Читать книгу SIR JOHN PLUMB - Prof Neil McKendrick - Страница 10

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 by the joint arrival of a very demanding new baby and another son suddenly reduced to total dependence on her. As a result Jack was that very rare twentieth-century infant who was breast-fed not by his own mother but by a friend of hers who volunteered to act as a wet-nurse. Seeing Louie Moodie (the wet-nurse in question) and Mrs. Plumb together I always felt that it looked as if Jack had sucked far more than simple nourishment from the ample breasts of Mrs. Moodie. Where Sarah Plumb was small and bony and bird-like, Louie Moodie was stocky and muscular and mesomorphic. Where Jack’s mother was reticent and discreet, his wet-nurse was boldly outspoken. Where the birth mother seemed indecisive and lacking in energy and drive, the surrogate mother exuded physical stamina and the self-confidence that came from her certainty that she was always in the right. She was born to take charge and she ruled her family with Napoleonic decisiveness. Even on her deathbed when her relatives were trying to tempt her to eat by offering to open a precious wartime tin of salmon, she barked with Plumb-like ferocity, “You leave that alone. I want that kept for the guests at my funeral”. One always felt that there was a lot of Louie Moodie in Jack. He quickly assumed power over the other members of his family (many of whom, again rather remarkably, also always called him “Plumb”). He, too, was never reluctant to take decisions on their behalf. He, too, expected his extended family to heed his wishes, obey his instructions and “do what I bloody well tell them to do!” Like a cuckoo in the nest, he came to occupy a disproportionate part of the house, and take up a disproportionate part of his parent’s attention. His mother always took him morning tea in bed and his father always polished his shoes.

More importantly he always planned ahead – whether for his life, his death or for his future education.

His first school was Narborough Road Primary School, but winning a scholarship to Alderman Newton’s Grammar School was his first significant step on the educational ladder. Known as the Green Coat School because of its distinctive green blazer, it was the oldest grammar school in Leicester (having been founded in 1784) but was by no means ranked as the best.

The history of the school is scarcely mistily nostalgic about its building or its setting. It opens with the words “Alderman Newton’s is not an impressive building. Its Victorian drabness is not improved by the scars inflicted on it by a modern industrial city. Its position scarcely serves as an inspiration to a scholar. The thunder of traffic produces an atmosphere even less conducive to academic work.”

One has to concede that its position in the centre of Leicester was very far from the pastoral ideal of the many schools that consist of distinguished architecture set in arcadian surroundings. The only grass to be seen at Newton’s was not the rolling acres of playing fields but the thin strips surrounding the gravestones that we overlooked from the playground. Newton’s was closely hemmed in by the cathedral cemetery, a large municipal bus depot, a huge hosiery factory, and, on the fourth side, a building works called, to all small boys’ delight, “British Erections Ltd” which operated on Peacock Lane.

I much prefer to recall William Cooper’s description of Plumb’s and my old school in the opening words of his brilliant first novel Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), which was published when I was there in the V1th form:

“The school at which I was a science-master was desirably situated, right in the centre of the town. By walking only a few yards the masters and the boys could find themselves in a cafe or a public house.

“I used to frequent a cafe in the market place. It was on the first floor, and underneath was a shop where coffee was roasted. A delicious aroma drifted through the maze of market-stalls, mingling with the smell of celery, apples and chrysanthemums: you could pick it up in the middle of the place and follow it to the source, where, in the shop-window, a magnificent roasting-machine turned with a flash of red enamel and chromium plate – persistently reminding you that coffee smelt nicer than it tasted.”

That was the cafe – called Bruccianis, which opened in in 1937 and is still operating in Leicester to this day- in which historians from Newton’s spent many hours of their schooldays educating themselves in seemingly endless debates and successive cups of coffee. It was a bit like the common rooms I later encountered in Cambridge colleges, panelled in oak and restricted to “gentlemen only”. If my schooldays evoke nostalgic reminiscence, it is the aroma of coffee and the memories of robust argument at Bruccianis that flood back not the grim Victorian pile opposite the bus station. It was our common room and debating society all rolled into one. Its significance was that we were allowed to use it in school hours, indeed we were strongly encouraged by the charismatic history master H.E. Howard to do so. It was symptomatic of his teaching methods which launched so many historians (including Plumb and myself) on their route to Cambridge.

