1937

1937 is the year James Herriot enters the story as a newly qualified veterinary surgeon at a moment when professional training offered no guarantee of work. Against agricultural depression and a shrinking role for draught horses, an invitation from Siegfried Farnon to interview in Darrowby becomes a rare opening: if the two men suited one another, Herriot might stay as an assistant. The date thus marks both a precarious beginning and the threshold of a career whose daily demands extend far beyond the examination room.

A profession with too few openings

The employment prospects facing new graduates were stark. After five years of study, Herriot and his contemporaries emerged into a country where enthusiasm and accumulated knowledge could not create jobs: the veterinary vacancies listed in the Record numbered only two or three a week, with an average of eighty applicants for each. Many of his fellow graduates were unemployed or had taken work in shops or shipyards. In that setting, the letter from Darrowby was not merely an invitation to tea; it seemed to offer a way out of an increasingly dispiriting search for a future.

The opportunity also came with uncertainty. Herriot was to meet Farnon on a Friday afternoon, and the possibility of staying depended on their being mutually suited. He travelled in a rickety bus in the July heat, wearing his best suit despite the weather because the interview mattered so much. The journey carried him toward a place he had never seen and had expected to be dull. As the bus climbed toward the Pennines, however, the landscape revised that expectation: grassy heights, broad valleys, winding rivers, grey-stone farmhouses, cultivated fields, and dry-stone walls replaced his imagined picture of an unromantic county. The prospect of work and the first impression of Yorkshire arrived together.

The work behind the opportunity

The wider account makes clear what a young rural veterinarian’s employment would entail. In one difficult calving, Herriot’s first internal examination reveals a calf with its head back, little room to manoeuvre, and the cow already dry after her waters had passed. A farmer’s relative confidently recommends turning the calf around or pulling it out with ropes. Herriot recognizes that the confined space makes the first suggestion impossible and that pulling without correcting the head could break the cow’s pelvis. The episode exposes a recurring tension in practice: local confidence can carry authority among farmers, but professional responsibility rests on what the veterinarian can establish by examination and on the risks a proposed intervention would create.

That responsibility is also expressed in Farnon’s fundamental rule, You Must Attend. When Herriot leaves a cow’s chronic mastitis until the following day because the animal seems well and the owner has been treating her, Farnon insists that a veterinarian cannot decide urgency from the client’s description alone. A condition may worsen, and the animal may die. The rule makes attendance more than a matter of diligence: it is the means by which the practitioner accepts responsibility for judging the case firsthand, whatever the hour or weather.

Diagnosis under pressure

Other practice scenes show the uncertainty that lies between symptoms and a defensible diagnosis. At a severe colic case, a bay hunter staggers around its box, soaked in sweat and foaming at the mouth after a day of black draughts. Herriot recognizes that an ordinary dose is no answer to continuous, severe pain and raises the possibility of a twisted bowel. On rectal examination he feels displacement of the small intestine and a tense, abnormal mass. The examination supplies evidence, but the scene also records the burden of acting before certainty: the animal is in pain, the experienced horseman is distressed, and Herriot must decide what the signs mean.

A later case involving Strawberry presents a slower form of the same problem. The cow is still eating and has a normal temperature, but a slight difficulty in swallowing and a faint snoring sound suggest a possible abscess behind the throat. Herriot gives Prontosil and directs the farmer to apply hot water and salve at least three times a day. Over the next ten days the abscess develops; Strawberry eats less, loses weight, and produces less milk, while Herriot recognizes that his injections are doing little to resolve the underlying danger. Together, these cases show a practice governed by observation, imperfect options, and the consequences of waiting.

A wider world of competing expertise

The professional environment around Herriot includes more than farmers and veterinarians. Jeff Mallock’s knackering yard serves as a rough post-mortem room where diagnoses can be checked, but Mallock’s standing among farmers also makes him a rival authority. Though unable to read or write, he takes pride in his long experience cutting up diseased animals, and farmers sometimes accept his explanations over the veterinarian’s. His supposed diseases, including worm in the tail, illustrate how confidence and communal reputation can sustain claims that professional knowledge rejects.

The office has its own demands. When Miss Harbottle inspects the practice, she finds a desk crowded with bills, Ministry of Agriculture forms, drug-company circulars, pills, ointment tubes, and an old ledger. Against the shortage of veterinary posts that gives 1937 its urgency, such scenes show the varied work a position actually entails: clinical judgment, client relations, records, and administration. The year’s significance lies in the convergence of a narrow employment opening with a profession whose responsibilities are practical, unpredictable, and continually tested by experience.