All Creatures Great and Small actor Samuel West meets James Herriot’s children while filming Series 4 in the Yorkshire Dales

“Shown round by Alf Wight’s children Jim and Rosie, our friends since ACGAS started, the make-up department and I got a wonderful tour with all sorts of personal insight and wisdom.”

He continued his thread: “Jim and Rosie lived in the house as children and the stuff they remembered (the sound of the metal latch on the door, Donald (Siegfried) knocking the wall when he walked into the hallway) could only come from them. But the museum’s terrific anyway.”

Samuel then posted a picture taken at the museum of the Meccano article that persuaded Alf Wight that he wanted to become a vet and a football programme from the game he was watching when he chose his pen-name, naming himself after the Birmingham City and future Scotland goalkeeper, Jim Herriot.

Samuel added: “There’s a lot of good vet stuff too. Memories of the first ever ep, where I used Donald Sinclair’s actual hoof knife to clear an abscess.” He went on to note that All Creatures Great and Small has “always inspired people to join the profession” and posted a photograph of Alf Wight’s wife, Joan Danbury, asking: “Don’t you think that Joan (the real life Helen Herriot) has something of Rachel Shenton in this picture?”

Last year, Rosie Page and Alf Wight published a new book celebrating the words and tales of their father, called The Wonderful World of James Herriot, a collection of favourite stories taken from all eight of the vet novels, interwoven with background and insight as to what happened in real life to inspire the penned work.

Both Rosie and Jim still live in and around Thirsk. Rosie told The Yorkshire Post in an article last year that her father’s stories still make her laugh and lift her up. “He was a genius with words,” she said.

Jim added: “It’s the interplay that I think is so funny between Siegfried and his younger brother. They are one of the great comedy duos to me - the love-hate relationship.”

Siegfried and Tristan were based on Alf’s real-life fellow vets Donald Sinclair and younger brother Brian, who were a constant presence in Rosie and Jim’s young life. They called Donald and his wife “Uncle Donald and Auntie Audrey”, a fact that will excite many fans of Channel 5’s remake of All Creatures Great and Small.

Donald, said Jim, had “no awareness of his amazingly eccentric personality” and was appalled by his portrayal. “‘Alfred – he always called him by his full name, never Alf - ‘this book is a test of our friendship’. Yet, when tourists from America came to our little surgery, he would show them round and give them guided tours.”

Jim has a treasured possession, a first edition of If Only They Could Talk, inscribed by Donald. “It says ‘To Alfred, with best wishes from Donald’. Alfred wrote the bloody thing.”

Jim and Rosie helped their father on his rounds, so naturally wanted to follow in his path. Sure enough, Jim went to Glasgow University and became a vet at the same practice. Some of the Herriot stories were in reality inspired by his experiences.

But Alf was less keen that Rosie follow suit, and she studied Medicine at Cambridge. “I am glad I became a doctor rather than a vet,” she said. “I wanted to do what he did, go round farms, and he didn’t want me lying on my stomach in a cow byre. He gradually put me off, and I have never had any regrets.”

She worked as GP in Thirsk for 20 years, and she and Jim had many patients in common. “You find in life that there are people who are awkward, whoever they are going to,” she said. “I thoroughly enjoyed being a GP.”

Series three of the popular, award-winning Channel 5 series of All Creatures Great and Small ended with the Christmas episode which saw young vet Tristan Farnon (Callum Woodhouse) enlisting to fight in World War II and leaving aboard a train, having hugged goodbye at the station with concerned elder brother Siegfried. Helen and James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) married at the start of series three, and so baby news is expected for series four, although a cloud hangs over the couple with the possibility of James leaving for war.

All Creatures Great and Small is produced by BAFTA-winning production company Playground (Howards End, Wolf Hall). This Channel 5 reboot has been adapted from James Herriot’s cherished collection of stories. James Alfred Wight OBE FRCVS was a veterinary surgeon who graduated from Glasgow Veterinary College at the age of 23 and headed to a veterinary practice in Thirsk, Yorkshire, in 1940 where he fell in love with the Dales and the woman he would marry, Joan Danbury. Wight later wrote stories based on his own adventures as a young country vet, under the pen name James Herriot, quickly becoming one of Britain’s best-loved authors.

The Christmas 2022 episode was filmed in Yorkshire during the searing heatwave of summer 2022, and saw Patricia Hodge return as Mrs Pumphrey (with Derek as Tricki-Woo) with Broughton Hall used as Pumphrey Manor. Harrogate student Imogen Clawson plays Helen’s sister, Jenny Alderson.

Filming is expected to continue through to the summer, with series four broadcast in September this year in the UK.

• The Visit The World of James Herriot website for more details of visiting. The video shown here at the top of this story was taken at the museum in 2019.