Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

1868 the inhabitants of a London slum alley gather together for a portrait.  

This was one that really got the curiosity going. Samuel Drew was an early nineteenth-century author who have we visited a couple of times on this blog: once while describing a Cornish bear monster (about 1500 years after bears had disappeared from Cornwall) and once being set up as the author of a fictional sky […]

This is the most bizarre aircraft carrier story of them all. It involves suitably enough a Japanese and an American aircraft carrier. May 7 1942 American and Japanese forces are fighting in the Coral Sea. Both American and Japanese planes have been flying off the flat-tops, hoping to hunt down the enemy’s ships. It was […]

On her way up…

Death of a Princess, a modest British television documentary, turned out to be the most expensive film ever made. It cost perhaps  a billion pounds and this was in 1980 when that kind of money could buy your three or four aircraft carriers. The piece, made for British television, tells the story of a nineteen-year-old Saudi […]

Dear Reader, A hard but fun month of work, looking out over a garden in a blaze of flowers. Audit hell continues. Thanks, as always, to the multiple linkers: Amanda, Chris, Chris S, Joan, Ricardo, Wade and others. I’ve put the very best contributions below to the posts from this month. Thanks for all emails too […]

Plane comes down badly on aircraft carrier: did he survive?

The Index Biography is a new form of biography pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The writer must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the indivdual’s life. We offered up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph […]

Beach recently pointed out that were you to want to have a joke at someone’s expense it is probably not a good idea to involve poison. Similiarly strangehistory would advise against the use of nooses as these three sorry stories go to show. 20 Aug 1881: Last week a fatal practical joke was perpetrated at […]

  Rare shot of bombs coming down…  

***Dedicated to Mike Dash and Theo*** Beach has been having the time of his life looking at nineteenth-century Big Foot reports thanks to a very useful book by Chad Arment, Historical Bigfoot. All page numbers in the next paragraph come from that volume. What Beach loves about the book is that nineteenth-century Big Foot reports […]

Waiting to take off the USS Lexington…

Strangehistory has given previously some space to the Cornish ‘Methodist metaphysician’ Samuel Drew (obit 1833). Last time Samuel Drew had been accused, almost certainly falsely by Wikipedia, of witnessing a ghost army. This time Samuel’s witnessing of the paranormal can be substantiated as it appeared in his biography, the author, his son, having apparently taken […]

The chance event that led to this extraordinary WW2 picture was a sailor, an ableseaman Ricky, being washed overboard in heavy seas from his ship HMS Glowworm. Glowworm under its captain Gerard Roope had been, 5 April 1940, one of four destroyer escorts of HMS Renown rallying out from Scapa Flow to prevent Hitler’s invasion […]

  WW1 victory