SIR JOHN PLUMB: The Hidden Life of a Great Historian

Sir John Plumb

The Hidden Life of a Great Historian

A Personal Memoir by Neil McKendrick

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Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2019

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Sir John Plumb. The Hidden Life of a Great Historian. A Personal Memoir

By Neil McKendrick.

First published in Great Britain in 2019.

© Neil McKendrick 2019.

This edition © Edward Everett Root Publishers 2019

ISBN 978-1-911454-83-0 Hardback  

ISBN 978-1-911454-86-1 ebook

Neil McKendrick has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and as the owner of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Cover and Production by Head & Heart Book Design.

This memoir is dedicated to my wife, Melveena McKendrick,

and to our daughters, Olivia and Cornelia, who all

witnessed at first hand and for many years

the Marmite character and

personality

of

Sir John Plumb.

CONTENTS

Introduction

J.H.Plumb’s Curriculum Vitae

Preface: Jack Plumb: A Personal Memoir from 1949 to 2001

Plumb in Leicester: Family Upbringing and Schooling

Plumb’s Coming to terms with Cambridge

Plumb’s Early Research and his later Publications

Plumb, Elton and Chadwick and the Regius Chair

Plumb the Possessive Father Figure

Plumb’s Reputation as Patron, Promoter and Fixer

Plumb in Fiction

Plumb’s Painted Portraits

Plumb and the Secret World at Bletchley Park

Plumb: his tastes, his collections and his enthusiasms

Plumb’s wealth – Its Sources and its Size

Plumb as a prolific Editor

Plumb’s American Journalism – American Heritage and Horizon

Plumb’s Apolaustic Lifestyle: Expensive Cars and their Destruction

Plumb the Big Spender: Houses, Holidays and other Indulgences

Plumb and his New Friends: A Case of Social Mobility

Plumb’s Reputation as a Scholar and Walpole III

Plumb’s Health and his Declining Productivity

Plumb’s Critique of Cambridge Historians

Plumb’s Dedications

Plumb’s Other Writing

Plumb’s Other Pupils and Plumb the Novelist Manqué

Plumb’s Changing Political Beliefs and the Blunt Affair: from Communist Sympathiser to Combative Tory

Plumb’s Generosity to his Staff, his Friends and Himself

Plumb and his Wine

Plumb and Philanthropy

Plumb’s Very Private Love Life: Sex, Secrets and Subterfuge

Plumb and Friendship

Plumb’s Posthumous Sale in 2002

Plumb’s Secret Daughter and his Attitude to Marriage and Children

Plumb’s 90th Birthday: a Symbol of Old Age and the Black Years

Plumb and his Mastership of Christ’s in Context

Plumb and Public Recognition: the film If and Desert Island Discs

Plumb’s Changing Attitude to his Pupils

Plumb: the End of Life, his Death, his Burial and a Memorial Dinner

Plumb and his Legacy: Historian and Teacher of Historians

Acknowledgements

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Front cover: Plumb in front of the Master’s Lodge in Christ’s

2. Plumb in Litt.D. gown

3. Plumb’s birth certificate

4. Plumb’s birthplace and first home – 65, Walton St., Leicester

5. The youthful Dr. J.H. Plumb aged 25 in 1936

6. Plumb aged 39 – his favourite self-image

7. Plumb aged 60 – chosen for his Festschrift

8. Plumb aged 90

9. Plumb with the author in 1954

10. Plumb with Craig Barlow, Angus Wilson and the author in 1956

11. Plumb with the author in 1964

12. Plumb: a portrait by Jenny Polack, commissioned by Christ’s in 1978

13. Plumb: a portrait by Lawrence Gowing, commissioned by Christ’s in 1980

14. Plumb: a portrait by John Ward, commissioned by the author in 1991

15. Plumb’s country home from 1958-1992 – The Old Rectory, Westhorpe

16. Plumb in the garden at the Old Rectory, Westhorpe

17. A Christmas card cartoon of Plumb and colleagues at Bletchley Park in the early 1940s

18. Plumb’s favourite photograph of his surrogate family – the McKendricks.

19. Plumb drinking a 1911 Perrier-Jouët at a Bordeaux Club dinner at Hugh Johnson’s home at Saling Hall, Saling.

20. Hugh Johnson, John Jenkins, Michael Broadbent, Jack Plumb, Neil McKendrick and Daphne Broadbent – before a Bordeaux Club dinner hosted by Hugh Johnson at Saling Hall.

