TrinityCollegeChoir

Denys Arthur Winstanley

1877-1947.  Vice-Master; historian.

Winstanley was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London, and went up to Trinity as a sub-sizar in 1897. He graduated with first-class honours in historyand was Lightfoot Scholar. From 1903 to 1906 he was an assistant school inspector in Durham, but he did not like either his tasks or the place. Characteristically informing the Board of Education that he was leaving their service to take up educational work, he returned to Trinity as a Fellow and Lecturer in 1906.

For the rest of his life Winstanley lived in Trinity, with an interval in the First World War in military intelligence in Egypt. He did not marry. Nurturing the collegiate community was habitual. Although a high-church Anglican, he did not allow differences to affect friendship. He served as Tutor and Senior Tutor before becoming Vice-Master, a burden he carried brilliantly during the declining years of Sir J.J. Thomson, Master until 1940. His firmness of decision fitted him for administration, and his imagination and moral power enabled him to respond nobly to events in the Second World War.

His first two books concern British eighteenth-century history, and though now superseded they retain interest because of what was then their novel emphasis on the importance of patronage and family connection. During the quarter century before his death Winstanley wrote four volumes on the history of Cambridge University, from about 1750 to the new statutes of 1882. Though the complex story is often interpreted from the standpoint of Trinity, it is told with authority and faultless accuracy, which guarantee the lasting value of these four works. On the other hand, even in its day the chronicle seemed incomplete because of its almost total neglect of Cambridge's intellectual life in teaching and scholarship, a surprising gap in view of Winstanley's contribution to this essential function of the University.

Winstanley died in Trinity College on 20 March 1947; there was a service in the College Chapel, and he was buried in St Giles's Cemetery, Cambridge, now known as the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground.

DNB