Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach is continuing to hunt down rumours, this time from the British press in the Second World War. Here are some global and some local, some silly and some worryingly credible. All were published with the implication being that they are not to be believed and yet were they so far off the mark? The […]

An oft quoted fact about the Great War is that the Romanian Army in 1916, when it bravely but foolishly entered that conflict, ordered its soldiers not to wear makeup. But is this unlikely sounding detail true? Did Romanian soldiers routinely wear mascara and the like? And did their generals try and control the practice? The claim about Romanian […]

  There follow some WW1 Christmas pictures from the British press. Most soldiers, naturally, served in the ‘holidays’. Here is a British sailor on HMS Jupiter The gifts are given out in the trenches This being Britain there were lots of silly Christmas parties with the awkward but ritualistic mixing of the classes. Rather you than […]

Happy Christmas to all readers and their families: originally published in the Graphic.

Margaret Murray (obit 1963) is so often a rather obscure presence, flitting behind her bizarre writing on witchcraft and her sensible writing on Egyptology. It is from Hilda Ellis Davidson that we get a precious glimpse of the real woman in her twilight. HED, a great medievalist (obit 2006) had known Murray for many years […]

Anyone who studies fairies, witches and the supernatural generally will have a simple series of thoughts about Katharine Briggs (1898-1980): gratitude for keeping the Folklore Society going over a rocky couple of decades; love of her marvelous books, including one of the great fairy novels; and an affection for that brooding severe child of Victorian […]

On this site we have frequently examined how fairies have changed through the generations. For example, the way that fairy wings have gone from being a minority convention in art to being practically de rigueur for the fay; or the way that the size of fairies has changed. However, these are superficial baubles in the […]

Beach is happy to announce that just two days ago Gibson Square released Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies (a topic close to the heart of many readers of this blog). The book is choc full of fairy experts and includes three chapters on European emigrant fairies in the New World. The authors are: Magical […]

The three great totalitarian states that dominated Europe in the 1930s were the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Did these have their own urban legends? Of course. But what were they? Beach wants only to open one obvious form of totalitarian urban legend: what he will provisionally call ‘the big brother story’. Now, […]

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate [1960] This blogger has been very reluctant to write posts on historical fiction for the simple fact that he cannot stand most representatives of the genre. But Life and Fate was started reluctantly during the recent flu wars, and has been great bedtime and pre-siesta reading ever since. Written in […]

There are few things in life sweeter than self important people being made to look silly. The picture above is one of this blogger’s favourite. The subject is, of course, Benito Mussolini, in the mid, late 1930s.* A group of Fascist dignitaries are prancing up some steps at the Foro Italico: but not all is […]

The playpen originated when a hunter-gatherer mother realized, many thousands of years ago, that she could keep her child in a safe corner of the cave with a simple barrier. But when did the business of playpens becomes serious, when were the first commercial models available in the shops? Beach set himself the task of trying […]

***Melissa gets it, scroll down for the answer*** 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 previously […]

This note was published in Folklore in 1942 by, of all people, Violet Alford, one of a handful of impressive interwar British folklorists. Following Professor Hutton’s Presidential Address on Werewolves, this note may be of interest. An English friend, born and brought up in Portugal, remembers, when she was about seven years old, the mysterious […]

Much of British folklore has been carefully curated and packed into volumes on library shelves: but most of British folklore lies, in truth, uncollected out in the fields. This brings us to one of the heroes of modern British folklore, Roy Vickery. RV is a botanist with a long-term interest in the folklore of plants: […]