Читать книгу SIR JOHN PLUMB - Prof Neil McKendrick - Страница 11
Оглавление5. Plumb Coming to Terms with Cambridge
Armed with his First (one of only three awarded to external candidates for the London degree), he was awarded a London Post-Graduate Studentship worth £150 in May 1934 – one of only six available for all subjects, in science as well as the humanities. He was always very proud that R.H. Tawney was one of those who chose him for this. With this modest funding and with the backing of Snow, who was by then a Fellow of the college, he was eventually admitted to Christ’s in October 1934. There he started his research (as one of G.M. Trevelyan’s very rare research students) and so began a relationship with the college which was to last for sixty-seven years. Apart from a brief interlude as a Research Fellow at King’s and his time at Bletchley during the war, he never left Christ’s again. He became a Fellow in 1946 and for the next fifty-five years loyally devoted his life to the college. Such devotion and such loyalty are all the more to his credit because he was not offered easy access to Christ’s High Table. There were other aspiring young Cambridge historians who stood much higher in the pecking order than Plumb – the provincial product of what Plumb himself described as “an almost unknown and certainly despised University College”. Whilst what he called “the blue-eyed boys in command of the inside track” prospered, he had to scrape a living by supervising any undergraduates he could find.
Fortunately, coming from the Howard school of history at Newton’s, Plumb passionately believed in the value of good teaching. He did not simply encourage his pupils to aim high, he insisted on them doing so. If they did so they could be sure of his full and undivided attention. Anyone exposed to the blinding glare of Plumb’s curious mixture of high-octane teaching methods and persistent psychological probing will testify to its mesmeric, almost hypnotic, power. Few could resist such intense interest in them. Fixing them with his bulging exothalmic eyes (they protruded so much he swore that they got sunburned in summer) he asked the most personal questions. Whilst he listened so attentively and so sympathetically, he expertly extracted the intimate confessions that so interested him. According to him, it was all too easy. Since so many late adolescents are wonderfully self-obsessed and only too willing to talk about themselves, the inquisitive Plumb had a field day.
Little wonder that he started to prosper as a teacher. His supervisions offered his pupils not only a professional concern with their scholarship but also an almost obsessive fascination with their life histories – especially their sex lives, and, failing that, their emotional lives and their family relationships. Young women from Newnham and Girton proved to be especially responsive to these highly personal teaching methods. Few things appeal more irresistibly to the impressionable young than a powerful interest in them as people and a powerful interest in their work – especially their prose. So his pupils loved the fact that Plumb was as interested in their literary style as he was in their command of scholarship and the structure of their arguments. They loved the fact that he spent as much time in polishing their prose as he did in picking holes in their arguments. Pride of authorship is a powerful emotion. Telling undergraduates that they write well can have the most magical effect on their attention and their motivation. Jack recognized very early that flattering people into working hard and succeeding can be as effective as bullying them into doing so.
Since he was an expert flatterer and if necessary an accomplished bully, his results grew more and more impressive, and his reputation as a teacher grew with them.
They grew at Christ’s much more slowly. Jack has recorded that in these years he was not thought to be grand enough to teach Christ’s men. Indeed to use his own phrase, he first “cut his teeth on the Cambridge Supervision system on female students”. In the mid-thirties there was a revolt amongst the undergraduate historians at Newnham. They demanded a new supervisor in English history and “through the good offices of Christopher Morris” (who directed studies at King’s), “three girls, brilliant, beautiful and wilful, became my pupils”. Through them his reputation as a stimulating and demanding supervisor soon spread and most of the tributes to his teaching in the thirties come from Newnhamites and Girtonians who gratefully recall his ability to make them strive to succeed and his sympathetic concern with their personal problems and preoccupations. A touching dedication in The Hinge of History (1996) to “Sir John Plumb, my kindly tutor and mentor for the History Tripos in those far off days of 1933-36” was from the octogenarian Charlotte Waterlow, M.B.E. of Newnham College, the only female First in either part of the Tripos in 1936. Sixty years after the event, Jack still talked fondly of her, and of Angela Gray from Girton who first sat at his feet in the mid-thirties. He spoke even more fondly, although alas anonymously, of “the beautiful Newnham girl from Much Hadham, whose house was full of paintings from the Scottish colourist school and who was a leading light of the Newnham anti-virgin club”. What a sweet description, and what a touching reminder of a lost innocence and a past era.
Acceptance in Cambridge in terms of a tenured job grew even more slowly.
He knew that his early research was felt to be disappointing and he knew equally well that his Ph.D. which he was awarded in 1936 (having been examined by Sir Keith Feiling and Harold Temperley) was not the key which would immediately open any career doors for him. He knew that the local stars, such as Herbert Butterfield, who had been elected into a Fellowship immediately on graduation, would never think of taking a Ph.D. Indeed, as David Cannadine so elegantly put it, Plumb’s doctorate was felt, by him as well as by his starrier contemporaries, to be more “a badge of inferiority” than “a passport to preferment”.
One of the reasons why he would not let me submit my research for a Ph.D. was that he thought once one had been elected early into a Fellowship the best way to advertise that status was to retain the title of Mr. And, of course, at that time he was right. When I was elected into first a research Fellowship at Christ’s and then a full Fellowship at Caius in 1958 within two years of graduating, the last thing my advisors wanted me to do was to take a lowly Ph.D. My supervisor Charles Wilson had never had to take one, the historians in Caius such as Philip Grierson and Guy Griffith had never had to take one and all of them urged me not to do so. The Master of Caius, the Nobel-winning physicist Sir James Chadwick, had taken one to try to make it respectable, but it had little effect on Cambridge historians at that time. It was thought by most of the leading people in the History Faculty to be an un-necessary Germanic fad.
I took the same attitude towards my outstanding pupils and urged those such as Quentin Skinner and Norman Stone not to bother with a Ph.D, in the early 1960s. Jack continued to do the same, which is doubtless why Simon Schama never took one.
It was only when ambitious young historians started to seek work in the States that we all had to change our views and insist that they must have a doctorate to gain employment in an American university.
