Mr. Sidlow

Mr. Sidlow is a farmer whose confidence in his own animal cures turns veterinary visits into tests of professional authority. He regards himself as the chief expert on sick beasts and distrusts vets, yet he does eventually summon them when his treatments fail. His recurring encounters with James Herriot turn that contradiction into a comic, increasingly personal ordeal: James is already an object of the family’s suspicion when he arrives, and each mishap seems to confirm their worst opinion of him.

Reputation and household authority

The Sidlow family’s contempt for veterinarians is more than a complaint about cost or competence. In their view, vets are expensive layabouts who know little about animals, while Mr. Sidlow alone can treat the farm’s sick beasts. His wife and large family share an almost absolute faith in his judgment, which he learned in part from his long-dead grandfather. The household’s private cures thus carry the weight of inherited knowledge as well as his own authority.

That confidence does not mean indifference to suffering. James describes Mr. Sidlow as just and humane: after five or six days of nursing, he will call a vet because he wants the animal to have every chance, even if he expects professional treatment to do no good. Before seeking help, however, he may administer half a pound of lard and raisins three times a day, rub a cow’s udder vigorously with turpentine, or cut the end of a tail to let the bad out. His care is real, but it operates through remedies he trusts, even when their failure has become hard to ignore.

The result is a self-sealing judgment. After several days of home treatment, the vet typically finds a sunken-eyed, dying animal; when it then dies, the Sidlows take the outcome as further proof that vets are useless. The delay, the animal’s worsening condition, and the family’s existing belief reinforce one another. Mr. Sidlow’s humane wish to give an animal a chance therefore coexists with a method that can leave the professional called too late to change the outcome.

A strained relationship with the practice

The farm lies outside the Darrowby practice’s normal area and is closer to Brawton. Before joining the Darrowby practice, Mr. Sidlow had employed Angus Grier of Brawton and then moved on after becoming dissatisfied with him. He had been with the Darrowby practice for more than a year, but the relationship was uncomfortable from the start. On Siegfried’s first visit, Mr. Sidlow described pushing raw onions into a moribund horse’s rectum and wondered why it was unsteady on its legs. Siegfried answered with a deliberately pointed comparison involving Mr. Sidlow himself. The retort made a bad beginning worse; with no other available vets to turn to, Mr. Sidlow remained a client all the same.

His calls also acquired a pattern. He rarely contacted the practice during ordinary working hours. After wrestling with his conscience for several days, he generally gave in around eleven at night, with occasional Sunday-afternoon exceptions. Those calls had repeatedly fallen on Siegfried’s duty nights. Siegfried would set out muttering and return in the small hours looking shaken. This history helps explain why James does not welcome his first assignment to the farm: even a seemingly straightforward case comes with the accumulated reputation of an unhappy professional relationship.

James Herriot’s first visit

James’s first call to the Sidlow farm concerns a choking bullock, a problem that can become fatal when an obstruction prevents gas from escaping. Mr. Sidlow had tried his usual method, using a broom handle and a piece of hosepipe. James recognizes that the gullet has been ruptured and tells him the outlook is very poor. Mr. Sidlow asks what can be done, and James arranges for Harry Norman at the abattoir to come promptly. He leaves with his face burning, manoeuvring his car under the family’s watchful eyes and hoping that the visit will be his last.

It is not. After that first call, every subsequent summons happens to find James on duty, and he recalls that something went wrong each time. The family’s already severe judgment settles on him as the worst vet they have encountered. The failures are not presented as proof that James is incompetent; rather, his cases take place within a household prepared to interpret every poor result as confirmation of its distrust. The name Sidlow becomes, for James, a kind of jinx. When he sees family members in town, he sometimes ducks down an alley to avoid them; in the market, he once watched their crowded old car pass, every face held forward while he felt their eyes fixed on him. He retreated into the Drovers’ Arms and steadied himself with half a pint of Younger’s Special Heavy.

The missed bet

The farm’s hold on James becomes especially vivid when a Saturday call interrupts his chance to bet on Kemal at Brawton races. James has withdrawn five pounds from the Midland Bank, about half his available capital, and changed into his best suit for the course. Just as he is about to leave, Mr. Sidlow phones about a scouring cow that needs immediate attention. James assumes the visit will be brief and that he can still get there in time.

At the farm, the family’s oblique glances greet his immaculate clothes, while Mr. Sidlow’s rigid bearing suggests that he is bracing himself for another visit from the vet he distrusts. The cow has had recurring bouts of diarrhoea for months. Mr. Sidlow has progressed from ground eggshells in gruel to blue vitriol and dandelion tea, but James recognizes Johne’s disease as soon as he looks at her. The diagnosis gives the visit a clarity that many of their encounters lack; it cannot, however, restore the lost afternoon. By the time James reaches the course, the first race is over and Kemal has won at ten to one. James imagines the fifty pounds that fortune has snatched away and decides that, of all the humiliations and hopeless cases, he will never forgive Mr. Sidlow for costing him that bet.

Character and narrative function

Mr. Sidlow’s authority depends on a sharp division between the family’s faith in him and its distrust of professional veterinary knowledge. He is not simply a caricature of a stubborn farmer: his willingness to call a vet after days of nursing shows that his confidence has limits, and his persistence is bound up with concern for the animals. But the repeated delay also exposes the cost of treating experience and inherited remedies as sufficient grounds for judgment. His household’s approval makes that private expertise difficult to challenge, even when the animal is deteriorating.

For James, Mr. Sidlow is both a demanding client and an accumulating source of comic bad luck. One difficult call becomes a history of calls, and that history begins to shape James’s conduct beyond the farm: he avoids the family in town and experiences a missed wager as the last injustice in a long run of cases. The contrast is central to the episodes. Mr. Sidlow believes the vet cannot do the animals any good; James, meanwhile, must keep responding to a client who calls only after his own interventions have failed. Their encounters turn the gap between professional judgment and confident lay practice into a recurring conflict, while the man’s genuine concern for his livestock prevents that conflict from resolving into simple villainy.