Читать книгу SIR JOHN PLUMB - Prof Neil McKendrick - Страница 12

6. Plumb’s Early Research and his later Publications

Jack was well aware, however, that (for the successful international career he sought) he would need a solid foundation in published research. Always only too well aware of what he called “the wasted years” of the war and his delayed acceptance in Cambridge, and aware too of the disappointment of his early research in the 1930s and the distractions of his flirtation with fiction, he was determined to make up for lost ground. What he had done before the war had done very little to mark him out as a serious contender to be regarded as a significant scholar.

As a result, he was always happier, in the fifties and sixties at least, in eagerly pursuing his research interests. I was lucky enough to be invited as an undergraduate to accompany him on research trips to Houghton Hall and to see what research conducted in ideal circumstances could be like. Sybil, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, who lived in the great Norfolk house built by Sir Robert Walpole, represented the platonic ideal of the perfect hostess to preside over such an enterprise. She was striking to look at, fascinating to talk to (with wonderful stories of Lloyd George’s amorous activities on country house weekends), highly interested in the research itself, and hugely generous to her guests. She may well have been amused to have two humbly-born historians to entertain, but she certainly did so with verve, elegance and style. I was summoned to her side on a Kent sofa, with a Holbein on an easel at her elbow, while she explained the beauty and provenance of the contents of the house. She showed off with wonderful assurance and flawless scholarship the portraits of her by John Singer Sargent, the superb still life by Oudry, the fabulous baroque pearls fashioned into priceless jewels by Cellini, the magnificent ceramics, the superb bronzes and the world famous furniture made for the house when Sir Robert Walpole had it built and furnished.

Not surprisingly I felt deliciously indulged. I was allowed to choose what we should eat off from a china room stacked with priceless porcelain and I boldly chose Sèvres. I was given a magnificent bedroom complete with a roaring fire – even my bathroom had its own fire, especially lit for my bath. I tried to convince myself that the long hours spent in the archives justified such indulgence. We had after all been so thorough that we had discovered a book borrowed by Colonel Robert Walpole (Sir Robert Walpole’s father) from Sidney Sussex College library in 1669 and not returned for 288 years! (The Guinness Book of records cites it as the most overdue book in British library history but I am happy to confirm that no fine was exacted by the magnanimous Fellows of Sidney Sussex). We certainly did not skimp in our scholarly duties but nevertheless I still felt over-generously rewarded for my efforts.

Some of the cosseting was admittedly less than entirely welcome. I have to admit that I was taken aback to discover that my very modest suitcase and its even more modest contents had been unpacked by unseen hands and carefully laid out for my use – I was aghast to find that my ancient socks had been given the hotel napkin treatment and turned into elegantly convoluted shapes so that one had only to insert the one’s foot into an invitingly prepared space and then draw them effortlessly upwards. Such embarrassments soon dwindled as, in more than ample compensation, I was taken on a comprehensive tour of the Stone Hall and all the magnificent staterooms. Even the Library in which Jack and I worked was stupendous. As I sat surrounded by Walpole’s sumptuously gold tooled calf bound books and gazed out at the herds of white deer roaming the Houghton estate, I (perhaps rather cynically) thought that I could see why Jack was so attracted to research in the great aristocratic houses of the eighteenth century.

He was certainly completely at home at Houghton. He had earned the respect, admiration and trust of the Cholmondeleys. He had also earned a friendship that survived unbroken into great old age. Sybil Cholmondeley always remembered his birthdays, and Jack always showed off with pride the charming gifts of Georgian silver or Lalique glass or a haunch of venison or such like, which she sent from Houghton.

Some of the other archives he worked in would not support the ungenerous view that it was luxury and indulgence that drew him there. Those who think that it was simply Jack’s love of an apolaustic life-style that dictated his research interests might have thought that his research work at Blenheim Palace would provide further confirmation of his self-indulgent tastes. If so they would have been much surprised by the reality. I went as a humble research assistant on such a visit and the contrast with research at Houghton could not have been more marked. No aristocratic welcome and certainly no superlative food and wine were on offer from the Duke of Marlborough. On the contrary we entered the house by the tradesmen’s entrance, we even paid an entrance fee, and we were then ushered into a white-tiled cellar, which passed as an archive room. It was unbelievably cold. So incensed was Jack at this welcome and this environment – or merely so cold – that he spent several freezing January days there wrapped in the royal standard for warmth, discontentedly but efficiently working his way through the evidence of the behaviour of the Cabinet under Queen Anne. When I, encouraged by his boldness, reached for some lesser ducal pennant to wrap myself in, I was sharply told to desist. My job was to keep copying the documents, not his behaviour. “Youth will keep you warm, McKendrick” was the cold comfort I received. Fortunately the research was productive and Plumb made some exciting discoveries about the working of Queen Anne’s cabinet. And listening to the gossip of the Blenheim staff as they chattered about the behaviour of their employer had its lighter moments. Hearing a voice (slightly off stage, as it were, from our research in the Muniment room) ask rather wearily “You know, I really don’t understand why his Grace needs a second footman when he dines alone” was worth the entrance fee. But such entertainment was very intermittent, and it was almost unbearably cold.

