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  • Die of the Pox or on the Gallows? April 13, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Die of the Pox or on the Gallows?

    Pox or the Gallows The lines are certainly old ones. A mighty aristocrat offended by some commoner asks whether the man before him will die of the pox or on the gallows tree. The commoner shoots back ‘that depends whether I embrace your Lordship’s mistress or your principles’. No question that it’s memorable. But where […]

    Hanging a Twelve Year Old, Lancaster 1812 March 27, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Hanging a Twelve Year Old, Lancaster 1812

    The Cripple’s Death It says something terrible about Britain’s nineteenth-century legal system. In 1812 a twelve year old was brought to the scaffold for having broken a window. He was barely able to walk, needing crutches: in fact, he was a ‘cripple’: he had been put on a man’s shoulder’s to break the window and […]

    What Happened to William Hare? March 17, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    What Happened to William Hare?

    Introduction William Burke and William Hare were two ne’er-do-wells who, in 1828, discovered that murdering people in the Edinburgh slums and selling their corpses to doctors made for good money. They were finally arrested after an incredible sixteen men and women had been done away with. Burke was tried, found guilty and hung; his common […]

    One Duel Eight Dead January 27, 2018

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    One Duel Eight Dead

    A duel was described in a British compendium in 1784: the Weekly Entertainer since you ask. The full text is below for connoisseurs, but what was remarkable about it was that eight men died and 2 were injured. Briefly the story went as follows. A group of friends in a tavern in Galway had an argument. At […]

    Romanian Military Make-Up December 27, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Romanian Military Make-Up

    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 […]

    Napoleon and the Dorset Convent October 29, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Napoleon and the Dorset Convent

    Beach recently ran with a story that Napoleon was believed to have visited Britain incognito in 1803: Wales to be exact. Here is an annex to that post. The wonderful idea that Napoleon’s brother had holed up in a convent in Dorset at Marnhull no less! These were the glory years when the French were […]

    Flight Hoaxes at Norwich October 7, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Flight Hoaxes at Norwich

    Beach recently came across this remarkable hoax from Norwich UK from 1826. The public are respectfully informed that Signor Carlo Grain Villecrop [these sound like foreign names made up by an English writer], the celebrated Swiss Mountain-flyer, from Geneva, and Mont Blanc, is just arrived in this city, and will exhibit, with Tyrolese pole, fifty feet […]

    The Origins of Jill the Ripper September 16, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Origins of Jill the Ripper

    There has long been a minority opinion that Jack the Ripper was a woman: the so-called ‘Jill the Ripper theory’. It is often said that the theory begins with William Douglas Steward, Jack The Ripper: A New Theory in 1939. Steward established to his own satisfaction, that Jill was a deranged midwife. But Steward was […]

    Thomas Lucy and Shakespeare’s Lost Ballad September 9, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Thomas Lucy and Shakespeare's Lost Ballad

    Most Shakespeare scholars believe that Shakespeare’s first plays were written in about 1590, a couple of years before the sonnets: Shakespeare would have been 26. But there must have been earlier attempts, now lost apprenticeships in prose and poetry, where Shakespeare learnt his art. It is just possible that we get a distant echo of […]

    The Male Midwives Called Peter and the Empty Box Trick June 17, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    The Male Midwives Called Peter and the Empty Box Trick

    The Chamberlen brothers were first generation French Hugenots whose father had fled to Britain in 1569: one brother Peter was born in Paris (1560) and the other brother Peter was born in Southampton (1572). Yes, you read that right. Two sons and both were called Peter: a fair introduction to a very unusual family. (And […]

    Nun Immured in Britain? April 18, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Medieval, Modern
    Nun Immured in Britain?

    In mid March 1846 the Hereford Philosophical and Antiquarian Association had a meeting at which the Dean of Hereford Cathedral spoke about some remarkable finds at Hill House, at Woolhope not eight miles from Hereford. He spoke with sadness and, yes, some occasional indignation as human bones had been uncovered there. This was, he suggested, […]

    Phoenician Sun God in Eighteenth-Century Ireland? March 2, 2017

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Modern
    Phoenician Sun God in Eighteenth-Century Ireland?

    It is the most extraordinary inscription. This mill-stone rock, which once stood on the top of Tory Hill in County Kilkenny in Ireland, has been taken as proof of Carthaginian contact and settlement or at least trade with Ireland in antiquity. The words clearly read (give or take some distorted letters) Beli Dinose, a reference to […]

    Pook’s Hill and Kipling September 29, 2016

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Pook's Hill and Kipling

    There are two versions of the history of Pook’s Hill: the official version; and the official-official version. First, the official version. Kipling wrote in the Edwardian period a book for his children about English history: Puck of Pook’s Hill, published in 1906. A fairy, Puck, introduces Kipling’s two children to the marvelous wonders of the […]

    Time, Blood and Money in World War Two September 17, 2016

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary
    Time, Blood and Money in World War Two

    It is perhaps the best quotation about the Second World War. ‘The British gave time, the Americans gave money, the Soviets gave blood’. In other terms the defeat of the Axis was made possible by the UK hanging on in the summer of 1940; by the Americans ability to outproduce the enemy; and by twenty […]

    Earliest Optography? September 16, 2016

    Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern
    Earliest Optography?

    Two ideas interested late nineteenth-century crime fiction writers. First, the ridiculous notion that finger prints were unique and that they could be recorded to incriminate this or that thief or murderer; and, second, optography, the sensible-sounding proposition that a murder victim would record the last thing he or she saw on the eye’s retina. Take […]