Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Parliament in flames in 1834

Beach is really getting into all these fake history news-stories on the internet: the champions of which are the generic sounding worldnewsdailyreport, the malodorous yet strangely attractive offspring of National Enquirer rutted with the History Channel. We have reported one of their previous fictions and have an especial joy now in spreading the word that […]

Madness on the internet in the last few days with the announcement that Leonardo da Vinci’s mother was a Chinese slave and that she is the Mona Lisa. Many readers will have stumbled upon this theory and enjoyed its improbability, but they may not know that there has been almost ten years of similar theories […]

  Early train disaster, the fear of travelling by rail in the early nineteenth century.

Iceland has often featured on this blog for two reasons: first, because it is a part of the formula by which the thuggish Vikings made it to the New World five centuries before Columbus; and, second, because it retains in its traditions some particularly old pagan customs, customs that have been absorbed or overlaid by […]

Ignore the movie star, Kim Nowak, as she sits and look at the faces in the dining car, 1956

The story is a simple one. A Roman and a Persian arrive by boat at the same time in a foreign port. Both are taken off to see the king (suggesting that the visitors were actually dignitaries) and the king decides to provoke them ‘Which of your kings is the greater and the more powerful?’ Of course, […]

HMS Vanguard goes on its last voyage towards the scrapyard, 1960. It took two years to break her up.

Caroline Rance set up her website, The Quack Doctor, in 2009 as a way of cataloguing historical medical advertisements and stories of health fraud. Since then, her book The Quack Doctor: Historical Remedies for All Your Ills has been published by The History Press and she also recently compiled a pocket trivia compendium, What the […]

It is remembered as ‘the King and Country Debate’, the most famous student debate in history. 9 February 1933 Oxford Union (the students of Oxford University in contentious mode) undertook to discuss the proposal ‘that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. The expectations were that the proposal would be brushed […]

German soldiers being stripped as they begin prison life in France

Unknown medieval manuscript: Watership Down goes horribly wrong as an executioner rabbit takes out a knight in slow motion

First of all, thanks to all those who wrote wishing the baby and mother happy times. Mrs Beachcombing’s main concern was that ‘she’s a scorpioo’ whereas now that seems to have subsided in the general love in. Thanks to all those who sent in multiple links: Amanda, Chris, Chris S, Joan, Ricardo, Wade and others. […]

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 and Joseph […]

Churchill, 1920s?