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
