1966

1966 marks the beginning of James Herriot’s sustained literary career: at fifty, after years in which family responsibilities, wartime service, and a busy veterinary practice had postponed his ambitions, he began writing regularly. The date is a turning point rather than a publication milestone; his first books appeared later, and the name that became famous followed later still.

A Late Beginning

James Herriot was the pen name of James Alfred Wight, whose stories drew extensively on his experience as a veterinarian in northern England. Although he had long wanted to write, starting a family, serving in the Royal Air Force during World War II, and establishing a demanding practice delayed his literary debut. In 1966, his wife encouraged him to begin writing regularly, making this the year an unrealized ambition became sustained work.

From Veterinary Practice to Narrative

The material behind the writing was a working life far removed from the controlled conditions of veterinary school. In the rural Yorkshire setting later evoked in his memoirs, treatment could mean attending difficult cases on farms and confronting the practical demands that textbooks did not prepare a young veterinarian to meet. His stories drew autobiographical material from this life and presented a country world attentive to animals, people, and the cycles of nature. The gap between formal training and actual practice thus belongs both to the experience that preceded 1966 and to the distinctive subject of the writing that began then.

Publication and Recognition

The start of regular writing did not bring immediate success. Wight tried sportswriting without success before publishing If Only They Could Talk in 1970 and It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet in 1972, which brought modest success. He adopted the name James Herriot because self-promotion by doctors and veterinarians was frowned upon in England at the time. In the United States, a publisher combined the first two books as All Creatures Great and Small in 1972, making the pen name famous. The memoirs’ later reach—including a film and a long-running British Broadcasting Corporation program—shows how far the regular writing begun in 1966 traveled beyond its delayed start.