Back in 1936, the title Dr J.H. Plumb cut little ice either academically or socially in Cambridge. So at this period of his life he tended to return to Leicester for much of his social life. There he was a “star” who had made it to Cambridge. There he could join his old friends in heavy drinking sessions (invariably beer) in his favourite pubs. There he could indulge his radical left-wing political opinions without fear of offending his listeners. In Cambridge he had learned that his openly expressed atheism and his ardent socialism could earn him very powerful enemies. Sir Herbert Butterfield and his powerful right-wing and Christian allies never fully forgave him for either. He felt that they did much to block his promotion in Cambridge and his public recognition outside it.
Those who knew Jack Plumb only in his mature years would be very surprised to learn how much of his early life was spent drinking beer in distinctly down-market pubs. In later life his drinking was dominated by claret and champagne, and his standard social habitat was by then a mixture of college common rooms and London club-land and aristocratic drawing rooms. In his youth things were very different. Even as late as the mid-1960s he still held very informal seminars for young Cambridge historians in the rather seedy setting of the Red Lion in Petty Cury.
Copious amounts of Worthington “E” and Greene King bitter beer were drunk. Reputations were cheerfully shredded. The world – especially the narrow world of Cambridge history – was enthusiastically put to rights. Simon Schama has well described these lively weekly “gatherings of the like-minded” under the tutelage of the dominant figure of Plumb: “Monday evenings in the Red Lion in Petty Cury, there since Macaulay’s day, but long since reduced to a state of scrofulous decrepitude, flakes of plaster dropping into the Greene King, saw Plumb, Kenyon, McKendrick, Burrow, Skinner and the undergraduate Schama (in descending order of being able to hold their drink) batting gossip, academic and political, back and forth”. The ability to hold one’s drink was subjected to a pretty demanding test because the prevailing rule was that everyone paid for a round of drinks and each round was a pint of bitter. Thank God the party was usually restricted to about half a dozen or so.
Jack’s devotion to his Monday evenings in the Red Lion culminated in a memorable evening dedicated to mourning its closing down. The mourning proved to be about as sober as an Irish wake. The old pub, condemned in a piece of sixties’ vandalism to be demolished to make way for a very undistinguished shopping centre, was given a stirring send-off. Bill Noblett, who was then an undergraduate in his first term at Christ’s in October 1968, has vividly recalled the attempt of a party (consisting amongst others of the future Professor Sir John Plumb, the future Professor Sir Simon Schama, the future Professor David Nokes, the future Professor David Blackbourn and the future Dr Peter Musgrave) “to drink the place dry before it finally closed”. How well they succeeded in their attempt can be judged from the evidence of Jack tearing down the brass Final Orders Bell as they left and making off with it back to Christ’s. The, by now, well-liquored party marched triumphantly down Petty Cury with Jack at their head waving the bell to ring out the demise of one of his favourite drinking haunts. We found the bell at the back of one of his cupboards when he died. It sold at auction at Jack’s own “closing down” sale for £90. The auctioneer allowed himself the wry comment that “this bell was apparently stolen from the Red Lion in Petty Cury. It was torn from the wall by Sir John Plumb, an act that casts an unusual light on how distinguished Cambridge academics once conducted themselves!” After a thoughtful pause, he added, “Sir John seems to have been rather a lively chap”. Apparently the bell now decorates the bar of the Queen’s Head at Newton.
Beer drinking had also set the tone in yet earlier days when Jack Plumb spent every Easter vacation sailing with the Green Wyvern Yacht Club. On these expeditions all life revolved around the pub. Craig Barlow, another historian schoolmaster, described the “electrifying effect of the arrival of Jack in these beer and sawdust surroundings” and these long drinking sessions certainly allowed Jack to give full expression to his dominant personality – tongues were loosened by beer, inhibitions were cast to the winds and things could be said which would have been unacceptable in the cold light of day. It was a situation made for Jack to say the un-sayable, ask the un-askable and argue the indefensible – just the situation he enjoyed most. In these tumultuous debates senior figures in the Green Wyvern hierarchy, such as the Howard brothers and Gordon Winterton (the three schoolmasters who had originally set up the club) gave as good as they got; occasional imposing visitors like Pat Moynihan and Frank Fenton (with his double First in Greats at Oxford, and later Vice-President of US Steel) put up stout resistance; and youngsters like myself occasionally tried our hand at challenging the dominant voice, but an alcohol-fuelled Plumb relished the arguments and rarely gave ground and never gave in. They could be turbulent times.
Not everyone was an admirer. The odious toad-like mother of Bert and Cecil Howard declared Plumb to be “a sunket” – a Norfolk insult I never fully understood but which I was assured was about as low as one would ever want to be. Since Plumb had seduced and then promptly dumped her only daughter perhaps one can understand and forgive Mrs Howard’s less than flattering description. And I have to admit that Mrs. Howard had an enviable way of pinning people down with her nicknames – Jack came to be known as “the Sunket of all sunkets” (the defining example of this despicable creature); Gordon Winterton’s wife, Valerie Winterton, who looked like a young and sexier Felicity Kendal, was nicknamed “all bum and pockets”, which exactly caught the impression made by her tight fitting jeans; and I was called “the long-haired Lothario” for reasons which I could never understand and, alas, certainly did not deserve.
In these years Jack had a taste for even less salubrious dives. In those days London did not mean St James’s Street, much less St James’s Palace. It could mean East End Pubs on the Isle of Dogs – hardly the haunt of the respectable professional middle class that Jack then aspired to join, but good places to let down one’s hair in relative anonymity. I recall one such evening that came close to disaster. Having dragged a group of rather doubtful friends out East on the grounds that the jazz was exceptionally good in the smoky, noisy interior of the very crowded pub we finished up in, Jack caught the eye of a very pretty young woman across the room. Having made eye contact, Jack stared intently at her.
