Herrioting on the hoof

LIZZIE the motley-coloured cat walks into the living room of Teesdale vet Neville Turner for a look round as he’s talking. “In the 1970s,” says Neville, “James Herriot was flavour of the month and everyone thought every vet had wonderful experiences and was a gifted raconteur. But not many of us were. I wasn’t. Standing up in front of an audience, I still get butterflies, but I have always liked taking pictures and when I started getting invited to give talks to Women’s Institutes, it was much easier to show them slides and that gave me inspiration.”

Having finished her inspection, Lizzie leaves the Barnard Castle living room, tail held high as she affects an air of complete disinterest. But her owner’s stories and pictures make an entertaining debut for the ladies of Stainton and Streatlam WI, and since then their telling has sailed him around the world, lecturing on cruise ships. Now his favourites from 40 years "Herrioting" up dale and down town have been compiled into a beautiful new book.

Stories like that of Luigi, a one-and-a-half ton Italian Chianina bull. Neville's largest patient, even in the best of moods he wasn't friendly. But when toothache was gnawing into his skull, Luigi was quite literally a raging bull.

It took three of them to lasso him and every droplet of bravery for Neville to get close enough to discharge a syringe of sedative into him. Then the vet had 20 minutes. He wedged the jaw open, easily found the wobbly back tooth, but pull as he might, it wouldn’t come out. And the clock was ticking…

“Looking back, I loved those adrenalin-filled moments which necessitated quick thinking, inspiration and improvisation,” he says.

He spotted a metal bar at the back of the byre and called for a large brick. “The plan was to lay one end of the bar against the tooth while the farmer struck the other with the brick,” he says. “Down came the brick. There was a crunch in the mouth. The plan had worked. The tooth would offend no more.”

There were still a couple of minutes of anaesthetic left – time enough for a picture of Luigi sleeping like a baby on a pillow of straw.

“I lay on the ground, flat on my stomach to get the right angle. Click went the shutter, and as it did, Luigi’s eyes opened. He was awake and looking straight at me. We both sprang to our feet in the same instant. I knew how fast he could move and that I had to be faster. I reached a wall and achieved its seven-foot summit in one gigantic leap.”

Neville was born in Crook in 1944 and grew up in “a little council house with six of us in it. It was a mining community with a lovely sense of belonging”. He studied veterinary science at Edinburgh University and, after four years practising in Somerset, got a job in Barnard Castle. It was ideal, allowing him to combine his love of natural history with his growing knowledge of local lore and his passion for pictures.

“Weardale is a steeper sided valley, whereas Teesdale has much more open feeling,” he says. “The dales run parallel to the North Sea and in the past, before motorised transport, each one was a crucible of its own culture. If you were an expert on field houses and stone barns and were parachuted into a dale, you could tell where you had landed by the style of barn or stonework.”

In the early 1970s, when Neville dropped in, the local vet was held in the same esteem as the local vicar, although the dales farmers expected him to dispense medical miracles for a very small fee.

And Barney really could have been Darrowby, the fictional seat of All Creatures Great And Small. “It was very much like you saw with Christopher Timothy and Robert Hardy,” he says. “We were flying by the seat of our pants. We only had two or three antibiotics - now there’s an armoury of sophisticated drugs.”

He tells of Daffy the drake who had a disagreement with a dales pony. Neville subdued Daffy with a cat anaesthetic, and x-rayed it to reveal the bone in its wing was broken in three places. He carefully selected a stainless steel pin, shaped like “a sturdy knitting needle”, and inserted it through the marrow cavity of Daffy’s bone, knitting the three pieces together and embedding the pointy end in the duck’s thicker elbow.

Neville returned to the duckpond a couple of weeks later. “It was my first foray with boyish enthusiasm into avian orthopaedic surgery, and as if to say thank-you, Daffy rose on the water and demonstrated two perfect wings,” says Neville.

Most of these moments Neville captured with his camera, initially a Kodak Coloursnap. “The only adjustment was bright sun, low cloud or dark cloud, but it is having a camera with you that counts,” he says.

He drove 35,000 miles for 30 years up and down dale and amassed a library of tens of thousands of photographs. The most famous are those of the grouse, which have advertised Famous Grouse whisky around the globe.

“I got in touch with Saatchi and Saatchi and they said I had what nobody else in the world had – full frame portraits of grouse in flight,” he says. “They had sent professional photographers into the Scottish Highlands, but even they didn’t get a flying bird – but I had dozens because I saw them every day.”

His stories and pictures have allowed Neville to take flight too, because, having honed his skills on the Teesdale WIs, he and wife Chris now sail the world as he lectures on cruise ships.

Just as the Herriot stories chronicle the lost world of the 1940s, so the Turner tales tell of the vanished days of a later generation which will, in turn, seem alien to those whose animals are treated to sophisticated micro-surgery in the age of the supervet.

“I almost don’t recognise the profession I started in because it has changed so much,” he says. “I have very fond memories - on a good day, it was like earning a living by visiting friends, it really was.”

And he has amassed a collection of pictures and stories that will fascinate anyone with a love of rural life... no matter what Lizzie the cat might think.

• The Dales Vet: A Working Life in Pictures by Neville Turner (Old Pond Publishing, £24.95). Neville is signing copies at Guisborough Book Shop on Saturday, December 3 from 11am to 2pm.