I have lived all my life in Wycombe, apart from two spells when my work took me away elsewhere in the south of England. 

For all that time I seem to recall that the gardens on the corner of the High St and Queen Victoria Rd have been referred to the Library Gardens. 

This I presumed was because they were adjacent to the old library and would have been laid out when that was built in 1932 and opened on June 25 that year.

However, is that correct?

I started to investigate this further after reader Ian Simmonds contacted me having seen a picture of the gardens in the Then and Now page on August 17. 

This had the caption “In this shot of the Library Gardens…” Ian said he thought the caption should refer to the Memorial Gardens. 

This email set me thinking and in the deepest recesses of my memory I remembered, or I thought I did, that when I was a child they were indeed called the Memorial Gardens.

Memories of course play tricks so I set about trying to prove this. A good source of information about the recent history of Wycombe is the SWOP website – www.swop.org.uk. Photographs it is said are worth a thousand words. 

One photograph on SWOP shows that there was a garden on that corner c.1920, well before the library was built.

It is not laid out like the formal garden which it became, but is nevertheless a garden.

At that time the only building on the western side of Queen Victoria Rd was the Town Hall, which had been built in 1903/4.

Another picture on SWOP taken in July 1923 shows the same area, which is now a more formal garden.

Furthermore it includes three Field Guns placed at regularly spaced positions and pointing in an easterly direction across Queen Victoria Road.

This therefore appears to be a military Memorial Garden.

But why Field Guns? The answer is simply that during WWI, the Great War, a Royal Field Artillery training regiment was based in Wycombe. 

At its peak this meant that thousands of gunners and other soldiers were billeted in Wycombe, which became virtually a military town, rivalling Aldershot as it is today.

An approach to Wycombe District Council, who were very helpful, did not elicit any further information.

I am therefore appealing to readers. Is there anyone who can provide definitive information that the Library Gardens should be referred to as the Memorial Gardens, being a memorial to High Wycombe in the Great War?

This is particularly apposite with the centenary of the WWI Armistice on November 11 this year.

If you have any information please contact me on 01494 755070 or by email deweymiked@aol.com.