Given his bulging eyes and concentrated attention, just looking at her might have been interpreted as having lascivious intent, but he then very deliberately licked his lips. Just what this act denoted in the East End one can only guess at, but suddenly we were surrounded by a threatening group of heavies convinced that one of their women had been publicly insulted. The situation looked quite ugly but was dramatically transformed when Jack’s right hand shot inside his jacket. In an instant the circle took a collective step backwards and, against a gasp of “This one’s tooled up”, there was a chorus of “No guns, there’s no need for that”. Jack left his hand inside his jacket, put on what he called his ‘Peter Lorre look’, and the circle retreated further. The less brave of us thought that this was a good moment for a strategic retreat and quietly withdrew, firmly taking Jack (hand still inside his jacket) with us.
To this day I am convinced that Jack reached instinctively for his wallet in the hope that (by buying a round of drinks for everybody) he could buy his way out of trouble, but, in the story as he told it, he had saved us all from a beating by his own quick thinking. In claiming to have saved us all from the heavy mob, he conveniently forgot that we were not being threatened, he was. And he had created the offence in the first place. We were guilty only by association. But he remained triumphant. It just showed, he argued, that he knew exactly how to face down a threatening mob! “Meet force with force” was his characteristic advice. Fortunately the other side, the much tougher looking East Enders, were of an altogether more conciliatory disposition.
Many of his old friends have equally arresting stories of Jack’s youthful enjoyment of a Bohemian lifestyle in the thirties and forties – stories of heavy drinking sessions in Paris pavement cafés which grew so uproarious that Jack would summon taxis to drive the whole party less than ten yards to the café next door; stories of excessively amorous farewells with most unsuitable partners being watched disapprovingly by more up-tight academics and their outraged wives; and many other stories of a free-wheeling lifestyle and abandoned behaviour, none of which would have greatly advanced his prospects in Cambridge.
Later in life, when he perhaps felt that his status and success would protect him, he continued to behave in what he called his “unbuttoned style”. After one uninhibited occasion in Caius, it took a very long time before the College staff stopped saying (with heavy irony) “We know how much your friends enjoy themselves when they dine here, Sir”, whenever I booked another dinner in college. Their comments were the entirely justifiable consequence of Jack’s behaviour after Gordon Winterton’s 50th birthday, which I had foolishly agreed to host in Caius. Jack, in his cups, had paraded round the dining room extravagantly kissing every compliant woman in sight and within reach. He did this to the accompaniment of extravagant declarations of unbridled lust, and, if allowed, embarrassing public manifestations of it. In a pitiful attempt to rescue my reputation I led the party back to my rooms in Caius Court where my wife and I thought his drunken antics might at least be more discreetly hidden. All that happened was that he twined himself around Selina, the first wife of his old friend Dante Campailla, with such enthusiasm that their combined weight completely destroyed a charming Victorian buttoned-back nursing chair. The chair was a much-cherished favourite of my wife’s. Its sad wreckage was a reminder of the (admittedly only occasional) hazards of entertaining Jack Plumb in his cups.
On a later occasion in New York his behaviour with Selina led to his whole party being asked to leave the Rainbow Room. After a very good dinner, Jack and Selina had taken to the floor under the watchful if indulgent gaze of her husband Dante. According to Dante’s account at Jack’s memorial dinner they danced with impressive expertise. Carried away with his own prowess Jack asked his partner to kick off her shoes the better to respond to his dancing skills (and, I expect, the better to balance their heights). Having done so she then removed her stockings (the better to retain her balance on the polished dance floor). Whether it was the public shedding of her clothes, which led to the request that they leave or, as Dante claimed, the extravagant eroticism of Jack’s dancing, we shall never know. As usual, when faced with such problems, Jack’s solution was to order more expensive wine. An order of a couple of magnums of their best champagne apparently appeased the outraged American staff and led those in charge of the Rainbow Room to change their minds and let his party stay.
Such enthusiastic partying in such expensive surroundings was very much for the future. His behaviour may not have changed as much as his friends would have liked over the years but the locations went steadily up market. New York nightclubs and super smart restaurants were all a far cry from the beer and sawdust of his youthful drinking haunts. He was a master of successful social disguise and a master of social adaptation. The man and the methods remained the same, but he quickly learned how to make himself acceptable (sometimes only just acceptable) wherever he finally pitched up. The journey from the working class two-up two-down of his birth via the petit bourgeois semi-detached and seedy pub life to a royal palace and plutocratic pleasure domes was one he greatly enjoyed. When he first stayed the night at Sandringham as a guest of the Queen he used the headed notepaper in his bedroom to write to his friends, saying simply “Made it!”
He loved learning the new rules that prevailed in these heady social circles and loved imparting them to a succession of what he called his “more un-travelled pupils”, even if his own behaviour did not offer an ideal role model.
He first learned the arcane skills of successful social adaptation in Cambridge. He believed not only in watching and learning by example. He also believed in reading and learning by rote. He was the only person I have ever met who knew Debrett’s Correct Form off by heart. If you wanted to know how to address an archbishop, an archdeacon or an ambassador Jack was your man. If you wanted to know the proper way formally to address a letter to the vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, as against the vice-Chancellor of Oxford (not as simple as one might think), Jack was a quick and authoritative source. As for the aristocracy no cadet title was too minor for Jack not to know its place in the social hierarchy. Perhaps – given his chosen research topic – all this information really was necessary. The important thing was that the young Plumb really believed that it was. He was pained beyond belief by my insouciant unconcern with such social trivia. To him a detailed knowledge of the niceties of English etiquette was vitally important. If he was to succeed in his chosen profession, he felt that he must learn to conduct himself as a gentleman, or at least as someone who could from time to time pass himself off as one. He was certainly very well informed on how to behave – however badly he often put that knowledge to use. As the distinguished economic historian, Munya (later Sir Mchael) Postan, once said to me, “How extraordinary it is that the man from the back-streets of Leicester should be better informed about the rules of social precedence and protocol than my wife who was the daughter of an earl”. He then pointedly added, “And how even more extraordinary it is that the man with such an insistence on the rules of social behaviour should also be the rudest man in Cambridge” .
He even riled those senior professorial colleagues who, having received a knighthood, proudly listed themselves as “Professor Sir”, by pointing out that according to Debrett’s Correct Form it was a dreadful solecism to use any title ahead of one bestowed by Her Majesty the Queen. Understandably few of them were willing to stop using their hard-earned academic titles, but to do him justice when Plumb was knighted he always presented himself as Sir John Plumb, dropping Professor because court etiquette expected nothing less, and dropping Jack “because the Queen does not like nicknames”. Such advice did not go down well with colleagues such as my colleague Professor Sir Sam Edwards at their moment of career triumph.
