James Herriot was not, in one sense, a writer. He was a veterinary surgeon who had a gift for storytelling and a wife who told him he should write it all down. The resulting six books — published between 1970 and 1992 — have sold over 60 million copies worldwide and inspired two major television adaptations. He wrote them between surgery appointments, on the kitchen table, in his fifties.
Understanding who James Alfred Wight actually was — where he came from, how he ended up in the Yorkshire Dales, what his life was actually like in the 1930s and 40s when the stories are set — makes both the books and the television series significantly richer. This is that story.
James Alfred Wight was born in Sunderland in 1916, grew up in Glasgow and trained as a veterinary surgeon at the Glasgow Veterinary College, graduating in 1939. He answered an advertisement for an assistant to a veterinary practice in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, travelled by train for the interview, and was offered the position by Donald Sinclair — the man who became Siegfried Farnon in the books — on the spot.
He had never been to the Yorkshire Dales. He had grown up in cities. His first encounters with the farming life of the Dales — the farms, the farmers, the animals and the landscape — were the encounters he later wrote about.
He married Joan Danbury in 1941; she became Helen in the books. He served in the RAF during the war, returned to Thirsk, eventually became a full partner in the practice, and practised there until the late 1980s. He died in 1995, aged seventy-eight, sixteen years after the publication of the first television adaptation had made him one of the best-known writers in Britain.
He wrote under a pseudonym — James Herriot — to avoid any professional complications from writing about his patients and clients, even in heavily fictionalised form. The name came from a goalkeeper he saw on television one evening. He kept the pseudonym throughout his career, and many readers never knew his real name.
His real name was on his surgery door in Thirsk. Patients who read the books knew exactly who the author was. This was not a secret. It was just not publicised.
The books are set primarily in the late 1930s and early 1940s — the years immediately before and during the Second World War. The veterinary practice Wight joined was a rural practice dealing almost entirely with farm animals: cows, horses, pigs, sheep. This was the era before effective antibiotics, before modern diagnostic equipment, before the industrialisation of farming. A vet in rural North Yorkshire in 1940 was performing operations in muddy fields by lamplight, treating animals by physical examination alone.
This world is what both television adaptations recreated. The Channel 5 version is particularly good at it — the detail of the farming methods, the cold, the mud, the professional uncertainty of a young vet learning on the job in a landscape he has never worked in before.
The World of James Herriot in Thirsk occupies the original veterinary practice at 23 Kirkgate — the building where Wight worked and where Donald Sinclair ran his practice. The museum restores the house to its 1940s appearance and tells the full story of the books and the television adaptations.
Thirsk is east of the Dales, in the Vale of York. Our All Creatures tour focuses on the Channel 5 filming locations in the Dales themselves rather than Thirsk — but the museum is worth visiting on an independent trip if you want the full biographical context.
The real story of James Wight and the Dales he worked in is part of every All Creatures Great & Small tour. Your expert storyteller weaves the biography throughout the day.