21. Bert Howard – scoolmaster mentor of Plumb and the author.

22. Plumb – celebrating Christmas dinner with the McKendricks in the dining room of the Master’s Lodge in Caius.

23. Plumb on holiday in France.

24. Plumb’s holiday home for many years – Le Moulin de la Ressence, Plan de la Tour.

25. Plumb walking across Brooklyn Bridge in New York in 1972

26. The author in 1949 when he first met Plumb

27. The author in 1953 when he went up to Cambridge

28. The author in 2000

29. The author in 2005 painted by Michael Noakes

30. C.P. Snow

* Illustrations can be found near the middle of the book

1. INTRODUCTION

This book is a very personal attempt to delineate in some detail the life and career of Sir John Plumb. It tells the story of a fascinating and controversial individual who believed in living both his multi-faceted career and his bisexual life to the full. It attempts to shed new light (much of it very surprising and known only to his closest friends) on a man who lived a life often shrouded in secrecy and often embellished and improved upon by his fertile and creative imagination.

It was a life that, in fact, needed little embellishment to make it unusually interesting. His character was sufficiently beguiling and sufficiently intriguing to attract the attention of four novelists. It has been claimed that, between them, they left six vivid fictional versions of him. They are, to say the least, not all unambiguously flattering. They depict him as ruthlessly ambitious, engagingly self-aggrandising, and successfully upwardly mobile. They also depict him as a highly intelligent, highly entertaining, life-enhancing, multi-talented individual and as an endearingly self-congratulatory lover, of both sexes. One of them even bizarrely portrays him as an academic fraud and a murderer planning further murders.

Jack Plumb’s life began on one of the lowest rungs of the social ladder and ended being spent among those on the highest. It started in a humble red brick two-up-two-down terrace house in the back streets of Leicester where his father was a clicker in a local shoe factory and where he was (most unusually) wet-nursed by a friend of his mother. It ended amongst the smart set of London and New York and as a friend of the English aristocracy and a familiar of the Royal family – invited to stay as a guest of the Queen at Sandringham, invited as a guest to the Prince Charles and Diana wedding and frequently invited to spend holidays on the beach with Princess Margaret on the Caribbean island of Mustique.

An equally remarkable rise up his career ladder began with a humiliating rejection by Cambridge, after turning up for his interview at St John’s misguidedly wearing a bowler hat (the headgear of the un-amused college porters), and ended up as Master of Christ’s College with a knighthood, a Cambridge professorship, a Fellowship of the British Academy, a Litt.D. and seven Honorary degrees amongst many other accolades.

His financial situation started as that of a poor working-class boy, unable to afford the place reluctantly offered to him at Cambridge when he failed to get the scholarship he needed, and progressed to a life as a young don so hard-up as to need to ask for windfall apples from his mother’s garden to be sent up to Cambridge. Yet he finished his career as a multi-millionaire, able to give away millions as a result of the huge royalties earned by his writing.

His political sympathies changed as dramatically as his financial fortunes. In the 1930s, he was an ardent Communist sympathiser (some say that he was a card-carrying member of the Party); in the 1960s he was an almost besotted supporter of Harold Wilson and the Labour Party; by the 1980s he had moved so far to the Right that he often criticised his new heroes, Thatcher and Tebbitt, as being timid pinkoes. When confronted with the appalled reactions of his old liberal friends, he smugly replied, there’s no rage like the rage of the convert.

His teaching career in Cambridge started as someone not thought grand or distinguished enough to teach Christ’s undergraduates and finished as the acclaimed mentor of probably the most remarkable stable of successful students and colleagues from any single college in either Oxford or Cambridge. Many of them went on to follow his path to academic eminence and popular acclaim. They included Sir Simon Schama, Roy Porter, Quentin Skinner, John Vincent, John Burrow, Joachim Whaley, Norman Stone, Geoffrey Parker, Jonathan Steinberg, David Reynolds, Niall Ferguson, Sir David Cannadine, Linda Colley and many others.

