first novel Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), which was published when I was there in the V1th form:
“The school at which I was a science-master was desirably situated, right in the centre of the town. By walking only a few yards the masters and the boys could find themselves in a cafe or a public house.
“I used to frequent a cafe in the market place. It was on the first floor, and underneath was a shop where coffee was roasted. A delicious aroma drifted through the maze of market-stalls, mingling with the smell of celery, apples and chrysanthemums: you could pick it up in the middle of the place and follow it to the source, where, in the shop-window, a magnificent roasting-machine turned with a flash of red enamel and chromium plate – persistently reminding you that coffee smelt nicer than it tasted.”
That was the cafe – called Bruccianis, which opened in in 1937 and is still operating in Leicester to this day- in which historians from Newton’s spent many hours of their schooldays educating themselves in seemingly endless debates and successive cups of coffee. It was a bit like the common rooms I later encountered in Cambridge colleges, panelled in oak and restricted to “gentlemen only”. If my schooldays evoke nostalgic reminiscence, it is the aroma of coffee and the memories of robust argument at Bruccianis that flood back not the grim Victorian pile opposite the bus station. It was our common room and debating society all rolled into one. Its significance was that we were allowed to use it in school hours, indeed we were strongly encouraged by the charismatic history master H.E. Howard to do so. It was symptomatic of his teaching methods which launched so many historians (including Plumb and myself) on their route to Cambridge.
Plumb was one of the first of many that Howard set on this path even if his launch was initially to prove abortive and embarrassing, This was all the more disappointing because Howard had quickly recognised that with Plumb he had a candidate of exceptional promise with a very clear idea of what he wanted to do. When asked by Roy Plumley on Desert Island Discs what his earliest ambitions had been, Plumb replied promptly “To write”, adding that he had initially wanted to teach (“What bright little boy doesn’t want to teach”), but by the age of fourteen or fifteen he had decided on a writing career. By the age of 15 he had mapped out a whole series of Mercian novels after the model of Hardy’s Wessex series, but admitted that they never got beyond a list of titles. He was, he said, a boy of “infinite curiosity”, and history seemed likely to offer him endless possibilities on which to exercise it.
So his education was always his first priority and there was never much doubt that he would seek it initially as an historian. Even as a schoolboy he claimed that he was engaged in critical assessments of historical sources – carefully comparing the accounts of the fates of Charles I, Strafford and Cromwell as recorded by Clarendon, Gardiner and Carlyle. Such an intuitive critical response to history boded well for his future. His teachers’ assessment of his abilities boded even better. So urged on by his remarkable schoolmaster, H.E. (Bert) Howard (later immortalized by C.P. Snow as George Passant in his Strangers and Brothers series of novels), who had such a profound influence on him at Newton’s, the goal was ambitiously agreed on – to get him to Cambridge to read History.
Howard’s teaching methods, as I learned from first-hand experience in the 1940s and 1950s, were robust and relaxed and relatively free from normal schoolmasterly formality. At times they were so relaxed and so free as to excite much head-masterly disapproval. He smoked in class and he drank heavily out of class. He encouraged his pupils to do the same – meeting the sixth formers in raffish pubs near the school at the end of school hours, to argue about history and life and politics. The sessions could be long and combative and could end in angry confrontation – it was an instructive precursor for those of his pupils who got to be taught by Plumb in Cambridge.
His methods of instruction were equally un-conventional. Rather than feeding his pupils with well-prepared lists of ‘essential points’ to be made in answer to major historical questions, he encouraged us to do the work for ourselves. Rather than insisting on our turning up to school for his lessons, he would give us significant historical problems to work on and then advise us to go off to work in the local Reference Library in the town centre. Instead of giving us prepared bibliographies of recommended reading he told us to read as widely as possible and to seek out our own sources. Having completed our research on say the Reformation or the English Civil War or the Industrial Revolution, we would be required to give a lecture on the subject to the whole class whilst he sat at the back smoking his pipe and delivering withering criticism on anything he thought inadequately researched, poorly explained or sloppily delivered. Work, which he approved of, would receive fulsome praise. It was a pattern of praise and blame that Plumb was to copy in his supervisions at Christ’s.
Howard never stuck to any formal syllabus. We were encouraged to read widely and to pursue any subject that we found interesting. We were encouraged to argue and debate amongst ourselves and the fact that we all met up for coffee in the town centre to do so, rather than clocking in at school, was perfectly fine as far as he was concerned. It gave him more free time in which to write his own novels and publish his own history books, or to travel down to London to appear on the BBC’s Brains Trust.
The result of these methods was that we were encouraged to be independent, encouraged to pursue our own research, encouraged to choose our own subjects and reach our own conclusions with as little schoolmasterly intervention as possible. Standing up in class to deliver one’s findings (to our fellow pupils as well as to him) encouraged us to be well prepared and to be as entertaining as possible. If one could come up with some original and provocative arguments so much the better. The results were in time to prove to be dazzlingly successful in getting his pupils into Cambridge. For thirty years he attracted almost all of the brightest pupils in the school (much to the irritation of other subject masters) and (much to the ill-concealed envy of those colleagues) collected scholarship after scholarship at Cambridge. It was always Cambridge.
Many have described his methods, and the relaxed informal atmosphere in which we were prepared for our assault on the Cambridge Scholarship examinations, as uncannily similar to those which Alan Bennett portrayed so brilliantly in The History Boys. Indeed some, such as Asa Briggs, have told me that they were convinced that Bennett’s play must owe something to tales of Howard’s methods and his legendary success becoming well known throughout Oxbridge. I have no direct confirmation of this, but the resemblance was very strong. Bennett’s charismatic Hector (with his scatter-gun approach to imparting information and his belief that learning must be respected for its own sake) was very reminiscent of Howard’s unstructured teaching methods. But like Bennett’s contrasting character, Irwin, Howard was also dedicated to achieving success for his pupils. Indeed he was reminiscent of Bennett’s Hector, Irwin and Mrs Lintott all rolled into one. He completely dominated our pursuit of a place at Cambridge, and he set the tone of what life was like for the “seventh term sixth formers”. When Alan Bennett wrote: “Teachers need to feel they are trusted. They must be allowed some leeway to use their imagination; otherwise teaching loses all sense of wonder and excitement”, he might well have been quoting Howard.
Even the relaxed tolerance of the sixth-formers in The History Boys towards what they regarded as the harmless homoeroticism of their history master was a striking echo of our relaxed attitude to Howard’s affectionate (but in our eyes, at this stage of his life, pretty asexual) interest in his pupils.
It has to be conceded that in today’s moral climate, some of Howard’s teaching methods, which produced so many Cambridge historians (including Jack Plumb and Rupert Hall as long term Fellows of Christ’s, Arthur Hibbert as a long term Fellow of King’s and myself as a long term Fellow of Caius, and many others), would probably not now be tolerated.
His method began by picking the six brightest first year boys at Newton’s, based on their scores in the entrance Scholarship examination, to form Howard’s club. These six eleven year olds would then be regularly invited to Howard’s bachelor home to play simple educational games, which allowed him to assess in detail their individual academic potential. The games were carefully designed to test their knowledge, their memory, their intellectual curiosity, their reasoning skills, their verbal agility, their competitiveness, their sheer need to win. Having assessed their potential, Howard could then do his best to steer those he thought would excel in his own