Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Shiver….

English is a Germanic language and its closest living relation should be one of the Continental Germanic tongues, German, Dutch and the like. However, try speaking English to a German who knows no English, or try understanding German (with just English) and you will find that they are very distant relations. An Italian listening to Spanish: or […]

Daily Mirror just as war is declared, a bit late of course…

Beach has previously examined the frequent paranormal experiences of sentries in the nineteenth century: with the help of Chris from Haunted Ohio Books. It has, long-time readers will remember, been suggested that lonely, potentially violent men asked to spend the night, attentive to every noise and movement, might easily conjure up ‘something’. Here are two […]

Anyone but a fool or a wishful (?) thinker would have understood that the Third Reich was doomed by early 1945. Yet, as we all know, the Nazi high command kept shooting. Tanks were sent west for the Battle of the Bulge and German soldiers frequently fought to the last man a week after Hitler […]

Rick Antonson has just brought out Full Moon with Skyhorse. Always intrigued by the Noah’s Ark legend…  

Beach recently stumbled upon a small book of early nineteenth-century British toasts: literally hundreds of them, composed in a time where standing an offering a pithy sentence at drinking was a fundamental part of being a gentleman. Of course, toasts went out with the Second World War so it is difficult to compare them with […]

Andrew J. Bacevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East A long military perspective. Greatly looking forward to this one.

Another in our Victorian Urban Legends series. This looks like the ancestor (or more likely one of the many ancestors) of the modern Mafia Neighbours, story. You know the one, young married couple move into the neighbourhood, all their new furniture is stolen while they are on their honeymoon, but when they tell an elderly […]

Possibly my two least favourite people in the history of the western hemisphere, hand in hand.

Based on the Bayeux Tapestry. Remarkable.

There are a number of fairy oaks in Wales, as Chris from Haunted Ohio Books, previously illustrated. But this one, the fairy oak of Wrexham, is particularly interesting because of a curious legend associated with it. This article appeared in a book of Welsh poems in 1837. Apparently the fairy tree had grown on a […]

19 Cent Romanticism and bad art but somehow…

Robert E. Lee led the army of North Virginia, the central institution of the Confederacy, for just under three years (1862-1865). In that time he was able to rely on the most important military resource of all: not acumen, not courage, not atom bombs but sheer dumb luck. In Lee’s case the luck was deserved: there […]

Beach has frequently pointed to burning libraries, lost books or in this case lost sheaves of papers. First, let’s introduce the author ‘Ariel’ writing in the Blackburn Standard in 1892. ‘Ariel’ wrote a column for this publication from the late 1880s and then right through the 1890s apparently ending in 1900: normally termed ‘Passing Notes […]