A vet’s life for father and son (From York Press)

Jim Wight speaks ahead of launch of a new James Herriot book

11:51am Saturday 18th September 2010 in Books By Stephen Lewis

Fifteen years after his death, Alf Wight – aka James Herriot – is as much-loved as ever. His son, Jim, spoke to STEPHEN LEWIS at the launch of a new book about his famous dad.

JIM Wight lifts a glass of clear, viscous liquid off the shelf of what used to be his father’s veterinary pharmacy. His face splits in a grin. “Castor oil for cattle!” he says. “This is what the old farmers used to call ‘opening medicine!’”

He pauses for a moment to let my imagination work, before explaining. “The worst thing for a cow, from a farmer’s point of view, was a blockage. That was disastrous. As the old vet in Glasgow who taught my father used to say: “keep the bowels open, and trust to God!”

Jim’s father, of course, was Alf Wight: better known to millions of fans around the world as James Herriot.

I’ve come up to Thirsk to meet him at the launch of a new book about his famous father: WR Mitchell’s Herriot: A Vet’s Life. The book launch is taking place at 23 Kirkgate in Thirsk – the very building from which Alf’s father practised in the 1940s and early 1950s, and which was made famous in the Herriot books and TV series as Skeldale House.

It is now, of course, The World of James Herriot museum. In the front room, a queue of people are waiting to get copies of their books signed, both by Jim and the new book’s author, Bill Mitchell – himself a bit of a Yorkshire icon, having edited the Dalesman for many years. But I manage to persuade Jim to give me a quick tour of the house in which he grew up, during the course of which we end up in the pharmacy.

There are shelves and shelves of medicines, with quaint names such as Hoose mixture and Universal Cattle Medicine. “See a vet with a bottle of this in his hand, and you knew he didn’t have a clue what was wrong!” Mr Wight says cheerfully. “This was supposed to cure everything!”

Jim lived in this house – with its huge, stone-flagged kitchen, its tiled hallways, surgery, and oddly small sitting room crammed with stuffed chairs – until he was ten years old.

It was, he admits, bitterly cold in winter. The only heating was an anthracite stove, another small fire, and the range in the kitchen.

“It was freezing cold. I remember once my dad saying to me, ‘Jim, you look cold.’ ‘Yes, I’m cold,’ I replied. ‘Well, run, then!’” Jim laughs. “That’s what we used to do to get warm, we ran. The house was big enough!”

But he has many happy memories, too. It was from here, after all, that he went out with his father on his rounds. “I did that from the age of three. I was a fully qualified vet by the age of five!”

As a little boy, he loved it – visiting all the different farms, meeting all the animals. “It was tremendous, playing with the equipment, setting things up, calving cows, lambing sheep. For a little lad, it was exciting.”

Small wonder that Jim himself went on to become a vet. By the late 1960s, he was fully qualified and practising in Staffordshire, when his father asked him to come and work for him at his Thirsk practice.

Alf was, at the time, working on what was to become his first book, If Only They Could Talk. He needed Jim to help out so he’d have more time for his writing. “I did the night work for him,” Jim says.

Sales were slow at first, but after being published in the United States as All Creatures Great And Small, the book became a sensation.

His dad wasn’t changed by success, however, Jim recalls. He was always a modest, unassuming man. “And he didn’t change.” Unlike most best-selling authors of the time, he refused to leave the home he loved – paying a whacking 83 per cent taxes on his earnings as a result of staying in the UK. “He used to joke that that’s why he got his OBE!” When he bought a house, it was a modest bungalow: and he was never overly concerned about money, Jim says.

The farmers who were his clients were equally unimpressed by his celebrity. Jim remembers an American once asking a farmer what it was like to have James Herriot as his vet. “Oh, he’s only one of the boys around here,” the man replied. Another farmer once memorably described Alf’s books as “being all about nowt”.

Well, they weren’t, of course. They captured, with humour and love, the life of the Dales farmer of the 1940s and 50s. And they launched a gallery of unforgettable characters on the world: not least among them Herriot’s colleagues Siegfried and Tristan Farnan.

Siegfried, bombastic and irascible, and his sometimes unreliable younger brother Tristan, are often the heart and soul of the books. They were based on two real-life brothers, Donald and Brian Sinclair, vets who worked in Thirsk with the young Alf – and his dad captured them beautifully on the page, Jim says. If anything, he underplayed the characters. Donald in particular was hugely eccentric.

In the famous TV series Siegfried was played by the actor Robert Hardy. As Jim tells it, Hardy once met the man whose character he was playing, and asked Donald if he thought he was the right person for the part. “No I don’t,” came the answer. “It should have been somebody with manners – somebody like Rex Harrison.”

Bill Mitchell’s new book is subtitled ‘The Real Story Of Alf Wight’ – but it’s not a biography as such: Jim himself has already written that. Instead, it is one Yorkshire icon writing a gentle memoir about another, a man who he once interviewed. There are plenty of warm anecdotes here – including the one about the Herriots’ honeymoon. Alf had wed Joan on November 5, 1941, and the couple spent their honeymoon at the Wheatsheaf in Carperby. But, notes Bill in his book, “two days of their five day honeymoon were spent tuberculin-testing cattle”. Alf was later to say: “The farmers were aghast that I should spend part of my honeymoon doing vet’s work. Yet it was a very good honeymoon and it was cheap.”

Herriot: A Vet’s Life, isn’t just about Herriot himself, however, despite the title. There are plenty of stories of Bill’s own meetings with the farmers and characters of Yorkshire in here too.

“My experience of the Dales farmers and Alf’s overlapped,” the author says. “I remember the old days when you stepped into a kitchen and saw bacon hanging from the ceiling, and the kettle singing its head off all day long.”

The book is as much a tribute to those people as it is to the vet who brought their stories so vividly and gloriously alive on the page.

• Herriot: A Vet’s Life by WR Mitchell is published by Great Northern books, priced £15.99.