of Arts and
Sciences, 1970
Honorary Member of the Society of American History, 1976
Honorary Member of American Historical Association, 1981
Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, 1961-82
Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum, 1960-77
Trustee of the Fitzwilliam Museum, 1985-92
Member of the Wine Standards Board, 1973-75
Elector of the Wolfson Prize for History, 1974-86
Fellow of the British Academy, 1968-2001
Member of the Council of the British Academy, 1977-80
Chairman of the Centre of East Anglian Studies, 1979-82
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, 1969
Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, 1969
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1969
Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York, 1960
Distinguished Visiting Professor NYC University, 1971-72
Distinguished Visiting Professor NYC University, 1976
Charles & Ida Green Honours Chair, Texas Christian University, 1974
Distinguished Visiting Professor, Washington University, 1977
Knighthood, 1982
Lectures:
Ford Lectures, University of Oxford, 1965-66
Saposnekov Lectures City College, New York, 1968
Guy Stanton Ford Lecture, University of Minnesota, 1966
The Stenton Lecture, University of Reading, 1977
George Rogers Clark Lecture, Society of Cincinnati, 1977
Honorary Degrees:
Hon. D.Litt. University of Leicester 1968
Hon. D.Litt. University of East Anglia 1977
Hon. D.Litt. Bowdoin College, U.S.A. 1974
Hon. D.Litt. University of Southern California 1978
Hon. D.Litt. Westminster College, U.S.A. 1983
Hon. D.Litt. Washington University, St. Louis 1983
Hon. D.Litt. Bard College, New York 1988
Editing:
Editor of the History of Human Society, 1957-1978
Editor of the Fontana History of Europe, 1957-1997
Senior Editor of American Heritage, 1957-1982
Historical Advisor, Penguin Books, 1960-91
Editor of Pelican Social History of Britain, 1982-91
Editor of the Library of World Biography for Little Brown of Boston, 1972
Editing work for British Museum Publications
Festschrift:
Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, edited and introduced by Neil McKendrick (1974)
3. PREFACE JACK PLUMB: A Personal Memoir from 1949 to 2001
“When we encounter a natural style we are always astonished and delighted, for we expected to see an author and found a man.”
- Pascal
This is an informal and very personal, and necessarily incomplete biographical memoir of Sir John Plumb. Professor Sir David Cannadine has already offered the best critical summing up of his importance to English historiography in History Today and has added further important insights in his formal assessment in The Proceedings of the British Academy. Professor Sir Simon Schema has produced the most affectionate appreciation of his role in keeping alive the traditions of history as literature in The Independent, and Professor Niall Ferguson has written a formal assessment of his work as an introduction to a new edition of Plumb’s The Death of the Past. This offering is an attempt to record some more personal insights about his life and work and character.
I have known Jack Plumb since I was thirteen. I first met him when I sailed as a cabin boy with the Green Wyvern Yacht Club in Easter 1949 – even then he was clearly very different from the other sailors. He was more interesting, more entertaining and much more demanding. He was a Cambridge don, an as yet largely unpublished historian, an exceptional cook, and a frantically competitive sailor who made up for any technical deficiencies in his sailing skills by picking and later buying the fastest boat, choosing the best crew and making sure that they were up early enough to leave before everyone else – arguing persuasively that this would ensure us the choice of the best mooring for the night and the longest period of drinking in the pub. In those days, bitter beer was his chosen tipple (a taste largely abandoned in the late 1960s), cigarettes his drug of choice (a habit given up in the 1950s) and serious wine drinking was still mainly preserved for his more sophisticated friends. The sailing club was a school and university-based society. It sailed as a flotilla of yachts, each of which housed often highly competitive crews of about five or six schoolboys, Old Boys, schoolmasters and an assortment of guests, the most memorable in my time being Pat Moynihan (later U.S. Secretary of Labour Moynihan, Ambassador Moynihan and Senator Moynihan) who effortlessly drank everyone under the table.
Being chosen to crew for Jack was a mixed blessing – his boats were chosen or bought for speed rather than comfort, but everything that money could buy was employed to make the week’s sailing a memorable experience. His fastest boat, Sabrina, was dismissively nick-named “The Gilded Canoe” by those sailing in the larger, heavier, sturdier boats which trailed more sluggishly in its wake; his food was disdained as the product of the “Garlic Galley”; and his fellow sailors were pitied as the galley slaves in Plumb’s forced labour crew. I felt that the cooking and the speed and the conversation more than made up for the shouting and the cursing and the incessant insistence on maintaining our competitive edge. It was a good introduction to Jack’s teaching methods in Cambridge – on board his yacht, as in supervisions in Christ’s, he saw his role as part teacher, part father-figure and part tyrant.
Having known him for over fifty years and having seen him within hours of his death I feel that I have gained some insights into the man.
Having observed the full curve of his adult career, I can claim to know him pretty well.
I came from a very similar background. I lived in the same Leicester street that he did, went to the same grammar school, was even taught by the same two history masters there some quarter of a century after he was. He taught me and directed my studies for three years in Christ’s. He was even – very briefly – my tutor. I shared a staircase with him in the First Court for five years (three as an undergraduate, one and half as a graduate student, and half as a Research Fellow). I can, I feel, fairly be described as both a product of the Plumb school of
