Customer Reviews

James Herriot: The Life of a Country Vet

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The most positive thing about this book is that it shows you what Jim Wight (James Herriot's son) was up against when he wrote his memoir. I highly recommend Jim Wight's memoir for anyone who is interested in learning about James Herriot (Alf Wight).

I think Mr. Lord may have been well-meaning when he wrote James Herriot: Life of a Country Vet but the book is really appallingly bad. Mr. Lord has no feel for the WWII period, has done no practical research, seems to have little to no perception of human character and relies almost exclusively on gossip and word-of-mouth. One gets the impression that Mr. Lord decided before writing his book what he was going to find and proceeded to twist or ignore any information to the contrary. He relies on those "witnesses" who will tell him what he wants to hear without taking into consideration the inherent complexity of human beings. Witnesses do not always tell the truth--it is a gross error in judgment to think that one person can fully, and accurately, explain another person.

The lack of reliable facts results in Mr. Lord relying almost exclusively on guesswork, and the assumptions inherent in Mr. Lord's guesswork are almost all negative. For instance, he assumes that because he, Mr. Lord couldn't find evidence that Alf Wight's parents were musicians, ergo, they weren't, therefore Alf Wight was lying when he referred to his parents as professional musicians. The point may be debatable but in the interests of good writing, the assumption is not enough. If Mr. Lord wasn't willing to do the required research to prove the point conclusively one way or the other, he should have left it out.

Mr. Lord strikes one as the kind of man who is continually surprised by the inconsistencies of human nature. He reports with something like glee that Alf once told someone that his father died in 1961, instead of 1960. This becomes evidence for . . . the mind boggles. I'm not sure Mr. Lord himself has a clue what he is trying to accomplish in this book. Whatever it is, it suffers from an utter lack of scholarship and is therefore deeply insulting both to Alf Wight's memory and to the reader.

Mr. Lord could have written a good book. He has the tools and the know-how, and he did his research. He made one fatal error, however. Actually he made not one, but two mistakes. The first mistake is that his starting point is wrong. As a trained journalist, he does as a journalist does - he keeps trying to find "dirt", or rather manufacture dirt - all in order to give us a "balanced view". One can't help feeling, as one reads interview after interview, that Mr. Lord has somehow picked only the disgruntled, caustic and jealous remarks to print. The second mistake was in underestimating "James Herriot"'s fans, and familys goodwill towards him. He treats his subject manner as just another subject, as routine grist for the gossip mill, but Alf Wight was not that kind of person. He was a person totally out of Mr. Lord's scope and understanding. He underestimated Mr. Wight's fans and family's tolerance for having his name besmearched, and, indeed, his son wrote another book in response, a beautiful book about his father, and in it he easily refutes all Mr. Lord's accusations - and turns Mr. Lord into a laughingstock. Because anybody who has read the two books side by side - which I just did - would realize that Mr. Lord has indeed made a laughingstock of himself.

While there are some good parts to the book, they are very much overshadowed by the other parts. There are two good chapters - in the middle - which were written factually - the chapters dealing with the content of James Herriot's first books, and the publishing history. There is a good reason why this is so - Mr. Lord was indeed part of the publishing business and would have been privy to that sort of information.

But much of the book is exactly what he accuses James Herriot of writing - pure fiction. It would take too long to point out every one of Mr. Lord's mistakes, but I would like to simply write just a few of the many mistakes Mr. Lord makes. The rest, if you still want to read this book, you could find out for yourself.

The first accusation Mr. Lord makes about James Herriot is that Alf Wight did not write a semi-autobiography, but rather pure fiction. He maintains that even if this were so, it would not matter, because the books are still entertaining. With that salve to his conscience, he methodically starts to take apart many stories in an effort to prove them fiction.

His first assertion - that it would not matter if it were actually fiction, is simply not true. It would matter, and matter a lot, to both his fans and friends and family. His son says as much in his book- that it would matter a lot if his books are fiction. Fortunately for us, Mr. Lord does not bring a single proof that could stand up to scrutiny. His method seems to be - I don't think this story is true, so it's probably not. That's it. Not one single proof. For instance, he says that Alf Wight's memoirs of his war years are fiction - because the dates are wrong. He says that Alf Wight joined the army in March, 1941, and was discharged two years later, and therefore his story that he was called up to the RAF while his wife was expecting their first child is a fictional story. His son, in his book "The Real James Herriot" explains that he enlisted in the RAF in March, but was NOT CALLED UP until 15 months later, in November 1942, when his wife was indeed, expecting their first child. Is it possible his son and wife might know when he joined the RAF better than Mr. Lord? Especially since Mr. Lord actually admits that he is going from hearsay - since the RAF would not give Mr. Lord access to their records, claiming that they were still classified? This should be enough of a blooper to discredit Mr. Lord; however, there are many, many more - so many that it would be funny if it were not also very, very sad that someone could so easily print a book full of lies and get away with it (by prefacing all his explanations with "perhaps" he covers himself from libel, I suppose).