From all accounts the young Plumb was at first more cautious about what he said and did in Cambridge. He knew he had to make himself socially acceptable. And even more importantly he had to make himself professionally employable. Making unnecessary enemies would simply make his ambitions more difficult to achieve. He checked his tongue and learned to listen and to flatter.
The uninhibited street-wise habitué of East End pubs was not the image the young Plumb was trying to project in Cambridge and in the academic world at large. There, he was learning the tricky arts of pleasing such disparate and demanding potential academic patrons as L.B. (later Sir Lewis) Namier, Herbert (later Sir Herbert) Butterfield and George Macaulay Trevelyan (later to be awarded the Order of Merit). The least demanding and in the long run the most influential (on history in general as well as on Plumb in particular) was the great G.M. Trevelyan.
All Trevelyan seemed to demand was that Jack kept up with him on his thirty mile walks and that he be allowed the pleasure of polishing Plumb’s apprentice prose.
The other two were much more complicated personalities. Both wanted disciples, both wanted complete devotion to themselves, both wanted uncritical acceptance of their historical methods. Each loathed the other. Even the subtle and quick-witted and sure-footed Plumb would eventually have found it impossible to serve two such masters. Fortunately he decided to serve neither.
The decision made him two powerful enemies – but by refusing to join Namier in the History of Parliament project he gave himself the freedom to write the kind of books he wanted to write, and by breaking with Butterfield he created the freedom to attract pupils who shared his vision of what history should be. Both were brave decisions for a young eighteenth-century historian with his way to make. Both were the right decisions.
There was no way that he could have maintained for long a workable relationship with the teetotal, Methodist, right-wing Butterfield. Initially they were much drawn to each other. Plumb found Butterfield “brilliant, exasperating, devastating, mischievous, mixing in equal quantities malice and generosity”. They argued until the early hours of the morning. “He dragged his principles before my blood-shot eyes”, wrote Plumb, “with the skill of a matador. He forced me to reconsider every idea that I had; I got better at defending myself, and through Butterfield I gradually knew that I would never truly belong to the profession of history. I loved yet distrusted Butterfield’s impish qualities, his almost electric versatility at times daunted me but his major principles – his deep belief in the role of Providence (Christian of course) in human history – left me, in the end, bored as well as disbelieving. We disagreed too on the function of history. I believed then as I believe now that history must serve a social purpose no matter how limited – to try to teach wisdom about the past and so, perhaps, no more than perhaps, about ourselves and our times. Butterfield thought historians should suspend all judgment about history”. So Jack decided to disengage himself. To judge from reports from those who have worked on the Butterfield archive, Sir Herbert never fully forgave him. The love-hate relationship was a long-lasting one, but it was a relationship doomed to fail.
There was no way either that Plumb could have become one of Namier’s long-term disciples. Here the barrier was historical methodology and historical interpretation as much as incompatible personalities and religious beliefs. Namier was convinced that the keys to understanding politics, and therefore to understanding political history, were to be found in greed and self-interest. Realist as he always was, and cynic that he often was, Jack nevertheless found this view a depressingly reductionist interpretation of politics. As he said, even if one accepted such a view one still had to recognize the very different ideological routes that one could choose in pursuit of one’s self-interest and self-promotion. Such choices could control an individual’s career, dictate the outcome of historical events and determine a country’s future. History without such dimensions would be an arid and incomplete record. It was not a form of history that could have much long-term appeal for Plumb.
Quite apart from the methodological gap between them, Plumb was increasingly drawn to a view of history that was poles apart from that of Namier’s bleak technical vision. He wanted to write history that was read outside the modest limits of academia. He was increasingly drawn to the view that Trevelyan was a better guide to that ambition. He was increasingly convinced by Trevelyan’s view that “history’s power was essentially poetic rather than scientific”. If he had to choose between the classic narratives of Gibbon, Macaulay and Trevelyan and the so-called “technical” history as espoused by Namier and later by Elton, then what Simon Schama has called “the lumbering Goliaths of technical history” had no chance of enlisting his support.
It is no accident that the only historian Plumb felt the need to organize a Festschrift for was Trevelyan. It was no accident that the piece he quoted from him in his introduction was about “the poetry of history”. Trevelyan had written that “the poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar plot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cock-crow”. It was Trevelyan’s conviction that “There is nothing that more divides civilized from semi-civilized men than to be conscious of our forefathers as they really were, and bit by bit to reconstruct the mosaic of the long forgotten past”. It was increasingly Plumb’s conviction that “hundreds of thousands of men and women read history [out of] curiosity mixed with a desire to escape into another world”. It was increasingly his hope to satisfy those desires. It was a hope that would have excited dismissive contempt and derision from Namier and his followers.
Much of this debate about historical method was for the future. In his twenties and thirties, his main need was to secure a permanent position. He could not afford to offend any possible patron and his correspondence shows him skilfully keeping contact with all of them without making any firm commitment to any of them.
Eventually his patience was rewarded and Cambridge doors started to open up for him. With the perspective of hindsight he always used to reassure the brilliant young who were impatiently waiting for recognition that “all things come to those who wait”. To people like Simon Schama and my wife who both suffered shameful delays in getting the university jobs they deserved he always insisted that ability could be slowed down but very rarely blocked altogether. Their experiences (and, of course, his own) gloriously proved him right, but for a young man of Plumb’s impatient nature it must have been very galling to see lesser men effortlessly achieve what he pined for. It may surprise those who knew Plumb only in the years of his high success to learn that in 1938 he applied unsuccessfully for an Assistant Lectureship at Exeter.
Needless to say he did not tell many people about what he would later have regarded as a humiliating rejection.
