James Herriot

James Herriot was the pen name of a Yorkshire veterinary surgeon who, at the age of fifty, began writing stories about his experiences treating farm animals in the Yorkshire Dales and produced a series of books that became, improbably and wonderfully, one of the great publishing phenomena of the late twentieth century. His memoirs — warm, funny, modest, and populated by an unforgettable cast of human and animal characters — sold over sixty million copies, were translated into dozens of languages, and introduced the world to a vanishing rural England of stone-walled fields, market-day towns, and hard-bitten farmers whose stoicism and dry humour Herriot chronicled with affection and a storyteller’s instinct for the perfect anecdote.

Alf Wight of Thirsk

James Alfred Wight was born in Sunderland in 1916 and grew up in Glasgow, where his father worked as a shipyard joiner and cinema pianist. He studied at Glasgow Veterinary College, qualifying in 1939, and after a brief period as an assistant in Sunderland, he answered an advertisement for a veterinary assistant in Thirsk, a small market town in the North Riding of Yorkshire.

He arrived in Thirsk in 1940 and stayed for the rest of his life. His employer — and later partner — was Donald Sinclair, a brilliant, eccentric, and temperamental veterinarian who became the model for the character “Siegfried Farnon” in the books. Sinclair’s younger brother Brian became “Tristan Farnon.” Wight himself was “James Herriot,” a name he chose after hearing a Scottish footballer’s name during a television broadcast.

The practice was a mixed one — cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats — and the work was physically demanding and often unglamorous: calving cows in freezing barns at three in the morning, dehorning cattle, treating sheep with foot rot, and performing surgery in farmhouse kitchens. This world, with its hardship, its comedy, and its deep connection between humans and animals, became Herriot’s material.

The Books

Wight did not begin writing until 1966, when he was nearly fifty. His first two books — If Only They Could Talk (1970) and It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet (1972) — were published by Michael Joseph in Britain. They sold modestly in the UK, but when St. Martin’s Press published them in the United States as a single volume under the title All Creatures Great and Small (1972), the book became a massive bestseller.

American readers were enchanted by Herriot’s world — the stone-built Yorkshire villages, the bluff farmers, the endless varieties of animal ailment and character, and the narrator’s gentle, self-deprecating humour. All Things Bright and Beautiful (1974), All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977), and The Lord God Made Them All (1981) followed, each drawing on Wight’s decades of practice and each becoming a bestseller. Every Living Thing (1992) was a late addition to the series.

The books are structured as loosely connected episodes rather than continuous narratives — each chapter typically tells the story of a single case or a single encounter with a farmer and his animals. This structure gives them a quality of oral storytelling: Herriot is the country vet at the pub, telling stories about his day. The tone is warm without being sentimental, funny without being cruel, and observant without being literary. Herriot never condescends to his farmers, never sentimentalises animal suffering, and never presents himself as anything other than a working professional doing a difficult job in a beautiful place.

The Television Series

The BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small (1978–1990), starring Christopher Timothy as Herriot, Robert Hardy as Siegfried, and Peter Davison as Tristan, was enormously popular in both Britain and the United States and cemented the books’ place in popular culture. A revival series on Channel 5, beginning in 2020, introduced Herriot’s world to a new generation of viewers.

The television adaptations are faithful to the books in spirit if not in detail, and they contributed enormously to the tourism industry of the Yorkshire Dales — the village of Askrigg, where the original series was filmed, and Thirsk itself became pilgrimage sites for Herriot fans.

The Real Yorkshire Dales

James Herriot’s Yorkshire (1979) was a photographic book celebrating the landscape that provides the backdrop to the stories. Herriot’s descriptions of the Dales — the sweep of the fells, the clarity of the light, the silence of the moorland — are among the finest landscape writing in modern English literature, though they are so seamlessly integrated into the veterinary narratives that they can be overlooked.

Collecting Herriot

If Only They Could Talk (Michael Joseph, 1970) in first edition with dust jacket is the key collecting target — Herriot’s first book, published before his fame and therefore in a small printing. It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet (Michael Joseph, 1972) is the second. The American combined editions — All Creatures Great and Small (St. Martin’s, 1972) and its successors — are more common. Signed copies are scarce, as Wight was a private man who did not aggressively promote his books.