Plumb was one of the first of many that Howard set on this path even if his launch was initially to prove abortive and embarrassing, This was all the more disappointing because Howard had quickly recognised that with Plumb he had a candidate of exceptional promise with a very clear idea of what he wanted to do. When asked by Roy Plumley on Desert Island Discs what his earliest ambitions had been, Plumb replied promptly “To write”, adding that he had initially wanted to teach (“What bright little boy doesn’t want to teach”), but by the age of fourteen or fifteen he had decided on a writing career. By the age of 15 he had mapped out a whole series of Mercian novels after the model of Hardy’s Wessex series, but admitted that they never got beyond a list of titles. He was, he said, a boy of “infinite curiosity”, and history seemed likely to offer him endless possibilities on which to exercise it.

So his education was always his first priority and there was never much doubt that he would seek it initially as an historian. Even as a schoolboy he claimed that he was engaged in critical assessments of historical sources – carefully comparing the accounts of the fates of Charles I, Strafford and Cromwell as recorded by Clarendon, Gardiner and Carlyle. Such an intuitive critical response to history boded well for his future. His teachers’ assessment of his abilities boded even better. So urged on by his remarkable schoolmaster, H.E. (Bert) Howard (later immortalized by C.P. Snow as George Passant in his Strangers and Brothers series of novels), who had such a profound influence on him at Newton’s, the goal was ambitiously agreed on – to get him to Cambridge to read History.

Howard’s teaching methods, as I learned from first-hand experience in the 1940s and 1950s, were robust and relaxed and relatively free from normal schoolmasterly formality. At times they were so relaxed and so free as to excite much head-masterly disapproval. He smoked in class and he drank heavily out of class. He encouraged his pupils to do the same – meeting the sixth formers in raffish pubs near the school at the end of school hours, to argue about history and life and politics. The sessions could be long and combative and could end in angry confrontation – it was an instructive precursor for those of his pupils who got to be taught by Plumb in Cambridge.

His methods of instruction were equally un-conventional. Rather than feeding his pupils with well-prepared lists of ‘essential points’ to be made in answer to major historical questions, he encouraged us to do the work for ourselves. Rather than insisting on our turning up to school for his lessons, he would give us significant historical problems to work on and then advise us to go off to work in the local Reference Library in the town centre. Instead of giving us prepared bibliographies of recommended reading he told us to read as widely as possible and to seek out our own sources. Having completed our research on say the Reformation or the English Civil War or the Industrial Revolution, we would be required to give a lecture on the subject to the whole class whilst he sat at the back smoking his pipe and delivering withering criticism on anything he thought inadequately researched, poorly explained or sloppily delivered. Work, which he approved of, would receive fulsome praise. It was a pattern of praise and blame that Plumb was to copy in his supervisions at Christ’s.

Howard never stuck to any formal syllabus. We were encouraged to read widely and to pursue any subject that we found interesting. We were encouraged to argue and debate amongst ourselves and the fact that we all met up for coffee in the town centre to do so, rather than clocking in at school, was perfectly fine as far as he was concerned. It gave him more free time in which to write his own novels and publish his own history books, or to travel down to London to appear on the BBC’s Brains Trust.

The result of these methods was that we were encouraged to be independent, encouraged to pursue our own research, encouraged to choose our own subjects and reach our own conclusions with as little schoolmasterly intervention as possible. Standing up in class to deliver one’s findings (to our fellow pupils as well as to him) encouraged us to be well prepared and to be as entertaining as possible. If one could come up with some original and provocative arguments so much the better. The results were in time to prove to be dazzlingly successful in getting his pupils into Cambridge. For thirty years he attracted almost all of the brightest pupils in the school (much to the irritation of other subject masters) and (much to the ill-concealed envy of those colleagues) collected scholarship after scholarship at Cambridge. It was always Cambridge.

