To: Mr Smirthwaite, Topcliffe Parks, Topcliffe25 November 1940Visit, calve cow 6 hours Pessaries, 1 bottle UCM, 1 injection strychnine £2 os od
Unlike today, there was limited small animal work to help maintain cash flow through the practice. Alf learned a little about the financial side of life in the practice in those first months, Donald having asked him to keep an account of all the money coming into the business. At the end of every day, he had to sit down to write up the books. He soon began to see where the most lucrative work lay. Driving around the countryside attending to various sick animals was certainly not going to fatten his employer’s purse but Tuberculin Testing herds of cattle presented a very different picture.
One of the veterinary profession’s greatest achievements has been the virtual eradication of tuberculosis from the national herd. This disease was the scourge of the dairy industry in the 1930s and 1940s. Very few young veterinary surgeons today have ever seen a cow infected by TB, thanks to the efforts of the profession fifty years ago but, in those days, stricken animals presented a sorry sight – gaunt, emaciated creatures, with the giveaway soft cough that Alf got to recognise so well. It was not only cows that succumbed; countless people died through drinking the milk from these infected animals. Jean Wilson, his old girlfriend from his Yoker days, died through contracting it as a young woman, and Donald Sinclair, who had married while still a student at Edinburgh Veterinary College in the early 1930s, lost his young wife to the disease. Veterinary surgeons were paid to help eradicate the disease by carrying out intradermal tests on the animals, after which any reactors would be slaughtered. It was tough and tedious work, involving the injection of many thousands of uncooperative beasts, but it was a lifeline to cash-strapped practices.
A typical day’s work in Donald’s practice ledger at that time would amount to around £2–3 per day whereas a couple of days’ TB Testing could earn the practice £20–30. No wonder veterinary surgeons snatched eagerly at any testing that came their way.
There was one notable exception to this. He was a veterinary surgeon who lived in Leyburn, twenty-five miles from Thirsk, in the Yorkshire Dales – a beautiful area which teemed with cows. This vet did not want the tedium and paperwork associated with TB Testing; the acquisition of money meant less to him than the preservation of his steady, enjoyable lifestyle. His name was Frank Bingham, an unambitious but very capable Irish vet, described by Alf as one of the finest veterinary surgeons he ever knew. It was Frank’s easy approach to life that was largely instrumental in introducing Alf to the Yorkshire Dales.
Donald Sinclair’s practice, at that time, covered a very large area. Within the part of Yorkshire which stretches some sixty miles from Helmsley in the east to Hawes, a town at the far end of Wensleydale in the west, there were very few practices and Donald’s and Frank Bingham’s were two of them. Frank, having no desire to undertake the TB Testing work, offered it some years later to Donald who, naturally, grabbed it with both hands. They entered into a tenuous partnership, one which for a few years was known as ‘Bingham, Sinclair and Wight’.
When Alf first started work in Thirsk, his days were very long. He travelled across to Frank Bingham’s Leyburn practice in the mornings to test endless cows before returning to Thirsk in the afternoons to deal with the work that had accumulated there. He covered vast distances but in doing so he had a wonderful introduction to the Dales, an area that was a revelation to him the first time he set eyes upon it. He was totally captivated by the wild majestic fells sweeping down to the green valleys, with the stone walls winding down from the high tops to the sturdy grey villages and farmsteads. He loved the sweet, clean air punctuated with the sounds of birds – curlew, lapwing, skylark and grouse. It is no surprise that, many years later, he would set his books in the Dales; he would see many beautiful places in his lifetime but there was nowhere he would love more than the Yorkshire Dales.
Another bonus resulting from this arduous regime was that he became well acquainted with Frank Bingham. Frank, a distinguished-looking man with fair hair and blue eyes, was almost twenty years older than Alf, and was a man who had travelled widely. He had been a Mountie in Canada and had spent time in Australia riding the rabbit fences, enduring many long hours in the saddle, with the result that he was an artist when it came to dealing with horses. This elegant and soft-spoken man was someone to whom Alf Wight took an immediate liking. He and his Swiss wife, Emmy, enriched his first years in the Dales with their wonderful kindness and hospitality.
Alf was always hungry in those days. He would set out from Thirsk in his basic little car, with just a pack of cheese sandwiches to last him the whole day, but there was more than cheese waiting for him whenever he walked into the Binghams’ house in Leyburn. Emmy was a magnificent cook, and she fed him like a king. Delectable stews, apple pies and cakes passed his willing lips, while Frank would sit back and talk quietly as though there were all the time in the world.
Frank, who went about his work calmly and methodically, was one who would never be hurried. His great saying was ‘Always set your stall out first’, and he would never embark upon any job unless he was thoroughly prepared. To a young, eager-to-learn veterinary surgeon like Alf Wight, he was a joy to watch. Some of the principles to which he adhered in his work – great care combined with scrupulous cleanliness – are just as valid today as they were fifty or more years ago. Alf used to be amused when he saw Frank boil up his instruments and wrap them in clean brown paper before every operation, but he noticed that Frank’s surgical wounds always healed rapidly and cleanly.
He was a real horseman who could rope and throw wild colts with effortless ease, and on one remarkable occasion, Alf watched fascinated as Frank cast an unbroken young horse with one hand while rolling a cigarette with the other. He was equally at home when dealing with cows. One of the most daunting challenges to a veterinary surgeon is the replacement of a prolapsed uterus in the bovine. This involves the returning of an enormous pink mass of tissue through the vagina, a task rather like trying to stuff a large cushion up a drain pipe. It can be a demoralising and exhausting job. Frank, as usual, made little of such a challenge, and young Alf Wight watched in amazement on a Dales farm one day as he covered the huge mass with sugar before rolling the cow onto a small stool to stop her straining the uterus back out. The sugar sucked the moisture out of the tissues, reducing it to a fraction of its size, while Frank, gently, replaced it – a freshly rolled cigarette dangling from his lips as he worked. As the young vet watched, he reflected that such things are not taught at veterinary college; they are acquired over years of experience.
Frank Bingham appears in the third of James Herriot’s books, Let Sleeping Vets Lie, under the name of Ewan Ross, and the admiration Alf felt for the man shows clearly in his writing. Perhaps not everyone shared his opinion, however. Frank was regarded by most as a fine veterinary surgeon – when he made himself available.
Frank Bingham had a problem common to many veterinary surgeons of the day. He liked a drink – and he liked more than one. Numerous are the tales of his long sessions in the inns and public houses of the Yorkshire Dales, sessions that could last for days. Frank worked only when he felt like it, and once he was comfortably seated beside a warm fire with a drink in his hand, it was a persuasive man who could winkle him out. As many of the Dales folk were from strict Methodist families, such drinking habits may well have been frowned upon, but it was not this aspect of his character that Alf remembered. The warm friendship that this easy-going and charming man had extended to him, ensured that Alf’s early days in the Yorkshire Dales were ones that he would always recall with happiness and nostalgia.