Sir John (Jack) Harold Plumb (20 August 1911 – 21 October 2001) was a British historian, known for his books on British 18th-century history. He wrote over thirty books.

Biography

Plumb was born in Leicester on 20 August 1911. He was educated at

Alderman Newton's School Alderman Newton's Boys School was a school in Leicester, England. It was a grammar school then it became a comprehensive school. The original school was opened in 1784, thanks to money bequeathed by a former Mayor of Leicester, Gabriel Newto ...

, Leicester, then at University College, Leicester (BA Lond. 1933) and finally at Christ's College, Cambridge (PhD 1936). His doctoral thesis, on the social structure of the

House of Commons The House of Commons is the name for the elected lower house of the bicameral parliaments of the United Kingdom and Canada. In both of these countries, the Commons holds much more legislative power than the nominally upper house of parliament. T ...

at the time of William III, was supervised by

G. M. Trevelyan George Macaulay Trevelyan (16 February 1876 – 21 July 1962) was a British historian and academic. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1898 to 1903. He then spent more than twenty years as a full-time author. He returned to the ...

, the only time that Trevelyan is believed to have taken on that role. In 1939, Plumb was elected to the Ehrman Fellowship, which was a research fellowship at

King's College, Cambridge King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Formally The King's College of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge, the college lies beside the River Cam and faces out onto King's Parade in the centre of the cit ...

. During the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...

, Plumb worked in the codebreaking department of the Foreign Office at

Bletchley Park Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years followin ...

Hut 8 Hut 8 was a section in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park (the British World War II codebreaking station, located in Buckinghamshire) tasked with solving German naval ( Kriegsmarine) Enigma messages. The section was ...

and

Hut 4 Hut 4 was a wartime section of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park tasked with the translation, interpretation and distribution of '' Kriegsmarine'' (German navy) messages deciphered by Hut 8. The messages were largely ...

, later Block B. He headed a section working on a German Navy hand cipher, ''

Reservehandverfahren ( en, Reserve Hand Procedure) was a German Naval World War II hand-cipher system used as a backup method when no working Enigma machine was available. The cipher had two stages: a transposition followed by bigram substitution. In the transpo ...

''. In 1946, he became a Fellow and Tutor of Christ's College and a University Lecturer in History. In 1957, he was awarded the degree of

Doctor of Letters Doctor of Letters (D.Litt., Litt.D., Latin: ' or ') is a terminal degree in the humanities that, depending on the country, is a higher doctorate after the Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree or equivalent to a higher doctorate, such as the Docto ...

for his work on 18th-century history, and in 1962, he was appointed Reader in Modern History at Cambridge University. He became Professor of Modern English History in the University in 1966. He served as Master of Christ's College from 1978 to 1982. He had a visiting professorship at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

in 1960. He was elected a Fellow of the

British Academy The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars spa ...

in 1968 and knighted in 1982. Plumb was the European Advisory Editor for '' Horizon'', and the advisory editor for history for

Penguin Books Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.Morris Bishop Morris Gilbert Bishop (15 April 1893 – 20 November 1973) was an American scholar, historian, biographer, essayist, translator, anthologist, and poet. Early life and career Bishop was born while his father, Edwin Rubergall Bishop, a Canadian p ...

Jacob Bronowski Jacob Bronowski (18 January 1908 – 22 August 1974) was a Polish-British mathematician and philosopher. He was known to friends and professional colleagues alike by the nickname Bruno. He is best known for developing a humanistic approach to sc ...

, and

Maria Bellonci Maria Villavecchia Bellonci (30 November 1902 – 13 May 1986) was an Italian writer, historian and journalist, known especially for her biography of Lucrezia Borgia. She and Guido Alberti established the Strega Prize in 1947. Biography Bellonc ...

