SIR JOHN PLUMB

The Hidden Life of a Great Historian

Neil McKendrick

• Publisher: Edward Everett Root
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781911454830
• eBook ISBN: 9781911454861
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Biographies

Sir John(Jack)Harold Plumb(1911 – 2001) was a great British historian. He led an extraordinary lifeof startling contrasts, much of it cloaked in secrecy. This memoir attempts to lift that cloak. / This is a very personal account written by Neil McKendrick, a fellow historian, a fellow Master of a Cambridge college and one his oldest and closest friends, who knew Plumb from his early days to his dying hours some fifty years after they first met. / This new memoir depicts a startlingly revelatory portrait of a complex and controversial man who moved from poverty to great affluence; from beginning his life in a two-up two-down terrace house in Leicester to end it in what was called "Jack's Palace" surrounded by a world-class collection of Vincennes and Sèvres. / Plumb's personality was sufficiently beguiling to attract the attention of four significant novelists who left six vivid if unflattering fictional versions of him – depicting him as a ruthless charmer, a serial bisexual philanderer and, most bizarrely of all, as a murderer planning a further murder. In truth the real man needed no fictional elaboration to make him unusually interesting. In fact, his life is often astonishing. The historian, who achieved such international eminence that, on the direct order of the US President and after a unanimous vote in Congress, the Union flag was flown over the American Congress on his 80thbirthday to do honour to the historian who had taught the American people so much, was no run of the mill academic. / In addition to his academic work, during theSecond World WarPlumb worked in the code-breaking department of theForeign OfficeatBletchley Park, Hut 8&Hut 4; later Block B. He headed a section working on a German Naval hand cipher, Reservehandverfahren.He became Professor of Modern English History at Cambridge in 1966, serving as Master of Christ's College from 1978-82, when he was knighted in 1982.His pupils included Simon Schama, Roy Porter, Niall Ferguson and Quentin Skinner. / Plumb had moved from drinking beer in down-market pubs in his youth to drinking champagne in aristocratic drawing rooms and owning the finest collection of claret in Cambridge; from a passionate socialist for most of his life (with, at one time, strong Communist sympathies) to a passionate Thatcherite in his 70s; from his provincial working class family in Leicester to become a close friend of the Rothschilds and a companion of the Queen's sister who gave a memorable 80thbirthday party for him in her home at Kensington Palace Gardens. / He moved from a Cambridge college reject in his youth to the Mastership of Christ's; from a rejected author (of both a novel and his early research) to an acclaimed and prolific writer, editor and journalist; from a conventional heterosexual youth in Leicester to an opportunistic bisexual life thereafter; from his life-enhancing and inspiring best to his embittered worst in extreme old age; from his infancy when he was wet-nursed by a friend of his mother's to his funeral when he was buried without mourners or music or elegies or even a coffin. For all his achievements, his life also encompassed failure and disappointments and its end was almost unbearably sad. / This memoir is an attempt to do for Plumb what a relative of Lord Macaulay once did for that great historian, when he wrote: "There must be tens of thousands whose interest in history and literature he has awakened and informed by his pen, and who would gladly know what manner of man it was that has done them so great a service". The "manner of man" that emerges from this book is as fascinating as it is surprising./ Contents: Introduction. Biography. Preface. Sir John Plumb. Family upbringing and schooling: Leicester and Alderman Newton's. Plumb at Cambridge. Plumb's Early Research. Plumb's publications. Plumb, Elton and Chadwick and The Regius Chair. Plumb and his adopted family. Plumb's Reputation as a Patron, a Promoter and a Fixer. Fictional Portraits of Plumb. Painted Portraits of Plumb. Plumb at Bletchley. Influences on Plumb. The Sources of Plumb's wealth. Plumb as Editor. Plumb's Apolarist Life style. Expensive cars and Their Destruction. Plumb the Big Spender: Houses, Holidays and Other Indulgences. Plumb and His New friends: A Case of Social Nobility. Plumb's reputation as a Scholar. Plumbs' Health and His Declining Productivity. Plumb's Professional Reputation. Plumbs' Dedications. Plumbs' Other Writing. Plumb's Pupils. Plumb's Changing Political Beliefs. Plumb's Generosity: to his Staff and His Friends and Himself. Plumb's Wine. Plumb's Donations. Plumb's Private Life. Plumb and Friendship. The Posthumous Sale of 2002. Plumb's Adopted Family. A Postscript on the Black Years. The Plumb Master ship in Context. Other Public Recognition. Desert Island Discs. Plumb's Changing Attitudes' to His Pupils. The End of Life, Death and a Memorial Dinner: Memories and Legacy and Final Judgements. Postscript: Sir J.H.Plumb Historian and Teacher of Historians. Acknowledgements. Select Bibliography.

Sir John Plumb

The Hidden Life of a Great Historian

A Personal Memoir by Neil McKendrick

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Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2019

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Edward Everett Root, Publishers, Co. Ltd.,

30 New Road, Brighton, Sussex, BN1 1BN, England.

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Sir John Plumb. The Hidden Life of a Great Historian. A Personal Memoir

By Neil McKendrick.