It took him six years in Cambridge to get a Research Fellowship at King’s and it was twelve years (admittedly including the war years) since he came up as a graduate student and sixteen years since he started at Leicester before he achieved a permanent job in Cambridge. Even then he had to swallow his pride when King’s told him that there would be no permanent position for him there. So, when Christ’s offered him a teaching Fellowship in 1946, he gratefully accepted what the Fellows of Kings rather cruelly called “going back to the suburbs” and devoted himself to making an unambiguous success of his position there. No job was too humble for the young Plumb to take on – his formidable energies and his undoubted stamina allowed him to thrive on over-work. He rapidly made himself indispensable.
So, unlike many academic “stars”, Plumb dedicated himself to becoming “a good college man”. Anyone who used that phrase in a disparaging way in his presence could expect an exocet-like rebuke. Not for him the uninterrupted research time that many academic prima donnas now demand. He was in turn an Official Fellow, College Lecturer and Director of Studies in History, Tutor, Steward, Wine Steward, Vice-Master and Master. He once even unsuccessfully stood for Bursar – he failed by a single vote. Greater love for his college has no man than the Fellow willing to take on such burdens whilst at the same time producing a stream of original research.
Of those who take on such college burdens, few pour as much energy (some would say as much interference) into them as Jack Plumb did. Many of these college posts had no exact terms of reference but Plumb interpreted them as a licence to take over the college, to energize his more torpid colleagues and to organize everything from a royal visit to a new building along the lines that he saw fit. When as a young don he was made Steward he assumed a Napoleonic interpretation of the range of his duties and generously took on responsibility for the kitchens, the gardeners, the porters, the bed-makers, the buildings, the allocation of rooms and the organisation of college entertainments. His correspondence with C.P. Snow in the late 1940s is full of gleeful descriptions of the absurdities of his colleagues and his even more gleeful accounts of how he made them do his bidding.
A classic example is his description of his role in the arrangements for entertaining Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) when she visited Christ’s in 1948, as the first woman formally to take a Cambridge degree in person. According to Jack’s account, the collegiate response was frenzied. In a letter to Snow, which opens with the words, “Never entertain a Queen”, Jack vividly described the anxious delight with which the Fellowship prepared for the royal presence. Everything from the danger of rain falling on the royal head to suitable provision for royal comfort stops was anxiously debated. According to the Plumb correspondence, the whereabouts of the royal hat occupied two whole college meetings. Where it was to be removed before she donned the doctoral bonnet, how it was to be conveyed from the Senate House back to Christ’s, where it was to be safely kept until it was returned to the royal head – all such details were exhaustively debated and meticulously planned for. The decision that an undergraduate runner should convey the royal hat across Cambridge led inevitably to the further delicate decision as to who the undergraduate should be and who would have the authority to choose him. Such matters went far beyond the revelations of Snow about the treacherous intrigues of college politics. It was Microcosmographia Academica at its richest and ripest. P.G. Wodehouse could not have imagined it. Tom Sharpe could not have bettered it.
In the photographs of the royal visit, the round, already-balding head of Plumb can clearly be seen. As befitted his comparative youth and junior position in the Fellowship, he was quite properly bringing up the rear of the party, but to judge from his letters it was Plumb who was in control, in command and in charge. It was where he always preferred to be.
The fact that he thought that his colleagues’ reactions to such matters were profoundly comic did not stop him taking them very seriously himself. If there was an event he liked to run it. If there was a problem he liked to solve it. If there was an election he liked to win it. He was a natural college politician and he gave a huge amount of his time to plotting, persuading, bullying or flattering his colleagues into agreeing with his plans. One of his favourite maxims for running the College was “always have a candidate”. When it came to Mastership elections, he was in his element and he certainly always had a candidate. I remember how hard he worked to set up Sir Oliver Wright as his successor and how dashed he was when he failed. He had got the necessary support from the Fellowship to elect him and he had extracted an agreement from Sir Oliver that he would accept. All was set fair when one Sunday morning in his Suffolk home the telephone rang and Sir Oliver said that he had received an offer he could not refuse from Mrs Thatcher. It amounted to a royal command that he should take the British Ambassadorship at Washington. He would have to decline the Mastership. Jack was nothing if not a realist. He knew at once that he was defeated. But although he was completely out-gunned by the Thatcher initiative, he immediately switched to plan B and started to mobilize support that afternoon for his pupil, Professor Barry Supple. He was determined to stop Professor Hans Kornberg being elected but he failed by one vote. Supple and Kornberg were tied at 22 votes each. When the tie was broken, the decisive vote, to Jack’s not inconsiderable fury, moved the other way.
Little wonder then that at the next election when Kornberg was to be replaced, Jack insisted on coming out of hospital in a wheelchair so that he could cast his vote for Dr Alan Munro, the biochemist and immunologist who was to prove such a success as Master, especially in establishing the college’s fund raising campaign. I tried to persuade him not to take risks with his health. “Surely”, I said, “you can agree to pair with one from the other side”. “I wouldn’t trust any of the buggers”, he growled. “Anyway”, he said, “there isn’t really another side. Alan Munro is the only candidate still in the race, but the mean-minded buggers cannot be cajoled into producing the majority he needs. They would rather abstain than vote for him”. For a man of Plumb’s decisive nature, abstaining was for wimps. So out he came by ambulance, cast his decisive vote, and then returned, triumphant in his wheelchair, back to Addenbrooke’s.
To do justice to Jack Plumb’s role in college politics would require a lengthy biographical memoir devoted to that alone. Even from my own correspondence with him, which admittedly stretches over fifty years, I could produce several richly evidenced chapters. But college politics are an acquired taste and one that most people sensibly never acquire. I will, perhaps, write something elsewhere on the political manoeuvrings of the Fellows in Christ’s and try to explain the use Snow made of them in The Masters. Sir David Cannadine has recently had a passing look at this in his sparkling, beautifully crafted Lady Margaret lecture on “Snow, Plumb and Todd”. It might be worth saying here (given the merriment he evoked in his audience at the endless round of drinking that, according to Snow’s fictional account, the Fellows of Christ’s seemed to indulge in) that this was much closer to the truth than he might imagine. I am amazed and not a little embarrassed to read in my correspondence from the ‘fifties and ‘sixties just how much life seemed to revolve around drink. Cannadine’s audience rocked with laughter as he quoted from Snow’s novels his accounts of how dons would ask one to join them for a glass of Chablis at 10.30 in the morning or a glass of Madeira at coffee time or a whiskey before dinner and a bottle of claret with it and a bottle of port after it and “perhaps a brandy as a nightcap”. Alas, on the evidence of my letters, this seems very close to the truth. Old “Daddy” Grose, the Senior Fellow at Christ’s, really did say things like “We find it rather fortifying” as he asked one to join him for a glass of Madeira in the morning or “a really rather decent bottle of claret” in the evening. Young historians forget that in those pretty enclosed, all male societies, (without the distractions of television or young women or much money or power), there seemed much more time for petty college politics.
