James Alfred Wight (3 October 1916 – 23 February 1995), better known by his pen name James Herriot, was a British veterinary surgeon and author.
Born in Sunderland, Wight graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College in 1939, returning to England to become a veterinary surgeon in Yorkshire, where he practised for almost 50 years. He is best known for writing If Only They Could Talk and its seven sequels about veterinary practice, animals, and their owners, all set in the 1930s–1950s Yorkshire Dales. Since the publication of the first book in 1970, the series of books has sold some 60 million copies.
The franchise based on his writings was very successful. In addition to the books, there have been several television and film adaptations of Wight's books, including the 1975 film All Creatures Great and Small; a BBC television series of the same name, which ran 90 episodes; and a 2020 UK Channel 5 series, also of the same name.
James Alfred Wight, who was called "Alf" for short, was born on 3 October 1916 in Sunderland, County Durham, England. The family moved to Glasgow when James was a child, and he lived there happily until leaving for Sunderland, and then Thirsk in North Yorkshire, England, in 1940. He had a "soft, lilting Scottish accent," according to actor Christopher Timothy, who portrayed James Herriot in the 1978 series.
Wight attended Yoker Primary School and Hillhead High School. When he was a boy in Glasgow, one of Wight's favourite pastimes was walking with his dog, an Irish Setter, in the Scottish countryside and watching it play with his friends' dogs. He later wrote: "I was intrigued by the character and behaviour of these animals... [I wanted to] spend my life working with them if possible." At age 12, he read an article in Meccano Magazine about veterinary surgeons and was captivated with the idea of a career treating sick animals. Two years later, in 1930, he decided to become a vet after the principal of Glasgow Veterinary College gave a lecture at his high school, leading to his eventual professional career as a vet, first for a brief spell in Sunderland and then from 1940 for the remainder of his working life, in Thirsk, North Yorkshire.
In 1940, Wight met 21 year old Joan Danbury, the daughter of the local borough engineer, who was working as a secretary in an office in Millgate in Thirsk. They courted for 6 months until the start of Wight's military service in the RAF (see below) and married 6 months later on 5 November 1941 at St Mary's Church, Thirsk, while Wight was stationed in Scarborough. The couple were then apart until Wight's return from service (having rotated from Scarborough to other locations for training) in November 1943, with Joan plus the couple's first child James Alexander (known to his parents as "Jimmy" or "Seamus"), born February that year, residing at her parents' home in Sowerby for the duration.
After the couple returned to Thirsk, Wight "carried on TB testing [of] cows in Wensleydale and the top floor of 23 Kirkgate became Joan and Alf's first home". They also had a second child Rosemary Beatrice ("Rosie"), born 9 May 1947.
Wight took six years to complete the five-year programme at Glasgow Veterinary College. He failed several of his classes on the first try (surgery, pathology, physiology, histology, animal husbandry). His setback was partly because of a recurring gastrointestinal problem, which required operations. He graduated on 14 December 1939.
In January 1940, Wight joined a veterinary practice in Sunderland, working for J. J. McDowall. He decided that he would prefer a rural practice and accepted a position in July, based at 23 Kirkgate in Thirsk, near the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors. The practice owner, Donald Sinclair, had enlisted in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and was soon to leave for training; he gave Wight all the practice's income in return for Wight's looking after it during his absence. (His brother, Brian Sinclair, was not yet a vet.) After Sinclair was discharged from the RAF four months later, he asked Wight to stay permanently with the practice, offering a salaried partnership, which Wight accepted.
Wight enlisted in the RAF in April 1941 (although in his books he gave the date as November 1942), undertaking preliminary training in London, Scarborough (during which time he obtained leave to marry Joan in Thirsk, some forty miles away), an unnamed location in Shropshire, then flying training at Winkfield airfield near Windsor and finally to Heaton Park near Manchester. He did well in his training and was one of the first in his flight to fly solo. However after undergoing surgery on an anal fistula in July 1943, he was deemed unfit to fly combat aircraft and was discharged as a leading aircraftman the following November, having trained in the force for 2 years and 7 months without seeing active duty. He joined his wife at her parents' house, where she had lived since he left Thirsk. They lived there until the summer of 1945, when they moved back to 23 Kirkgate after Sinclair and his wife moved to a house of their own. In 1953, the family moved to a house on Topcliffe Road, Thirsk. Wishing for more privacy as the popularity of All Creatures Great and Small increased, in 1977 Wight and his wife moved again, to the smaller village of Thirlby, about 4 miles (6.4 km) from Thirsk; Wight lived there until his death in 1995.
Wight became a full partner in the Thirsk practice in 1949 and retired from full-time practice in 1980 but continued to work part time. He fully retired in 1989 (or 1990 according to some sources); by then, he had worked in his field for roughly 50 years.
In Wight's will, his share of the practice passed to his son, Jim Wight, also a vet. Alf Wight had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1991 and was treated in the Friarage Hospital in Northallerton. On 23 February 1995, he died at his home in Thirlby as a result of the cancer, leaving an estate valued for probate at UK£5,425,873 His remains were cremated and scattered on Sutton Bank. His wife's health declined after his death, and she died on 14 July 1999.
In 2001, a book by Wight's son Jim, was published. A review of The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father noted, "Wight portrays his father as a modest, down-to-earth and generous man, utterly unchanged by fame, a private individual who bottled up his emotions, which led to a nervous breakdown and electroshock therapy in 1960."
Wight's obituary confirmed his modesty and preference to stay away from the public eye. "It doesn't give me any kick at all," he once said. "It's not my world. I wouldn't be happy there. I wouldn't give up being a vet if I had a million pounds. I'm too fond of animals." By 1995, some 50 million of the James Herriot books had been sold. Wight was well aware that clients were unimpressed with the fame that accompanied a best-selling author. "If a farmer calls me with a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw," Wight once said.
Although Wight claimed in the preface of James Herriot's Yorkshire that he had begun to write only after his wife encouraged him when he was 50, he in fact kept copious diaries as a child, as a teenager wrote for his school's magazine, and wrote at least one short story during his college years. In the early 1960s he began analysing the books of successful authors that he enjoyed reading, such as P. G. Wodehouse and Conan Doyle, to understand different writing styles. During this time he also began writing more seriously, composing numerous short stories and, in his own words, 'bombarding' publishers with them.
Based on the year when he started work in Thirsk, the stories in the first two books would have taken place early during the Second World War. Wight preferred to have them take place in a quieter era so he set them in pre-war years. There are also a number of other discrepancies between the life of the fictional "James Herriot" and Wight's own which prevent the works being read purely as autobiography, for example his wife-to-be Joan ("Helen" in the books) was not a farmer's daughter but worked in an office, the couple were married after and not before the start of James' RAF service, and so on. Of course, as Wight's biographer Graham Lord has noted, if the works are regarded as "entertaining and satisfyingly rounded fictionalized short stories" that are only partly based on the writer's own life, that does not really matter.