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.
5. 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
