The principal himself, Dr Whitehouse, had answered the telephone. ‘Good!’ he had replied. ‘When can you start?’
At the time of Alf’s entry in 1933, Glasgow was unique among the veterinary schools of the British Isles. It was receiving no financial aid from the government, and its survival depended solely upon the fees received from the students, together with local authority grants and donations from various organisations. A government report of 1925 had decreed that only one veterinary school was needed in Scotland, resulting in the grant upon which the school depended being ruthlessly terminated. Glasgow Veterinary College defiantly carried on functioning through the sheer determination of the chairman of the governors, Professor John Glaister, and the principal, Dr A. W. Whitehouse. As a result, it took a fierce pride in its very existence, and the students emerged from the five-year course feeling a real sense of achievement.
Alf received a Carnegie Bursary of £18 a year together with a Glasgow Education Authority grant of £10 towards his fees, but the real cost was much more. Books, materials and living expenses multiplied the drain upon the students’ resources many times over. As at Hillhead, Alf received the full support of his parents throughout the six years he spent at the veterinary college – years that were to provide him with unforgettable memories and life-long friendships.
He began his education at the college on 26 September 1933 and he wrote in his diary at that time: ‘A momentous day! This morning I started in the veterinary college. Crowd of new fellows waiting outside – seasoned veterans swaggering in – stamping of feet in lecture rooms – big thrill when I went into a room full of dead animals. There’s some queer fish here!’
He was soon to discover that the big difference between Hillhead School and the veterinary college was that, here, no one seemed to care whether he did any work. In keeping with the regimented discipline at Hillhead School, his teachers had seemed fiercely determined that he should pass his exams, with the reputation of the school being at stake. At the veterinary college, however, the whole atmosphere was almost one of apathy. During his first term, large amounts of time, especially in the afternoons, were spent playing table tennis in the common-room, visiting the cinema, or just going home to do exactly as he liked.
This was not really surprising. The college was only too pleased to have the students there, paying their fees; if they did not work and took fifteen years to complete a five-year course, that was their problem. In fact, there was little incentive to qualify since there were very few jobs waiting for them when they eventually achieved their goal. For the student whose parents were wealthy and willing enough to continue their support, the way of life at Glasgow Veterinary College was an attractive proposition. To some of the students, money did not seem a problem and they did, indeed, take up to ten, twelve or more years to complete the course. Some of them never made it at all, finishing up in a variety of jobs. In the years following his qualification, Alf used to see some of his old college chums during his visits to Glasgow; one he saw serving in a textile shop, and he was startled to see another of his old pals directing the traffic at Charing Cross. Some of these long-serving students became such a part of the establishment that when they eventually took their leave, Dr Whitehouse and his staff bade them farewell with a tear in the eye. In the introduction to his book James Herriot’s Dog Stories, published many years later, Alf described the professor’s reaction to the departure of one of these ‘permanent students’:
One chap, McAloon by name, had been there for fourteen years but had managed to get only as far as the second year in the curriculum. He held the record at the time but many others were into double figures … The fourteen-year man was held in particularly high esteem and when he finally left to join the police force, he was sadly missed. Old Dr Whitehouse, who lectured in anatomy, was visibly moved at the time. ‘Mr McAloon,’ he said, putting down a horse’s skull and pointing with his probe at an empty space, ‘has sat on that stool for eleven years. It is going to be very strange without him.’
*
The building in which Alf received his veterinary education was an uninspiring one, situated on a steep hill on the corner of Buccleuch Street in the Cowcaddens District of Glasgow. This old establishment, formerly a pumping station for Glasgow Corporation, was built of dull stone with rows of tired-looking windows, and bore more resemblance to a high-security prison than a recognised seat of learning. Gloomy tenement buildings looked down on the college from all sides, and there was not a sign of any greenery for as far as the eye could see.
Despite its forbidding appearance, there was a warmth and friendliness within those grim walls. Alf felt a great affection for his old college, but one of the interesting things about the James Herriot books is the absence of stories about his life there. In the years following publication of The Lord God Made Them Allin 1981, he swore that he was not going to write another one. This disappointed me, as I knew it would his fans, and I often reminded him that he still had plenty of material left, including his years as a veterinary student. Apart from a handful of people, everyone was under the impression that he had written nothing about those days apart from the section in the introduction to James Herriot’s Dog Stories. This is far from the truth.
In the early 1960s, when he first began writing in earnest, he wrote a series of stories, some of which were based on his experiences at Glasgow Veterinary College and which he pieced together into a novel. The abandoned typescript, which lay forgotten for many years, has been very valuable in nudging my memories of the veterinary college experiences that he so often recounted to us. In this novel, which was written in the third person, he called himself ‘James Walsh’.
After only three weeks at the veterinary college Walsh knew his life had changed. He had thought that learning to be a vet would be a kind of extension to his schooldays with the same values holding good and the same scholastic atmosphere. True, it would be rather a slummy extension because his first sight of the college had been a shock: a low, seedy building covered half heartedly in peeling, yellowish paint crouching apologetically amongst grime blackened, decaying apartment houses. In Victorian times the district had been the residential quarter of the prosperous city merchants and many of the houses had imposing frontages and pillared entrances but now, it was a forgotten backwater, the haunt of broken down actors, purveyors of dubious trades and pale, stooping women.