IT may be a shock to Bournemouth’s Alex Chapman that his ex- wife, is allegedly a Russian spy.

But those with long memories in this neck of the woods probably won’t be unsurprised, because Anna Chapman is just the latest in a long line of folk with links to Bournemouth and the New Forest – where Mr Chapman and his mother now live – who have been connected to espionage.

We have had Reds under the bed, a Cambridge spy, a School for Spies, the Portland Spy ring, and it was in Purbeck that James Bond creator, Ian Fleming, was educated and drew inspiration for his novels. Add to that disgruntled ex-KGB agent, Victor Makarov, last heard of in a bedsit in Boscombe, and no wonder this area has, at times, resembled Spy Central.

Part of the reason must have been our proximity to the School For Spies secretly opened in Beaulieu during the Second World War. The Special Operations Executive’s HQ trained more than 3,000 people in the dark arts of burglary, forgery, sabotage and murder.

They would practise losing their “tails” by mingling with shoppers in local stores like Bealesons, as well as blowing up random bits of the New Forest as they tried to set explosives.

Who could have dreamed the sailor-suited son of the vicar of Holy Trinity in Old Christchurch Road would have turned out to be the Fourth Man in the notorious Cambridge Spies scandal? Anthony Blunt lived a life of Edwardian comfort in Bournemouth and no one who saw him off to Cambridge University could have imagined what would happen next. Blunt became involved with fellow students Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Donald Maclean in passing secrets to the Soviets but escaped their unmasking and went on to become the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures until he was himself unmasked in 1979.

But Blunt wasn’t the only local toiling on behalf of Mother Russia. In Saxonbury Road in Tuckton, in a house known as “the Russian colony”, Melita Norwood was mingling with people who would set her on course to becoming the most important foreign female spy in KGB history.

When Norwood was unmasked in 1999, the nation could scarcely believe this sweet-faced old granny was the codenamed “Hola” who joyously committed treason for 40 years, passing the secrets of the nuclear weapons programme, to her KGB handlers. This information is said to have helped the Soviets build an atomic bomb two or three years earlier than would otherwise have been possible.

When her cover was blown, Norwood brazenly told reporters: “In general I do not agree with spying against one’s country.” But she did shed light on the town’s Communist leanings by confirming: “Bournemouth had a good left-wing movement.”

In 1961 it was the turn of west Dorset to discover spies in its midst. The Portland Spy ring, as it became known, were tried for espionage at the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment at Portland. A mole codenamed “Sniper” told the CIA in 1960 that secrets from the establishment were being leaked to the Soviets and when it became apparent that those secrets included plans of HMS Dreadnought, our first nuclear submarine, all hell, discreetly, broke loose.

It was the same again in 1972 when husband and wife spy team, the Binghams, were convicted of selling submarine defence plans to the Russians.

After a spell in jail and their subsequent divorce, Maureen changed her surname and settled in Bournemouth. And her husband moved to Boscombe after his sentence had ended and became vice president of the local Conservative association. He died several years ago.

Money was at the root, too, of the spying by “goody-goody prefect type” and former Parkstone Grammar schoolgirl Ann Bowen, which came to light in 1994. Christine Ann Rupp – as she later became known – was exposed as Turquoise, who helped her spy husband pass on an estimated 10,000 secrets to the East German Stasi secret police.

But perhaps the strangest spy connection of all is in the peaceful churchyard of Whitchurch Canonicorum where lies the grave of one Georgi Markhov. Markov wasn’t a spy – he was a Bulgarian dissident who died after a deadly ricin pellet was fired into his leg from an umbrella tip as he walked in London.

The spies got him in the end.