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Picture source: Movement80

The Friend At hand was situated on West Wycombe Road. This pub was licensed from 1845. West Wycombe station opened in August 1862. Original station replaced c1905. A Lucas Frogmore Brewery pub by 1872, Wheeler's Wycombe Brewery from 1898, then Simonds of Reading and Courage. Closed in 1998 and is now in residential use.

From the Aylesbury & High Wycombe CAMRA Magazine, October/November 2011 edition

The loss of the Friend At Hand near West Wycombe was a blow to both drinkers and railway enthusiasts alike. It was a two levels locals pub, with the garden and the car-park both upstairs, having in the past been an inn and railway station combined. It is believed that the Friend At Hand was built at the turn of the 19th century, when a broad gauge line used to run through the village. The station was then built in 1854, according to the Wycombe Railway Society, mainly to serve West Wycombe Park and to cater for the expansion of High Wycombe to the west. The station was shut down in November 1958, due to competition from the bus service and increasing private car ownership, and by 1963 the main part of the station had been completely demolished following constant vandalism. The pub, once a ticket office/bar, was owned by British Rail until it was sold to Courage Brewery in 1987, as they disposed of another piece of the Great Western Railway and the Great Western & Great Central joint line. Terry Tedman, who was licensee at the pub for many years from 1984, was a railway enthusiast and he did his best to keep the memory of West Wycombe station alive for as long as he could. A railway buff ever since he could read cab-side numbers, Terry converted one of the bars (formerly one of the station’s old waiting rooms) into a nostalgic railway room. Pictures of the pub as it was and paintings of the steam locomotives that used to hurry along the old track used to decorate the walls. Any spare wall space was filled with a piece of railway memorabilia, including old signals, toilet signs etc. To help bring back a railway feel to the pub, Terry also redesigned the pub’s name sign, with the picture of a man aiding a young lady off a train at the station. The sign used to picture a young boy with two lambs under his arms. The gents’ toilet in the top half of the pub used to the station’s ticket office, the upstairs bar another waiting room and the pub’s bedroom the old station master’s living quarters. The whole pub was steeped in history and many of the pictures on the walls were brought in by locals who knew of Terry’s interests in railways, ironic when you think that now many people don’t know that West Wycombe ever had a station or a Friend At Hand.

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