High Wycombe, or simply Wycombe, has had a long and remarkable past: the
Royal military academy was founded in the town in the late eighteenth
century before moving to Sandhurst; Charles I passed through on his way
to the scaffold in 1649; and Benjamin Disraeli, MP for the town between
1874 and 1880, made his first political speech from a portico in the
high street. Beneath the main high street is a honeycomb network of
secret tunnels, originally thought to serve some clandestine purpose but
in fact used by the brewery to transport beer to the many pubs
throughout Wycombe as it was easier than negotiating the crowded
streets. Nearby is the village of Penn, the ancestral home of William
Penn, founder of the city of Philadelphia and from whom the state of
Pennsylvania takes its name. His sons lie buried in the churchyard.
Bizarrely, the same churchyard contains the graves of David Blakeley,
murdered by Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, and the
infamous Soviet spy, Donald Maclean. In Secret High Wycombe, local
author Eddie Brazil delves beneath the surface of this Buckinghamshire
market town, revealing a lesser-known past that even most local people
don't know.
