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
