argued by the conspirators, Selwyn would take him if all else failed.
The youthful Plumb was as fierce an atheist then as he was to remain until the end of life. Nothing could better signal his determination to get into Cambridge than the fact that he was willing to be confirmed, willing to fake a set of beliefs he despised, if it could open the gates of a college which he was to regard with dismissive contempt in later life. He had the grace to appear somewhat shame-faced when confronted by this awkward revelation about how far he was willing to go to achieve his ambitions, but claimed that it was the Machiavellian Snow who prompted him to go to such lengths.
As it turned out all their carefully concocted plans were in vain, for his first attempt to get into Cambridge ended in a humiliating form of rejection.
He took the St John’s Scholarship Examination in December 1929. According to his account (which he said was based on the Cambridge Group 3 Scholarship Examination Book which he studied many decades later when he himself was the Chairman of Examiners) he was well up amongst the scholars after the first round of marking, but after the second round of marking (in which the dons at St John’s had a decisive say) he was demoted to tenth place in the list of Exhibitioners.
He actually came top amongst the potential Johnians placed in the Exhibition class and second amongst all the applicants for St John’s. Colleges were obliged to offer Scholarships to those listed as scholars but they could, and very exceptionally did, reject an Exhibitioner. He was one of those very exceptional rejects. St John’s offered Exhibitions to other applicants in spite of the fact that they came lower in the list than the young J.H. Plumb, and not even lowly Selwyn wanted him. The fact that St John’s had turned down their top Exhibitioner must inevitably have sent out warning signals to other colleges still in the market for award-winners.
Jack went to his grave still resenting the injustice that he felt – not without some justification – he had been subjected to. It is true that he could have had a place at St John’s if he could have afforded to accept it. He could not. As David Cannadine has put it “He was a scholarship boy without the scholarship!”
As he told the story (very memorably and very amusingly at his retirement dinner) much of the fault lay in his mother’s advice on how he was to dress for his assault on St John’s. First she advised him to wear his “funeral suit” for his interviews and then, quite fatally, suggested that he topped off this lugubrious outfit with a bowler hat to arrive in. One look at the languid public school boys in their tweed jackets and cavalry twill trousers quickly alerted Jack to his first sartorial error. One encounter with the formidable bowler-hatted Head Porter of St John’s immediately alerted him to his second even greater mistake. In despair he trudged to the Bridge of Sighs and (like an adolescent Odd-Job) hurled the offending bowler hat into the Cam, but by then the damage had been done. The story of the bowler-hatted young “funeral director” or “aspiring porter” from Leicester had already reached and entertained the dons. The confidence of the young Plumb had been deeply dented and he over-compensated in his efforts to impress what he regarded as his patronizing and disdainful interviewers. His excited parade of his current enthusiasm for Freud and Proust did not go down at all well. French homosexuality and the psycho-dynamics of everyday life were not much to the taste of Johnian historians in the late 1920s. He would have done far better at King’s.
In the eyes of the dons of St John’s (including apparently the distinguished Tudor historian J.R.Tanner), he must have seemed pretentious as well as provincial and sartorially embarrassing as well as proletarian. What was worse, instead of social savoir-faire he offered ardent socialism. Instead of uncontaminated historical scholarship he offered suspect literary tastes and an unhealthy interest in sexual psychology. Such offerings were to prove a fatal mixture. Doubtless the story of the bowler hat did not help.
Undeterred by this rejection Plumb wrote again next year (on his school notepaper on the 12 May 1930) asking for the entrance forms for a sizar-ship at St John’s. This time he was aiming rather lower. Sizars were originally student servants who earned their keep by such duties as waiting in Hall on the other wealthier undergraduates, but by 1930 the title was given to poor but worthy students on the basis of an examination. It was rather like a poor man’s scholarship or bursary. I do not know for certain whether or not he made use of the application forms but we do know that Plumb’s name was not amongst the list of successful sizars at St John’s published in The Reporter of the summer of 1930.
Whatever the motives of those involved in his first assault on Cambridge, the dons of St John’s had not offered him the financial support he needed, and so he went to University College Leicester (later the University of Leicester) and became the first person ever to take a First in History as an external London degree from that modest university college. It cannot have been easy. He certainly did not get the kind of teaching he would have enjoyed at Cambridge. No one would claim that Leicester had a richly endowed or generously staffed university in 1930 – the residents numbered just eighty students and faculty members, and that number included “the hall porter who taught botany”. For his first two years at Leicester, there was only one History member of the staff – a sad Oxford M.A. without ambition or hope – who taught everything: all six papers from Greek Political Thought to Nineteenth-Century European History.
As Plumb has recorded, in The Making of an Historian, by the age of 23 he had met only five professional historians – and two of them for only a few minutes. The one he remembered with most warmth and gratitude was Rosalind Hill, who in his last year arrived to her first teaching position with a First Class degree from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She was a woman of exceptional warmth and kindness who was to go on to enjoy a distinguished career as a medieval historian. In recognition of her distinction and to show how much he had valued her presence at University College, Leicester in the early 1930s, he gave a celebratory lunch for her some sixty years later in Christ’s on Friday, 10 February 1995.
At the lunch Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, the leading Cambridge historian of the Crusades, was invited to join them in recognitions of Professor Hill’s research on the Crusading movement. Less than two years later, as Chairman of the Faculty, he wrote to Plumb to tell him that Rosalind Hill had died. In his reply to Riley-Smith, Plumb wrote, “a wonderful woman to whose memory I will always be indebted”.
The respect was mutual. She proudly named him as one of her first and most successful students and Plumb’s name was the only pupil mentioned in her obituaries.
Grateful as he was for her early encouragement, it was nevertheless a very far cry from what he might have experienced if St John’s had accepted him. To get a First with such very modest teaching was a very considerable achievement, and, perhaps understandably, he always took a sardonic pleasure in the fact that of the twelve historians St Johns had preferred to him for admission only one got a First in their Cambridge Finals and only three more managed even to get into the 2.1 class.
Perhaps it was his sense of burning injustice about his initial rejection at Cambridge, or perhaps it was his and Snow’s addiction to organising other people’s lives, but I know from my own experience that they could not resist what Snow called “a kind of personal imperialism”. They both loved to give advice. They both loved to pontificate. They both loved to instruct. They both could not resist telling the uninitiated how the world worked. In spite of their spectacular failure to organise a successful assault on the Cambridge admissions system for Plumb, they had no hesitation in instructing me what I needed to do to gain admission.
They had heard from Bert Howard about what he regarded as my academic promise and about his frustration that he could not persuade me to read History. As a consequence, I was nearing the end of the second term of my first year in the Sixth Form taking Maths, Physics and Chemistry for “A” Level. Most would, at this stage, have given me up as a lost cause as an aspirant to read History at Cambridge, but convinced that the science teaching at Newton’s would be insufficient to exploit my Cambridge potential, Howard arranged for me to meet Plumb
