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      Such an attitude shows just how influential Howard’s contrasting encouragement could be, and (in seeking the authoritative backing of Snow and Plumb to achieve his ends) also shows how far he was willing to go to guide his pupils to success. He and Snow may have failed with Plumb in the late 1920s but that setback had merely convinced him that better plans of attacks in the early 1950s would yield greater and greater success.

      My experience demonstrates all too clearly the self-confident certainties that Plumb brought to advising and directing and encouraging the success of so many of his pupils at Cambridge. His own initial humiliating failure made him all the more determined to guide others to a smoother path to success. Many have told me similar stories of how they were flattered, bullied or generally browbeaten into taking his advice on the direction that their lives and careers should follow.

      A typical example was the experience of Wallas Eaton, the actor. Eaton was taught by Howard at Alderman Newton’s in the 1930s and also went up to Cambridge to read History and then English at Christ’s. He told me that he was not only advised by Plumb and Snow on how to apply for admission to Cambridge, he was also then advised that he would never enjoy a successful acting career with the name he was christened with – namely Reg Eaton. In their customary authoritative way, Plumb and Snow decided that he needed a more distinctive theatrical first name. Unfortunately in the mid 1930’s they recommended a new name, namely Wallis, which Mrs Simpson was just about to make the most unpopular name in the country. By then Eaton had started theatrical work with his new name and the best that he could do was to unobtrusively change the spelling to Wallas.

      Plumb admitted that their choice of Wallis could have been better timed in light of Wallis Simpson and the abdication crisis, but still argued that Eaton would never have become either a major in the war or a household name as an actor after it, if he had stuck with Reg. Jack always boasted that Wallas Eaton would never have appeared on stage with Vivien Leigh or been cast by Joan Littlewood if he hadn’t abandoned his distinctly down-market original first name. His new name, he argued, made him far more memorable in the ten years he starred in “Take It From Here” on the radio, not to mention making him sound more glamorous in the gay world he so enthusiastically lived in throughout his adult life.

      This re-naming was typical of Plumb’s complete certainty that he was always right and characteristic of his unshakable conviction that his friends and pupils should always heed his advice: whether it was to change subjects, change names, change colleges, change fiancés, change careers, change wives, change husbands, change their children’s schooling, change homes, change political allegiance (nationally as well as collegiately) or even change sexual orientation – all of which he had been known to do or try to do.

      All in all, I think I got off pretty lightly in taking his advice.

      Much as I regretted abandoning my fledgling career as a scientist I cannot deny that his advice that I should switch to history was almost certainly right in the short-run. He certainly had no doubt that I owed my career to his advice and he was never slow to take full credit for it. Once again, who is to say that he wasn’t right?

      His initial painful rejection by St John’s and the stuttering start to his career at Christ’s convinced him of the need for more expert guidance than he had received himself, and, once he had achieved success, he was only too happy to pass his advice on and insist that it was followed. His startling success as a teacher (and as a promoter of the careers of those he taught) must surely justify his self-confident and at times dictatorial plans for his protégées.

      5. Plumb Coming to Terms with Cambridge

      Armed with his First (one of only three awarded to external candidates for the London degree), he was awarded a London Post-Graduate Studentship worth £150 in May 1934 – one of only six available for all subjects, in science as well as the humanities. He was always very proud that R.H. Tawney was one of those who chose him for this. With this modest funding and with the backing of Snow, who was by then a Fellow of the college, he was eventually admitted to Christ’s in October 1934. There he started his research (as one of G.M. Trevelyan’s very rare research students) and so began a relationship with the college which was to last for sixty-seven years. Apart from a brief interlude as a Research Fellow at King’s and his time at Bletchley during the war, he never left Christ’s again. He became a Fellow in 1946 and for the next fifty-five years loyally devoted his life to the college. Such devotion and such loyalty are all the more to his credit because he was not offered easy access to Christ’s High Table. There were other aspiring young Cambridge historians who stood much higher in the pecking order than Plumb – the provincial product of what Plumb himself described as “an almost unknown and certainly despised University College”. Whilst what he called “the blue-eyed boys in command of the inside track” prospered, he had to scrape a living by supervising any undergraduates he could find.

      Fortunately, coming from the Howard school of history at Newton’s, Plumb passionately believed in the value of good teaching. He did not simply encourage his pupils to aim high, he insisted on them doing so. If they did so they could be sure of his full and undivided attention. Anyone exposed to the blinding glare of Plumb’s curious mixture of high-octane teaching methods and persistent psychological probing will testify to its mesmeric, almost hypnotic, power. Few could resist such intense interest in them. Fixing them with his bulging exothalmic eyes (they protruded so much he swore that they got sunburned in summer) he asked the most personal questions. Whilst he listened so attentively and so sympathetically, he expertly extracted the intimate confessions that so interested him. According to him, it was all too easy. Since so many late adolescents are wonderfully self-obsessed and only too willing to talk about themselves, the inquisitive Plumb had a field day.

      Little wonder that he started to prosper as a teacher. His supervisions offered his pupils not only a professional concern with their scholarship but also an almost obsessive fascination with their life histories – especially their sex lives, and, failing that, their emotional lives and their family relationships. Young women from Newnham and Girton proved to be especially responsive to these highly personal teaching methods. Few things appeal more irresistibly to the impressionable young than a powerful interest in them as people and a powerful interest in their work – especially their prose. So his pupils loved the fact that Plumb was as interested in their literary style as he was in their command of scholarship and the structure of their arguments. They loved the fact that he spent as much time in polishing their prose as he did in picking holes in their arguments. Pride of authorship is a powerful emotion. Telling undergraduates that they write well can have the most magical effect on their attention and their motivation. Jack recognized very early that flattering people into working hard and succeeding can be as effective as bullying them into doing so.

      Since he was an expert flatterer and if necessary an accomplished bully, his results grew more and more impressive, and his reputation as a teacher grew with them.

      They grew at Christ’s much more slowly. Jack has recorded that in these years he was not thought to be grand enough to teach Christ’s men. Indeed to use his own phrase, he first “cut his teeth on the Cambridge Supervision system on female students”. In the mid-thirties there was a revolt amongst the undergraduate historians at Newnham. They demanded a new supervisor in English history and “through the good offices of Christopher Morris” (who directed studies at King’s), “three girls, brilliant, beautiful and wilful, became my pupils”. Through them his reputation as a stimulating and demanding supervisor soon spread and most of the tributes to his teaching in the thirties come from Newnhamites and Girtonians who gratefully recall his ability to make them strive to succeed and his sympathetic concern with their personal problems and preoccupations. A touching dedication in The Hinge of History (1996) to “Sir John Plumb, my kindly tutor and mentor for the History Tripos in those far off days of 1933-36” was from the octogenarian Charlotte Waterlow, M.B.E. of Newnham College, the only female First in either part of the Tripos in 1936. Sixty years after the event, Jack still talked fondly of her, and of Angela Gray from Girton who first sat at his feet in the mid-thirties. He spoke even more fondly, although alas anonymously, of “the beautiful Newnham girl from Much Hadham, whose house was full of paintings from the Scottish colourist school and who was a leading light of the Newnham anti-virgin club”. What a sweet

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