Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

So you have decided to become an expert on fairies. Your eyes wander over the map of western Europe and after some consideration of the different regional varieties you settle on Ireland: English fairies too pompous; Dutch fey MIA; Icelandic elves aloof; Scandinavian trolls stupid… But where do you begin? There follows a list of […]

May 1945 (just) ahead of the Red Army…

A golf duel from the US picked up by a British newspaper in 1927 and so dating to that year? From America comes an account of a strange duel – a combat with golf clubs and balls as ‘the weapons’ wherewith two disputants went out to seek satisfaction. A St. Louis man and a visitor […]

From Quo Vadis, the lyre is magnificently outsized…

Beach offered, just the other day, a Wandering Jew story. Here is another encounter, this time from Tunis: incidentally how can the WJ live in both Tunis and Monte Carlo, perhaps he got the boat over once a year? Canadian movie star Matheson Lang meets a fan, after he produces a play, The Wandering Jew. […]

Village games, late 18C

Beach once before ran a post on missing Sherlock Holmes stories in the Invisible Libraries series: books that do not exist save in the imagination. However, he missed a trick. There are not just missing Sherlock Holmes stories there are also missing Sherlock Holmes publications. On several occasions in the canon Sherlock refers, en passant, […]

There is a book, admittedly a very small book to be written about sightings of the wandering jew: the man cursed by Christ to walk all over the earth for refusing a drink on the road to crucifixion. Here is one of the most curious of these myths. This one was first attested 18 Jan 1902 and […]

The world’s first pretzel…

Whoops, lost my note on this one, but I think this is Puck of Pook’s Hill introducing himself and British history to Kipling’s children.

Vampire legends arrived in Britain and Ireland from the east of Europe in the eighteenth century and were, then, celebrated in fiction in the early, mid nineteenth century (The Vampyre, 1819 and Varney the Vampire, 1847). Two of the great popularisers of vampires in, what was then, the UK were, of course, Irish: the brilliant […]

Beach has been enjoying Pickpockets, Beggars and Ratcatchers by Kellow Chesney on London’s underworld in the teeming, dirty and unmatchable nineteenth century: the illustrations are great too. One of the joys about entering this world is the lively slang used by the underclass. The following come from Pickpockets but also from one of the most […]

Brian Hughes, Defying the IRA? Not sure about the question mark but hope to read this before the summer.

Royal parents have a unique problem. They have to bring up their children like anyone else (or, ok, pay others to do so), but they also have to convince their children that they are God’s anointed. Infants painfully learn that the world does not revolve around them: yet, in the case of royal children, particularly heirs […]

Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis, Shadow Warriors of World War II: The Daring Woman of the OSS and SOE A good few months for espionage and spy books. I look forward to reading this one…