Plumb.
My family and I also shared a house with him in Suffolk for over thirty years. I wrote a book with him. I edited his festschrift, worked on “Plumb’s century” and discussed his work with him on a daily basis during the most productive years of his life. I have been asked to give innumerable speeches in his honour and he, in return, spoke as the best man at my wedding. My family and I took holidays with him for at least thirty-five of the last fifty years of his life and I have dined with him more times than either I can or care to remember. I knew almost all of his friends, many of his male lovers, some of his mistresses and most of his professional rivals.
When I wrote his obituary for The Guardian, I was generously offered 2000 words in which to do so. But since he died on a Sunday and my obituary appeared on the Monday morning little more than twenty-four hours after his death, I obviously did not have the time or the space to say all that I would have wished to say. He was a complicated man, and so I welcome this opportunity to expand my obituary and to expatiate a little more on some of the complexities that made him such a fascinating and maddening friend and colleague. If nothing else it will contain quite a lot of information about his life that few others will know about and even fewer might wish to record. It is very far from all that I could say but the time is not yet ripe for the publication of all the rich details of an exceptionally full life. His archive was purchased by the Cambridge University Library (for the surprising sum of £60,000 several decades ago when that sum would have bought a pretty substantial house) and will provide rich biographical pickings when it is free from its fifty-year embargo. Some sections of it are even embargoed until the death of the last surviving grandchild of the current monarch.
On the Sunday of his death when I was writing his obituary, my younger daughter said, “Forget about the black years and concentrate on the good Jack”. That is what I tried to do. But one cannot deny that the last years of his life were often very black indeed. To try to explain what happened to Jack in his later years I have added “A Postscript on the Black Years”. It was difficult to write and the contrast between the man it portrays and the ebullient, inspiring and uninhibitedly generous man about whom I wrote in a “Valedictory Tribute” when he retired from the Faculty in 1974 is painful to contemplate. Without it, however, this personal memoir would be incomplete and the portrait of Jack would be cosmetically distorted by excessive censorship and excessive kindness – he would have disapproved of the former and despised the latter. In his old age, he rarely practiced either.
I make no apology for this portrait being presented very much from my point of view. Others doubtless have different perspectives on Jack’s life and character. Doubtless some will disagree with my version and my judgements. Doubtless other portraits will appear. All I can say is that this is how I saw him and this is how I remember his distinctive personality. I have enjoyed casting my mind back to the exhilarating early years of our friendship and have found it curiously therapeutic to try to explain and to understand the later darker years.
He always used to divide people into those who enhanced life and those who detracted from it. We should never forget that for most of his life he was without question one of the great life-enhancers – someone who raised the temperature of life just by being there. But there is more of interest to him than that. Perhaps this memoir will offer more evidence and some greater insight into what kind man was the Sir John Plumb who awakened so many people’s interest in history and literature in the late twentieth century.
I hope that this memoir will be read as an affectionate if un-illusion piece. I hope that it will be seen as genuinely admiring and compassionate in tone and content, if not uncritical in spirit and analysis. I have tried to include some of the more revealing and more characteristic episodes in his career and I have concentrated on those aspects of his life of which I had the most direct experience. So, above all, it is how I remember my old teacher and friend. I owe him a great debt of gratitude – indeed, apart from my wife and my daughters, he unquestionably had more influence on my life than any other individual. If history is, in one sense, the record of memory, then perhaps these memories and very personal recollections can be regarded as my modest contribution to the first draft of a history of a fascinating if ultimately much troubled life.
It was clear in 2001 that, with his death, Cambridge had lost one of its most influential historians of the late twentieth century. It had also lost one of its most memorable characters.
He was one of a remarkable group of dynamic and charismatic scholars (including Sir Moses Finley, Sir Geoffrey Elton, Sir Harry Hensley, (Sir) Owen Chadwick, Sir Denis Brogan, Sir Herbert Butterfield, Dom David Knowles, Mania (Sir Michael) Postman, Philip Grierson, Walter Ullmann, Peter Laslett and Denis Mack Smith) who made the Cambridge History Faculty such an exciting place to be in the 1960s and 1970s. When one recalls that Joseph Needham and E.H. Carr were then at the height of their powers in Cambridge, that exciting young scholars, such as John (later Sir John) Elliott, Quentin Skinner, Christopher Andrew and Norman Stone, had already joined the Faculty, and that ambitious youngsters such as Richard Overy, Geoffrey Parker, Roy Porter, Simon (later Sir Simon) Schama, John Brewer, Keith Wrightson, David (later Sir David) Cannadine, Chris (later Sir Christopher) Clark and Chris (later Sir Christopher) Bayly were beginning their research careers here, it is little wonder that one looks back on it now as a Golden Age which has not been equalled since. It was (as Roy Porter once memorably said of the eighteenth century) “a tonic time to be alive”.
Few if any could claim to have played a more central role in that golden era than Dr. J. H. Plumb as he was then known. As a hugely influential teacher, the most popular lecturer and the most prolific writer, and as an unforgettably colourful character, Plumb dominated Christ’s and Cambridge History during much of this period. In the final years of his life it gave him great pleasure that he had outlived almost all of his contemporaries, and he reacted to the death of particularly fierce rivals, such as Lord Todd in Christ’s and Sir Geoffrey Elton in the History Faculty, with undisguised glee.
4. Plumb in Leicester: Family Upbringing and Schooling
Jack Plumb did not enjoy the effortless rise to the top that so many of his colleagues did. He often complained – probably justifiably – that the scales of social justice were stacked against his succeeding in life.
Certainly he was not blessed with a privileged or wealthy background. He was the product of a working-class family in Leicester and of the local grammar school, Alderman Newton’s. His father toiled away on the shop floor of a local boot and shoe factory and Jack spent his childhood in a humble red brick terrace house typical of nineteenth-century workers’ housing. It can still be seen at 65 Walton Street, leading off Narborough Road, Leicester. His family later moved to suburbia – a modest semi-detached house near the corner of Dumbleton Avenue and Somerville Road (both of which also lead off Narborough Road), which he felt signalled his parents’ success in joining the lower middle classes. I briefly lived in the same street in 1939, and I was much surprised and mildly amused to learn how much it irritated Jack that my family lived in one of the large three story Edwardian houses at the town end of Somerville Road whilst his family lived in an undistinguished inter-war semi at the other end. I was even more amused to hear Jack’s adult efforts to re-write a more romantic background for himself. On the slender basis of six silver teaspoons carrying the arms of a family in whose service his grandmother had worked, he wove a fantasy of himself as a by-blow of an aristocratic English family. He even claimed to be able to trace a family resemblance. When he later confided this suspicion to one of his aristocratic friends and offered the decisive evidence of his mother’s possession of the silver teaspoons, he was quite crushed when she replied, “But Jack darling, the servants always steal the tea-spoons!”
What was always obvious was that he had no intention of staying any longer than he had to in the social milieu into which he felt an unkind fate had so very undeservedly tipped him. His schoolboy diaries make it abundantly clear that he yearned to explore a wider world and that he had the energy and drive and intelligence to ensure that he would succeed in doing so. Even as a schoolboy he was active in persuading and
