The Real James Herriot by Jim Wight

Alf had been brought up in a home where drinking and swearing hardly existed, and some of the songs he heard that night must have come as a bit of a culture shock. A more vivid example of the unruly students of his day occurred at the annual prize-givingthat November. Prize-givings are usually well-ordered and dignified occasions, but this one was different.
    This remarkable ceremony was reported the next day in the
Glasgow Evening Times:
    A human skull decending suddenly on a cord from the ceiling to within a foot or so of his face was one of the shocks sustained today by the chairman at the prize-giving of the Glasgow Veterinary College, Buccleuch Street. The platform party was met by thunderous applause and banshee shrieks when they entered the hall in which the students were assembled. The opening remarks of the chairman, Mr Alexander Murdoch, were punctuated by loud interruptions and the speaker was threatened with early hoarseness. He was diffident, however, about having recourse to the water carafe because it looked suspiciously like an aquarium – a goldfish having been inserted there by some ‘person or persons unknown’. After his first half-dozen sentences, he raised his head and was confronted by a dark brown skull revolving slowly on a cord in front of his face. After a ‘look round’ at the platform party, the skull slowly rose to the ceiling again, from which it descended, ‘spider fashion’ at intervals, finally dropping with a loud bang on the table much to the alarm of the chairman. The students seemed to enjoy the command performance.
    Alf had obviously appreciated the occasion, as his diary entry shows: ‘The prize-giving. What a rag! They hissed the unpopular profs, cheered the doctor, and sang ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, and bawled remarks at the big-wigs as they entered. I enjoyed it, I can tell you!’
    Alf threw himself willingly into this new way of life. A few weeks after the prize-giving, he went, in the company of seventy other students, to the Empress Theatre in St George’s Road. The students, already having had a drink or two, were intent on having a good time. The police were soon on the scene. One student kicked in the door of the theatre as he left, later receiving a fine of two guineas – a punishing sum for a student in those days. Alf made good his escape by running into the jungle of nearby tenements; his athletics training at school stood him in good stead that evening.
    Riotous behaviour was not confined to ‘extra-curricular’ activities outside the walls of the college. Some of the lectures within bore more resemblance to wild parties than periods of study and in those early weeks at the college, James Alfred Wight was beginning to realise that life at Buccleuch Street was going to be a little different from that atHillhead. In his unpublished novel, he later wrote about the teachers whose lot it was to teach these tearaway students:
    Some of the staff were old men snatched from retirement and forced to spend their declining years in an unequal struggle with boisterous youth. Others were veterinary surgeons in practice in the city who combined their daily work with lecturing and, in the process, imparted a practical and commonsense slant to their instruction which stood their pupils in good stead in later years. They, like the older men, had a detached, fatalistic attitude to their job and took the view that if the students paid their fees it was up to them whether they gathered knowledge or acted the fool.
    Professor Andy McQueen, who taught biology in the first year, read his notes out from papers in front of him and if he ever turned over two pages at once by mistake, he just carried on as if nothing had happened. Alf later wrote about one of his lectures in his novel and it illustrates the atmosphere at the college very accurately. He gave his old teachers varying
noms de plume,
and refers to Andy McQueen as ‘Professor King’.
    The difference from school