Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Why we love mini skirts…

Here is a remarkable fairy account from Newfoundland. We are in Canada and the report appeared in the Evening Telegraph 26 Dec 1900. This, then, is a creepy Christmas story. A resident of this city, who is subject to extraordinary hallucinations, was the other night, as he seriously states himself, ‘again carried off by fairies’. […]

Beach has recently been dealing with the horrors of losing manuscripts in times before personal computers and photocopiers. But why exempt the contemporary world? Why ignore the potential of broken hard discs and failed backups and lost pen drives to ruin lives? Example. Several years ago Beach found himself associated with a family whose matriarch […]

And on bikes too: Great War image

Another fairy wings question thinking of the last two posts on the origins of fairy wings and on the production of fairy wings: what do fairy wings look like? Here Beach is going to start wide by looking at all winged flying supernatural creatures including angels, Cupid, putti (curse them), cherubs (curse them), Psyche and […]

Sydney 1945: Japan prostrate.

Christopher Lane, Surge of Piety: I read one of Norman Vincent Peale’s books many years ago and was fascinated. If the publisher wants to send me a copy…

After yesterday’s post on the origin of fairy wings, Beach now asks a parallel question. If from the later 19C children were wearing fairy wings at parties who actually made the damn things. Today there are special firms. What about in 1850 or 1890 or 27 October 1933. Here is a short article from that […]

Douglas Smith, Rasputin: ‘you have to sin to be forgiven’. Fascinated, watching with my daughter, by the role that Rasputin take on in the Disney’s Anastasia.

Next year Beach has to write an article on the history of fairy wings, something that he is greatly looking forward to: for absolute beginners fairies were not shown with wings until relatively recent times. There are three big historical questions: (i) when were fairies first portrayed in art or literature as wearing fairy wings; […]

An anniversary bomb!

Aged 7 or 8 Beach had a life changing experience in the garden of a Mrs Ann Atkin’s in south-western England. He stumbled on this article today and wanted to publish it for the historical record, but also out of, well, gratitude. Briefly he was a member of the Gnome Club of Great Britain. Somewhere […]

This is an interesting case from 1867 recorded in a local newspaper. Readers might need to be reminded that Britain was an overwhelmingly Protestant country at this date; that the Protestant majority despised Catholicism and that Lancashire, in the North-West of England was one of the places where English Catholicism had survived best, albeit as […]

I would be fun to do a series of these from all wars and all armies

A voice among the gentiles…