{"id":4497,"date":"2015-02-24T17:38:14","date_gmt":"2015-02-24T17:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=4497"},"modified":"2020-09-02T15:41:07","modified_gmt":"2020-09-02T15:41:07","slug":"recalling-why-vet-author-james-herriot-never-got-rich-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=4497","title":{"rendered":"Why vet and author James Herriot never got rich"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"James<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

The stories of veterinarean James Herriot, who wrote \u201cAll Creatures Great and Small\u201d and died 20 years ago today aged 79, remain immensely popular and they attract many tourists to Yorkshire but they did not make him a fortune.<\/p>\n

He told me: \u201cI\u2019ve made vast amounts of money but in this country they take it all away from you. I mean, I pay 83% in income tax so it doesn\u2019t leave a lot. It\u2019s made things a wee bit more comfortable but you can\u2019t get rich now, not in England.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was in 1979 when I interviewed him for TV Guide Canada. His real name was James Alfred Wight and he told me that his inspiration came one day when he finished his pint of McEwan\u2019s Export ale and strode from the Three Tuns public house into the quiet Yorkshire evening. Once more, the villagers of Thirsk in the North Riding had supped their bitter entranced with his yarns about life as a country veterinarean in the 1930s.<\/p>\n

\"all<\/a>With Don, a large black Labrador, and Hector, a Jack Russell terrier, at his heels, he arrived home and declared: \u201cI\u2019m going to write a book.\u201d Joan Wight, his wife of 25 years, had heard that before. She smiled indulgently and said, \u201cOld vets of 50 don\u2019t start writing books.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twelve years later, the author told me, \u201cI suppose she had a point but that sort of nettled me into it. I kept talking about the fact that I would write one day and then she made that remark.\u201d His voice still had traces of a youth spent in Glasgow. \u201cIt made me think, well, right, I\u2019ll show her. So I rushed out and bought a lot of paper and I started to write.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing did not come easy: \u201cThe hardest thing was to realise that I couldn\u2019t write. Aye, that was a nasty blow. When I\u2019d written it down, I realised it was just terrible, you see. It was rather like a child\u2019s school essay. Great, long balanced sentences that nobody in his right senses would ever think of paying money to read.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince they were supposed to be lighthearted books, I had to evolve some sort of light, conversational style. You\u2019ve heard the phrase \u2018artful artlessness\u2019? That\u2019s what I aimed at and it was damned hard work. I rewrote again and again. I think I was always regarded as something of a raconteur but on holiday I couldn\u2019t even write postcards. My wife always wrote them for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

The eventual result was a novel titled \u201cIf Only They Could Talk\u201d, a charmingly rustic and amusing account of Wight\u2019s own introduction into the quaint and curious ways of farmers in the rolling hills of Yorkshire\u2019s Pennine country before World War II with a combustible older partner he calls in his books Siegfried Farnon.<\/p>\n

It led to another book, \u201cIt Shouldn\u2019t Happen to a Vet\u201d and they both sold comfortably. But then an American publisher picked them up and packaged them as one under the inspired title of \u201cAll Creatures Great and Small\u201d, and remarkable things began to happen remarkably fast.<\/p>\n

\"All<\/a>Herriot said, \u201cThe books were more or less limping along here and then they found out I was a bestseller in the United States and they began to take a bit of notice at home.\u201d More books followed, packaged in the States as \u201cAll Things Bright and Beautiful\u201d and \u201cAll Things Wise and Wonderful\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anthony Hopkins starred as Siegfried Farnon in a feature film, \u201cAll Things Great and Small\u201d in 1975 with Simon Ward as Herriot and \u201cIt Shouldn\u2019t Happen to a Vet\u201d (1977) starred John Alderton as Herriot with Colin Blakely as Siegfried. In 1977, BBC-TV launched a 13-part series of \u201cAll Creatures Great and Small\u201d with Robert Hardy as Siegfried and Christopher Timothy as Herriot. It reached an audience of 19 million every Sunday night and ran on and off until 1990 and is still available on DVD.<\/p>\n

When I interviewed him, he was, at 62, still a full-time working veterinarean, still in partnership with Siegfried (he had given up hiding his own identity by not Siegfried\u2019s). Herriot said, \u201cI\u2019ve been inveigled to go to a tax haven. There\u2019s not many of me left in this country, Most bestselling authours are away in Ireland, where they pay no tax at all; in Jersey, where they pay 10%; or on the Isle of Mann, where it\u2019s much the same. But I stay here and pay my 83%. I like it here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Little wonder. Pennine country is spectacular. There are no massive peaks but the high grassy hills are magnificent. He said: \u201cI like to get up into the hills. About my only pleasure pursuit these days is dog-walking. I\u2019ve always carried two of them around in the car. The terrier died recently but I\u2019ve still the Labrador. One of the nicest things about my job is to be able to stop, get out of the car and walk along the top of a hill with the dog. The countryside around here is practically unchanged.\u201d<\/p>\n

His stories traveled widely but Herriot was content to stay at home, he said: \u201cI\u2019ve done two tours of the States and I\u2019ve had many invitations to go to Canada, New Zealand and Australia, but when I do these rather exhausting publicity tours, I come straight back, put my gumboots on and get back to my veterinary work. It\u2019s a bit much, so I\u2019ve opted out of all that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He never wrote about modern times and he was nostalgic for the old days, he said: \u201cWhen science comes in, the fun goes out. In those old days, we were a very unscientific profession and farmers were unscientific people. There\u2019s always fun in dealing with animals but there\u2019s nothing like 30 years ago \u2013 the lovely old characters with their witchcraft cures and their bigotries, all their funny old ideas. And the funny old vets, too. Bigger farms today are run by very clever, very knowledgeable young farmers. They\u2019re a lot more efficient than their forefathers were but they\u2019re not nearly as interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett The stories of veterinarean James Herriot, who wrote \u201cAll Creatures Great and Small\u201d and died 20 years ago today aged 79, remain immensely popular and they attract many tourists to Yorkshire but they did not make him … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,6,1263,2257,15],"tags":[2361,2360],"class_list":["post-4497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-recalling","category-television","tag-all-creatures-great-and-small","tag-james-herriot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4497"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10094,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4497\/revisions\/10094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}