His war-service, spent in code-breaking secrecy at Bletchley in Hut 4 and Hut 6, started in a scruffy anonymous wartime lodging, and ended up (as a result of his gallant and explosive response to a snide anti-Semitic comment about Yvonne de Rothschild) as the only, and much indulged, lodger of the Rothschilds, spending his evenings drinking their finest first growth clarets.

His writing career was so delayed that he was nearly forty when he produced his first significant book but so productive that over the next twenty-five years he published forty-four books bearing his name either as editor or sole author. He was at the same time a hugely prolific journalist in both Britain and the United States. By then he had earned the reputation of being one of the most widely-read living historians.

His first efforts at publication were rejected, first a novel and then a learned article. His PhD dissertation was also regarded as not worth publishing and his early research was dismissed as very disappointing. Yet the prose in his later work was to earn the praise of novelists of the calibre of Grahame Greene, C. P. Snow and Angus Wilson, and its influence was regarded as so pervasive in the States that, on the direct order of the President and a unanimous vote in Congress, the Union flag was flown over the American Capitol in his honour to mark his 80th birthday and to recognise a man whose writing had taught the American people so much.

It was not only as a teacher and a writer that he excelled. It must have been a pleasing irony to him in his mature years that the aspiring writer, who had had his first literary efforts rejected by editors and publishers alike, should eventually come to control a dazzling portfolio of editorial appointments himself. Those appointments led to a huge array of significant publications with an impressive cast of distinguished authors and distinguished publishers. The list of books he commissioned and promoted arguably ultimately exceeded his own writings. They also helped to boost his enviable income level, as did his prolific and well-paid international journalism.

As a result, even in years of stratospheric tax levels (83% on earned income and 98% on unearned income, at their peak) he was able to enjoy a munificent lifestyle far beyond that of the average don. These were the years when he enjoyed a pleasure-loving lifestyle, as well as a hugely productive one and a much acclaimed one. These were the days of ever more expensive fast cars, and ever more expensive and expansive foreign holidays in Provence, the Algarve and the Caribbean for himself and his friends.

These were the prosperous years when he also bought in profusion: eighteenth-century English silver; seventeenth-century Dutch paintings; and in particular fine wine, which led him to amass the finest private cellar in Cambridge; and, perhaps most notably of all, fine porcelain, which became a finer collection of Vincennes and Sèvres than that in the Fitzwilliam museum.

These were the heady years when he aspired to become Regius Professor of History in Cambridge, President of the British Academy, and ultimately a peer of the realm.

These were the upbeat years when Sir David Cannadine has described him as being at his Balzacian best when he radiated warmth, buoyancy, optimism and hope.

These were the years when he was at his exuberant and inspiring best, attracting and helping to promote his remarkable and unparalleled phalanx of brilliant pupils.

From these dizzying peaks of achievement and acclaim, and even more dizzying peaks of aspiration, there were to follow the years of disappointment and decline and ambitions not achieved. These were the darker years of rage, resentment and recrimination, which saw him in what Cannadine has described as his more Dostoyevskian mode when he was consumed by doubt, loneliness and disappointment.

In old age his private life seemed to offer few compensations. He had always claimed that he had based his life on serial friendships with both sexes. He had always derided marriage. He claimed to have had a daughter but he never recognized her. Without children or grandchildren or a permanent partner to comfort him in his later decades, he began to think that he might have made the wrong choices in his personal life.

The end was the darkest episode of all – a lonely and embittered old age, when, echoing the closing words of his great work on Walpole, the future would bring the death of friends, the decline of powers, age, sickness and defeat.

Perhaps the grimmest moment of all was the manner of his lonely death, and the even lonelier manner of his burial. At his insistence he was buried without friends or mourners or music, without elegies or eulogies, without even a coffin. For a man who wrote so many elegant words it seems especially stark that no words should mark his passing from this world. For a man who promoted the careers of so many pupils it seems especially sad that he left orders that none should attend.

This book is an attempt to explore the reasons for these dramatic changes of fortune, and to examine the significance of his lasting literary and historical legacy. It also attempts to explain how the man who inspired and charmed so many, infuriated and offended so many others, and why, in consequence, that legacy is as controversial and questionable to some as it is considerable and undeniable to others.

