Introduction – ANDREW ROBERTS

The chapter begins with the words: ‘If you want to give a wine enthusiast a treat, there is something even better than a bottle: introduce him to a fellow sufferer. To have a precious bottle of wine and no one to discuss it with is a kind of torture.’ He then explains that if you want to avoid such torture and to enjoy the pleasure of sharing fine bottles on a regular basis, it pays to formalize the arrangement and set up a dining club. As Michael Broadbent wrote: ‘The common problem with all owners of fine wines is wondering with whom to share them.’

So, clubs like the Bordeaux Club are born when a group of enthusiasts come together to ardently pursue what they, in this case, variously called ‘a common interest’, ‘a shared passion’, ‘a lifelong recreation’, ‘an allconsuming hobby’, or (per Jack Plumb) a ‘mild obsession with wine and an abiding passion for claret’.

Members can be from very different backgrounds, but they are usually driven by a single shared passion – in this case, a passionate interest and belief in the wines of Bordeaux.

Indeed, one of the most striking things about the Bordeaux Club was the diverse nature of its membership. In terms of education, social origins, politics, religion and wealth (not to mention the stark differences between stable and faithful families and notoriously dysfunctional ones), it would be difficult to find more yawning contrasts among such a small group of men. Over the years our very small membership (never more than six at any one time) included Old Etonians and provincial grammar school boys. It included impassioned Catholics and ardent atheists. It included High Tories, enthusiastic socialists, occasional Liberals and a former communist. It included men born into very rich, well-established and highly respected Jewish families, and men born into poor and pretty anonymous conventional Anglican families. It included men born to live in cosmopolitan London society and men born in the depths of proletarian provincial England. It included men born in terrace houses with outside privies and men who lived all their lives in some of the grandest houses in London and some of the most enviable houses in the country. It included politicians, farmers and financiers. It included bankers, businessmen and scholars, not to mention wine merchants and wine writers. It included a famous horticulturist, an expert in human fertility and many historians. It included men who never went to university, a man who never completed his degree, and three men who finished their careers as heads of distinguished Oxbridge colleges. It included some enthusiastic

Sir John Plumb

(1911–2001)

Jack Plumb, later Dr JH Plumb, later Professor JH Plumb, later Sir John Plumb, was our leading founder and for much of our history the dominant member of our club. He was also, as his career amply demonstrates, a man of great academic and public distinction in both Great Britain and the United States.

Professor Sir John Plumb, BA (London), MA, PhD, LittD (Cambridge), FBA, FSA, FRSL, FRHistS and Hon LittD from seven universities (including five American ones), was a former master of Christ’s College, Cambridge. He had held a Cambridge chair in History, had been Ford Lecturer at Oxford, Stenton Lecturer at Reading and Saposnekov Lecturer at New York, had held a visiting professorship at Columbia in New York and been a distinguished visiting professor at several other American universities, ranging from New York and Washington to Texas.

There were many other accolades to his name, too numerous to mention here. He not only published many distinguished works of his own, but also held a quite remarkable list of major editorial roles for Penguin, Pelican, Fontana, Little, Brown & Company and American Heritage.

He enjoyed a very distinguished academic career and an enviably profitable lifetime as a highly successful scholar and a prolific journalist. Many of his books were international best-sellers and at his peak he was recognized as the most widely read historian in the world. He was a brilliant, much-in-demand lecturer and claimed to have lectured in 47 of America’s 50 states – only Alaska, Idaho and North Dakota escaped him.

Perhaps as a result of his prolific American journalism and his profitable American lecture tours, he always felt that he enjoyed a higher reputation in the States than he did in Britain. He was understandably

proud of the fact that, on the direct order of the President and a unanimous vote in Congress, the Union flag was flown over the American Capitol in his honour, to mark his eightieth birthday and in recognition of a man ‘whose writing had taught the American people so much’.

