Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Many moons ago Beach ran an article on telephony, the use of telephones as a kind of primitive music radio. Essentially telephone owners would subscribe to a ‘channel’ and would then phone into said channel to listen to shows: those of us old enough to remember the speaking clock or telephone weather forecasts were listening to […]

This poker story comes from an extremely rare poker book that has, unfortunately, never been scanned and put online, John Lillard’s Poker Tales. It is perhaps the best collection of poker anecdotes the world has seen and dates to 1896: A certain very well known New Jersey politician – an old man, whose fame extends […]

Following on from a recent post Beachcombing has had several extraordinary emails about coincidences among our governing classes. He thought, meanwhile, that today he would premiere another of his favourite coincidence stories: the good works of Edwin Booth (obit 1893). In 1909 an American citizen wrote the following letter to The Century Magazine with an […]