debated. According to the Plumb correspondence, the whereabouts of the royal hat occupied two whole college meetings. Where it was to be removed before she donned the doctoral bonnet, how it was to be conveyed from the Senate House back to Christ’s, where it was to be safely kept until it was returned to the royal head – all such details were exhaustively debated and meticulously planned for. The decision that an undergraduate runner should convey the royal hat across Cambridge led inevitably to the further delicate decision as to who the undergraduate should be and who would have the authority to choose him. Such matters went far beyond the revelations of Snow about the treacherous intrigues of college politics. It was Microcosmographia Academica at its richest and ripest. P.G. Wodehouse could not have imagined it. Tom Sharpe could not have bettered it.
In the photographs of the royal visit, the round, already-balding head of Plumb can clearly be seen. As befitted his comparative youth and junior position in the Fellowship, he was quite properly bringing up the rear of the party, but to judge from his letters it was Plumb who was in control, in command and in charge. It was where he always preferred to be.
The fact that he thought that his colleagues’ reactions to such matters were profoundly comic did not stop him taking them very seriously himself. If there was an event he liked to run it. If there was a problem he liked to solve it. If there was an election he liked to win it. He was a natural college politician and he gave a huge amount of his time to plotting, persuading, bullying or flattering his colleagues into agreeing with his plans. One of his favourite maxims for running the College was “always have a candidate”. When it came to Mastership elections, he was in his element and he certainly always had a candidate. I remember how hard he worked to set up Sir Oliver Wright as his successor and how dashed he was when he failed. He had got the necessary support from the Fellowship to elect him and he had extracted an agreement from Sir Oliver that he would accept. All was set fair when one Sunday morning in his Suffolk home the telephone rang and Sir Oliver said that he had received an offer he could not refuse from Mrs Thatcher. It amounted to a royal command that he should take the British Ambassadorship at Washington. He would have to decline the Mastership. Jack was nothing if not a realist. He knew at once that he was defeated. But although he was completely out-gunned by the Thatcher initiative, he immediately switched to plan B and started to mobilize support that afternoon for his pupil, Professor Barry Supple. He was determined to stop Professor Hans Kornberg being elected but he failed by one vote. Supple and Kornberg were tied at 22 votes each. When the tie was broken, the decisive vote, to Jack’s not inconsiderable fury, moved the other way.
Little wonder then that at the next election when Kornberg was to be replaced, Jack insisted on coming out of hospital in a wheelchair so that he could cast his vote for Dr Alan Munro, the biochemist and immunologist who was to prove such a success as Master, especially in establishing the college’s fund raising campaign. I tried to persuade him not to take risks with his health. “Surely”, I said, “you can agree to pair with one from the other side”. “I wouldn’t trust any of the buggers”, he growled. “Anyway”, he said, “there isn’t really another side. Alan Munro is the only candidate still in the race, but the mean-minded buggers cannot be cajoled into producing the majority he needs. They would rather abstain than vote for him”. For a man of Plumb’s decisive nature, abstaining was for wimps. So out he came by ambulance, cast his decisive vote, and then returned, triumphant in his wheelchair, back to Addenbrooke’s.
To do justice to Jack Plumb’s role in college politics would require a lengthy biographical memoir devoted to that alone. Even from my own correspondence with him, which admittedly stretches over fifty years, I could produce several richly evidenced chapters. But college politics are an acquired taste and one that most people sensibly never acquire. I will, perhaps, write something elsewhere on the political manoeuvrings of the Fellows in Christ’s and try to explain the use Snow made of them in The Masters. Sir David Cannadine has recently had a passing look at this in his sparkling, beautifully crafted Lady Margaret lecture on “Snow, Plumb and Todd”. It might be worth saying here (given the merriment he evoked in his audience at the endless round of drinking that, according to Snow’s fictional account, the Fellows of Christ’s seemed to indulge in) that this was much closer to the truth than he might imagine. I am amazed and not a little embarrassed to read in my correspondence from the ‘fifties and ‘sixties just how much life seemed to revolve around drink. Cannadine’s audience rocked with laughter as he quoted from Snow’s novels his accounts of how dons would ask one to join them for a glass of Chablis at 10.30 in the morning or a glass of Madeira at coffee time or a whiskey before dinner and a bottle of claret with it and a bottle of port after it and “perhaps a brandy as a nightcap”. Alas, on the evidence of my letters, this seems very close to the truth. Old “Daddy” Grose, the Senior Fellow at Christ’s, really did say things like “We find it rather fortifying” as he asked one to join him for a glass of Madeira in the morning or “a really rather decent bottle of claret” in the evening. Young historians forget that in those pretty enclosed, all male societies, (without the distractions of television or young women or much money or power), there seemed much more time for petty college politics.
Drink was the almost universal solvent which loosened tongues, encouraged indiscretions and allowed perceptive interrogators like Plumb and Snow to prise open secret ambitions and ancient animosities. Much of the time the SCR at Christ’s was run like a miniature Whips Office in the House of Commons – consumed by a need to get the votes out. Soliciting support, spiking the opposition’s plans, judging who could be “turned” and which Fellow always bore the imprint of the last person to sit on him, all this was part of everyday college life. One was sucked into it from the moment one joined the Fellowship. There are colleges well known to me that still operate like this today. There are many fellows equally well known to me who are still “exalted by wine” many nights in the week.
Politics and drinking still go hand in hand. Most academics have little power and less money. So scoring points and plotting minor coups have greater appeal than in many other spheres of life. It is like office politics with the difference that many of the plotters do not have a home to go to. They live and work, eat and drink, plot and plan all in the same small college world – when Plumb was elected to a Fellowship at Christ’s, the whole fellowship amounted to only eighteen Fellows.
And in some colleges they never have to retire – continuing to plot and plan and vote as Life Fellows until death finally releases them from addictive college politics. Little wonder that the politics sometimes fester. Little wonder that malice and bitterness sometimes thrive. When one of my colleagues boasted that he was going to give up malice for Lent, there was a great shout of alarm. “Oh please don’t”, his colleagues cried in unison “What would poor malice do without you?” Alas the petty feuding and minuscule animosities do not translate well to paper. They mostly seem irremediably trivial. But that does not mean that they were not ferociously fought over. Henry Kissinger was only too accurate when (having been asked why academic politics were so vicious), he replied, “Because the stakes are so small”.
Perhaps if I quote from a single letter written by John Kenyon, a distinguished historian of the seventeenth century and a Jack-supporting Fellow of Christ’s, it might give some flavour of my old college in the mid-1950s. It powerfully evokes the intense emotions that Jack aroused. It also incidentally gives a little hint of the way dons in those days tried to sublimate their sexual needs by burying themselves in work and politics. The letter is from Kenyon to Dante Campailla, a former schoolmate of his in Sheffield who had read Law at King’s. It describes a tiny part of the internecine battles over the election of a new Bursar in Christ’s.
Jack, ever eager for any form of power and influence, very much wanted the job. He saw it as a stepping-stone to the Mastership. In fairness to him he would have done it very well in terms of driving the College forward financially and in fairness to his enemies he might well have done it pretty badly by stirring up enmity in the Fellowship. Fortunately for him (and probably for them) he did not get it.
Jack was too ambitious, too creative, too dynamic a personality to have been a safe, boring Bursar. He would have been a decisive, even a risk-taking, Bursar. Most colleges are not comfortable with Bursars who take risks. I have known colleges that could be scandalized by Bursars who took even the smallest decisions without lengthy prior discussions. I know of