Drink was the almost universal solvent which loosened tongues, encouraged indiscretions and allowed perceptive interrogators like Plumb and Snow to prise open secret ambitions and ancient animosities. Much of the time the SCR at Christ’s was run like a miniature Whips Office in the House of Commons – consumed by a need to get the votes out. Soliciting support, spiking the opposition’s plans, judging who could be “turned” and which Fellow always bore the imprint of the last person to sit on him, all this was part of everyday college life. One was sucked into it from the moment one joined the Fellowship. There are colleges well known to me that still operate like this today. There are many fellows equally well known to me who are still “exalted by wine” many nights in the week.
Politics and drinking still go hand in hand. Most academics have little power and less money. So scoring points and plotting minor coups have greater appeal than in many other spheres of life. It is like office politics with the difference that many of the plotters do not have a home to go to. They live and work, eat and drink, plot and plan all in the same small college world – when Plumb was elected to a Fellowship at Christ’s, the whole fellowship amounted to only eighteen Fellows.
And in some colleges they never have to retire – continuing to plot and plan and vote as Life Fellows until death finally releases them from addictive college politics. Little wonder that the politics sometimes fester. Little wonder that malice and bitterness sometimes thrive. When one of my colleagues boasted that he was going to give up malice for Lent, there was a great shout of alarm. “Oh please don’t”, his colleagues cried in unison “What would poor malice do without you?” Alas the petty feuding and minuscule animosities do not translate well to paper. They mostly seem irremediably trivial. But that does not mean that they were not ferociously fought over. Henry Kissinger was only too accurate when (having been asked why academic politics were so vicious), he replied, “Because the stakes are so small”.
Perhaps if I quote from a single letter written by John Kenyon, a distinguished historian of the seventeenth century and a Jack-supporting Fellow of Christ’s, it might give some flavour of my old college in the mid-1950s. It powerfully evokes the intense emotions that Jack aroused. It also incidentally gives a little hint of the way dons in those days tried to sublimate their sexual needs by burying themselves in work and politics. The letter is from Kenyon to Dante Campailla, a former schoolmate of his in Sheffield who had read Law at King’s. It describes a tiny part of the internecine battles over the election of a new Bursar in Christ’s.
Jack, ever eager for any form of power and influence, very much wanted the job. He saw it as a stepping-stone to the Mastership. In fairness to him he would have done it very well in terms of driving the College forward financially and in fairness to his enemies he might well have done it pretty badly by stirring up enmity in the Fellowship. Fortunately for him (and probably for them) he did not get it.
Jack was too ambitious, too creative, too dynamic a personality to have been a safe, boring Bursar. He would have been a decisive, even a risk-taking, Bursar. Most colleges are not comfortable with Bursars who take risks. I have known colleges that could be scandalized by Bursars who took even the smallest decisions without lengthy prior discussions. I know of one Cambridge college in which a General Meeting recently listened to a thirty minute tirade seeking to “turn back the tide of Bursarial tyranny” when a newly elected Senior Bursar took it on himself to replace a water-ruined television set with a new one without seeking the Fellows’ permission. With Jack Plumb it would have been a building he bought without permission, not a T.V. set. So perhaps it is just as well that the economist Arthur Prest got the job. He was not as charismatic or exciting as Plumb would have been (Plumb used to say, very unkindly, that he could have bored for England) but I can confirm that he was a decent chap and a safe pair of hands; and as an academic economist he was thought to be likely to be a good investor – a very common mistake in Cambridge colleges who rapidly learn that not all economists are as effective as Maynard Keynes. The point was that Christ’s ultimately preferred the promise of a quiet life with Prest to the fear and excitement of a turbulent one with Plumb. And who is to say that they were wrong. Prest liked the banality of the tried and trusted, Plumb liked to trust his judgement on the new and exciting. Prest was a War Bonds man, Plumb was an Equities man. Prest liked safe agricultural land. Plumb liked the hope-value of development land. But above all Christ’s could rely on Prest seeking consensus. They feared that they would be bullied and bulldozed by Plumb into accepting his decisions. So, not so very surprisingly, they chose Prest, but not without a battle royal, not without a typical bout of bitter Cambridge college politics.
If the seemingly uneventful outcome was that Christ’s got a perfectly competent, if un-exciting Bursar, the politics that led to that outcome were not at all uneventful and were far from boring for those involved – as John Kenyon’s letter to Dante Campailla reveals.
“Christ’s College,
Cambridge
13 January 1955
About Jack (confidential).
My Dear Dante,
I met him on Sunday, when he calculated the odds at 13:7 in his favour, with two doubtful.
We had reckoned without the Midianites, otherwise the Three Murderers. Pratt, Davies and Kempton. Hating Jack like poison, they pushed the claims of Arthur Prest, the economist; far too nice a chap to be associated with them.
When we met on Monday at 10 it was soon clear that the Midianites had won over the two doubtfuls: Yale, the lawyer, who genuinely preferred Prest, and Sir Alexander Todd, who likes Jack but fears his competition later on for the Mastership. {That made it 13:9 in Plumb’s favour} But the boat was really torpedoed when two of Jack’s most loyal allies revealed that they had been brainwashed: Raven, a treacherous old swine, from whom nobody ever expects much, and Hamilton. Jack has a very high regard for Hamilton, and likes him very much – I think his defection hurt him more than anything. (I should add, of course, that Jack and Prest had left the meeting.) Kempton put up a strong case for Prest, arguing very temperately, and at about 11 a vote was taken – a dead heat 11:11.
