Yorkshire Vet Peter Wright shares how he started career and sadness of seeing small family-run farms disappear
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Yorkshire Vet star Peter Wright reveals how he got into the job
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Yorkshire Vet star Peter Wright has revealed the moment he made his career choice – soon after a school master had suggested he become a dentist. The star of the hit Channel 5 documentary series spilled the beans during a guest appearance on James Martin ‘s Saturday Morning show.
Now in his mid-60s, Peter sat down to chew the fat with the Yorkshire-born celebrity chef, whose weekend culinary series on ITV sees him invite celebrity guests into his kitchen to taste his mouth-watering recipes and chat about their lives. In today’s episode, James cooked him a delicious roast beef dinner, complete with Yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes – cooked in dripping, of course.
Peter began working with world-famous vet and author Alfred Wight, who is better known by his pen name James Herriot, at a practice in Thirsk, in 1982. Similar to Herriot’s ‘All Creatures Great and Small’, which also became a classic TV series starring Christopher Timothy and Robert Hardy, The Yorkshire Vet series follows his day to day work helping animals in the glorious Yorkshire Dales.
READ MORE: Who is Yorkshire Vet’s Peter Wright from tractor rallies to working with James Herriot
The veteran vet revealed to James how he wasn’t a fan of either TV or cooking, but was nonetheless delighted to be a guest on the show. “I’ve got to say James, it’s a privilege to be here,” said Peter. “I don’t watch much television and I don’t watch many cookery programmes.
“But I’ll make an exception for you because the way you take a little bit of this and a little bit of that – and everything turns out so fantastically well.” James, meanwhile, revealed to viewers how he’s always wanted to be a vet.
“I always wanted to be a vet,” he said. “If I gave up this job tomorrow I’d give it up to be a vet. I think it’s one of the most amazing jobs in the world.” Peter replied: ” I’m very privileged really to do what I’ve done throughout my life, as a veterinary surgeon. For me, there’s no other job like it.”
Peter said he’d actually had no idea what he wanted to do as the end of his school days approached. “I didn’t know what I was going to do to be honest, until I got to careers choice at school.
“The head of careers said ‘Peter, what are you going to do when you leave?’. I said ‘Well, I don’t know sir’ and he said ‘What about dentistry?’. Well, the thought of looking in people’s mouths all day just filled me with dread.
“So he said ‘What about veterinary science?’ I thought that sounds okay, because I could be out in the countryside, I could be with animals which I love being around anyway. And I can use what little grey matter I have as well.”
“He said he’d fix it up for me to do down there for half a day with Alf White and his son Jim, who he taught,” added Peter. “And within two hours I’d absolutely got on it – I thought this is for me. I thought ‘how lucky am I’.”
During the conversation, Peter reflected on how farming has changed in rural communities over the years – and how the type of colourful characters which inspired All Creatures Great and Small have disappeared. “Skeldale was a mixed veterinary practice, so we were dealing with all species – literally all creatures, great and small,” he said.
“That’s changed somewhat now and the profession is becoming much more specialist. You either go down the small animal route or the farm route.”
He added: “Farming has changed. A lot of the family farms that Herriot wrote about, that I grew up with aswell, the small family farms were very plentiful. And so, with it, were the characters.
“Now the small, family farms are disappearing as the large farming enterprises take over. So it’s very sad really, in some ways, that the countryside is changing with it as well.”