and could end in angry confrontation – it was an instructive precursor for those of his pupils who got to be taught by Plumb in Cambridge.
His methods of instruction were equally un-conventional. Rather than feeding his pupils with well-prepared lists of ‘essential points’ to be made in answer to major historical questions, he encouraged us to do the work for ourselves. Rather than insisting on our turning up to school for his lessons, he would give us significant historical problems to work on and then advise us to go off to work in the local Reference Library in the town centre. Instead of giving us prepared bibliographies of recommended reading he told us to read as widely as possible and to seek out our own sources. Having completed our research on say the Reformation or the English Civil War or the Industrial Revolution, we would be required to give a lecture on the subject to the whole class whilst he sat at the back smoking his pipe and delivering withering criticism on anything he thought inadequately researched, poorly explained or sloppily delivered. Work, which he approved of, would receive fulsome praise. It was a pattern of praise and blame that Plumb was to copy in his supervisions at Christ’s.
Howard never stuck to any formal syllabus. We were encouraged to read widely and to pursue any subject that we found interesting. We were encouraged to argue and debate amongst ourselves and the fact that we all met up for coffee in the town centre to do so, rather than clocking in at school, was perfectly fine as far as he was concerned. It gave him more free time in which to write his own novels and publish his own history books, or to travel down to London to appear on the BBC’s Brains Trust.
The result of these methods was that we were encouraged to be independent, encouraged to pursue our own research, encouraged to choose our own subjects and reach our own conclusions with as little schoolmasterly intervention as possible. Standing up in class to deliver one’s findings (to our fellow pupils as well as to him) encouraged us to be well prepared and to be as entertaining as possible. If one could come up with some original and provocative arguments so much the better. The results were in time to prove to be dazzlingly successful in getting his pupils into Cambridge. For thirty years he attracted almost all of the brightest pupils in the school (much to the irritation of other subject masters) and (much to the ill-concealed envy of those colleagues) collected scholarship after scholarship at Cambridge. It was always Cambridge.
Many have described his methods, and the relaxed informal atmosphere in which we were prepared for our assault on the Cambridge Scholarship examinations, as uncannily similar to those which Alan Bennett portrayed so brilliantly in The History Boys. Indeed some, such as Asa Briggs, have told me that they were convinced that Bennett’s play must owe something to tales of Howard’s methods and his legendary success becoming well known throughout Oxbridge. I have no direct confirmation of this, but the resemblance was very strong. Bennett’s charismatic Hector (with his scatter-gun approach to imparting information and his belief that learning must be respected for its own sake) was very reminiscent of Howard’s unstructured teaching methods. But like Bennett’s contrasting character, Irwin, Howard was also dedicated to achieving success for his pupils. Indeed he was reminiscent of Bennett’s Hector, Irwin and Mrs Lintott all rolled into one. He completely dominated our pursuit of a place at Cambridge, and he set the tone of what life was like for the “seventh term sixth formers”. When Alan Bennett wrote: “Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement”, he might well have been quoting Howard.
Even the relaxed tolerance of the sixth-formers in The History Boys towards what they regarded as the harmless homoeroticism of their history master was a striking echo of our relaxed attitude to Howard’s affectionate (but in our eyes, at this stage of his life, pretty asexual) interest in his pupils.
It has to be conceded that in today’s moral climate, some of Howard’s teaching methods, which produced so many Cambridge historians (including Jack Plumb and Rupert Hall as long term Fellows of Christ’s, Arthur Hibbert as a long term Fellow of King’s and myself as a long term Fellow of Caius, and many others), would probably not now be tolerated.
His method began by picking the six brightest first year boys at Newton’s, based on their scores in the entrance Scholarship examination, to form Howard’s club. These six eleven year olds would then be regularly invited to Howard’s bachelor home to play simple educational games, which allowed him to assess in detail their individual academic potential. The games were carefully designed to test their knowledge, their memory, their intellectual curiosity, their reasoning skills, their verbal agility, their competitiveness, their sheer need to win. Having assessed their potential, Howard could then do his best to steer those he thought would excel in his own subject to concentrate on History. In a sense we were groomed, but in a very positive sense, not in the pejorative sense that grooming has come to indicate. At least I never heard any hint or rumour of inappropriate grooming in my day, but one has to admit that this process all ended very badly – indeed it ended disastrously for Howard. Many years after I had left the school an adolescent boy accused him of inappropriate behaviour and Howard was forced to resign. To avoid public disgrace he left his job and left the country. He fled to Amsterdam were he happily reverted to his previous love of prostitutes.
When a few years later he died there, he was buried in an unmarked grave. His brother Cecil Howard had opted for the cheapest choice of burial spot which allowed the authorities to plough it up and re-use it after only a very few years of “occupation”. There could be very few more anonymous endings. It was an appalling conclusion to nearly forty years of spectacularly successful teaching. Many us feared that the steady flow of scholarships to Cambridge would come to a sudden end, and so it proved.
After his death, I was asked to write a tribute to his achievements for the school magazine. Having rehearsed the remarkable record of his successes, I ended my piece with the grim but prescient words: “new talent, like milk to a suicide’s doorstep, will inevitably continue to be delivered to the school gates, let us hope that it will not be allowed to go sour, in the absence of the devoted attention to make the maximum use of it that Howard provided for so many decades”. Alas my hopes largely proved to be illusory, the flow of successfully harnessed talent that had begun with Plumb dried up dramatically with Howard’s departure. The occasional unstoppably bright pupil emerged (I admitted one outstanding Newtonian to read history at Caius) but they were pretty rare after Howard.
To be fair to the school the chances of finding a replacement of his calibre and his commitment were not great. His record was almost impossible to match, even if his initial efforts with what was to prove to be his most successful pupil was to end in abject failure when he prepared Plumb for his assault on Cambridge.
As the most charismatic member of the teaching staff, his influence on the young Plumb was predictably profound, but initially embarrassingly unsuccessful. With a First in History from London under his belt, and powerful literary ambitions as yet unfulfilled, Howard had just the kind of proven track record and promise for the future most likely to appeal to the aspirations of the schoolboy Plumb. Admission to Cambridge with a scholarship to provide the necessary financial support was the first thing he aspired to; with Howard’s help, it must have seemed to be intoxicatingly within reach.
With the assistance of the then Dr. C. P. Snow (later Sir Charles Snow and later still Lord Snow), an Old Newtonian who had made it to Cambridge via the fledgling Leicester university college, and who had quickly recognized the exceptional qualities of the young Plumb, the plans were hatched with all the precision of a military campaign. The strategy included contingency plans that seem astonishing to those who knew the adult Plumb. Perhaps the greatest astonishment would come from the knowledge that the teenaged Jack was instructed to become a confirmed Anglican in case he did not make his first-choice college, St John’s, and had to seek admission to Selwyn. Selwyn was in those days an altogether less glamorous and less desirable college than St. John’s, but also a less demanding one in terms of the likely competition for admission. Selwyn was not even to achieve full collegiate status until 1958, and as long as Jack met its singular requirement – that
