Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Mei Fong, One Child  Always been curious about this policy and its social effects…

A few weeks ago Beach had the very great pleasure of looking at the genealogy of various words with a root in bugge: these related to such monsters as bogeyman, boggles and boggins (all nasty fairies). That post was dedicated to following an almost pathetically inadequate trail of breadcrumbs through the Indo European forest. This […]

Martin Caidin, Black Thursday A disastrous WW2 raid

Invisible books are, as long time readers of this blog will know, books that have never existed save in the imagination. Beach has offered, over the years, many such invisible titles, most dreamt up or taken from books (where there are shelves and shelves of these non-existent volumes). However, a new sub-category of invisible book […]

The happy combination of imperial suns and swastikas…

The second in our Poetic Justice series (covered Molotov in Mongolia a year ago) is dedicated to George Blake, Donald MacClean, Kim Philby and Guy Burgess. Beach has treated these sorry four briefly on another occasion: Dealing with Double Agents. But for the uninitiated all were British spies whose night job was to work for […]

Mount Rushmore, Washington’s face

The Dorset Ooser is a simply terrifying horned head/mask that was once kept in the village of Melbury Osmond: it so shocked a man there in the mid nineteenth century that he jumped through a window and almost died from his wounds. As can be imagined there are some very colourful theories about its purpose […]

German soldiers in their French girlfriends’ clothes

This review should begin with an important caveat. The author loathes UFOs, aliens and Close Encounters of the Third Kind: mosquito smudges on the window of our existence. Yet the book pictured above, which details a series of mysterious objects in the sky (and near to the earth) from 1662 to 1947, gripped and impressed […]

Cree chief from Alberta

Beach is always curious about the present’s manipulation of the past and there are few subjects that have been manipulated more than the Crusades. Those men and women who set off towards the Holy Land, in 1095 have been cast in almost every imaginable role in the last two hundred years. They have been made into […]

Potential towers

Cannabis became illegal in the United Kingdom once the 1925 Dangerous Drug Acts came into force in 1928. However, before that there was a long tradition of ‘hemp’ smoking in the country: mainly for medicinal reasons. Regrettably we know little about British hemp-smokers. Victorian interest in opium often reached almost hysterical levels: but interest in […]

Paddy Hayes, Queen of Spies A regional commander in SIS