The isolated headstone, which marks his unattended burial spot in its neglected country churchyard, may symbolize his lonely and miserable end, but in the libraries of the world his work lives on in his still sparkling and memorable prose. And many have judged that his ultimate legacy lives on in the form of the many other books alongside his own, written by his many flourishing pupils, some of whom have gone on to match or perhaps even surpass his remarkable achievements as a communicator and populariser of serious academic history.

*** *** *** ***

This book is not a conventional biography of Jack Plumb. Even less is it an academic critique of Plumb’s publications. His books are all freely available in the libraries of the world. They can largely be left to speak for themselves. Their author, however, has mainly remained hidden from public scrutiny and this book is designed to lift the veil on an extraordinary character who lived an extraordinary life. It is a very personal memoir and personal memoirs are by definition a collection of memories recorded by one individual from their knowledge of another.

This memoir is inevitably based to a large extent on my own memories, although the story it tells is reinforced by those of many of my friends and colleagues. I make no apology, therefore, if my part of the story seems to some to be disproportionately large. In consequence it can be read in some senses simply as the story of the changing nature of a close friendship between two Cambridge academics that lasted over fifty years.

Its main intention is to do for Plumb what George Otto Trevelyan did for that earlier great historian Macaulay when he wrote there must be tens of thousands whose interest in history and literature he has awakened and informed by his pen, and who would gladly know what manner of man has done them so great a service. In identifying and describing what manner of man Jack Plumb was, it also attempts to put into perspective his academic rivalries, his personal ambitions, his prolific publications, his major role as a editor, his inspiring role as teacher, his role as a promoter of his remarkable school of famous pupils, his role as a war-time code breaker and his achievement as a Master of a Cambridge college.

Most of all it attempts to paint a portrait of a remarkable individual who did so much to change the nature and direction of travel of popular academic history, and seeks to explain why he provoked so much interest and so much controversy amongst novelists, portrait painters, fellow historians and Cambridge colleagues. It depicts a man who climbed very high from very lowly beginnings, but also alas a man who ended his life as a sad, lonely and embittered individual.

2. J.H.Plumb’s Curriculum Vitae

B.A. (London), M.A., Ph.D., Litt.D. (Cambridge), FRHistS., FBA., FSA., FRSL., Hon. Litt.D. (Leicester, East Anglia, Bowdoin College, Southern California, Westminster College, Washington University, St. Louis, Bard College, New York), Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Honorary Member of the Society of American Historians, Honorary Member of American Historical Association.

Education:

Alderman Newton’s Boys School, 1923-30

University College Leicester, 1930-33

B.A. (London) 1st Class Honours in History 1933

Cambridge University 1934-2001

Ph.D. (Cambridge) 1936

Litt.D. (Cambridge) 1957

College Career:

Christ’s College, Cambridge, matriculated October 1934

Ehrmann Research Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge, 1939-46

Christ’s College, Cambridge, 1946-2001

Fellow, 1946-2001

Steward, 1948-50

Director of Studies 1949-66

Tutor, 1950-59

Vice-Master, 1964-68

Master, 1978-82

University Career:

University Lecturer in History, 1946-62

Reader in Modern English History, 1962-66

Chairman of the History Faculty, 1966-68

Professor of Modern English History, 1966-74

War-time Career:

Foreign Office, Bletchley 1940-45

Honours and Appointments:

Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and

Sciences, 1970

Honorary Member of the Society of American History, 1976

Honorary Member of American Historical Association, 1981

Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, 1961-82

Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, 1960-77

Trustee of the Fitzwilliam Museum, 1985-92

Member of the Wine Standards Board, 1973-75

Elector of the Wolfson Prize for History, 1974-86

Fellow of the British Academy, 1968-2001

Member of the Council of the British Academy, 1977-80

Chairman of the Centre of East Anglian Studies, 1979-82

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, 1969

Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, 1969

Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1969

Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York, 1960

Distinguished Visiting Professor NYC University, 1971-72

Distinguished Visiting Professor NYC University, 1976

Charles & Ida Green Honours Chair, Texas Christian University, 1974

Distinguished Visiting Professor, Washington University, 1977

Knighthood, 1982

Lectures:

Ford Lectures, University of Oxford, 1965-66

Saposnekov Lectures City College, New York, 1968

Guy Stanton Ford Lecture, University of Minnesota, 1966

The Stenton Lecture, University of Reading, 1977

George Rogers Clark Lecture, Society of Cincinnati, 1977

Honorary Degrees:

Hon. D.Litt. University of Leicester 1968

Hon. D.Litt. University of East Anglia 1977

Hon. D.Litt. Bowdoin College, U.S.A. 1974

Hon. D.Litt. University of Southern California 1978

Hon. D.Litt. Westminster College, U.S.A. 1983

Hon. D.Litt. Washington University, St. Louis 1983

Hon. D.Litt. Bard College, New York 1988

Editing:

Editor of the History of Human Society, 1957-1978

Editor of the Fontana History of Europe, 1957-1997

Senior Editor of American Heritage, 1957-1982

Historical Advisor, Penguin Books, 1960-91

Editor of Pelican Social History of Britain, 1982-91

Editor of the Library of World Biography for Little Brown of Boston, 1972

Editing work for British Museum Publications

Festschrift:

Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, edited and introduced by Neil McKendrick (1974)

3. PREFACE JACK PLUMB: A Personal Memoir from 1949 to 2001

When we encounter a natural style we are always astonished and delighted, for we expected to see an author and found a man.

- Pascal

This is an informal and very personal, and necessarily incomplete biographical memoir of Sir John Plumb. Professor Sir David Cannadine has already offered the best critical summing up of his importance to English historiography in History Today and has added further important insights in his formal assessment in The Proceedings of the British Academy. Professor Sir Simon Schema has produced the most affectionate appreciation of his role in keeping alive the traditions of history as literature in The Independent, and Professor Niall Ferguson has written a formal assessment of his work as an introduction to a new edition of Plumb’s The Death of the Past. This offering is an attempt to record some more personal insights about his life and work and character.

I have known Jack Plumb since I was thirteen. I first met him when I sailed as a cabin boy with the Green Wyvern Yacht Club in Easter 1949 – even then he was clearly very different from the other sailors. He was more interesting, more entertaining and much more demanding. He was a Cambridge don, an as yet largely unpublished historian, an exceptional cook, and a frantically competitive sailor who made up for any technical deficiencies in his sailing skills by picking and later buying the fastest boat, choosing the best crew and making sure that they were up early enough to leave before everyone else – arguing persuasively that this would ensure us the choice of the best mooring for the night and the longest period of drinking in the pub. In those days, bitter beer was his chosen tipple (a taste largely abandoned in the late 1960s), cigarettes his drug of choice (a habit given up in the 1950s) and serious wine drinking was still mainly preserved for his more sophisticated friends. The sailing club was a school and university-based society. It sailed as a flotilla of yachts, each of which housed often highly competitive crews of about five or six schoolboys, Old Boys, schoolmasters and an assortment of guests, the most memorable in my time being Pat Moynihan (later U.S. Secretary of Labour Moynihan, Ambassador Moynihan and Senator Moynihan) who effortlessly drank everyone under the table.

Being chosen to crew for Jack was a mixed blessing – his boats were chosen or bought for speed rather than comfort, but everything that money could buy was employed to make the week’s sailing a memorable experience. His fastest boat, Sabrina, was dismissively nick-named The Gilded Canoe by those sailing in the larger, heavier, sturdier boats which trailed more sluggishly in its wake; his food was disdained as the product of the Garlic Galley; and his fellow sailors were pitied as the galley slaves in Plumb’s forced labour crew. I felt that the cooking and the speed and the conversation more than made up for the shouting and the cursing and the incessant insistence on maintaining our competitive edge. It was a good introduction to Jack’s teaching methods in Cambridge – on board his yacht, as in supervisions in Christ’s, he saw his role as part teacher, part father-figure and part tyrant.

Having known him for over fifty years and having seen him within hours of his death I feel that I have gained some insights into the man.

Having observed the full curve of his adult career, I can claim to know him pretty well.

I came from a very similar background. I lived in the same Leicester street that he did, went to the same grammar school, was even taught by the same two history masters there some quarter of a century after he was. He taught me and directed my studies for three years in Christ’s. He was even – very briefly – my tutor. I shared a staircase with him in the First Court for five years (three as an undergraduate, one and half as a graduate student, and half as a Research Fellow). I can, I feel, fairly be described as both a product of the Plumb school of history and a product of the history school which produced Plumb.