Many have described his methods, and the relaxed informal atmosphere in which we were prepared for our assault on the Cambridge Scholarship examinations, as uncannily similar to those which Alan Bennett portrayed so brilliantly in The History Boys. Indeed some, such as Asa Briggs, have told me that they were convinced that Bennett’s play must owe something to tales of Howard’s methods and his legendary success becoming well known throughout Oxbridge. I have no direct confirmation of this, but the resemblance was very strong. Bennett’s charismatic Hector (with his scatter-gun approach to imparting information and his belief that learning must be respected for its own sake) was very reminiscent of Howard’s unstructured teaching methods. But like Bennett’s contrasting character, Irwin, Howard was also dedicated to achieving success for his pupils. Indeed he was reminiscent of Bennett’s Hector, Irwin and Mrs Lintott all rolled into one. He completely dominated our pursuit of a place at Cambridge, and he set the tone of what life was like for the “seventh term sixth formers”. When Alan Bennett wrote: “Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement”, he might well have been quoting Howard.

Even the relaxed tolerance of the sixth-formers in The History Boys towards what they regarded as the harmless homoeroticism of their history master was a striking echo of our relaxed attitude to Howard’s affectionate (but in our eyes, at this stage of his life, pretty asexual) interest in his pupils.

It has to be conceded that in today’s moral climate, some of Howard’s teaching methods, which produced so many Cambridge historians (including Jack Plumb and Rupert Hall as long term Fellows of Christ’s, Arthur Hibbert as a long term Fellow of King’s and myself as a long term Fellow of Caius, and many others), would probably not now be tolerated.

His method began by picking the six brightest first year boys at Newton’s, based on their scores in the entrance Scholarship examination, to form Howard’s club. These six eleven year olds would then be regularly invited to Howard’s bachelor home to play simple educational games, which allowed him to assess in detail their individual academic potential. The games were carefully designed to test their knowledge, their memory, their intellectual curiosity, their reasoning skills, their verbal agility, their competitiveness, their sheer need to win. Having assessed their potential, Howard could then do his best to steer those he thought would excel in his own subject to concentrate on History. In a sense we were groomed, but in a very positive sense, not in the pejorative sense that grooming has come to indicate. At least I never heard any hint or rumour of inappropriate grooming in my day, but one has to admit that this process all ended very badly – indeed it ended disastrously for Howard. Many years after I had left the school an adolescent boy accused him of inappropriate behaviour and Howard was forced to resign. To avoid public disgrace he left his job and left the country. He fled to Amsterdam were he happily reverted to his previous love of prostitutes.

When a few years later he died there, he was buried in an unmarked grave. His brother Cecil Howard had opted for the cheapest choice of burial spot which allowed the authorities to plough it up and re-use it after only a very few years of “occupation”. There could be very few more anonymous endings. It was an appalling conclusion to nearly forty years of spectacularly successful teaching. Many us feared that the steady flow of scholarships to Cambridge would come to a sudden end, and so it proved.

After his death, I was asked to write a tribute to his achievements for the school magazine. Having rehearsed the remarkable record of his successes, I ended my piece with the grim but prescient words: “new talent, like milk to a suicide’s doorstep, will inevitably continue to be delivered to the school gates, let us hope that it will not be allowed to go sour, in the absence of the devoted attention to make the maximum use of it that Howard provided for so many decades”. Alas my hopes largely proved to be illusory, the flow of successfully harnessed talent that had begun with Plumb dried up dramatically with Howard’s departure. The occasional unstoppably bright pupil emerged (I admitted one outstanding Newtonian to read history at Caius) but they were pretty rare after Howard.

To be fair to the school the chances of finding a replacement of his calibre and his commitment were not great. His record was almost impossible to match, even if his initial efforts with what was to prove to be his most successful pupil was to end in abject failure when he prepared Plumb for his assault on Cambridge.

