Martin Gibson

MARTIN GIBSON was born and brought up in rural north Lancashire. He read history at New College, Oxford and after graduating studied law at the City University in London. He qualified as a barrister in 1990 and then spent many years practising from chambers in central London.

In 2009 his first book Servant of Empire was published. It is the life story of my maternal great-grandfather Thomas Wilson Bracken (1865-1932), a successful civil engineer who participated in the building of the first railway on the west coast of Africa. In 1915 at the age of 50 Bracken answered the War Office’s call for experienced civil engineers to volunteer and then served as an officer in the Royal Engineers in France and Belgium between 1915 and 1919. On returning to civilian life Captain Bracken wrote a series of nostalgic letters and articles that commentated on the post-War transformation of so much that had gone before.

His second book, A Primrose Path, was released in Spring 2020. It tells the story of Neil Primrose, the favourite son of a Prime Minister (Rosebery) and his Rothschild heiress wife. Raised in almost unimaginable wealth and luxury, Neil spent his entire life surrounded by the Liberal political elite, including Gladstone, Asquith, Churchill, and Lloyd George. However his life-long love for his Oxford friend and fellow Liberal MP Thomas Agar-Robartes marks him out from the generality of Edwardian upper class male privilege. The Great War, which tragically curtailed his life, brought Neil political success as Chief Whip, and at the Foreign Office. It also led to Thomas’s 1915 death in France, leaving Neil grief-stricken and guiltily haunted. In the finale, Neil abandons the safety of London political life, to join the 1917 campaign to liberate Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, resulting in his own heroic death. Neil’s story has never been told, in large part because of Lord Rosebery’s opposition. This biography is the result of extensive archival and newspaper research.

He now lives on the Somerset/Dorset border with his partner and their two labradors.