I am a historian (MA (Oxon), M Phil) of Saffron Walden and its hinterland, retired to Catmere End after a 30-year career around the world with the British Council. I have recently published (at long last!) the first major biography of Henry Winstanley (1644-1703), Henry Winstanley: The Last Renaissance Engineer. My other recent publications include Nehemiah Perry and his Gypsy Bride (2022), the story of a Strethall farmer of the early 19th century who married a Gypsy girl in a disastrous marriage that foundered in alcohol, adultery and murder; and The Line through Audley End (2024), an account of the politics and the building of the railway from London to Cambridge in the 1840s.
I’ve also published a novella, The Affair of the Emerods (2008); There and Back by Candle-Light (2016), an account of a British Council posting to Baghdad before and during the Gulf War of 1990; and A Morocco Anthology: Travel Writing through the Centuries (2018), which is exactly what it says on the tin.
Henry Winstanley: The Last Renaissance Engineer, is over 400 pages in length, stitched and casebound with many illustrations and, in an appendix, a catalogue raisonné of Winstanley’s etchings, architectural and other. It is priced at £25. It is available from a small number of bookshops – Harts Books and the Tourist Information Centre in Saffron Walden, and John Sandoe Books near Sloane Square in London. It is also available directly from me: contact me on this e-mail – martin.rose@magd.oxon.org – and I will post a copy, or deliver in Saffron Walden and the surrounding area.
Martin Rose 