As the most charismatic member of the teaching staff, his influence on the young Plumb was predictably profound, but initially embarrassingly unsuccessful. With a First in History from London under his belt, and powerful literary ambitions as yet unfulfilled, Howard had just the kind of proven track record and promise for the future most likely to appeal to the aspirations of the schoolboy Plumb. Admission to Cambridge with a scholarship to provide the necessary financial support was the first thing he aspired to; with Howard’s help, it must have seemed to be intoxicatingly within reach.

With the assistance of the then Dr. C. P. Snow (later Sir Charles Snow and later still Lord Snow), an Old Newtonian who had made it to Cambridge via the fledgling Leicester university college, and who had quickly recognized the exceptional qualities of the young Plumb, the plans were hatched with all the precision of a military campaign. The strategy included contingency plans that seem astonishing to those who knew the adult Plumb. Perhaps the greatest astonishment would come from the knowledge that the teenaged Jack was instructed to become a confirmed Anglican in case he did not make his first-choice college, St John’s, and had to seek admission to Selwyn. Selwyn was in those days an altogether less glamorous and less desirable college than St. John’s, but also a less demanding one in terms of the likely competition for admission. Selwyn was not even to achieve full collegiate status until 1958, and as long as Jack met its singular requirement – that undergraduates had to be communicant members of the Church of England – then surely, it was argued by the conspirators, Selwyn would take him if all else failed.

The youthful Plumb was as fierce an atheist then as he was to remain until the end of life. Nothing could better signal his determination to get into Cambridge than the fact that he was willing to be confirmed, willing to fake a set of beliefs he despised, if it could open the gates of a college which he was to regard with dismissive contempt in later life. He had the grace to appear somewhat shame-faced when confronted by this awkward revelation about how far he was willing to go to achieve his ambitions, but claimed that it was the Machiavellian Snow who prompted him to go to such lengths.

As it turned out all their carefully concocted plans were in vain, for his first attempt to get into Cambridge ended in a humiliating form of rejection.

He took the St John’s Scholarship Examination in December 1929. According to his account (which he said was based on the Cambridge Group 3 Scholarship Examination Book which he studied many decades later when he himself was the Chairman of Examiners) he was well up amongst the scholars after the first round of marking, but after the second round of marking (in which the dons at St John’s had a decisive say) he was demoted to tenth place in the list of Exhibitioners.

He actually came top amongst the potential Johnians placed in the Exhibition class and second amongst all the applicants for St John’s. Colleges were obliged to offer Scholarships to those listed as scholars but they could, and very exceptionally did, reject an Exhibitioner. He was one of those very exceptional rejects. St John’s offered Exhibitions to other applicants in spite of the fact that they came lower in the list than the young J.H. Plumb, and not even lowly Selwyn wanted him. The fact that St John’s had turned down their top Exhibitioner must inevitably have sent out warning signals to other colleges still in the market for award-winners.

Jack went to his grave still resenting the injustice that he felt – not without some justification – he had been subjected to. It is true that he could have had a place at St John’s if he could have afforded to accept it. He could not. As David Cannadine has put it “He was a scholarship boy without the scholarship!”

As he told the story (very memorably and very amusingly at his retirement dinner) much of the fault lay in his mother’s advice on how he was to dress for his assault on St John’s. First she advised him to wear his “funeral suit” for his interviews and then, quite fatally, suggested that he topped off this lugubrious outfit with a bowler hat to arrive in. One look at the languid public school boys in their tweed jackets and cavalry twill trousers quickly alerted Jack to his first sartorial error. One encounter with the formidable bowler-hatted Head Porter of St John’s immediately alerted him to his second even greater mistake. In despair he trudged to the Bridge of Sighs and (like an adolescent Odd-Job) hurled the offending bowler hat into the Cam, but by then the damage had been done. The story of the bowler-hatted young “funeral director” or “aspiring porter” from Leicester had already reached and entertained the dons. The confidence of the young Plumb had been deeply dented and he over-compensated in his efforts to impress what he regarded as his patronizing and disdainful interviewers. His excited parade of his current enthusiasm for Freud and Proust did not go down at all well. French homosexuality and the psycho-dynamics of everyday life were not much to the taste of Johnian historians in the late 1920s. He would have done far better at King’s.

