Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Young Putin, unmistakable…

The Index Biography is a new form of biography pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the individual’s life. We offered up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph […]

Strangehistory recently featured the longest European war of the twentieth century, that between Greece and Albania (1940-1987). While looking at this Beach was intrigued, nay amazed by the true duration of the Second World War. In fact, this morning his room has taken on a strange orange sheen. For example, how long was Britain at […]

Anderson and Piuk, Trapped Behind Enemy Lines Rescuers in WW1, a new subject for me: can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Tony Judt wrote twelve fine history books* before his untimely death in 2010, one of them ‘the unmatched and perhaps unmatchable’ (Snyder) Postwar (2005). When he died, after a courageous fight with an impossible illness, eulogiums rained down. But there was a minority opinion that Judt was something less than a new Gibbon. Dylan Riley wrote […]

The hopeless fight in Rhodesia… Enter Mugable left stage. Wessels, A Handful of Hard Men  

A bit of Star Wars nostalgia

Beach really, really, really doesn’t like ceremonial magic, creepy pentagrams and casual acquaintances with books by the ‘Beast’ Crowley on their shelves. But he recently steeled himself to read The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett, mainly to see what the alchemists and magi had to say about fairylore. There is a lot of material as it […]

The queen in front of her truck (note ‘L’)

The following was a written answer given in a written exchange in the British parliament 13 March 1962. At this date Nyasaland (aka Malawi) was a British territory and would be for another two years. (In the postwar period the British government was often put under pressure over the question of responsibility for colonial possessions […]

This particular swindle should have gone in the post on British provincial swindles, but Beach loves it so much that he kept it apart to do honour to its creator, Mr Hartley, somewhere still picking oakum in purgatory. First, though a little background on the subscription system. If, in the nineteenth century, a striving author wanted […]

Celebration of victory in WW1: helmets stacked into a pyramid.

With a gun? London? Anon X writes in: this is not 1930, its rather 1960, and the city is Bern, Switzerland. The street is called “Kreuzgasse“…

In previous posts Jeffrey has been explained by this blogger as a product of life in a strictly regulated religious setting, where adolescent girls were yoked to Samuel Wesley’s strict high Anglican ideals. There is a very good chance that this is the key to understanding the poltergeist events and that some sort of poltergeist […]

This has to be a put up? 30 Dec 2015: Nathaniel: According to the this site, the “Lips That Touch Liquor…” photo is “a still from an [Thomas] Edison motion picture produced around 1910”. See the comment posted by Andrea Grimes about halfway down the linked page: So no, apparently not a photo of an actual […]