Another example of Mr. Lord's innuendos - he quotes from one of Mr. Herriot's books that James Herriot was taken aback by the red (and squished) face of his newborn son, and asked the nurse if there was something wrong with the child. Mr. Lord asks how can this story be true if he is a vet? Just so, explains his son, animals are born much more fully formed than humans are. (A horse is born already able to walk as soon as he is born). Mr. Lord falls flat in the mud.

Mr. Lord quotes James Herriot as saying that 90% of his stories are based on real life. Mr. Lord asks how that can be - when the Herriot books say that he joined Seigfried's practice in 1937, when he actually started working there in 1941? Mr. Lord, I think we are ready for a lesson in English. Do you know what the words "based on true life" means? "Based" means "based", not "actually, exactly, fact". When he first started writing, he was hoping to remain anonymous, and therefore disguised his stories so that the people he was writing about would not recognize themselves. He changed the location of his practice to the Dales, he changed the dates, he even changed the characters - some from a man to a woman, for example. He put two stories into one, etc. etc. This all falls under the heading of "based on real life".

There are many, many more examples of this in his book - where he "proves" that James Herriot was writing fiction - and he has no proof whatsoever. Not even one single time.

If there is one person writing fiction, that person is Mr. Lord. Mr. Lord spends two entire chapters on a conjecture of how Alf's childhood might have been like - all based on the assumption that Alf had grown up in grinding poverty. These chapters become almost a farce when we read his sons portrayal of his real childhood - although his parents were not rich they were certainly never poor, and Alf had a very happy childhood. He also explains the economics of why this was so. Which puts Mr. Lord's two chapters of conjecture on how Alf's unhappy childhood might have been like in the category it deserves - pure fiction. While the poverty of the under-class in Glasgow in the 1920's is certainly very sad, it definitely does not belong in a biography of Alf Wight.

Another mistake that Mr. Lord makes is that he constantly contradicts himself. For example, in one chapter he spends many paragraphs conjecturing on why Alf was always poor, when he should have had a thriving practice - and the fanciful castles he builds in the air are very elaborate indeed. And yet in another chapter he quotes a neighbor as saying - "oh, they claimed they didn't have any money but that wasn't true. They had money for everthing - a tennis court, ballet lessons for Rosie, etc." This came across as a vitriolic statement, but of course in contradiction to his earlier assumption that he was poor. Mr. Lord, you can't really have it both ways, can you?

Another example - he constantly quotes Eddie Steanton throughout the book, with all kinds of outrageous comments, yet he himself quotes one of Eddie's colleagues "oh, Eddie always exaggerates, you can't believe everything he says". And later in the book it comes out that Eddie had had a falling out with Alf Wight, and I would assume that his "memories" might be somewhat tainted by those sentiments. And yet Mr. Lord accepts Mr. Streaton as a fully credible source.

As matters stand now, this book is laughable and barely deserving of a review - except for one thing: if Mr. Wight's son would not have written his own biography, Mr. Lord's fictious book would have remained as the factual biography of Alf Wight. He would have succeeded in besmirching Alf Wight's name with his book full of lies (oh, excuse me, fiction). The fact that his son wrote his own biography, and a beautiful and moving one at that, has turned Mr. Lord's book into a joke, a book that his fans would not touch with a ten-foot pole, but Mr. Lord did not know that in advance. He tried to change James Herriot's fans opinion of their idol, by trying to find "dirt" on him, and that was a very low thing. The fact is that he fortunately did not succeed, but that does not take away from what Mr. Lord tried to do.

Mr. Lord, shame on you!

Early on in Graham Lord's book on Alf Wight (known to the world as James Herriot), one begins to question Lord's frequent claim that he was a good friend of Wight. Although Lord certainly knew Wight, and as a reviewer, was apparently very helpful in getting the first Herriot book off the ground, his book is more of a hatchet job than a memoir one might expect from such a self-proclaimed friend.

