LITMIR.BIZ

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and that number included “the hall porter who taught botany”. For his first two years at Leicester, there was only one History member of the staff – a sad Oxford M.A. without ambition or hope – who taught everything: all six papers from Greek Political Thought to Nineteenth-Century European History.

      As Plumb has recorded, in The Making of an Historian, by the age of 23 he had met only five professional historians – and two of them for only a few minutes. The one he remembered with most warmth and gratitude was Rosalind Hill, who in his last year arrived to her first teaching position with a First Class degree from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She was a woman of exceptional warmth and kindness who was to go on to enjoy a distinguished career as a medieval historian. In recognition of her distinction and to show how much he had valued her presence at University College, Leicester in the early 1930s, he gave a celebratory lunch for her some sixty years later in Christ’s on Friday, 10 February 1995.

      At the lunch Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, the leading Cambridge historian of the Crusades, was invited to join them in recognitions of Professor Hill’s research on the Crusading movement. Less than two years later, as Chairman of the Faculty, he wrote to Plumb to tell him that Rosalind Hill had died. In his reply to Riley-Smith, Plumb wrote, “a wonderful woman to whose memory I will always be indebted”.

      The respect was mutual. She proudly named him as one of her first and most successful students and Plumb’s name was the only pupil mentioned in her obituaries.

      Grateful as he was for her early encouragement, it was nevertheless a very far cry from what he might have experienced if St John’s had accepted him. To get a First with such very modest teaching was a very considerable achievement, and, perhaps understandably, he always took a sardonic pleasure in the fact that of the twelve historians St Johns had preferred to him for admission only one got a First in their Cambridge Finals and only three more managed even to get into the 2.1 class.

      Perhaps it was his sense of burning injustice about his initial rejection at Cambridge, or perhaps it was his and Snow’s addiction to organising other people’s lives, but I know from my own experience that they could not resist what Snow called “a kind of personal imperialism”. They both loved to give advice. They both loved to pontificate. They both loved to instruct. They both could not resist telling the uninitiated how the world worked. In spite of their spectacular failure to organise a successful assault on the Cambridge admissions system for Plumb, they had no hesitation in instructing me what I needed to do to gain admission.

      They had heard from Bert Howard about what he regarded as my academic promise and about his frustration that he could not persuade me to read History. As a consequence, I was nearing the end of the second term of my first year in the Sixth Form taking Maths, Physics and Chemistry for “A” Level. Most would, at this stage, have given me up as a lost cause as an aspirant to read History at Cambridge, but convinced that the science teaching at Newton’s would be insufficient to exploit my Cambridge potential, Howard arranged for me to meet Plumb and Snow and him one Saturday afternoon in the unlikely setting of the Grand Hotel in Leicester. I had reluctantly to miss a trial for the Leicester County Rugby Team to attend this improbable meeting, at which I was told that switching to History was the only way I stood a chance of getting into Cambridge. They pointed out Howard’s remarkable long run of success in guiding Newtonians to admission, and contrasted it with the woeful record of the scientists.

      When I impertinently pointed out that Snow’s scientific career had been launched from Alderman Newton’s, he forcefully pointed out that in order to do so he had to stay on at the school after his time in the Sixth Form to work for several years as a lowly lab assistant, and then had to take an external London degree at University College Leicester. If I thought I was the intellectual equal of Snow, and if I was willing to face the many years toiling away at school after taking my “A” levels, and if I would be content to remain in Leicester to take my degree, then perhaps I should stick with science. It was presented as a series of conditions that only a fool would accept.

      My protestations that it was far too late to switch to a whole new set of “A” levels were brushed aside as weak-kneed; my protestations that I much preferred science and maths to History were brushed aside as self-indulgent; and my admission that I was not sure that I wanted to go to any university, much less Cambridge, were brushed aside as pathetically unambitious. It was, I was told in no uncertain terms by Plumb, one’s duty to maximize one’s potential.

      Impressed by their dogmatic certainties and no doubt flattered by their attention, I agreed to change to three new Arts “A” levels and to concentrate on History. The decision meant that I had just over a year to master my new syllabus.

      My mother was infuriated by my decision, and marched up to the school to demand an explanation. As a young war-widow with four children to bring up on her own, she was not surprisingly somewhat risk-averse. She was particularly suspicious of sudden ill-thought out decisions. This was very understandable given that my father (from a secure position in the Royal Armoured Corps after their successful North African Campaign against Rommel) had bravely but recklessly volunteered to join the SAS; and given that he had then volunteered to join the Special Boat Squadron, the most exclusive Special Forces unit in World War II; and given that he had then been sent to his almost certain death by Churchill’s even more reckless decision (against almost universal advice not to do so) to invade the Dodecanese Islands in 1943. It proved to be the spectacularly incompetent, the comprehensively disastrous and the absurdly optimistically-named “Operation Accolade”. It has rightly gone down in history as “Churchill’s Folly”.

      The Special Boat Squadron may have been “highly trained, totally secretive and utterly ruthless” as Gavin Mortimer describes it in his history of The SBS in World War II. It may have gone “from island to island in the Mediterranean, landing in the dead of night in small fishing boats and launching savage hit and run raids on the Germans”, but it never comprised more than 100 men and when sent to take the Dodecanese Islands with no air cover at all, they were sitting ducks for the German Stuka bombers who blew them to bits at their leisure.

      So little wonder that my mother was so risk averse. Unhappily well-versed in such male folly (and, for her, their life changing outcomes), she was determined to prevent me from taking what she saw as an equally sudden and foolish change to the course of my future education.

      My science teachers gave her a warm welcome, heartily agreeing with her that they thought that this was a ridiculous and reckless decision. It was particularly ill-advised they said because “Neil is the best mathematician we have ever had”. Fortunately at this point my mother asked what successes they had ever had? How many had they sent up to Cambridge for instance? When they said “None”, she decided that, on reflection, “perhaps my trio of advisors had a point”.

      When I tell this story, many people express surprise that I accepted my elders’ advice, which in many ways went against my strong inclinations, but for a fatherless teenager, Howard, Plumb and Snow were a formidable trio to refuse.

      Howard, after all, was a proven past master at preparing his pupils for the Cambridge scholarship examinations and was the most influential teacher at my school. Plumb and Snow were established academics who had both experienced major problems seeking to get themselves into Cambridge from our less than glamorous grammar school. All three had powerful personalities. All three were used to getting their own way. Their authoritative advice, when added to the magical effects of flattering encouragement, was difficult to resist.

      Just how important such encouragement was, can be judged when compared to the attitude of the deputy Headmaster of my school who had assured me that it was a disgrace for me, and the three others who also decided to apply, to even consider applying to Cambridge. Such an application would “only bring shame and dishonour and humiliation on the school”, he said. It was absurd to think that “boys like us” could hope to succeed at such a distinguished university. As we were the brightest boys in the school and I was Head Prefect, it showed the levels of discouragement that even the most promising received. When we all won open awards in the Scholarship Examination (I won a Scholarship and the other three got Exhibitions), he refused to change his mind and greeted us on our triumphant return to the school with the words: “Don’t expect any congratulations

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