Plumb: a portrait by John Ward, commissioned by the author in 1991
15. Plumb’s country home from 1958-1992 – The Old Rectory, Westhorpe
16. Plumb in the garden at the Old Rectory, Westhorpe
17. A Christmas card cartoon of Plumb and colleagues at Bletchley Park in the early 1940s
18. Plumb’s favourite photograph of his surrogate family – the McKendricks.
19. Plumb drinking a 1911 Perrier-Jouët at a Bordeaux Club dinner at Hugh Johnson’s home at Saling Hall, Saling.
20. Hugh Johnson, John Jenkins, Michael Broadbent, Jack Plumb, Neil McKendrick and Daphne Broadbent – before a Bordeaux Club dinner hosted by Hugh Johnson at Saling Hall.
21. Bert Howard – scoolmaster mentor of Plumb and the author.
22. Plumb – celebrating Christmas dinner with the McKendricks in the dining room of the Master’s Lodge in Caius.
23. Plumb on holiday in France.
24. Plumb’s holiday home for many years – Le Moulin de la Ressence, Plan de la Tour.
25. Plumb walking across Brooklyn Bridge in New York in 1972
26. The author in 1949 when he first met Plumb
27. The author in 1953 when he went up to Cambridge
28. The author in 2000
29. The author in 2005 painted by Michael Noakes
30. C.P. Snow
* Illustrations can be found near the middle of the book
1. INTRODUCTION
This book is a very personal attempt to delineate in some detail the life and career of Sir John Plumb. It tells the story of a fascinating and controversial individual who believed in living both his multi-faceted career and his bisexual life to the full. It attempts to shed new light (much of it very surprising and known only to his closest friends) on a man who lived a life often shrouded in secrecy and often embellished and improved upon by his fertile and creative imagination.
It was a life that, in fact, needed little embellishment to make it unusually interesting. His character was sufficiently beguiling and sufficiently intriguing to attract the attention of four novelists. It has been claimed that, between them, they left six vivid fictional versions of him. They are, to say the least, not all unambiguously flattering. They depict him as ruthlessly ambitious, engagingly self-aggrandising, and successfully upwardly mobile. They also depict him as a highly intelligent, highly entertaining, life-enhancing, multi-talented individual and as an endearingly self-congratulatory lover, of both sexes. One of them even bizarrely portrays him as an academic fraud and a murderer planning further murders.
Jack Plumb’s life began on one of the lowest rungs of the social ladder and ended being spent among those on the highest. It started in a humble red brick two-up-two-down terrace house in the back streets of Leicester where his father was a “clicker” in a local shoe factory and where he was (most unusually) wet-nursed by a friend of his mother. It ended amongst the smart set of London and New York and as a friend of the English aristocracy and a familiar of the Royal family – invited to stay as a guest of the Queen at Sandringham, invited as a guest to the Prince Charles and Diana wedding and frequently invited to spend holidays on the beach with Princess Margaret on the Caribbean island of Mustique.
An equally remarkable rise up his career ladder began with a humiliating rejection by Cambridge, after turning up for his interview at St John’s misguidedly wearing a bowler hat (the headgear of the un-amused college porters), and ended up as Master of Christ’s College with a knighthood, a Cambridge professorship, a Fellowship of the British Academy, a Litt.D. and seven Honorary degrees amongst many other accolades.
His financial situation started as that of a poor working-class boy, unable to afford the place reluctantly offered to him at Cambridge when he failed to get the scholarship he needed, and progressed to a life as a young don so hard-up as to need to ask for windfall apples from his mother’s garden to be sent up to Cambridge. Yet he finished his career as a multi-millionaire, able to give away millions as a result of the huge royalties earned by his writing.
His political sympathies changed as dramatically as his financial fortunes. In the 1930s, he was an ardent Communist sympathiser (some say that he was a card-carrying member of the Party); in the 1960s he was an almost besotted supporter of Harold Wilson and the Labour Party; by the 1980s he had moved so far to the Right that he often criticised his new heroes, Thatcher and Tebbitt, as being “timid pinkoes”. When confronted with the appalled reactions of his old liberal friends, he smugly replied, “there’s no rage like the rage of the convert”.
His teaching career in Cambridge started as someone not thought grand or distinguished enough to teach Christ’s undergraduates and finished as the acclaimed mentor of probably the most remarkable stable of successful students and colleagues from any single college in either Oxford or Cambridge. Many of them went on to follow his path to academic eminence and popular acclaim. They included Sir Simon Schama, Roy Porter, Quentin Skinner, John Vincent, John Burrow, Joachim Whaley, Norman Stone, Geoffrey Parker, Jonathan Steinberg, David Reynolds, Niall Ferguson, Sir David Cannadine, Linda Colley and many others.
His war-service, spent in code-breaking secrecy at Bletchley in Hut 4 and Hut 6, started in a scruffy anonymous wartime lodging, and ended up (as a result of his gallant and explosive response to a snide anti-Semitic comment about Yvonne de Rothschild) as the only, and much indulged, lodger of the Rothschilds, spending his evenings drinking their finest first growth clarets.
His writing career was so delayed that he was nearly forty when he produced his first significant book but so productive that over the next twenty-five years he published forty-four books bearing his name either as editor or sole author. He was at the same time a hugely prolific journalist in both Britain and the United States. By then he had earned the reputation of being one of the most widely-read living historians.
His first efforts at publication were rejected, first a novel and then a learned article. His PhD dissertation was also regarded as not worth publishing and his early research was dismissed as very disappointing. Yet the prose in his later work was to earn the praise of novelists of the calibre of Grahame Greene, C. P. Snow and Angus Wilson, and its influence was regarded as so pervasive in the States that, on the direct order of the President and a unanimous vote in Congress, the Union flag was flown over the American Capitol in his honour to mark his 80th birthday and to recognise a man whose writing had taught the American people so much.
It was not only as a teacher and a writer that he excelled. It must have been a pleasing irony to him in his mature years that the aspiring writer, who had had his first literary efforts rejected by editors and publishers alike, should eventually come to control a dazzling portfolio of editorial appointments himself. Those appointments led to a huge array of significant publications with an impressive cast of distinguished authors and distinguished publishers. The list of books he commissioned and promoted arguably ultimately exceeded his own writings. They also helped to boost his enviable income level, as did his prolific and well-paid international journalism.
As a result, even in years of stratospheric tax levels (83% on earned income and 98% on unearned income, at their peak) he was able to enjoy a munificent lifestyle far beyond that of the average don. These were the years when he enjoyed a pleasure-loving lifestyle, as well as a hugely productive one and a much acclaimed one. These were the days of ever more expensive fast
