffe bombed his house in Glasgow and, although his parents survived, he applied straight away “in a frenzy of rage”. Yet Wight was not called up for another 20 months, by which point he had married and Jim was on the way. Wight wrote that leaving his wife Joan (Helen in the books) was one of the “blackest days” of his life.
He did not become an airman, however: gastroenteritis put paid to his dreams of revenge. Perhaps it was just as well. “Bloody awful,” says the flying instructor of his first solo flight, at the start of his 1976 book Vets Might Fly.
All the same, Wight was a man who felt failure keenly and he redoubled his efforts over the next two decades to make up for that setback with success in his veterinary career.
But life as a vet in the Yorkshire Dales was tough and he and Donald were hopeless accountants, for years keeping their money in a pint pot on the mantelpiece. In 1960, his father died and, despite having sent his parents money every week, Wight, by now the father of two teenage children himself, still felt financially and emotionally in their debt. He also felt deeply ashamed that, unlike them, he had been unable to afford to pay for his children’s education. Not long after the loss of his dad he had a breakdown.
“He was a very sensitive man,” says Jim, who writes extensively about his father’s illness in his 1999 biography The Real James Herriot. “He became ill when I was in the sixth form. It lasted two years and he worked his way out of it. I admired him at the time because he never stopped working. But one of the problems was that he didn’t open up. We tried to get him to come forth and talk about it.”
Instead, Wight endured electroconvulsive therapy. “When he had recovered he said to me, ‘I don’t know what I was bothered about. The family are doing all right, the practice is doing all right.’ But of course, it’s a strange thing these nervous breakdowns that people have, these anxiety problems. They are not simple to analyse at all. But he got over it and that was that.”
Prompted by his experiences, Wight became a Samaritan. He also started writing. He had wanted to be a writer ever since he left school and often kept a diary. A photograph from the early Sixties shows him tapping away on his typewriter in front of the TV, Joan reading beside him, a gas heater on the wall. “He started to write as a therapy because he felt so relieved. He thought: ‘I’ve come through this, everything is OK.’”
Success didn’t come overnight. His first book, inspired by the rich kaleidoscope of people and animals he’d encountered in the Dales, took several years to write, partly because he was working full-time in the practice. It was rejected several times and after each polite no he doggedly rewrote it.
“He would not give up. That was a great lesson to a young man like me just starting out as a vet: he believed in himself and he had the determination to succeed,” says Jim. In 1970 If Only They Could Talk was published to modest sales figures; two years later it and its follow-up It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet were published as a single volume in America and by 1973 had sold well over a million copies. Within a few years tourists were flocking to the practice for book signings.
Wight always had an ambivalent relationship to fame. He rarely did interviews or appeared on TV. Andy Barrett, who worked at the practice for six years from 1988 and who advised on the new TV remake, remembers going to the pub with Wight and Sinclair on the day he met them and being amazed when a group of people mobbed the two men as they got out of the car. His new boss hadn’t mentioned his famous alter ego at all.
(Wight was gobsmacked, says Jim, when the actor Simon Ward was cast to play him in the 1975 feature film All Creatures Great and Small: Ward was fresh from playing Winston Churchill.)
Wight died in 1995 but leaves an untouchable legacy of stories about the cycle of life and death. “Among the thousands of letters my father received, a large number were from people saying how much his books had helped them at periods of great suffering,” says Jim. “His books are a terrific antidote to the times we are living in. A tonic.”
All Creatures Great and Small begins on Channel 5 at 9pm tomorrow
‘My dad didn’t know one end of a cow from the other when he arrived in Thirsk’
‘He believed in himself and he had the determination to succeed’