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.
