Professor J H Plumb

Can you tell us something about the work you were doing [in naval intelligence]?

Yes, I was working on Ultra, to begin on the ancillary codes that led into Ultra or helped to from time to time. And that was marvellously exciting. when you were doing it, but afterwards it became a bit tedious and repetitive. And then fortunately I moved into the intelligence that was to be d derived from Ultra, and that again was so the end of my war two was quite interesting and exciting. The middle years were a bit tedious.

How did you come to get mixed up in [Royal Heritage] in the first place?

Well, that, I think, was um due to um a variety of reasons, but partly I think because the people concerned uh Hugh Weldon and Michael Gill and Perhaps some of the palace, I don't know. uh liked what I did and had done and had written. And so they asked me to take part in it. And uh I was very hesitant because I had never written for television before. And I feared it might be more of a sort of View of Museum rather than historically based. But when I learnt that it was to be treated historically, of course I I leapt at the opportunity. There were the cynical critics, of course, who said what is a serious historian doing mixed up with this and called it Plum's Jubilee hack work and that sort of nonsense. Yes, well people always do that. Um I thought and tried to get into those programmes, a sense of what the British monarchy had meant to the people of the time, how the society in which they had ruled had expected them to live. And also I learnt myself a great deal about the character of a number of monarchs once I began to look at the objects which they'd collected and amongst which they'd lived. I think I know far more now about uh Charles I and George III. Than I did when I first started on the programmes.

Have you a book on the stocks at the moment?

Yes, it's going to be called The Pursuit of Happiness. It really deals with the middle class at last having enough money to have leisure pursuits. So naturally they thought the leisure was a little dangerous, uh might be very corrupting, so they went in for purposeful leisure. like literature and painting and music and occupying their leisure time with those things, with the arts in fact. When did that swing happen? That began towards the end of the 17th century and developed immensely strongly in the 18th century. Purposeful travel, for example. You couldn't have a holiday without a purpose. It was terribly interesting actually.