Little wonder then that, on this occasion, he was very happy to speed back to Christ’s and all the college jobs he had to do there. He never skimped on these however pressing the call of his scholarly interests, which make his research output all the more remarkable. Fortunately he had the phenomenal energy and the huge reserves of stamina to make up for his very slow start in research and publications.

When I first met Jack Plumb he had published very little. His first publication had been a ninety-four page booklet on his father’s factory entitled Fifty Years of “Equity” Shoemaking: A History of the Leicester Co-operative Boot and Shoe Manufacturing Society Limited, which was privately printed in 1936.

This was an act of filial piety, which he knew would earn at best a patronising response from his Cambridge contemporaries. He was the first to admit that much of the firm’s archive made for “dull if pleasant reading”, so he used it as a chance to showcase his political sympathies – eulogising the workers and condemning the capitalists. “The Equity”, he wrote, “is an outstanding example of what the workers can do when power is in their hands. It refutes the often-repeated doctrine that there is a natural selectivity at work in the world which leads to a situation where some must be exploited and some exploit…. Contrasted with English industry as a whole, the “Equity” is a tiny haven of refuge, a foretaste of socialist method, in a capitalist world….The workers at the “Equity”…ought not to forget that many of their brother workers are forced into lives of misery and distress in the system of production for profit, which is the general rule of British industry”.

There is much more in the same vein. It amounts to a hymn of praise of the workers’ co-operative movement, and a sustained condemnation of capitalism: “the rights of workers are threatened on all sides…the forces of capitalism are so deeply entrenched as to be irremovable by coalitions of workers in production. Capitalism can only be overthrown by political means; only when that has happened will the vast mass of workers enjoy the security and the good wages and treatment which the workers at the “Equity” now enjoy”.

This first publication was not then simply a work of filial piety, it was also a work of powerful left-wing piety. Given his dramatic swing to the right in his mature years, he was probably grateful that it was privately printed in very modest numbers and is now very difficult to find. Even in the 1930s it was pretty obscure. Its soft cardboard cover does not even carry the author’s name.

He must have known that this was not the kind of publication to win him a permanent position in Cambridge. Fortunately for the career he longed for, his later publications were neither obscure nor difficult to find. Once his Penguin history appeared and sold in serious numbers his career took off.

His more significant publications had started very slowly partly because of his frustrated dalliance with novel-writing; partly because of his distractingly anguished love life of the 1930s; partly because of what he always called “the wasted war years”; and partly because, when he finished his Penguin history of the eighteenth century in early 1948, there was such a chronic post-war paper shortage that it was not published until 1950.

After those initial delays, there was an explosion of publications. For in spite of all his college commitments, Jack proved to be a most productive researcher and a hugely prolific publisher.

By the time of my undergraduate days in Cambridge he had had a hand in eight separate publications. Books, articles and reviews had started to pour from his pen. When he supervised me in the mid-1950s he was mainly preoccupied with his forthcoming first volume on Walpole and rightly so because it was that project which established him as a significant scholar. He gave it to me to read in page proof, saying “this has already been checked in galleys and in page proofs by experts”, but said that it might be a salutary experience for me to realise how meticulous one has to be in preparing a major history book for publication. It did teach me one important lesson: errors are far more likely to slip through the net in the most unlikely places. When I handed back the final page proofs just before they were to be sent to the printers, I was able to tell him that his title page announced the publication of “Sir Robert Wallope”. My last minute contribution may have been very tiny but I used to boast that it saved him from a lot of gleeful mockery from reviewers.

It was good to be reminded of the amount of meticulous attention to detail that was involved in those years of prolific publication. All his work for the next quarter of a century was written in long hand, then typed, then corrected and re-typed, then corrected in galleys, and then corrected in page proofs. It makes it all the more impressive that between 1950 and 1973, he produced twenty-three books and that does not include the twenty-one books that he edited – the nine volumes he edited and introduced for The History of Human Society or the four volumes he edited and introduced for Signet Classics or the eight volumes of the Fontana History of Europe that he edited in those years. These were the decades when he was at the height of his powers and this was the period when he published his two great volumes on Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (1956), Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (1960), his Penguin History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1950), his life of Chatham (1953), his study of The First Four Georges (1956), his Ford Lectures on The Growth of Political Stability 1675-1725 (1967) and The Death of the Past (1969). These are the books that made his scholarly reputation, but Plumb wanted to be more than simply a scholar. He wrote to be read, and hungered to reach a large audience and it was with The Renaissance (1961) and in particular with Royal Heritage (1977), which sold 250,000 copies in its first edition, that he did so. These two books sold in massive numbers and together with his collected essays – Men and Places (1963), In the Light of History (1972), The Making of a Historian (1988) and The American Experience (1989) – established him as one of the few English historians to reach a wider public.

