Whaddon is a village and also a civil parish within Aylesbury Vale district, in Buckinghamshire.
Records of the first settlement in Whaddon date from Anglo Saxon times, when the village is referred to in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (AD 966-75) as Hwætædun, meaning ‘hill where wheat is grown’. Wadone, with its 14 villagers and nine small-holder households, is next mentioned in the Doomsday Book, listed as part of the reward by William the Conqueror to a Norman baron, Walter Giffard, Seigneur de Longueville, for his service during the Conquest. The manor reverted to the Crown in 1164 and was then granted to Richard de Humetis, Constable of Normandy. It passed through several prominent families throughout the medieval period.
The village is at the centre of the ancient Whaddon Chase, an important medieval hunting forest, in existence since the 13th century. Whaddon Chase is designated an area of ‘Special Landscape Interest’.
Arthur, 14th Lord Grey de Wilton, inherited the manor house in Whaddon (Whaddon Hall) in the mid-16th century and greatly extended it. Queen Elizabeth I is thought to have paid a visit, in 1568. The Elizabethan poet, Edmund Spenser, who was Grey’s secretary, frequently stayed at the hall and is even reported to have written The Fairie Queene sitting under an oak tree in the grounds! Other famous Whaddon residents include Dr Richard Cox, Bishop of Ely, and tutor to King Edward VI, who was born here in 1500; and Browne Willis (1682-1760), the well-known antiquary and author, who lived in Whaddon Hall and left his library to Oxford University.
Whaddon Hall became the home of the Lowndes family from 1783 when Mr William Lowndes Selby took possession of the Hall. In 1813 his son took again the family name of Lowndes after that of Selby, and so the name of Selby-Lowndes became associated with the village. The present Whaddon Hall, dating from around 1820, is at least the fourth to stand on the site.
During World War II Whaddon Hall served as headquarters of Section VIII (Communications) of MI6. The “Station X” wireless interception function was transferred here from Bletchley Park in February 1940. That facility served in a number of capacities, the most critical of which was the transmission of Ultra intelligence to allied generals in the field. In addition, specialist secret communications equipment used by secret agents and resistance groups, as well as in Allied naval vessels and aircraft, was designed and built in Whaddon. A plaque on the village hall, unveiled in May 2016, commemorates the village’s significant wartime role.
Whaddon in WWII
The many voices of the Whaddon Web
Whaddon Hall was the headquarters for MI6’s communications in World War Two. It was the centre of 20 different communication sites spread across the hills for miles around. These sites serviced MI6’s numerous wartime ‘customers’ (these customers typically had several sites, usually close to each other).
Click here to access the The Intelligence Zone Map
The communications were originally done from Bletchley Park, five miles from Whaddon, but there was soon such a maze of aerials spread over the trees in the grounds, that Whaddon Hall was taken over in September 1939. Whaddon, under the command of Brigadier Richard Gambier Parry, was designated as section VIII: the communications section of SIS.
There is much more about these sites and what they did in the blogs section of the website www.theintelligencezone.com These are extracts from Alan Biggins’ book, The Intelligence Zone, which explains how this network fitted into the wider picture of World War Two.
Whaddon Hall was, of course, the headquarters of the Whaddon Hunt and Gambier Parry took over the hunt as well as running MI6’s communications. He ran his section in some style; running his own chauffeured American Packard cars; while other Packards were equipped with radio as mobile command posts for the use of generals at the battle fronts.
Gambier–Parry was a colourful character. In the words of the witty and brilliant (but rather unpleasant) Hugh Trevor–Roper: ‘In the world of neurotic policeman and timid placemen who rule the secret service, he moves like Falstaff, or some figure from Balzac, if not Rabelais.’ (Trevor–Roper was a fellow huntsman and rode regularly with Gambier–Parry and the Whaddon hounds pre–war.) As a huntsman, Gambier–Parry was… ‘a loud, Levantine figure in a risqué chocolate uniform, beltless and betabbed, his brass slightly awry, thrusting merrily forward on a heavyweight hunter and closely followed by two modish blondes, his secretaries… In the evenings afterwards he would bang the bottle on the table and boast of his success “led the field all the way”… he lived like a colonial governor with a fleet of camouflaged Packards at his disposal.
The scope and importance of Section VIII to the war was massive – with saboteurs, spies, foreign governments, allied political leaders (including Churchill), foreign governments as its customers.
The Whaddon Hoard
The area between Buckingham and Milton Keynes was, until a few years ago, little populated. Now, of course, there is an explosion in population, as the intention seems to link Oxford and Cambridge in a semi-linked series of towns. This is, in a way, restoring the area to its important context in British history.
By restoring, I mean that this area was, in pre-Roman and Roman times, an important and wealthy area. Many archaeological finds have been made from this era – and the Milton Keynes museum is worth a visit to see some of them.
The reason why the area became a bit of a backwater are twofold. After Roman times, this area was for a couple of centuries a border zone between Viking invaders (the Danelaw) and Anglo Saxon England. It only slowly recovered its population after the Norman conquest and was then, in the 14th century, largely depopulated due to the Black Death. Much of the land here is marginal; and many of the survivors of the Black Death (which killed a third or more of the population) fled to richer farming areas. There are many deserted village sites in the area.
So, while it may seem surprising that the largest hoard of pre-Roman gold ever discovered in Britain was found near the rural village of Whaddon – it is less so if one understands that this was in pre-Roman times a rich area. Back to the Whaddon Hoard.
In 1849, some farm labourers who were working near Little Horwood struck gold. (Little Horwood is not far away and is on Whaddon Chase, for that ancient hunting ground, went far beyond Whaddon.) The farm workers are said to have celebrated in the pub at Little Horwood. When news of the find reached the lord of the manor of Whaddon he promptly claimed that the coins, having been found on his land, to belong to him. He wanted them, he had a legal right to them, he must have them – at once!
Not surprisingly, his muddy peasants didn’t all see things in quite that light. The lord of the manor (Selby-Lowndes) recovered about 400 of the coins; although it is believed that many, many more were kept by the villagers. Many were melted down.
Quite a few of the recovered coins found their way to museums,including the British Museum, Buckinghamshire County Museum, National Museum of Wales, Bibliotheque Nationale, Ashmolean Museum, Manchester University, Northampton Museum, Colchester Museum, Reading Museum, Fitzwilliam Museum and the Hunterian Museum.
These coins, which are called gold staters, date from around 50 BC. They are startlingly beautiful, as the picture shows.
That isn’t the end of the story, though. In 2012 an enterprising local detectorist, Gordon Heritage, thought that the farm labourers might well have overlooked some coins– so, with two friends he went back and detected the area. They found over 70 coins.
Thank you for reading this and I hope that is has whetted your appetite to find out more about the history of our wonderful area..
“The past is not another country – it is the seedbed of the present. We neglect it at our peril.” Shelagh Lewis author of ‘Buried around Buckingham’ and a very wise woman.
Alan Biggins. April 2025