By this time the Master had come out in Jack’s favour, and voted for him. We sat about for some time; several futile suggestions were made; and another vote was taken at 11.10 a.m. with the same result. We then adjourned for half an hour for coffee, until 11.45; after much caballing and false bonhomie, but not much result.
The fun started when we re-assembled. Pratt and Davies began to pull Jack to pieces, saying he had a gift for alienating people, that he was disliked by many people in the University, and that the servants hated him when he was Steward: in short, he wasn’t tactful enough to make a good Bursar. Since the late Wyatt was hardly the most tactful of men, there was also a lot of shit thrown at him in passing, as it were. Much of what they said of Jack, I feel, entre nous, to be quite true, but irrelevant; and doubly so since it was quite evident that nobody was going to freely change his mind at this stage. Some of the Opposition were clearly embarrassed at the tactics of their campaign managers.
But unless somebody did change his mind, we would have to go outside the College, which was unthinkable with two first class men available. After about ten minutes’ futile bickering in conditions of mounting tension the Vice Master (Steen) announced that he was going to abstain. Prest was then elected 11:10.
The tension of all this was quite unbelievable. I had to have a bath and lie down for most of the afternoon, and I wasn’t the only one.
Jack, as I’ve said took it philosophically, even puckishly. (“Shall I terrorise the servants”, he enquired blandly after dinner, “if I ask for the candles to be lit?”). Also the Midianites are somewhat ashamed of themselves, and are making no objection to Rupert Hall’s Official Fellowship. The Master is sure to appoint a sound man to succeed Prest as Tutor, so Jack will be able to consolidate his Empire. Prest himself is rather in the position of Eisenhower, a very clean man elected by dirty tactics and dirty men – which way he’ll swing is anybody’s guess. Everybody is now very nice to everybody else.
Thinking it over, it is clear that in some respects Jack has himself to blame. I am reminded of Wellington’s remark on being told that Parliament had refused to increase the personal allowances of the Princes of the Blood: – “By God!” he said, “They have insulted – personally insulted – two thirds of the gentlemen of England, and how can it be wondered at that they take their revenge upon them in the House of Commons?”
This letter is wonderfully revealing about Christ’s College politics. It highlights the bitter intensity and unforgiving rivalry that so often convulsed the college; and it highlights, too, the need in such a small claustrophobic community to return as soon as possible to some semblance of civilised behaviour in order to keep the place running.
Kenyon’s postscript to this letter is equally revealing about how much less time was spent discussing their personal lives. Sex and women all too often get confined to the footnotes. To judge from John Kenyon’s description of his recent girlfriend they were not always treated or discussed with any great sensitivity. Of this un-named mistress, he wrote: “The affair of Black Bitch is not so strange as you suppose. She insisted that I take her to some stupid dance instead of returning to Cambridge to write my lectures. On the other hand, I don’t want to feel obliged to stay in Sheffield or even go there very often – this Christmas, for instance, I only wanted to stay ten days, but because of her I had to make it three weeks. But I admired her very much (she was a girl of real character and spirit) and I was genuinely sorry to see her go. As you say the solution would be an occasional girlfriend (not prostitute) in London. However I can’t really afford the time or the money, and my work effectively sublimates all unruly desires”.
It was quite clear that work and ambition ranked well ahead of sex, and love hardly came into it. One feels that “Black Bitch” is a very revealing name for his mistress. He might well have been talking about an old gun dog he admired but had had regretfully to put down when she ceased to fit in with his career plans and work needs.
As Kenyon said in his final sentences “Of course, I approve highly of Molly (or Lena) – I am never polite in such matters, I’m afraid.” Here he was speaking of Molly Randle who later became Selina Campailla when she married Dante, but such matters were granted about one twentieth of the time he spent describing Jack’s failure to get the Bursarship. College politics were serious, time-consuming preoccupations. They required detailed concentrated attention. Sexual needs and future life-partners got half a sentence each. Emotional needs got even less. What could more vividly display what really interested the dons of Christ’s than that letter? What could better illustrate how rapidly the high drama of college politics fades over time?
For that last reason alone college politics are best treated with the lofty disdain they deserve. The Fellows of Christ’s may have been infuriated by the way in which Snow depicted them in The Masters, but, in truth, he rather flattered them. He gave a dignity and a strong narrative power to college politics that they very rarely deserve.
Jack, however, was an addict. He may have learned the sycophantic arts of seeking favour with the English aristocracy in later life, but in the early decades of his life at Christ’s he sought power and influence in college through full-scale frontal attack after tireless plotting.
He was involved in long running battles with Canon Charles Raven, Master of Christ’s from 1938-1950, and Alex Todd (later Lord Todd) Master from 1963-1978. He was also centrally involved in a poisonous campaign against Lucan Pratt, the Senior Tutor whom he forced out of office in 1961. In the battle with Pratt he made many enemies, but he felt wholly justified in forcing him to resign from his central role in college admissions. Pratt had become notorious throughout Cambridge for his success in attracting brilliant sportsmen to Christ’s – so successful that it was not uncommon for an overwhelming majority of almost all university teams to be Christ’s men. Pratt became so obsessed with his success that he would sit in the Junior Combination Room to pick up tips about promising sporting talent from undergraduates. He became notorious in admission interviews for tossing a cricket ball or a rugger ball at aspiring candidates and judging them by the skill with which they caught them. I can confirm from my own experience that, when in my admission interview he read from my school reference that I had represented my school for both cricket and rugger and represented my county for the latter, he threw both balls at me simultaneously and, when I casually caught both of them, said “You’re in”. In my own defence, I should add that I also won an open scholarship, and when I saw the super-charged quality of the college teams, I never played a game of any sport again.
Plumb was infuriated, not by the standard of the Christ’s sports teams, but by the fact that Pratt allowed the college’s academic standards to be damagingly lowered in order to let in any promising sportsman. He was determined to attack Pratt’s admissions plans root and branch, and Pratt played into his hands by failing to rein back on his tireless pursuit of sporting excellence at the cost of academic standards. The lists of brilliant sportsmen grew and grew, the lists of brilliant Firsts in the Tripos went down and down. It reached a stage when Plumb was gathering more and more support for his anti-Pratt campaign, and finally Pratt had to resign. But the fact that Plumb had academic virtue on his side in this campaign made little difference to those who thought that Pratt had been hard done by. He had many friends and admirers amongst the Fellowship and amongst the alumni, and inevitably Plumb harvested an impressive crop of new enemies as a result of his campaign.
