Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

How do you get rid of supernatural worries: call the priest, the alienist or the local bobby? Why no, you buy a tube of nineteenth-century vitamin pill, of course! This at least was the solution offered by one Irish newspaper in 1840. The belief in supernatural appearances has generally prevailed during the superstitious ages has […]

An old favourite…

Paul Flewers, The New Civilisation? Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union, 1929-1941 (2008) There is a strip in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930), where the intrepid boy reporter spies out some British leftists who are visiting ‘the new civilization’: the Soviet Union about five years after Stalin had ascended the blood steps to the iron throne. […]

Britain plans should the worst come to the worst: Fighting Nazi Occupation

Kay Massingill has recently offered to readers of Forteana Exchange a series of body in tree stories. The earliest seems to be this one from 1873 and they carry on into the 1920s. The tale typically has it that someone, perhaps escaping from danger, climbs into a tree, then cannot get out. That brings us to […]

How long were the longest ancient snakes? In 2004, Richard Stothers published a fascinating article ‘Ancient Scientific Basis of the ‘Great Serpent’ from Historical Evidence’, Isis 95, 220-238. Among many other bits of ancient flotsam and jetsom Stothers brought together a list of the longest snakes recorded in antiquity. The following snakes need to be looked […]

I tried this once with stones, I would not like to try it with grenades…

There are lots of different types of soldiers but today Beach wants to put aside the cowards, the sadists, the pragmatists, the survivors and concentrate on perhaps one of the few attractive categories: the gentleman soldier. The cult of the gentleman soldier began amongst the European aristocracy in the middle ages, its values were embodied […]

Dear Reader, thanks for all the emails and communications. This month two obstacles. First, despite being pre-programmed the blog posts were not visible to all readers from 20-30 September. No idea why! they are there now: for some of you were there all the time. Second, agonising toothache kept me away from the computer for […]

One of Goya’s most mysterious pictures: the flight of reason?

***Tacitus wins*** 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 […]

Nazis salute Swiss Guard at the Vatican…

More in our swindlers series. Bread Trick: X in Russia goes to a jewelers and gets 4000  roubles worth of goods. He can only pay 500 but asks the owner (the victim) to come to the bank for the rest. At the bank he reminds the banker that they had spoken before and says ‘can […]

Finnish troops prepare for a Soviet attack. Note the skis.

Beach has been living toothache hell for the last two weeks. A wisdom tooth had to be extracted and that was just fine: a bit of anesthetic and POW. But then the jawbone became infected and said bone had to be scraped with little in the way of laughing gas. Painkiller, antiobiotics were rushed in […]