Lord, for instance, dwells repetitively on the discrepancies between Wight's life and the life of the fictional James Herriot. Indeed, these differences are basically the central theme of this very sour book. It is, of course, interesting that Alf Wight's life, though parallel to that portrayed by the James Herriot character, was nonetheless quite different in many particulars. Lord seems to believe, however, that it is crucial that such differences be magnified and he treats all such differences as a species of lie by Wight. This treatment makes for a consistently peevish tone on Lord's part which makes the book heavy, dispiriting reading. Only an enemy of Wight could take much pleasure in this pseudo-muckraking.

Lord is also no biographer and no historian. He is utterly unable to drop his own preconceptions and prejudices in the face of contrary evidence. The worst instance of this lies in Lord's treatment of Wight's youth and early adulthood. Alf Wight grew up in Scotland, chiefly in Glasgow, during the period between the two world wars. Glasgow today is enjoying a rebirth and its Victorian-era buildings and monuments are being restored and gentrified. For most of the past fifty years, however, it has been a sort of British Detroit, an industrial wasteland of the extremely poor, a well of persistent high unemployment. Knowing this face of Glasgow, Lord incorrectly assumes that pre-war Glasgow was as bad, and that anyone living in it must have been dirt-poor and always living from hand to mouth. In fact, Alf Wight's father seems to have done very well for his family, and every move they made was to a better district and a larger home. Alf was even sent to a fairly posh private school in Glasgow as a boy. Nonetheless, Lord remains impervious to these clues, and takes every opportunity to talk about the Wights' supposed poverty and distress, which from his own evidence is patent nonsense. Similar failures to look past his own prejudices and preconceptions similarly mar the balance of the book.

Finally, it must be said that Lord, though a journalist by trade, is no writer. Perhaps he does better with the kind of breathless, tell-all yellow journalism demanded by Britain's tabloid press. He is utterly defeated, however, by the prose required by a serious book. His prose is leaden and labored at the best. His attempts at subtlety are embarrassingly obvious and heavy-handed. In short, the book is a plodding, badly written affair, which seems to have been given no editorial attention at all.

In short, the mystery is why Lord's book was published at all. The only answer can be the continuing popularity of the Herriot books and stories. Those books, in their warm humanity and poignant stories make a pointed contrast to Lord's sour, peevish book.

Whoever called this book a bio should take a course in library science. Its pages ought to be ripped out and distributed inside those trashy celeb magazines under the label of Gossip. I enjoyed Jim Wight's book about his father much more so and not only because it was naturally a warmhearted look at Alf's life but because there's honesty in his words. Not so with Graham Lord. You'd expect more of a slant with Jim's book than you would Graham's but that is not the case. Graham's research reminds me of National Enquirer-style publications and their anonymous-source dissing, except that Graham does provide their names. But so what? It only made me think less of some of his sources. I've met their kind in offices and at cocktail parties, dime-a-dozen personality hackers running off at the mouth about so-and-so. Graham insults our intelligence with shovel-fuls of similar dirt. And his motives for doing so are unclear. He seems to want to burst bubbles but what bubbles are they?

As a reader, I instinctively knew that Alf Wight's books came from his life and were based on his experiences, irregardless of Graham's pathetic attempts to prove them fiction. The stories were meant to entertain and they no doubt were entertaining for Alf to write. No crime there. Alfs' characters are well portrayed. Readers are given a good look at vetting in that time and place.
Stepping away from the books then and looking at the life of the author ought not to be made into some grand disillusionment. So what if Wight's wife, Joan, put her foot down on certain issues and her husband followed her lead from time to time - or if Alf himself grew a little testy with the effects of fame? Is Graham and his holier-than-thou sources trying to tell us that Joan was a shrew and Alf got too full of himself or that he was just acting a part of modesty? All human beings run a gamut of emotions and try out certain roles within their lifetimes. Shall we focus on the more unpleasant ones and snicker over them? No thanks, Graham, not with your type.
Alf and Joan were a successfully married and hardworking couple. They raised their children well. Like many, they encountered hardships in the way of finances and they probably acquired some eccentricities and personality flaws along the way. So? The only thing Alf owed us, upon publication of his books, was an entertaining read. Judging by its' sales, that is exactly what he delivered.
On the other hand, Graham's book, 'The Life of a Country Vet' (deceivingly titled, by the way)was a skim-through. If you must read it, rent it.

