John H. Plumb


Sir John Harold Plumb 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, Leicester, then at University College, Leicester and finally at Christ's College, Cambridge. His doctoral thesis, on the social structure of the House of Commons at the time of William III, was supervised by G. M. Trevelyan, 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.
During the Second World War, Plumb worked in the codebreaking department of the Foreign Office at Bletchley Park, Hut 8 and Hut 4, later Block B. He headed a section working on a German Navy hand cipher, Reservehandverfahren.
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 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 in 1960. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1968 and knighted in 1982.
Plumb was the European Advisory Editor for Horizon, and the advisory editor for history for Penguin Books. In the 1960s he branched out as an editor, notably working on The History of Human Society series. Contributors to his books included other well-known historians like Morris Bishop, Jacob Bronowski, and Maria Bellonci. Later Plumb worked with Hugh Casson 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 in the Carlyle Hotel."

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, Linda Colley, 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 and porcelain. This approach rubbed off on those he influenced, while he clashed unrepentantly with other historians with a perspective from constitutional history whose emphasis was on more traditional scholarship.
Friends from his early life, C. P. Snow and William Cooper, portrayed him in novels; he also is known to be the model for a character in an Angus Wilson short story The Wrong Set.

Works