Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

  Leaving Spain In 1492 Spain’s Jews were given an awful choice. They were, by royal fiat, to convert to Christianity or they would be kicked out of the country. The majority half-halfheartedly took on the new religion. However, a minority of as many as 100,000, loyal to the God of their fathers, took, instead, […]

Assassination by plane. This is opening a new tag on instances where state actors have deliberately killed marked individuals by shooting down or, otherwise destroying, the plane that they happened to be travelling on. Operation Vengeance A couple of examples just to get the ball rolling. First, Operation Vengeance. Early April 1943 the US picked […]

Why did the chicken…? ‘Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road? To get to the other side.’ It is one of the most tedious jokes in history, but it is also one of the oldest in continuous use. Now, just how old and where does it come from? Knickerbocker Glory The earliest reference that has […]

Wilhelm and Alfred This post is written not with a sneer still less with pleasure, but with real sympathy for two men who saw their courage relegate them to a thousand footnotes. Welcome from left stage Wilhelm Korpik and Alfred Liskow. A light ripple of applause fills the auditorium. German Attack Wilhelm and Alfred had […]

Introducing HMS Hood This blog dealt yesterday (it feels longer ago) with Helen Duncan, medium extraordinaire, claiming, in Portsmouth in 1941, that HMS Barham had sunk before the British government had announced that ship’s demise. In that post I acknowledged that there was another case where Helen Duncan had learnt that a ship had sunk […]

Introduction It is one of the most extraordinary psychic events of the twentieth century, rave some. It proves that mediums really can communicate with the dead, state others. A Scottish medium, Helen Duncan brought, in early December 1941, a relative of a crew member of HMS Barham into contact with her recently dead son (or […]

Introduction It was only a matter of time… In English ‘fairy’ has several different meanings. The primary one is, of course, a supernatural creature with or without wings. But somewhere down the list is a gay man. Where does this idea come from and when did it gain currency? Who Cares? It could be argued […]

This is a very weird little episode that Beach can’t get out of his head. First, though, some background. From about 13 to 20 October 1941 Moscow lived under the threat of invasion. The German army was practically at the suburbs of the city and the populace thought that they were living on borrowed time. […]

‘World war’ is a magnificent phrase. It alliterates, it promises a vast scale, and it doesn’t get lost in tiresome Latinate polysyllables. But where does the expression come from? The Longer Oxford Dictionary gives its earliest reference in English to 1848 and the People’s Journal.* Actually the phrase seems to have been used earlier in […]

Mid October 1941. A man with a mustache walks up and down besides a train, while snow falls. He is conscious, all too conscious that he is about to make a decision that will change the direction of the war, perhaps even its outcome: a true hinge moment. And the decision? Quite simply should he […]

***Sue got it – scroll down for the result*** The Index Biography is a quiz 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 […]

Here is a bit of a cheeky post as the photo is ‘borrowed’ from an Italian site (Matteo Rubboli): but as the text is overwhelmingly in Italian there is the fear that an international audience might not find it easily. This is particularly a shame as the text is just a mild commentary and the pictures are so […]

Beach came across this list of Japanese generals that was allegedly published in a Mexican newspaper in 1941. It was republished in A. Jimenez, Picardía Mexicana in 1965. The joke is that the names are all clever and very obscene double entendres in Mexican Spanish. Beach does not understand them all, but if anyone else […]

A delicate occupied zone with an unfriendly population. Think US Marines patrolling in southern Afghanistan or Israeli troops walking through a Palestinian village. That is challenging enough. But could we make it a little more interesting for, say, an HBO series? Why not, for example, put the occupying troops under the control of a young […]

Children, we are told, have supernatural encounters more easily than adults. On several levels this would make sense. But forgetting, for a moment, about whether this is true or false, where does the idea come from? There is a very strong notion among spiritualists and theosophists in the later 19C that kids had greater potential […]