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