This seemed to matter little to him. He was exultant. He had defended academic standards in the admissions procedures. He had defeated a sworn enemy. He had demonstrated his mastery of college politics.
For someone as addicted as he was to such parochial matters triumphing in such arcane skills really mattered. Even in old age he could not kick the habit.
So suffice it here to say that even in his late eighties, he was still deeply involved in manipulating the college to do his will in electing new Research Fellows of his choice, or spending its money as he chose. Inevitably he still had a couple of candidates for the 2002 Master-ship election and was furious when they would not stand. Putting one’s research interests before the interests of the College cut little ice with Plumb. “Do they not realise that the College will be here long after their research has been superseded?” he ranted. “Anyone of an age to be a Master will be past his research best, and anyone worthy to be a Master will have done quite enough research already. What matters is the academic leadership to ensure that the College survives and prospers as it has done for the last five hundred years”. Jack was by no means consistent in his views on such matters, but no one can doubt that he more than did his bit to ensure the future for Christ’s.
For over fifty years as a Fellow and four years as Master he worked tirelessly to promote its image, raise its profile, maintain and enhance its standards, and raise funds for its future.
For all his undoubted commitment to Christ’s, he did not skimp on his university duties either, being, amongst many other things, a notably brisk and efficient Chairman of the History Faculty Board in 1966-68, and a controversial Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum.
When many faculty boards regularly meet for five hours at a time, the History Faculty Board under Plumb’s chairmanship rarely lasted an hour. Those who arrived three minutes late were likely to be also three items on the agenda late; and I recall Professor Ullmann once leaving the Board Room almost reluctantly at 2.45 having entered only half an hour earlier, and recalling the days under more expansive and more deliberate chairmen when he would not expect to have left before the sun had set below the horizon.
Plumb’s passion for speed and efficiency was evident in most of the things he did; from writing a review to writing a reference he rarely dallied, which was one of the reasons why he was able to do so many jobs at the same time. Where some academics agonize for days over an important and lengthy testimonial, Plumb usually wrote a single paragraph with an unambiguous verdict, and got promptly back to his current research.
Being an efficient administrator did not mean that he was an enthusiast for all committee work. When he served on the Council of the Senate, he described it as the most boring thing he had ever done in his life. Watching paint dry would surely be orgasmically exciting, he said, compared with sitting on the Council of the Senate in Cambridge. He cheerfully dismissed his colleagues on this powerful central body as “a mournful mixture of meddlers, nodders and nit-pickers – the very worst kind of academic under-achievers, blessed with only their profound sense of their own self-importance to sustain them”. He used to say that as children they must have aspired to be not engine drivers but merely passengers on the train – and complaining passengers at that. He said that Balfour was being flattering when he described the “abominable system” of Cambridge central government as “an ingenious contrivance for making the work of ten wise men appear as if it were inferior to the work of one fool”. The experience had its minor value, he claimed, only in giving him some insight into the mentality of the self-elected oligarchies of the eighteenth century.
What he did give his unstinted attention to were his university lectures. When I arrived in Cambridge in 1953 he had established himself as a star lecturer. He was one of the very few lecturers who created a real buzz of excited anticipation before he turned up to perform in the old Mill Lane lecture rooms. He was also one of the relatively few who kept their audiences throughout the year.
Cambridge undergraduate audiences can be a tough test of a lecturer’s powers to inform, to instruct and to entertain. I well recall Harry Hinsley starting at the beginning of Term with an audience of over two hundred in Room 3 in Mill Lane and having to watch it dwindle down to two (I was one of the final two). Peter Laslett was another distinguished historian who singularly failed to keep his audience. Many others kept going with very modest audiences indeed.
Star performers, such as Moses Finley in Cambridge or A.J.P. Taylor in Oxford, were in the minority but Plumb was very much one of them. He had waited too long to get his faculty job to waste it and he put himself through agonies of preparation (regularly throwing up before each lecture) to achieve the popularity he sought. His lectures were fluent, witty and irreverent. The ingredients for public success, which allowed him to make so much money on lecture tours in the States later in his career, were already very apparent. He was not as compellingly authoritative as Hugh Trevor-Roper was at his best, he was not as elegantly eloquent and smoothly articulate as future stars such as Quentin Skinner or Sir Keith Thomas, he was not as playful or as vivid a wordsmith as Sir Christopher Ricks, he was not as good or as versatile a radio broadcaster as Sir David Cannadine or Lisa Jardine or Mary Beard or Linda Colley or David Reynolds, he was not as consistently politically polemical as Eric Hobsbawn, and he could not match the exuberant charm and enthusiasm of Simon Schama, but he could energize and enliven a traditional academic lecture in a way that very few of his generation could.
His pupils often fondly recall what Geoffrey Parker called “his genius as a lecturer” and compete with examples of his quick wit and natural showmanship to show how he appealed to the appreciative undergraduate audiences which gathered in such large numbers to hear him. “I remember to this day”, recalled Parker “a moment in one of the austere Mill Lane Lecture rooms, during his course on English Constitutional History. He started off ‘Charles II and James II: two of the worst monarchs in English history….’ Only to stop when two men at the back got up and walked out. It happened that they passed in front of his podium, and we watched Jack speak briefly to them before announcing: ‘Ha! Wrong lecture! Thought they were Jacobites!’ From that day to this I have longed for a similar impromptu triumph while lecturing”.
Those who so admired his relaxed self-confident lecturing manner would have been amazed to have seen the agonies of self-doubt that preceded them. He took enormous trouble to prepare himself for each performance, and treated the most mundane routine undergraduate lecture as if it was an address to his most demanding and critical peers. The energy he poured into them paid off in terms of his large and enthusiastic audiences who stayed faithful to him, but they were a significant drain on him for many years.
