Catholic Church, Harrogate, where he gave her away. In the 1920s, his elder brother, Donald, was a veterinary student at the Royal School of Veterinary Studies in the University of Edinburgh. In his youth, Sinclair had considered a career in dentistry, but his interest turned to veterinary medicine after assisting his cousin, then a local veterinarian, with bovine tuberculosis testing. In 1932, he entered the veterinary school at Edinburgh but failed his undergraduate examinations. His brother transferred him to Glasgow Veterinary College but he was expelled after laughing in Professor John William Emslie's pathology class. He finally passed his professional examinations at Edinburgh in December 1943, and in the same month, he was admitted a member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. He worked for his brother while studying veterinary medicine, and after he graduated, he returned to his brother's practice at 23 Kirkgate in Thirsk, Yorkshire. Veterinary career On 23March 1944, Sinclair enlisted in the Royal Army Veterinary Corps (RAVC) and was given the rank of lieutenant. He had been a member of the Edinburgh college Officers' Training Corps (OTC). A month later, on 20April 1944, he married Sheila Rose Seaton, the only daughter of Douglas Seaton, a general practitioner based in Leeds, at StRobert's in Harrogate. Four months after the wedding, he was deployed to the Ambala district in the state of Haryana, India. Sinclair was put in charge of the mules and camels used by troops in Burma. At the end of the war, he joined India's dairy programme, supervising the care of seventy thousand water buffalo on military farms, and teaching pregnancy testing to local veterinarians. The closest he got to military action was when a local tribe fired shots into the camp using homemade rifles. Alf Wight would write long letters to Sinclair, often twenty pages, that would give news from home and would finish with a description of the Yorkshire countryside. Sinclair would later say that "Reading the [Herriot] books I find that the descriptions of the countryside are just the same as in those old letters." Making the rank of captain, Sinclair was demobilised in 1946. On his return to England, he visited the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) headquarters in Surrey in search of a job. He was offered a post at the ministry's Sterility Advisory unit at Church Street, Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. He and his wife