IT has long been thought that the Bucks Free Press was the first newspaper to be regularly printed and published in High Wycombe, the first edition appearing on December 19, 1856.

That this was not so wasreported in the Wycombe Nostalgia page on April 24 last, with the publication in 1849/49 of the “Wycombe Gazette and South Bucks Observer” by a printer Charles Foyster.

Another earlier newspaper has now been discovered, the ‘Wycombe and South Bucks Monthly Advertiser’, which was published in 1854/55.

Note that it was a monthly publication, but even more interestingly, the publisher was Mr William Butler, who was of course the publisher and first editor of the Bucks Free Press. This information was in a letter to the Editor of the Bucks Examiner, which mainly served Amersham and Chesham districts, from a G. Loosely, in the edition of May 9, 1913.

This was also mentioned in a Note in the Bucks Herald, which stated that the newspaper comprised four pages.

Examples of the contents of this paper in the January 1, 1855, edition, were given in the BFP on June 17 1932 “Those were the days of the war in the Crimea, Wycombe held a Bazaar in aid of the Patriotic Fund and the stalls were named ‘Alma, Balaklava, and Inkerman’.

A young soldier named Joseph Coleman wrote to his sister in Radnage ‘There is no person in England who would believe the miseries that are here, without they could see them, and it is a thing that is impossible to describe on paper.’ ” And a century later there is war in Ukraine, although not involving British soldiers.