Head Porter

From Richard Evans on John Grenville in Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009) 129-130 -

John Grenville [known prior to migration as Hans Gubrauer], middle-class son of a lawyer whose fortune had been destroyed in the prewar inflation, left Germany in 1939 on a Kindertransport at the age of ten. After just over two years at a boarding school, where he learned English and became, by his own account, a passable slow left-arm bowler, Grenville, at the age of thirteen, was taken out of school by the children's refugee committee, who would not allow him to get an academic education despite his father's support for it, but expected him to enter a trade. His scientific education at the Cambridgeshire Technical School, another boarding institution, was not successful: he got chemical poisoning and was told to get an outdoor job to recover. So he became under-gardener at Peterhouse, where he read voraciously in History in his spare time. 'My request for permission to use the Peterhouse library', he wrote later, 'caused consternation. I was finally given permission, but only on condition that I would not attempt to enter Cambridge as a student'. The Master was sufficiently amazed by a College gardener reading books to arrange a weekly session over cocoa and biscuits at which they discussed what Grenville had been reading. At eighteen, Grenville was accepted to read History in evening classes at Birkbeck College, London: on hearing the news that he was leaving, the Bursar of Peterhouse told him that the Fellows would have liked him to stay because, as he said, 'you have the makings of a Head Porter'.

Grenville went on to become a Professor of Modern History.