Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Soviet troops in Poland 1945

In Beach’s long and passionate searches through the annals of snowballing, he has come across many descriptions of mass snowball fights. However, this, from February 1865, is perhaps his favourite. It combines reckless youth, police brutality (to not from), and significant property damage: in short it is the essence of the Victorian snow-balling. Glasgow has […]

Robert Forczyk, We March Against England Anything about Operation Sea Lion grabs me…

The US bombing of Hiroshima went off, in operational terms, flawlessly. The bombing of Nagasaki was a different matter. For one thing, Nagasaki was not even the target: Fat Man was supposed to have been dropped on nearby Kokura but smoke from a conventional raid obscured the bombing run. Everything that could go wrong on […]

Scott Wood, London Urban Legends Urban legend junkies are perhaps the most attractive of all folklorists. Their brethren get obsessed with the minutiae of traditional culture: polkadots on dresses, superstitions about dandruff, dance rhythms… Alternatively, men and women of advanced years (who should know better) plunge into subjects that defy understanding, that are actually about not […]

1942 US jungle training

The Fairy Hole on Cape Breton in Nova Scotia is a huge cave on a mountain side, some twenty yards across. There are several videos on youtube that give some sense of what it is like inside and immediately outside. Beach was interested by this site because Fairy Hole is a common placename in England, particularly […]

Mainly up for this extraordinary face…

What do you do if you really dislike someone? Hurt them, tax them, kill them obviously… But if you really hate them you salt their land… Confused? Let’s head back to mid eighteenth century Portugal. The Tavora executions were some of the bloodiest from the eighteenth-century west: even fifty years later the family would have […]

US Paras into Germany

Let’s hope that Google can’t read pictures 25 Oct 2016, Filip G comes back on Google: Well, when you process the photo with Tesseract OCR engine you will get: Emma W “‘1’ 176mg ISLlKE V FUCKINC‘FOK. ” Almost there… (at least for the F**KING). Tesseract OCR was created by Google, but I guess they use […]

Right through history castaways have been thrown up on foreign shores after a shipwreck, a storm or an argument on board (in many navies marooning was a form of punishment). For those of us interested in Wrong Place and Wrong Time phenomena these castaways are crucial. But how many were actually left behind. For example, how many […]

Love this from a Victorian novel. This is how the lovers meet in rough Lancashire…

Beach has neglected for some time the honourable pursuit of dumb duelling: duels where either the weapon or the motive or preferably both were absurd. Here is one from 1853 from France. It is reported in a contemporary English newspaper so it may even, say it quietly, be true. Enter the whip duel A singular duel […]

J. M. Adovasio and David Pedler, Strangers in a New Land The happy miles, the parts of America that had not yet then seen a human face….