My family and I also shared a house with him in Suffolk for over thirty years. I wrote a book with him. I edited his festschrift, worked on Plumb’s century and discussed his work with him on a daily basis during the most productive years of his life. I have been asked to give innumerable speeches in his honour and he, in return, spoke as the best man at my wedding. My family and I took holidays with him for at least thirty-five of the last fifty years of his life and I have dined with him more times than either I can or care to remember. I knew almost all of his friends, many of his male lovers, some of his mistresses and most of his professional rivals.

When I wrote his obituary for The Guardian, I was generously offered 2000 words in which to do so. But since he died on a Sunday and my obituary appeared on the Monday morning little more than twenty-four hours after his death, I obviously did not have the time or the space to say all that I would have wished to say. He was a complicated man, and so I welcome this opportunity to expand my obituary and to expatiate a little more on some of the complexities that made him such a fascinating and maddening friend and colleague. If nothing else it will contain quite a lot of information about his life that few others will know about and even fewer might wish to record. It is very far from all that I could say but the time is not yet ripe for the publication of all the rich details of an exceptionally full life. His archive was purchased by the Cambridge University Library (for the surprising sum of £60,000 several decades ago when that sum would have bought a pretty substantial house) and will provide rich biographical pickings when it is free from its fifty-year embargo. Some sections of it are even embargoed until the death of the last surviving grandchild of the current monarch.

On the Sunday of his death when I was writing his obituary, my younger daughter said, Forget about the black years and concentrate on the good Jack. That is what I tried to do. But one cannot deny that the last years of his life were often very black indeed. To try to explain what happened to Jack in his later years I have added A Postscript on the Black Years. It was difficult to write and the contrast between the man it portrays and the ebullient, inspiring and uninhibitedly generous man about whom I wrote in a Valedictory Tribute when he retired from the Faculty in 1974 is painful to contemplate. Without it, however, this personal memoir would be incomplete and the portrait of Jack would be cosmetically distorted by excessive censorship and excessive kindness – he would have disapproved of the former and despised the latter. In his old age, he rarely practiced either.

I make no apology for this portrait being presented very much from my point of view. Others doubtless have different perspectives on Jack’s life and character. Doubtless some will disagree with my version and my judgements. Doubtless other portraits will appear. All I can say is that this is how I saw him and this is how I remember his distinctive personality. I have enjoyed casting my mind back to the exhilarating early years of our friendship and have found it curiously therapeutic to try to explain and to understand the later darker years.

He always used to divide people into those who enhanced life and those who detracted from it. We should never forget that for most of his life he was without question one of the great life-enhancers – someone who raised the temperature of life just by being there. But there is more of interest to him than that. Perhaps this memoir will offer more evidence and some greater insight into what kind man was the Sir John Plumb who awakened so many people’s interest in history and literature in the late twentieth century.

I hope that this memoir will be read as an affectionate if un-illusion piece. I hope that it will be seen as genuinely admiring and compassionate in tone and content, if not uncritical in spirit and analysis. I have tried to include some of the more revealing and more characteristic episodes in his career and I have concentrated on those aspects of his life of which I had the most direct experience. So, above all, it is how I remember my old teacher and friend. I owe him a great debt of gratitude – indeed, apart from my wife and my daughters, he unquestionably had more influence on my life than any other individual. If history is, in one sense, the record of memory, then perhaps these memories and very personal recollections can be regarded as my modest contribution to the first draft of a history of a fascinating if ultimately much troubled life.

It was clear in 2001 that, with his death, Cambridge had lost one of its most influential historians of the late twentieth century. It had also lost one of its most memorable characters.

