My husband introduced me to the books & TV series. He’s English, I’m American, and I read the books during our many years of long-distance “dating.”
We watch bits of the TV series each Christmas. A great tradition.
I’ve never been anywhere near that part of the world, but all the characters are very familiar to me, too. Painfully so, in the case of some of the clients. Animals and their owners never change, I guess.
Ha! Ain’t that the truth!
I was just reminded of The Thermometer Story from my days working on a horse farm, in which our fresh-faced young vet haplessly/Herriotishly arrives at the farm without her thermometer and I am forced to loan her my oral, for-people, mercury thermometer – the kind that does NOT come with a handy clip to keep it from disappearing up a horse’s rear – out of my own medicine cabinet.
The barn owner never did buy me a new thermometer, by the way.
(as some background, just before the story begins, I have been roundly kicked by a horse. Hence the icepack.)
IIRC, his stories about training in the RAF all lead into stories of his veterinary practice.
I’m a big fan of his stories too, and was disappointed to find out that Siegfried and Tristan were not their real names.
My gift to my favourite teacher when I left school was “All Creatures Great and Small.”
Thank you! That’s on its way to my Kindle as we speak.
I love James Herriot - read the books over and over and the stories and characters have really stuck with me. Just the other day I called the smaller of my two dogs “Tricky Woo” (no relation :D) because of her efforts to get snacks off the counter.
There’s a framed image of the Yorkshire Dales at my work office and I think of James Herriot every time I see it.
Put me right off veterinary school, it did!
I just happened to have a Pekingese named Mr. Woo at the time I read the books, so that made the Tricki Woo chapters extra special. 
Put me down as another Herriot lover who’s right this minute downloading the Kindle version of the bio.
My dog sometimes goes all “flop-bottom” and I think of Tricki Woo.
I have read all the books hundreds of times, starting when I was 6 or 7. I love them. So why don’t I own any copies now?!
Don’t forget crackerdog! Actually, “Mrs. Pumphrey” was one of the few people who “recognized” herself in the Books, and fearing she would be offended he stopped writing about her as much. Her response? “There’s nothing to larf at now!”
I think that farmers in general are “of a type”. The accent and location may change but there is a weary fatalism common to them all.
I love the Herriot books. They are just about the only books I have read more than once, and I’ve read them probably 20-30 times.
I’ve read them so much, I have passages of them memorized. One time, I was driving and my daughter was in the car and was bored. I was trying to get her interested in the books and had her read to me. In the book I had, one of the pages had been torn, and part of the paragraph was missing. When she got to that part, she stopped reading, and I continued the narrative for her ti get past the missing parts on both pages.
I know I’ll probably be hauled off to Mallock’s for saying so, but I never really liked the TV series much, because I always thought they had miscast James and Siegfried. In the books, Siegfried was described as being tall and thin, while James was always fighting the battle of the bulge once, especially after he married Helen. In the TV series, I felt that the guy playing Herriot looked more like how I thought Siegfried should look, and vice-versa.
How incredible! I am reading All Creatures Great and Small right now every day on my lunch hour at work.
I’ve been purposely going slowly — and it’s been so long since I read it, I’ve mostly forgotten many of the details, so it’s all very fresh and fun! Of course I wouldn’t have forgotten all the time he spent on sticking his arms up cows; that kind of thing doesn’t leave you. I probably read the first book for the first time at about the age of 10.
I wonder why he chose such names for Siegfrid and Tristan; the book claims that their father loved Wagner. Donald and Brian are quite ordinary names. (The dedication page says ‘For Donald and Brian Sinclair. Still may friends.’)
Anyone who loves these books would probably like My Family and Other Animals, also dramatized on British television and aired on PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre a couple years ago.
I never saw the TV series, BobArrgh, but I think I prefer my imaginary smokin’ hot Farnons to anyone they might have cast.
Oh, the show is great IMHO - Siegfried is just perfectly himself, the way he says “Well, you see, James…”
I loved the books and the BBC series.
I get the feeling that the whole bunch lived in a sort of threadbare, genteel poverty…as I assume that 1930’s rural England was a place not blessed with lots of money.
But the love of animals expressed in the books really comes through, and that is a big reason why I liked them.