‘All Creatures Great and Small’: Who Was the Real James Herriot? (Published 2021) (2024)

Beginning at the age of 50, the beloved veterinarian James Alfred Wight led a double life. By day, he tended to animals in and around the English village where he lived, and in the evenings, writing under the pen name James Herriot, he chronicled his experiences, both past and present.

The resulting eight books sold more than 60 million copies worldwide and inspired multiple film and television adaptations, the latest being “All Creatures Great and Small,” the finale of which airs Sunday on “Masterpiece” on PBS. (The series is also streaming via Amazon with the PBS Masterpiece add-on.)

Wight didn’t fully retire until 1989, after 50 years as a vet. (He died in 1995, at the age of 78.) The magic of his stories was that they seemed to be set in a land that time forgot, and their cozy glow is due partly to his blurring of the lines between fact and fiction. (Spoiler alert: It caused some major friction at work.)

But what was Wight’s life really like? Competing biographies — including a heavily researched but still somewhat speculative one by Graham Lord (“James Herriot: The Life of a Country Vet”) and a more detailed but inevitably biased one by Wight’s son, Jim (“The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father”) — make it difficult to verify certain stories. Lord contends that Wight’s tales are mostly either recycled stories he heard elsewhere or wholly apocryphal. Jim Wight — a veterinarian like his father — writes that 90 percent of the stories are based on real cases, even if sometimes they are borrowed from other animal doctors (including Jim).

Can Alf Wight the man be cleanly distinguished from his celebrated stand-in, James Herriot? And was there really a little Tricki Woo who gave him goodies?

In the hunt for answers, we searched out biographical elements on which the two books agree and did some independent research as well, including in our own archives. Disputed details we skipped. Here’s what emerged:

Of war and peace

The stories recounted in Wight’s first two books, “If Only They Could Talk” (1970) and “It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet” (1972) — which were combined for the American audience as “All Creatures Great and Small” — took place at the outset of World War II, but he relocated them to the more tranquil prewar period. In real life, the author didn’t complete his veterinary studies until late 1939. After the Luftwaffe bombed both Sunderland, the English city where he was born, and Glasgow, the Scottish city in which he was raised, Wight signed up to join the Royal Air Force, even though, as a veterinarian, he was exempt from military service.