This book is not even worth turning the first page! This is one of those books where you actually feel embarrassment for the author. The book is poorly researched, poorly written, poorly edited, and well...... words just fail me. While I am not a great Herriot fan, I do have to give him, Herriot his due, the man could write well and could tell a great story (isn't that what authors are suppose to do?). This guy though, Graham Lord, I suspect, has problems feeding the paper into his typewriter! The entire book is such a obvious ploy to make some quick money on the shirttail of a "dead" but popular author it is rather nauseating. Shame on the publisher for accepting such shoddy work! I did finish the book though (thank God I did not purchase the thing) because each page became worse and worse and I could not stop, my thinking being with each turn of the page "well it just cannot be any worse than that last page/chapter." How wrong I was! If you must read the thing, borrow it or check it out of the library. I would hate to see a person waste their money, and I certainly would not want the author and his publisher to be rewarded for a work such as this. Herriot's life, warts and all, could be such a fastinating subject. I do hope someone will turn out a good study of him eventually. We certainly did not get it here. I just hate having to give this one even one star. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!

I bought this book while visiting the Yorkshire Dales, after lapping up the James Herriot series years earlier. I was sooo excited to find the book and had romantic visions of reading about the real James Herriot while visiting his homeland.

Ohhhhh, how I wish I had picked up the book, soaked up the photos, and put the book right back on the shelf.

A classic case of raining on my parade; bursting my bubble; toss out ANY fitting cliche. It shattered all my illusions about James Harriet's life, experiences, and loved ones. If you are a sentimental fool like me and have read Herriot's books, pass this one byyyyy.

I bought this book after having read and re-read all the Herriot books for the past twenty years. I was eagerly looking forward to seeing pictures of a young James Herriot, a young 'Siegfried' et al. We fans already knew that the characters names were pseudonyms but did Lord really have to go to so many lengths in almost calling James Herriot a liar ? Why did he feel it so important to reveal so much ? I felt he and Eddie Straiton collaborated in trying to destroy what James Herriot had spent so many years building - a little corner of the world where we can all escape to in our hearts and minds. I wonder how many people will ever be able to enjoy re-reading James Herriots books again after reading this unnecessary 'expose'. Shame on you Graham Lord !

I agree with most of the opinions expressed in other reviews - Lord seems to be determined to highlight the inconsistencies in Herriot/Wight's life. Even though it's a well documented and well written book, I really wonder about Lord's motivation for writing it.

One comment I haven't read so far, though, is that the book should be sub-titled "The Life of a Writer". Fully 1/2 of the book discusses his work as a writer - how he got started, how he got published, how he handled fame, etc. That was interesting, but - after reading 4 of Herriot's books - what I really wanted to know was what his daily life as a vet was like (what the sub-title implies). Unfortunately, Lord skims over those decades of Herriot/Wight's life, only focusing on dicrepancies between the Herriot books and reality. Overall, a disapointing read.

If you love James Herriot you will hate this book...

The author in attempting to tell the "true" story spends much of his time diminishing Herriot.

I actually threw the book out of a speeding car window.

Graham Lord is not a hack or a fraud, but he clearly wrote this book without any cooperation from the family of James Herriot (Alfie Wight), and it shows in an abominable lack of actual information about Herriot's life before meeting Lord or of Herriot's life as a vet. He also makes far too much about the fact that Herriot was writing compelling stories based on actual incidents rather than serving only as a journalist, but since his connection to Herriot was only through his books and some occasional personal contact, there was little else he could write. The book is infuriating in the extent to which it substitutes information about the times in which Herriot lived for actual information about Herriot: knowing nothing of Herriot's life growing up, Lord talks endlessly about the life of other people who grew up in the same neighborhood as Herriot, and historical records and newspapers were obviously his primary source, along with people who didn't live in Thirsk and who had limited contact with Herriot.

The inadequacies of this book inspired Jim Wight (Herriot's son) to write a truly revealing biography entitled The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father, and Lord is to be thanked for that. He did his best with what little information he had, but there is no escaping the fact that he had too little information, and having read the son's memoir, I quickly found Lord's book unbearable and started skimming after a couple of chapters in the hopes of finding SOMETHING I hadn't already learned from Wight's book. I was not successful.