In the eyes of the dons of St John’s (including apparently the distinguished Tudor historian J.R.Tanner), he must have seemed pretentious as well as provincial and sartorially embarrassing as well as proletarian. What was worse, instead of social savoir-faire he offered ardent socialism. Instead of uncontaminated historical scholarship he offered suspect literary tastes and an unhealthy interest in sexual psychology. Such offerings were to prove a fatal mixture. Doubtless the story of the bowler hat did not help.

Undeterred by this rejection Plumb wrote again next year (on his school notepaper on the 12 May 1930) asking for the entrance forms for a sizar-ship at St John’s. This time he was aiming rather lower. Sizars were originally student servants who earned their keep by such duties as waiting in Hall on the other wealthier undergraduates, but by 1930 the title was given to poor but worthy students on the basis of an examination. It was rather like a poor man’s scholarship or bursary. I do not know for certain whether or not he made use of the application forms but we do know that Plumb’s name was not amongst the list of successful sizars at St John’s published in The Reporter of the summer of 1930.

Whatever the motives of those involved in his first assault on Cambridge, the dons of St John’s had not offered him the financial support he needed, and so he went to University College Leicester (later the University of Leicester) and became the first person ever to take a First in History as an external London degree from that modest university college. It cannot have been easy. He certainly did not get the kind of teaching he would have enjoyed at Cambridge. No one would claim that Leicester had a richly endowed or generously staffed university in 1930 – the residents numbered just eighty students and faculty members, and that number included “the hall porter who taught botany”. For his first two years at Leicester, there was only one History member of the staff – a sad Oxford M.A. without ambition or hope – who taught everything: all six papers from Greek Political Thought to Nineteenth-Century European History.

As Plumb has recorded, in The Making of an Historian, by the age of 23 he had met only five professional historians – and two of them for only a few minutes. The one he remembered with most warmth and gratitude was Rosalind Hill, who in his last year arrived to her first teaching position with a First Class degree from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She was a woman of exceptional warmth and kindness who was to go on to enjoy a distinguished career as a medieval historian. In recognition of her distinction and to show how much he had valued her presence at University College, Leicester in the early 1930s, he gave a celebratory lunch for her some sixty years later in Christ’s on Friday, 10 February 1995.

At the lunch Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, the leading Cambridge historian of the Crusades, was invited to join them in recognitions of Professor Hill’s research on the Crusading movement. Less than two years later, as Chairman of the Faculty, he wrote to Plumb to tell him that Rosalind Hill had died. In his reply to Riley-Smith, Plumb wrote, “a wonderful woman to whose memory I will always be indebted”.

The respect was mutual. She proudly named him as one of her first and most successful students and Plumb’s name was the only pupil mentioned in her obituaries.

Grateful as he was for her early encouragement, it was nevertheless a very far cry from what he might have experienced if St John’s had accepted him. To get a First with such very modest teaching was a very considerable achievement, and, perhaps understandably, he always took a sardonic pleasure in the fact that of the twelve historians St Johns had preferred to him for admission only one got a First in their Cambridge Finals and only three more managed even to get into the 2.1 class.

Perhaps it was his sense of burning injustice about his initial rejection at Cambridge, or perhaps it was his and Snow’s addiction to organising other people’s lives, but I know from my own experience that they could not resist what Snow called “a kind of personal imperialism”. They both loved to give advice. They both loved to pontificate. They both loved to instruct. They both could not resist telling the uninitiated how the world worked. In spite of their spectacular failure to organise a successful assault on the Cambridge admissions system for Plumb, they had no hesitation in instructing me what I needed to do to gain admission.

