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 both sexes. He had always derided marriage. He claimed to have had a daughter but he never recognized her. Without children or grandchildren or a permanent partner to comfort him in his later decades, he began to think that he might have made the wrong choices in his personal life.
The end was the darkest episode of all – a lonely and embittered old age, when, echoing the closing words of his great work on Walpole, “the future would bring the death of friends, the decline of powers, age, sickness and defeat”.
Perhaps the grimmest moment of all was the manner of his lonely death, and the even lonelier manner of his burial. At his insistence he was buried without friends or mourners or music, without elegies or eulogies, without even a coffin. For a man who wrote so many elegant words it seems