He was one of a remarkable group of dynamic and charismatic scholars (including Sir Moses Finley, Sir Geoffrey Elton, Sir Harry Hensley, (Sir) Owen Chadwick, Sir Denis Brogan, Sir Herbert Butterfield, Dom David Knowles, Mania (Sir Michael) Postman, Philip Grierson, Walter Ullmann, Peter Laslett and Denis Mack Smith) who made the Cambridge History Faculty such an exciting place to be in the 1960s and 1970s. When one recalls that Joseph Needham and E.H. Carr were then at the height of their powers in Cambridge, that exciting young scholars, such as John (later Sir John) Elliott, Quentin Skinner, Christopher Andrew and Norman Stone, had already joined the Faculty, and that ambitious youngsters such as Richard Overy, Geoffrey Parker, Roy Porter, Simon (later Sir Simon) Schama, John Brewer, Keith Wrightson, David (later Sir David) Cannadine, Chris (later Sir Christopher) Clark and Chris (later Sir Christopher) Bayly were beginning their research careers here, it is little wonder that one looks back on it now as a Golden Age which has not been equalled since. It was (as Roy Porter once memorably said of the eighteenth century) a tonic time to be alive.

Few if any could claim to have played a more central role in that golden era than Dr. J. H. Plumb as he was then known. As a hugely influential teacher, the most popular lecturer and the most prolific writer, and as an unforgettably colourful character, Plumb dominated Christ’s and Cambridge History during much of this period. In the final years of his life it gave him great pleasure that he had outlived almost all of his contemporaries, and he reacted to the death of particularly fierce rivals, such as Lord Todd in Christ’s and Sir Geoffrey Elton in the History Faculty, with undisguised glee.

4. Plumb in Leicester: Family Upbringing and Schooling

Jack Plumb did not enjoy the effortless rise to the top that so many of his colleagues did. He often complained – probably justifiably – that the scales of social justice were stacked against his succeeding in life.

Certainly he was not blessed with a privileged or wealthy background. He was the product of a working-class family in Leicester and of the local grammar school, Alderman Newton’s. His father toiled away on the shop floor of a local boot and shoe factory and Jack spent his childhood in a humble red brick terrace house typical of nineteenth-century workers’ housing. It can still be seen at 65 Walton Street, leading off Narborough Road, Leicester. His family later moved to suburbia – a modest semi-detached house near the corner of Dumbleton Avenue and Somerville Road (both of which also lead off Narborough Road), which he felt signalled his parents’ success in joining the lower middle classes. I briefly lived in the same street in 1939, and I was much surprised and mildly amused to learn how much it irritated Jack that my family lived in one of the large three story Edwardian houses at the town end of Somerville Road whilst his family lived in an undistinguished inter-war semi at the other end. I was even more amused to hear Jack’s adult efforts to re-write a more romantic background for himself. On the slender basis of six silver teaspoons carrying the arms of a family in whose service his grandmother had worked, he wove a fantasy of himself as a by-blow of an aristocratic English family. He even claimed to be able to trace a family resemblance. When he later confided this suspicion to one of his aristocratic friends and offered the decisive evidence of his mother’s possession of the silver teaspoons, he was quite crushed when she replied, But Jack darling, the servants always steal the tea-spoons!

What was always obvious was that he had no intention of staying any longer than he had to in the social milieu into which he felt an unkind fate had so very undeservedly tipped him. His schoolboy diaries make it abundantly clear that he yearned to explore a wider world and that he had the energy and drive and intelligence to ensure that he would succeed in doing so. Even as a schoolboy he was active in persuading and if necessary bullying his friends – and even his schoolmasters – into accompanying him on cycling trips to explore ancient Welsh castles, historic sites and any available country houses. These he felt would provide his fertile historical imagination with the scope that the humble back streets of Leicester lacked.

The first surviving diary in his archive, which describes one such trip, is the work of several hands (including his first history master, Mr Joels, who later taught me) but it is dominated by Plumb, as he was called by his school friends and, more surprisingly, by his father. It is always Plumb doing the planning, Plumb dominating the talking, and Plumb whose experiences are being recorded. Even the fact that Plumb’s poor little snub-nose suffered the worst sunburn was faithfully recorded for posterity. This diary (neatly typed out and decorated with photographs of the travelling party) offers some revealing insights into the young Plumb, as do the postcards he sent home. Some surprising clues to his early self- image and his relations with his parents come from one such postcard signed (surely rather remarkably) with the words from your only handsome son. It also contains a rather snide reference to his handicapped elder brother (described as the Loved one) who he always felt enjoyed an excessive amount of parental attention, which could more deservedly have been directed to him.

He always felt that he had been starved of affection in infancy because Sid, the elder of his two brothers (the other was called Bert), had had to undergo major brain surgery just when Jack was born. Not surprisingly his mother was distracted