They had heard from Bert Howard about what he regarded as my academic promise and about his frustration that he could not persuade me to read History. As a consequence, I was nearing the end of the second term of my first year in the Sixth Form taking Maths, Physics and Chemistry for “A” Level. Most would, at this stage, have given me up as a lost cause as an aspirant to read History at Cambridge, but convinced that the science teaching at Newton’s would be insufficient to exploit my Cambridge potential, Howard arranged for me to meet Plumb and Snow and him one Saturday afternoon in the unlikely setting of the Grand Hotel in Leicester. I had reluctantly to miss a trial for the Leicester County Rugby Team to attend this improbable meeting, at which I was told that switching to History was the only way I stood a chance of getting into Cambridge. They pointed out Howard’s remarkable long run of success in guiding Newtonians to admission, and contrasted it with the woeful record of the scientists.

When I impertinently pointed out that Snow’s scientific career had been launched from Alderman Newton’s, he forcefully pointed out that in order to do so he had to stay on at the school after his time in the Sixth Form to work for several years as a lowly lab assistant, and then had to take an external London degree at University College Leicester. If I thought I was the intellectual equal of Snow, and if I was willing to face the many years toiling away at school after taking my “A” levels, and if I would be content to remain in Leicester to take my degree, then perhaps I should stick with science. It was presented as a series of conditions that only a fool would accept.

My protestations that it was far too late to switch to a whole new set of “A” levels were brushed aside as weak-kneed; my protestations that I much preferred science and maths to History were brushed aside as self-indulgent; and my admission that I was not sure that I wanted to go to any university, much less Cambridge, were brushed aside as pathetically unambitious. It was, I was told in no uncertain terms by Plumb, one’s duty to maximize one’s potential.

Impressed by their dogmatic certainties and no doubt flattered by their attention, I agreed to change to three new Arts “A” levels and to concentrate on History. The decision meant that I had just over a year to master my new syllabus.

My mother was infuriated by my decision, and marched up to the school to demand an explanation. As a young war-widow with four children to bring up on her own, she was not surprisingly somewhat risk-averse. She was particularly suspicious of sudden ill-thought out decisions. This was very understandable given that my father (from a secure position in the Royal Armoured Corps after their successful North African Campaign against Rommel) had bravely but recklessly volunteered to join the SAS; and given that he had then volunteered to join the Special Boat Squadron, the most exclusive Special Forces unit in World War II; and given that he had then been sent to his almost certain death by Churchill’s even more reckless decision (against almost universal advice not to do so) to invade the Dodecanese Islands in 1943. It proved to be the spectacularly incompetent, the comprehensively disastrous and the absurdly optimistically-named “Operation Accolade”. It has rightly gone down in history as “Churchill’s Folly”.

The Special Boat Squadron may have been “highly trained, totally secretive and utterly ruthless” as Gavin Mortimer describes it in his history of The SBS in World War II. It may have gone “from island to island in the Mediterranean, landing in the dead of night in small fishing boats and launching savage hit and run raids on the Germans”, but it never comprised more than 100 men and when sent to take the Dodecanese Islands with no air cover at all, they were sitting ducks for the German Stuka bombers who blew them to bits at their leisure.

So little wonder that my mother was so risk averse. Unhappily well-versed in such male folly (and, for her, their life changing outcomes), she was determined to prevent me from taking what she saw as an equally sudden and foolish change to the course of my future education.

My science teachers gave her a warm welcome, heartily agreeing with her that they thought that this was a ridiculous and reckless decision. It was particularly ill-advised they said because “Neil is the best mathematician we have ever had”. Fortunately at this point my mother asked what successes they had ever had? How many had they sent up to Cambridge for instance? When they said “None”, she decided that, on reflection, “perhaps my trio of advisors had a point”.

When I tell this story, many people express surprise that I accepted my elders’ advice, which in many ways went against my strong inclinations, but for a fatherless teenager, Howard, Plumb and Snow were a formidable trio to refuse.

