In the battle with Pratt he made many enemies, but he felt wholly justified in forcing him to resign from his central role in college admissions. Pratt had become notorious throughout Cambridge for his success in attracting brilliant sportsmen to Christ’s – so successful that it was not uncommon for an overwhelming majority of almost all university teams to be Christ’s men. Pratt became so obsessed with his success that he would sit in the Junior Combination Room to pick up tips about promising sporting talent from undergraduates. He became notorious in admission interviews for tossing a cricket ball or a rugger ball at aspiring candidates and judging them by the skill with which they caught them. I can confirm from my own experience that, when in my admission interview he read from my school reference that I had represented my school for both cricket and rugger and represented my county for the latter, he threw both balls at me simultaneously and, when I casually caught both of them, said “You’re in”. In my own defence, I should add that I also won an open scholarship, and when I saw the super-charged quality of the college teams, I never played a game of any sport again.
Plumb was infuriated, not by the standard of the Christ’s sports teams, but by the fact that Pratt allowed the college’s academic standards to be damagingly lowered in order to let in any promising sportsman. He was determined to attack Pratt’s admissions plans root and branch, and Pratt played into his hands by failing to rein back on his tireless pursuit of sporting excellence at the cost of academic standards. The lists of brilliant sportsmen grew and grew, the lists of brilliant Firsts in the Tripos went down and down. It reached a stage when Plumb was gathering more and more support for his anti-Pratt campaign, and finally Pratt had to resign. But the fact that Plumb had academic virtue on his side in this campaign made little difference to those who thought that Pratt had been hard done by. He had many friends and admirers amongst the Fellowship and amongst the alumni, and inevitably Plumb harvested an impressive crop of new enemies as a result of his campaign.
This seemed to matter little to him. He was exultant. He had defended academic standards in the admissions procedures. He had defeated a sworn enemy. He had demonstrated his mastery of college politics.
For someone as addicted as he was to such parochial matters triumphing in such arcane skills really mattered. Even in old age he could not kick the habit.
So suffice it here to say that even in his late eighties, he was still deeply involved in manipulating the college to do his will in electing new Research Fellows of his choice, or spending its money as he chose. Inevitably he still had a couple of candidates for the 2002 Master-ship election and was furious when they would not stand. Putting one’s research interests before the interests of the College cut little ice with Plumb. “Do they not realise that the College will be here long after their research has been superseded?” he ranted. “Anyone of an age to be a Master will be past his research best, and anyone worthy to be a Master will have done quite enough research already. What matters is the academic leadership to ensure that the College survives and prospers as it has done for the last five hundred years”. Jack was by no means consistent in his views on such matters, but no one can doubt that he more than did his bit to ensure the future for Christ’s.
For over fifty years as a Fellow and four years as Master he worked tirelessly to promote its image, raise its profile, maintain and enhance its standards, and raise funds for its future.
For all his undoubted commitment to Christ’s, he did not skimp on his university duties either, being, amongst many other things, a notably brisk and efficient Chairman of the History Faculty Board in 1966-68, and a controversial Syndic of the Fitzwilliam Museum.
When many faculty boards regularly meet for five hours at a time, the History Faculty Board under Plumb’s chairmanship rarely lasted an hour. Those who arrived three minutes late were likely to be also three items on the agenda late; and I recall Professor Ullmann once leaving the Board Room almost reluctantly at 2.45 having entered only half an hour earlier, and recalling the days under more expansive and more deliberate chairmen when he would not expect to have left before the sun had set below the horizon.
Plumb’s passion for speed and efficiency was evident in most of the things he did; from writing a review to writing a reference he rarely dallied, which was one of the reasons why he was able to do so many jobs at the same time. Where some academics agonize for days over an important and lengthy testimonial, Plumb usually wrote a single paragraph with an unambiguous verdict, and got promptly back to his current research.
Being an efficient administrator did not mean that he was an enthusiast for all committee work. When he served on the Council of the Senate, he described it as the most boring thing he had ever done in his life. Watching paint dry would surely be orgasmically exciting, he said, compared with sitting on the Council of the Senate in Cambridge. He cheerfully dismissed his colleagues on this powerful central body as “a mournful mixture of meddlers, nodders and nit-pickers – the very worst kind of academic under-achievers, blessed with only their profound sense of their own self-importance to sustain them”. He used to say that as children they must have aspired to be not engine drivers but merely passengers on the train – and complaining passengers at that. He said that Balfour was being flattering when he described the “abominable system” of Cambridge central government as “an ingenious contrivance for making the work of ten wise men appear as if it were inferior to the work of one fool”. The experience had its minor value, he claimed, only in giving him some insight into the mentality of the self-elected oligarchies of the eighteenth century.
What he did give his unstinted attention to were his university lectures. When I arrived in Cambridge in 1953 he had established himself as a star lecturer. He was one of the very few lecturers who created a real buzz of excited anticipation before he turned up to perform in the old Mill Lane lecture rooms. He was also one of the relatively few who kept their audiences throughout the year.
Cambridge undergraduate audiences can be a tough test of a lecturer’s powers to inform, to instruct and to entertain. I well recall Harry Hinsley starting at the beginning of Term with an audience of over two hundred in Room 3 in Mill Lane and having to watch it dwindle down to two (I was one of the final two). Peter Laslett was another distinguished historian who singularly failed to keep his audience. Many others kept going with very modest audiences indeed.
Star performers, such as Moses Finley in Cambridge or A.J.P. Taylor in Oxford, were in the minority but Plumb was very much one of them. He had waited too long to get his faculty job to waste it and he put himself through agonies of preparation (regularly throwing up before each lecture) to achieve the popularity he sought. His lectures were fluent, witty and irreverent. The ingredients for public success, which allowed him to make so much money on lecture tours in the States later in his career, were already very apparent. He was not as compellingly authoritative as Hugh Trevor-Roper was at his best, he was not as elegantly eloquent and smoothly articulate as future stars such as Quentin Skinner or Sir Keith Thomas, he was not as playful or as vivid a wordsmith as Sir Christopher Ricks, he was not as good or as versatile a radio broadcaster as Sir David Cannadine or Lisa Jardine or Mary Beard or Linda Colley or David Reynolds, he was not as consistently politically polemical as Eric Hobsbawn, and he could not match the exuberant charm and enthusiasm of Simon Schama, but he could energize and enliven a traditional academic lecture in a way that very few of his generation could.
His pupils often fondly recall what Geoffrey Parker called “his genius as a lecturer” and compete with examples of his quick wit and natural showmanship to show how he appealed to the appreciative undergraduate audiences which gathered in such large numbers to hear him. “I remember to this day”, recalled Parker “a moment in one of the austere Mill Lane Lecture rooms, during his course on English Constitutional History. He started off ‘Charles II and James II: two of the worst monarchs in English history….’ Only to stop when two men at the back got up and walked out. It happened that they passed in front of his podium, and we watched Jack speak briefly to them before announcing: ‘Ha! Wrong lecture! Thought they were Jacobites!’ From that day to this I have longed for a similar impromptu triumph while lecturing”.
Those who so admired his relaxed self-confident lecturing manner would have been amazed to have seen the agonies of self-doubt that preceded them. He took enormous trouble to prepare himself for each performance, and treated the most mundane routine undergraduate