Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Southport is a Lancashire seaside town. In the nineteenth-century Southport had something of a reputation, tourists flocked from throughout the north and in 1860 Southport would build the second largest pier in Britain: a big deal back then when coast towns measured their self esteem by ‘how long’ they were. At the centre of these […]

The historical practical joke tag has now reached almost a dozen posts and Beach thought that he would celebrate with a brief survey of a particularly unusual form of practical joke: jokes that ended in the joker or jokee dying. Beach limited himself to British newspapers from 1 Jan 1880 to Dec 31 1899 and […]

Not sure what is going on here….

This is a weird little story that has proved frustratingly difficult to pin down: not even the original reference. 12 June 1944 Churchill, Brook, and Smuts (far right) visited Montgomery’s forward position at Creully to see how the Normandy campaign was unwinding. This much can be attained from several sources not least the photograph above: […]

Note Haile Selassie being taken off after the palace coup: he died soon after, probably smothered by a cushion.

One of the most attractive stories to come out of the Second World is that of Christian X of Denmark and the yellow star. When told that Jewish Danes would have to wear said star the elderly king threatened to wear one himself. The King, adored by his people and a symbol of Danish nationhood, […]

Gable, Temple, Rooney and Garland

Nothing like a really beautiful mermaid, right: hair breezing sea blue blonde, scales shining with Brasso, tail whipping like a pike dropped in a bucket of acid? Well, yes, and Beach has previously celebrated the alluring mermaids of Venice: what some of his students would call ‘babes’. But he has been disturbed today by a […]

A terrible moment….

Sentences are passed from mouth to mouth down through the ages: some of these that are both reckoned wisdom and that attain a particularly attractive form remain with us. A simple question now: what is the oldest sentence in continual use? First, some ground rules. The sentences in question cannot be overly general. For example, […]

Germans light their cigs with a flamethrower…

Nothing like a medieval eccentric, there are so few of them: this was an age, after all, when originality was neither enjoyed nor, all too often, tolerated. How about Macarius then, allegedly an Irish monk though that name – Greek? – doesn’t seem Gaelic or the kind of name that Gaels would adopt in their […]

Hitler’s Last Picture, doesn’t look in a good mood.

A very speculative post. In war there may be something to be said, in strategic terms, let’s forget the tiresome debates around international law, for killing enemy leaders. Sometimes this is a simple decapitation strategy (American attempts to annihilate Sadam Hussein at the beginning of the Second Gulf War or earlier US targeted bombing on […]

Chamber pots have been practically banished from modern western households but as late as the Second World War most families had a ceramic bowl that passed as a toilet; a potty for grownups with no running water in the house. These chamber pots were, of course, carefully decorated. Some of them were twee, some were […]