Howard, after all, was a proven past master at preparing his pupils for the Cambridge scholarship examinations and was the most influential teacher at my school. Plumb and Snow were established academics who had both experienced major problems seeking to get themselves into Cambridge from our less than glamorous grammar school. All three had powerful personalities. All three were used to getting their own way. Their authoritative advice, when added to the magical effects of flattering encouragement, was difficult to resist.

Just how important such encouragement was, can be judged when compared to the attitude of the deputy Headmaster of my school who had assured me that it was a disgrace for me, and the three others who also decided to apply, to even consider applying to Cambridge. Such an application would “only bring shame and dishonour and humiliation on the school”, he said. It was absurd to think that “boys like us” could hope to succeed at such a distinguished university. As we were the brightest boys in the school and I was Head Prefect, it showed the levels of discouragement that even the most promising received. When we all won open awards in the Scholarship Examination (I won a Scholarship and the other three got Exhibitions), he refused to change his mind and greeted us on our triumphant return to the school with the words: “Don’t expect any congratulations from me. The standards at Cambridge have obviously fallen to an abysmally low level”.

Such an attitude shows just how influential Howard’s contrasting encouragement could be, and (in seeking the authoritative backing of Snow and Plumb to achieve his ends) also shows how far he was willing to go to guide his pupils to success. He and Snow may have failed with Plumb in the late 1920s but that setback had merely convinced him that better plans of attacks in the early 1950s would yield greater and greater success.

My experience demonstrates all too clearly the self-confident certainties that Plumb brought to advising and directing and encouraging the success of so many of his pupils at Cambridge. His own initial humiliating failure made him all the more determined to guide others to a smoother path to success. Many have told me similar stories of how they were flattered, bullied or generally browbeaten into taking his advice on the direction that their lives and careers should follow.

A typical example was the experience of Wallas Eaton, the actor. Eaton was taught by Howard at Alderman Newton’s in the 1930s and also went up to Cambridge to read History and then English at Christ’s. He told me that he was not only advised by Plumb and Snow on how to apply for admission to Cambridge, he was also then advised that he would never enjoy a successful acting career with the name he was christened with – namely Reg Eaton. In their customary authoritative way, Plumb and Snow decided that he needed a more distinctive theatrical first name. Unfortunately in the mid 1930’s they recommended a new name, namely Wallis, which Mrs Simpson was just about to make the most unpopular name in the country. By then Eaton had started theatrical work with his new name and the best that he could do was to unobtrusively change the spelling to Wallas.

Plumb admitted that their choice of Wallis could have been better timed in light of Wallis Simpson and the abdication crisis, but still argued that Eaton would never have become either a major in the war or a household name as an actor after it, if he had stuck with Reg. Jack always boasted that Wallas Eaton would never have appeared on stage with Vivien Leigh or been cast by Joan Littlewood if he hadn’t abandoned his distinctly down-market original first name. His new name, he argued, made him far more memorable in the ten years he starred in “Take It From Here” on the radio, not to mention making him sound more glamorous in the gay world he so enthusiastically lived in throughout his adult life.

This re-naming was typical of Plumb’s complete certainty that he was always right and characteristic of his unshakable conviction that his friends and pupils should always heed his advice: whether it was to change subjects, change names, change colleges, change fiancés, change careers, change wives, change husbands, change their children’s schooling, change homes, change political allegiance (nationally as well as collegiately) or even change sexual orientation – all of which he had been known to do or try to do.

All in all, I think I got off pretty lightly in taking his advice.

Much as I regretted abandoning my fledgling career as a scientist I cannot deny that his advice that I should switch to history was almost certainly right in the short-run. He certainly had no doubt that I owed my career to his advice and he was never slow to take full credit for it. Once again, who is to say that he wasn’t right?

His initial painful rejection by St John’s and the stuttering start to his career at Christ’s convinced him of the need for more expert guidance than he had received himself, and, once he had achieved success, he was only too happy to pass his advice on and insist that it was followed. His startling success as a teacher (and as a promoter of the careers of those he taught) must surely justify his self-confident and at times dictatorial plans for his protégées.