First published in Great Britain in 2019.

© Neil McKendrick 2019.

This edition © Edward Everett Root Publishers 2019

ISBN 978-1-911454-83-0 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-911454-86-1 ebook

Neil McKendrick has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and as the owner of this Work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

Cover and Production by Head & Heart Book Design.

This memoir is dedicated to my wife, Melveena McKendrick,

and to our daughters, Olivia and Cornelia, who all

witnessed at first hand and for many years

the Marmite character and

personality

of

Sir John Plumb.

CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. J.H.Plumb’s Curriculum Vitae
3. Preface: Jack Plumb: A Personal Memoir from 1949 to 2001
4. Plumb in Leicester: Family Upbringing and Schooling
5. Plumb’s Coming to terms with Cambridge
6. Plumb’s Early Research and his later Publications
7. Plumb, Elton and Chadwick and the Regius Chair
8. Plumb the Possessive Father Figure
9. Plumb’s Reputation as Patron, Promoter and Fixer
10. Plumb in Fiction
11. Plumb’s Painted Portraits
12. Plumb and the Secret World at Bletchley Park
13. Plumb: his tastes, his collections and his enthusiasms
14. Plumb’s wealth – Its Sources and its Size
15. Plumb as a prolific Editor
16. Plumb’s American Journalism – American Heritage and Horizon
17. Plumb’s Apolaustic Lifestyle: Expensive Cars and their Destruction
18. Plumb the Big Spender: Houses, Holidays and other Indulgences
19. Plumb and his New Friends: A Case of Social Mobility
20. Plumb’s Reputation as a Scholar and Walpole III
21. Plumb’s Health and his Declining Productivity
22. Plumb’s Critique of Cambridge Historians
23. Plumb’s Dedications
24. Plumb’s Other Writing
25. Plumb’s Other Pupils and Plumb the Novelist Manqué
26. Plumb’s Changing Political Beliefs and the Blunt Affair: from Communist Sympathiser to Combative Tory
27. Plumb’s Generosity to his Staff, his Friends and Himself
28. Plumb and his Wine
29. Plumb and Philanthropy
30. Plumb’s Very Private Love Life: Sex, Secrets and Subterfuge
31. Plumb and Friendship
32. Plumb’s Posthumous Sale in 2002
33. Plumb’s Secret Daughter and his Attitude to Marriage and Children
34. Plumb’s 90th Birthday: a Symbol of Old Age and the Black Years
35. Plumb and his Mastership of Christ’s in Context
36. Plumb and Public Recognition: the film If and Desert Island Discs
37. Plumb’s Changing Attitude to his Pupils
38. Plumb: the End of Life, his Death, his Burial and a Memorial Dinner
39. Plumb and his Legacy: Historian and Teacher of Historians
40. Acknowledgements

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Front cover: Plumb in front of the Master’s Lodge in Christ’s

2. Plumb in Litt.D. gown

3. Plumb’s birth certificate

4. Plumb’s birthplace and first home – 65, Walton St., Leicester

5. The youthful Dr. J.H. Plumb aged 25 in 1936

6. Plumb aged 39 – his favourite self-image

7. Plumb aged 60 – chosen for his Festschrift

8. Plumb aged 90

9. Plumb with the author in 1954

10. Plumb with Craig Barlow, Angus Wilson and the author in 1956

11. Plumb with the author in 1964

12. Plumb: a portrait by Jenny Polack, commissioned by Christ’s in 1978

13. Plumb: a portrait by Lawrence Gowing, commissioned by Christ’s in 1980

14. 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 cars, and ever more expensive and expansive foreign holidays in Provence, the Algarve and the Caribbean for himself and his friends.

These were the prosperous years when he also bought in profusion: eighteenth-century English silver; seventeenth-century Dutch paintings; and in particular fine wine, which led him to amass the finest private cellar in Cambridge; and, perhaps most notably of all, fine porcelain, which became a finer collection of Vincennes and Sèvres than that in the Fitzwilliam museum.

These were the heady years when he aspired to become Regius Professor of History in Cambridge, President of the British Academy, and ultimately a peer of the realm.

These were the upbeat years when Sir David Cannadine has described him as being “at his Balzacian best” when “he radiated warmth, buoyancy, optimism and hope”.

These were the years when he was at his exuberant and inspiring best, attracting and helping to promote his remarkable and unparalleled phalanx of brilliant pupils.

From these dizzying peaks of achievement and acclaim, and even more dizzying peaks of aspiration, there were to follow the years of disappointment and decline and ambitions not achieved. These were the darker years of rage, resentment and recrimination, which saw him in what Cannadine has described as “his more Dostoyevskian mode” when “he was consumed by doubt, loneliness and disappointment”.

In old age his private life seemed to offer few compensations. He had always claimed that he had based his life on serial friendships with...

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