positive sense, not in the pejorative sense that grooming has come to indicate. At least I never heard any hint or rumour of inappropriate grooming in my day, but one has to admit that this process all ended very badly – indeed it ended disastrously for Howard. Many years after I had left the school an adolescent boy accused him of inappropriate behaviour and Howard was forced to resign. To avoid public disgrace he left his job and left the country. He fled to Amsterdam were he happily reverted to his previous love of prostitutes.
When a few years later he died there, he was buried in an unmarked grave. His brother Cecil Howard had opted for the cheapest choice of burial spot which allowed the authorities to plough it up and re-use it after only a very few years of “occupation”. There could be very few more anonymous endings. It was an appalling conclusion to nearly forty years of spectacularly successful teaching. Many us feared that the steady flow of scholarships to Cambridge would come to a sudden end, and so it proved.
After his death, I was asked to write a tribute to his achievements for the school magazine. Having rehearsed the remarkable record of his successes, I ended my piece with the grim but prescient words: “new talent, like milk to a suicide’s doorstep, will inevitably continue to be delivered to the school gates, let us hope that it will not be allowed to go sour, in the absence of the devoted attention to make the maximum use of it that Howard provided for so many decades”. Alas my hopes largely proved to be illusory, the flow of successfully harnessed talent that had begun with Plumb dried up dramatically with Howard’s departure. The occasional unstoppably bright pupil emerged (I admitted one outstanding Newtonian to read history at Caius) but they were pretty rare after Howard.
To be fair to the school the chances of finding a replacement of his calibre and his commitment were not great. His record was almost impossible to match, even if his initial efforts with what was to prove to be his most successful pupil was to end in abject failure when he prepared Plumb for his assault on Cambridge.
As the most charismatic member of the teaching staff, his influence on the young Plumb was predictably profound, but initially embarrassingly unsuccessful. With a First in History from London under his belt, and powerful literary ambitions as yet unfulfilled, Howard had just the kind of proven track record and promise for the future most likely to appeal to the aspirations of the schoolboy Plumb. Admission to Cambridge with a scholarship to provide the necessary financial support was the first thing he aspired to; with Howard’s help, it must have seemed to be intoxicatingly within reach.
With the assistance of the then Dr. C. P. Snow (later Sir Charles Snow and later still Lord Snow), an Old Newtonian who had made it to Cambridge via the fledgling Leicester university college, and who had quickly recognized the exceptional qualities of the young Plumb, the plans were hatched with all the precision of a military campaign. The strategy included contingency plans that seem astonishing to those who knew the adult Plumb. Perhaps the greatest astonishment would come from the knowledge that the teenaged Jack was instructed to become a confirmed Anglican in case he did not make his first-choice college, St John’s, and had to seek admission to Selwyn. Selwyn was in those days an altogether less glamorous and less desirable college than St. John’s, but also a less demanding one in terms of the likely competition for admission. Selwyn was not even to achieve full collegiate status until 1958, and as long as Jack met its singular requirement – that undergraduates had to be communicant members of the Church of England – then surely, it was argued by the conspirators, Selwyn would take him if all else failed.
The youthful Plumb was as fierce an atheist then as he was to remain until the end of life. Nothing could better signal his determination to get into Cambridge than the fact that he was willing to be confirmed, willing to fake a set of beliefs he despised, if it could open the gates of a college which he was to regard with dismissive contempt in later life. He had the grace to appear somewhat shame-faced when confronted by this awkward revelation about how far he was willing to go to achieve his ambitions, but claimed that it was the Machiavellian Snow who prompted him to go to such lengths.
As it turned out all their carefully concocted plans were in vain, for his first attempt to get into Cambridge ended in a humiliating form of rejection.
He took the St John’s Scholarship Examination in December 1929. According to his account (which he said was based on the Cambridge Group 3 Scholarship Examination Book which he studied many decades later when he himself was the Chairman of Examiners) he was well up amongst the scholars after the first round of marking, but after the second round of marking (in which the dons at St John’s had a decisive say) he was demoted to tenth place in the list of Exhibitioners.
He actually came top amongst the potential Johnians placed in the Exhibition class and second amongst all the applicants for St John’s. Colleges were obliged to offer Scholarships to those listed as scholars but they could, and very exceptionally did, reject an Exhibitioner. He was one of those very exceptional rejects. St John’s offered Exhibitions to other applicants in spite of the fact that they came lower in the list than the young J.H. Plumb, and not even lowly Selwyn wanted him. The fact that St John’s had turned down their top Exhibitioner must inevitably have sent out warning signals to other colleges still in the market for award-winners.
Jack went to his grave still resenting the injustice that he felt – not without some justification – he had been subjected to. It is true that he could have had a place at St John’s if he could have afforded to accept it. He could not. As David Cannadine has put it “He was a scholarship boy without the scholarship!”
As he told the story (very memorably and very amusingly at his retirement dinner) much of the fault lay in his mother’s advice on how he was to dress for his assault on St John’s. First she advised him to wear his “funeral suit” for his interviews and then, quite fatally, suggested that he topped off this lugubrious outfit with a bowler hat to arrive in. One look at the languid public school boys in their tweed jackets and cavalry twill trousers quickly alerted Jack to his first sartorial error. One encounter with the formidable bowler-hatted Head Porter of St John’s immediately alerted him to his second even greater mistake. In despair he trudged to the Bridge of Sighs and (like an adolescent Odd-Job) hurled the offending bowler hat into the Cam, but by then the damage had been done. The story of the bowler-hatted young “funeral director” or “aspiring porter” from Leicester had already reached and entertained the dons. The confidence of the young Plumb had been deeply dented and he over-compensated in his efforts to impress what he regarded as his patronizing and disdainful interviewers. His excited parade of his current enthusiasm for Freud and Proust did not go down at all well. French homosexuality and the psycho-dynamics of everyday life were not much to the taste of Johnian historians in the late 1920s. He would have done far better at King’s.
In the eyes of the dons of St John’s (including apparently the distinguished Tudor historian J.R.Tanner), he must have seemed pretentious as well as provincial and sartorially embarrassing as well as proletarian. What was worse, instead of social savoir-faire he offered ardent socialism. Instead of uncontaminated historical scholarship he offered suspect literary tastes and an unhealthy interest in sexual psychology. Such offerings were to prove a fatal mixture. Doubtless the story of the bowler hat did not help.
Undeterred by this rejection Plumb wrote again next year (on his school notepaper on the 12 May 1930) asking for the entrance forms for a sizar-ship at St John’s. This time he was aiming rather lower. Sizars were originally student servants who earned their keep by such duties as waiting in Hall on the other wealthier undergraduates, but by 1930 the title was given to poor but worthy students on the basis of an examination. It was rather like a poor man’s scholarship or bursary. I do not know for certain whether or not he made use of the application forms but we do know that Plumb’s name was not amongst the list of successful sizars at St John’s published in The Reporter of the summer of 1930.
Whatever the motives of those involved in his first assault on Cambridge, the dons of St John’s had not offered him the financial support he needed, and so he went to University College Leicester (later the University of Leicester) and became the first person ever to take a First in History as an external London degree from that modest university college. It cannot have been easy. He certainly did not get the kind of teaching he would have enjoyed at Cambridge. No one would claim that Leicester had a richly endowed