Both wanted disciples, both wanted complete devotion to themselves, both wanted uncritical acceptance of their historical methods. Each loathed the other. Even the subtle and quick-witted and sure-footed Plumb would eventually have found it impossible to serve two such masters. Fortunately he decided to serve neither.
The decision made him two powerful enemies – but by refusing to join Namier in the History of Parliament project he gave himself the freedom to write the kind of books he wanted to write, and by breaking with Butterfield he created the freedom to attract pupils who shared his vision of what history should be. Both were brave decisions for a young eighteenth-century historian with his way to make. Both were the right decisions.
There was no way that he could have maintained for long a workable relationship with the teetotal, Methodist, right-wing Butterfield. Initially they were much drawn to each other. Plumb found Butterfield “brilliant, exasperating, devastating, mischievous, mixing in equal quantities malice and generosity”. They argued until the early hours of the morning. “He dragged his principles before my blood-shot eyes”, wrote Plumb, “with the skill of a matador. He forced me to reconsider every idea that I had; I got better at defending myself, and through Butterfield I gradually knew that I would never truly belong to the profession of history. I loved yet distrusted Butterfield’s impish qualities, his almost electric versatility at times daunted me but his major principles – his deep belief in the role of Providence (Christian of course) in human history – left me, in the end, bored as well as disbelieving. We disagreed too on the function of history. I believed then as I believe now that history must serve a social purpose no matter how limited – to try to teach wisdom about the past and so, perhaps, no more than perhaps, about ourselves and our times. Butterfield thought historians should suspend all judgment about history”. So Jack decided to disengage himself. To judge from reports from those who have worked on the Butterfield archive, Sir Herbert never fully forgave him. The love-hate relationship was a long-lasting one, but it was a relationship doomed to fail.
There was no way either that Plumb could have become one of Namier’s long-term disciples. Here the barrier was historical methodology and historical interpretation as much as incompatible personalities and religious beliefs. Namier was convinced that the keys to understanding politics, and therefore to understanding political history, were to be found in greed and self-interest. Realist as he always was, and cynic that he often was, Jack nevertheless found this view a depressingly reductionist interpretation of politics. As he said, even if one accepted such a view one still had to recognize the very different ideological routes that one could choose in pursuit of one’s self-interest and self-promotion. Such choices could control an individual’s career, dictate the outcome of historical events and determine a country’s future. History without such dimensions would be an arid and incomplete record. It was not a form of history that could have much long-term appeal for Plumb.
Quite apart from the methodological gap between them, Plumb was increasingly drawn to a view of history that was poles apart from that of Namier’s bleak technical vision. He wanted to write history that was read outside the modest limits of academia. He was increasingly drawn to the view that Trevelyan was a better guide to that ambition. He was increasingly convinced by Trevelyan’s view that “history’s power was essentially poetic rather than scientific”. If he had to choose between the classic narratives of Gibbon, Macaulay and Trevelyan and the so-called “technical” history as espoused by Namier and later by Elton, then what Simon Schama has called “the lumbering Goliaths of technical history” had no chance of enlisting his support.
It is no accident that the only historian Plumb felt the need to organize a Festschrift for was Trevelyan. It was no accident that the piece he quoted from him in his introduction was about “the poetry of history”. Trevelyan had written that “the poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar plot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cock-crow”. It was Trevelyan’s conviction that “There is nothing that more divides civilized from semi-civilized men than to be conscious of our forefathers as they really were, and bit by bit to reconstruct the mosaic of the long forgotten past”. It was increasingly Plumb’s conviction that “hundreds of thousands of men and women read history [out of] curiosity mixed with a desire to escape into another world”. It was increasingly his hope to satisfy those desires. It was a hope that would have excited dismissive contempt and derision from Namier and his followers.
Much of this debate about historical method was for the future. In his twenties and thirties, his main need was to secure a permanent position. He could not afford to offend any possible patron and his correspondence shows him skilfully keeping contact with all of them without making any firm commitment to any of them.
Eventually his patience was rewarded and Cambridge doors started to open up for him. With the perspective of hindsight he always used to reassure the brilliant young who were impatiently waiting for recognition that “all things come to those who wait”. To people like Simon Schama and my wife who both suffered shameful delays in getting the university jobs they deserved he always insisted that ability could be slowed down but very rarely blocked altogether. Their experiences (and, of course, his own) gloriously proved him right, but for a young man of Plumb’s impatient nature it must have been very galling to see lesser men effortlessly achieve what he pined for. It may surprise those who knew Plumb only in the years of his high success to learn that in 1938 he applied unsuccessfully for an Assistant Lectureship at Exeter.
Needless to say he did not tell many people about what he would later have regarded as a humiliating rejection.
It took him six years in Cambridge to get a Research Fellowship at King’s and it was twelve years (admittedly including the war years) since he came up as a graduate student and sixteen years since he started at Leicester before he achieved a permanent job in Cambridge. Even then he had to swallow his pride when King’s told him that there would be no permanent position for him there. So, when Christ’s offered him a teaching Fellowship in 1946, he gratefully accepted what the Fellows of Kings rather cruelly called “going back to the suburbs” and devoted himself to making an unambiguous success of his position there. No job was too humble for the young Plumb to take on – his formidable energies and his undoubted stamina allowed him to thrive on over-work. He rapidly made himself indispensable.
So, unlike many academic “stars”, Plumb dedicated himself to becoming “a good college man”. Anyone who used that phrase in a disparaging way in his presence could expect an exocet-like rebuke. Not for him the uninterrupted research time that many academic prima donnas now demand. He was in turn an Official Fellow, College Lecturer and Director of Studies in History, Tutor, Steward, Wine Steward, Vice-Master and Master. He once even unsuccessfully stood for Bursar – he failed by a single vote. Greater love for his college has no man than the Fellow willing to take on such burdens whilst at the same time producing a stream of original research.
Of those who take on such college burdens, few pour as much energy (some would say as much interference) into them as Jack Plumb did. Many of these college posts had no exact terms of reference but Plumb interpreted them as a licence to take over the college, to energize his more torpid colleagues and to organize everything from a royal visit to a new building along the lines that he saw fit. When as a young don he was made Steward he assumed a Napoleonic interpretation of the range of his duties and generously took on responsibility for the kitchens, the gardeners, the porters, the bed-makers, the buildings, the allocation of rooms and the organisation of college entertainments. His correspondence with C.P. Snow in the late 1940s is full of gleeful descriptions of the absurdities of his colleagues and his even more gleeful accounts of how he made them do his bidding.
A classic example is his description of his role in the arrangements for entertaining Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) when she visited Christ’s in 1948, as the first woman formally to take a Cambridge degree in person. According to Jack’s account, the collegiate response was frenzied. In a letter to Snow, which opens with the words, “Never entertain a Queen”, Jack vividly described the anxious delight with which the Fellowship prepared for the royal presence.