Coming up Trumps: a Memoir

In this characteristically trenchant memoir, the indomitable Jean Trumpington looks back on her long and remarkable life. The daughter of an officer in the Bengal Lancers and an American heiress, Jean Campbell-Harris was born into a world of considerable privilege, but the Wall Street Crash entirely wiped out her mother's fortune. Leaving school at 15, without ever taking an exam, the young Jean Campbell-Harris was sent to Paris to study art and both French and German, but two years later, with the outbreak of World War II, she became a land girl—on a farm owned by Lloyd George, a family friend—however, she soon changed direction, joining naval intelligence at Bletchley Park, where she stayed for the rest of the war. After the war she worked first in Paris and then in New York, on Madison Avenue, with advertising's "mad men." It was in New York that she met her husband, the historian Alan Barker, and their marriage, in 1954, ushered in the happiest period of her life—bringing up her only son, Adam, and becoming a not entirely conventional headmaster's wife, before embarking on her distinguished political career, as a Cambridge City councilor, Mayor of Cambridge, and, then, in 1980, a life peer. Forthright, witty, and deliciously opinionated, Coming Up Trumps is a wonderfully readable account of a life very well lived.