Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

De Seve and Irwen, Operation Ajax: The Story of the CIA Coup that Remade the Middle East (Verso August 18, 2015). ‘The year is 1953. As the value of oil skyrockets, global power brokers begin to take interest in the political regimes of the Middle East. British agents have controlled Iranian oil exports for a generation, […]

The immortal meals series has included prehistoric food and it has included an unlikely Victorian dinner in a dinosaur but this reference, thanks to Chris from Haunted Ohio Books is on a whole different level. Some of the bones of extinct animals found beneath the stalagmite floor of caves in England and elsewhere, presumably of […]

A recent post described the bizarre legal proceedings that led to New Haven men being accused of bestiality and one being hung. These cases provoke many thoughts but not least was the fate of the accused animals. When George Spencer was brought to the gallows the pig with which he had supposedly had sex with (and […]

All to real Japanese abuse of prisoners.

What are the most telling WW2 statistics? Here are ten that stand out for Beach. Send any others in: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com or correct at will. 1) The population of the first world Allied nations was approximately half a billion, the population of the first world Axis powers was approximately one hundred and fifty […]

Sorry

  Priests and monks have long considered to be unlucky in European folklore. If you met a priest in 1400 walking down a Derbyshire or Pyrenean road you would straight away do something to ward off bad luck: touch wood, your testicles etc etc. Priests and monks understandably got quite testy at being treated as albatrosses, […]

The elephant survived… Quite why anyone would put an elephant on a mono-rail I’m not sure but this picture captures the moment it jumps. 19 Sep 2015: Gary V writes in. There is a wikipedia page! ‘On 21 July 1950 the circus director Franz Althoff had Tuffi, then 4 years old, take the Schwebebahn in […]

OK this is weird little game. Beach has spent many hours in the last two months looking at nineteenth-century OS maps, that is maps produced by the Ordnance Survey, the government body that is responsible for charting Britain, and back in the day, Ireland. The maps are beautiful, they lack the gaudy colours of today […]

British troops surrender in Crete to German paratroopers. (May have been New Zealanders).

A simple question today. Are witch’s broomsticks dangerous? Well, anything that takes human beings out of the natural element, namely the earth and places them with the birds could go wrong and depending on how high witches were flying, horribly wrong. The greatest in flight danger that witches faced was accidentally saying a Christian name […]

Anti-lynching demonstration

Did Churchill allow Coventry to be bombed to save the Enigma secret?

Picture of the month? I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. Marlene Dietrich kisses a serviceman coming home, 1945.

For many years this blog has run a weird wars tag, some of the most bizarre story from humanities adventures on the battlefield. Beach has recently got a sniff of one story that has greatly excited him, but he can’t track down the details. He throws open the problem to readers hoping that someone will […]