He must surely be the only British historian for whom the American flag was flown from the flagpole of the American Capitol by express request of the President of the United States after a unanimous vote in Congress on 20th of August 1991. It was flown to mark his 80th birthday. It was a remarkable tribute to an English historian’s ability to carry the lessons of history to a wide American public and, in doing so, to do so much to foster Anglo-American relations.

He loved the freedom his American journalism offered him. It gave him the opportunity to expatiate on whatever topic took his fancy and the fact that he chose to pontificate on many of his rivals’ chosen territory only added to their fury and resentment. The idea of this widely read, highly literate historian musing interestingly on a great range of centuries, societies and subjects was not popular in the world of narrow academic professionalism in England. So Plumb writing on China or India or Africa, or sounding off on slavery and the American Constitution, or speculating on sex and childhood and the family, or cheerfully propounding the virtues of Fanny Hill and Lucretius, all proved intolerably provocative to many of his more narrowly gifted colleagues back in Cambridge.

It did not help that he was only too happy to discuss their manifold shortcomings in print. He seemed delighted to do so. Where a critic such as Cyril Connolly managed to sound elegantly regretful when he described reviewing books as “the thankless task of drowning other people’s kittens”, Jack gleefully described the task as “the noble and necessary duty to slaughter other people’s sacred cows”. Since he did so in memorable prose, his words of condemnation and mockery were much and lovingly quoted – most especially, of course, to those who had been most mercilessly mocked.

He opened his review of UNESCO’s “History of Mankind” with the following words: “I don’t often wish I were as rich as Paul Getty. Today I do. I want to buy time on every commercial radio and TV from Patagonia to the North Cape, to hire sky-writing planes in all the world’s capitals, to take pages of advertising in all the world’s press, just to say how awful, how idiotic is this second volume of UNESCO’s projected six-volume “History of Mankind”.

Of the editor of what he called “this appalling volume”, he wrote “Luigi Pareti seems to have been a scholar of monumental incompetence” with “a mind of startling silliness”. Of the illustrations he wrote, “The illustrations are as bad as the book; ill-chosen, ill-arranged and ill-produced, they would have been shameful 50 years ago”. Of the book as a whole he wrote, “What is so infuriating is not the vast waste of money and time but that such a signal failure should be possible in a history of one of the most exciting dramatic and important epochs in the life of man. This is neither history nor encyclopaedia, but an incoherent stream of detritus, hacked out of a score of pedestrian textbooks”. There was much more in the same vein about the three-quarter of a million words composed at huge expense by an international team of scholars overseen by “ancient and learned men” such as Joseph Needham, Bertrand Russell and the deceased Ernest Barker who “tottered at the world’s expense, to Mexico City or New Delhi to sit in solemn conclave in proliferating committees to plan the un-plannable or comment on the unreadable”. In a single review, Jack must have managed to enrage a tidy proportion of the world’s leading scholars. They were dismissed with near contempt. Even less palatably, they were memorably mocked as being boring, hugely incompetent and profoundly silly.

And there were plenty more reviews of the same ilk and the same ire from the same intrepid reviewer. It did not make for universal popularity.

It did, however, make for a certain welcome notoriety. It did not do his editorial ambitions any harm comprehensively to clear the field of most of his eminent rivals. It did not do his ambition to become an academic guru any harm to denounce the grand old men of the profession as superannuated incompetents completely out of touch with current scholarship and research. So Jack was increasingly in demand to pontificate on the nature of history and he was only too eager to do so. He wished to spread his wings and to explore new areas of historical interest.

He did much to encourage those willing to engage in exciting new historical disciplines.

Plumb’s major long-term scholarly standing will surely rest securely on his work as a political historian of “the long eighteenth century”. His great biography of Walpole has already stood the test of nearly fifty years’ scrutiny and has still not been bettered; his Penguin history survived as the best general introduction to eighteenth-century England for forty years until it was finally surpassed by the work of Roy Porter (Plumb perceptively chose Porter to be his last supervision pupil whilst he was still formally in charge of History at Christ’s); and his Ford lectures have permanently changed our attitudes to late Stuart and early Georgian England.

But Plumb recognised very early in his career that other historical disciplines were increasingly coming to the fore. He wrote in Studies in Social History (which he edited in 1955) that “social history, in the fullest and deepest sense of the term, is now a field of study of incomparable richness and the one in which the greatest discoveries will be made in this generation. Its purpose has long ceased to be merely evocative”. His prediction has long since been borne out, and he increasingly followed the dictates of his own prophecy – first in an editorial capacity but increasingly in his own writing and research which moved more and more into the sphere of social and cultural history. It was a decision that fuelled and exacerbated the strong antipathies between the Plumb and the Elton schools of historiography in Cambridge and beyond.