Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach has recently been going through modern folklore books for the northern English counties (Lancashire, the three Ridings, Northumberland etc etc). Of forty or fifty books he has so far taken to bed he has been struck by their rather low quality. There are not many awful books, but most are offensively mediocre: these people, remember, […]

Asserate, King of Kings Always had a thing for Haile: choked with a pillow?

Perhaps the most interesting read this Christmas were the CIA’s predictions, in 2000, for 2015. Fifteen years ago a lot of very intelligent men and women sat down, chewed the geo-political cud and they still got a good deal wrong. Here in 2015 Beach thought that he would go with his gut on a series of […]

Dear Reader, thanks as always for all the emails and communications. This month, for the first time in six years, started a book, very excited. Perhaps a cycle is drawing to an end. Christmas was good with friends visiting and a trip to the cinema for the first time in a decade: Star Wars… This […]

Shocking stuff…

The Index Biography is a new form of biography 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 here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph […]

Incredible image as the German army advances towards the Allied lines…

James McClenon is a sociologist who has written on the paranormal and parapsychology. His books are to be recommended in the highest terms, not just for their arguments, put perhaps most of all for their reasonable yet never irritating openness to the unexplained; something which does not offend even a hoary old materialist like Beach. […]

Angry?

Here is a cute witchcraft story from the wrong side of the Atlantic, where Salem is supposed to have put paid to any witch hunt shenanigans. What Beach loves about this account is that we are clearly dealing with very sincere people who are making it up as they go along on the basis of […]

In 1885 a neophyte priest William Herbert Seddon arrived at the parish of Painswick in Warwickshire. Seddon had a strong classical background, he appears for instance in that monument of Victorian learning, The Concordance to the Septuagint, as an important contributor. And he was interested to find, on his arrival, that until the early nineteenth […]

The day after….

Nutritionists disagree on almost everything. However, if you go and visit several score one of the few points of consensus (along with ‘eat vegetables’) is that sugar is bad for us: in fact, there is far more agreement about sugar than about fat. Humanity’s dalliance with sugar dates back to the first time that a brave […]

Christopher Othen, Katanga 1960-1963 Always been curious about Katanga, two many bad 1980 novels…

Beach recently had the immense pleasure or reading John Widdowson’s If You Be Don’t Be Good, a collection (and analysis) of bogeys used by Newfoundland parents in the interwar and immediate postwar. JW’s purpose was to examine how parents controlled their children in Atlantic Canada, particularly through folklore. But he also picked up many fascinating, […]