. Later Plumb worked with

Hugh Casson Sir Hugh Maxwell Casson (23 May 1910 – 15 August 1999) was a British architect. He was also active as an interior designer, as an artist, and as a writer and broadcaster on twentieth-century design. He was the director of architecture for t ...

on the BBC television series ''Royal Heritage'' about the British Royal family and the Royal Collections first broadcast in 1977. An obituary in the ''New York Times'' observed that from the 23 books that he wrote between 1950 and 1973, Plumb became wealthy enough to "indulge his taste for fine food and wine;" to build a collection of rare porcelain; to drive a Rolls-Royce; and to live in a "16th-century rectory in Suffolk, a mill in the south of France and a Manhattan

pied-à-terre A ''pied-à-terre'' (, plural: ''pieds-à-terre''; French for "foot on the ground") is a small living unit, e.g., apartment or condominium, often located in a large city and not used as an individual's primary residence. The term implies use o ...

in the

Carlyle Hotel The Carlyle Hotel, known formally as The Carlyle, A Rosewood Hotel, is a combination luxury apartment hotel located at 35 East 76th Street on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 76th Street, on the Upper East Side of New York City. O ...

Influence

Plumb is seen as mentor to a school of historians, having in common a wish to write accessible, broad-based work for the public: a generation of scholars that includes Roy Porter,

Simon Schama Sir Simon Michael Schama (; born 13 February 1945) is an English historian specialising in art history, Dutch history, Jewish history, and French history. He is a University Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University. He fi ...

Linda Colley Dame Linda Jane Colley, (born 13 September 1949 in Chester, England) is an expert on British, imperial and global history from 1700. She is Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University and a long-term fellow in history at ...

, David Cannadine and others who came to prominence in the 1990s. He was champion of a 'social history' in a wide sense; he backed this up with a connoisseur's knowledge of some fields of the fine arts, such as

Flemish painting Flemish painting flourished from the early 15th century until the 17th century, gradually becoming distinct from the painting of the rest of the Low Countries, especially the modern Netherlands. In the early period, up to about 1520, the painting ...

and

porcelain Porcelain () is a ceramic material made by heating substances, generally including materials such as kaolinite, in a kiln to temperatures between . The strength and translucence of porcelain, relative to other types of pottery, arises main ...

. This approach rubbed off on those he influenced, while he clashed unrepentantly with other historians (notably Cambridge colleague

Geoffrey Elton Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg; 17 August 1921 – 4 December 1994) was a German-born British political and constitutional historian, specialising in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and w ...

) with a perspective from constitutional history whose emphasis was on more traditional scholarship. Friends from his early life,

C. P. Snow Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, (15 October 1905 – 1 July 1980) was an English novelist and physical chemist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government.''The Columbia Encyclope ...

and

William Cooper William Cooper may refer to: Business *William Cooper (accountant) (1826–1871), founder of Cooper Brothers * William Cooper (businessman) (1761–1840), Canadian businessman *William Cooper (co-operator) (1822–1868), English co-operator * Will ...

, portrayed him in novels; he also is known to be the model for a character in an

Angus Wilson Sir Angus Frank Johnstone-Wilson, CBE (11 August 191331 May 1991) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was one of England's first openly gay authors. He was awarded the 1958 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for '' The Middle Age of ...

short story ''The Wrong Set''.

Works

*''England in the Eighteenth Century'' (1950), Pelican Books, London, *''Chatham'' (1953) *''Studies in Social History'' (1955) *''The First Four Georges'' (1956) *''Sir Robert Walpole'' (1956, 1960) in two volumes, sub-titled ''The Making of a Statesman'' and ''The King's Minister'' *''The Italian Renaissance'' (1961, 1987, 2001), American Heritage, New York, *''Men And Places'' (1963) *''Crisis in the Humanities'' (Ed., 1964) Penguin, Harmondsworth & Baltimore (responses to Snow's ''Two Cultures'') *''The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725'' (1967) *''The Death of the Past'' (1969) *''In The Light of History'' (1972) *''The Commercialization of Leisure'' (1974) *''Royal Heritage: The Treasure of the British Crown'' (1977) *''New Light on the Tyrant George III: The Second George Rogers Clark Lecture'' (1978) *''The Making of a Historian'' (1988) essays *''The American Experience'' (1989) essays.

References

* Black, Jeremy, "Plumb, J.H." in * * * Neil McKendrick's obituary in the Guardian

*Simon Schama's obituary in the Independent

{{DEFAULTSORT:Plumb, J.H. 1911 births 2001 deaths Alumni of the University of Leicester Alumni of Christ's College, Cambridge Fellows of the British Academy Knights Bachelor Masters of Christ's College, Cambridge Members of the University of Cambridge faculty of history Bletchley Park people People educated at Alderman Newton's School, Leicester People from Leicester 20th-century British historians