There was, however, much more of interest to him than his writing, his scholarship and his lecturing. His life story is the record of a fascinating and controversial individual who believed in living both his multifaceted career and his bisexual life to the full. My recent personal memoir on Plumb (Sir John Plumb: The Hidden Life of a Great Historian, 2019) attempted to shed new light on a man who lived a life often shrouded in secrecy and often embellished and improved upon by his fertile and creative imagination. My declared intention was to do for Plumb what George Otto Trevelyan did for that earlier great historian Macaulay, when he wrote: ‘There must be tens of thousands whose interest in history and literature he has awakened and informed by his pen, and who would gladly know what manner of man has done them so great a service.’ The ‘manner of man’ that was revealed proved to be as fascinating as it was distinctive. It was not all straightforward. Sometimes it was very controversial. Sometimes it came pretty close to being scandalous. Sometimes it was inspiring. It was hardly ever dull.

His combination of a huge capacity for work and his compelling need to complete his research, write his books and see them rapidly in print led to an enviable list of publications. Some, such as his great two-volume life of Sir Robert Walpole (1956, 1960) and the publication of his Ford Lectures as The Growth of Political Stability in England (1967), earned him well-deserved academic recognition and promotion; others, such as England in the Eighteenth Century (1950), The First Four Georges (1956), The Italian Renaissance (1961, 1987, 2001) and Royal Heritage (1977), earned him a very great deal of money.

Revealingly, it was the financial successes that seemed to give him most pleasure. When interviewed by Roy Plumley on the radio show Desert Island Discs in 1978, he took great delight in choosing as his first disc Handel’s triumphalist ‘Zadok the Priest’, the theme music that had introduced Royal Heritage, his hugely successful television series. When asked about his publications he happily described his Penguin history England in the Eighteenth Century as the book that kept him in cars for the rest of his life, described The First Four Georges as his ‘next best seller’ and described Royal Heritage as his ‘best best seller of all’.

Equally revealing, and of special relevance to this book, was his choice of ‘the luxury’ he could take with him. He explained that a week earlier he would have chosen a bottle of Lafite 1945, but he had recently enjoyed a magnum of Latour 1961 (as it happens with the Bordeaux Club) and he would now prefer to choose the Latour. He first asked for a case and then negotiated it up to a dozen cases – surely one of the most remarkable and most valuable luxuries ever chosen on that show.

Whatever Jack Plumb’s attributes, peccadilloes and peculiarities, it is important to recognize at once that he was a man of many great and singular gifts, who earned the deserved devotion and close friendship of a great many former pupils.

Yet he was also a very divisive character. As one of his oldest and closest friends, and someone who remained eternally grateful for his central role in launching and promoting my career, I always chose to take the charitable interpretation of his character, but I could well understand why so many took a very different view. He equally divided the Bordeaux Club. John Jenkins wept when Jack suddenly and wholly unexpectedly retired ‘for the night and forever’ from the club in the middle of the 1999 dinner celebrating our fiftieth anniversary. Hugh Johnson, who was also present, remained stoically dry-eyed for the disappearance of the man he has described in print as ‘the rudest man in Cambridge’. Plumb even divided our founders. He later wrote generously about both of them, but he frequently almost came to blows with his fellow founder Allan Sichel at the early club dinners, while Harry Waugh, his other fellow founder, remained a staunch friend and admirer who held Plumb in such high esteem and uncritical admiration that he would forgive him almost anything.

So it is not entirely surprising that his complex ‘love-him-or-hatehim’ personality and high-octane character should prove to be sufficiently beguiling and intriguing to attract the attention of four novelists. They were all somewhat ambivalent friends or openly hostile ex-friends. It has been claimed that, between them, they left six vivid fictional versions of him. They are, to say the least, not all unambiguously flattering. They depict him as ruthlessly ambitious, engagingly self-aggrandizing, and successfully upwardly mobile. They also depict him as a highly intelligent, highly entertaining, life-enhancing, multitalented individual and as an endearingly self-congratulatory lover, of both sexes. One of them even bizarrely portrays him as an academic fraud and a murderer planning further murders.