Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Queen Victoria, like Shakespeare’s cowards, died many time before her death in 1901. Beach has, in his career as a nineteenth-century voyeur, often stumbled over references to one or other corner of the Empire convincing itself that Victoria had died before time. You can well imagine how it happened. A misunderstanding in a tiny village, […]

Beach recently revived one of his favourite tags, the duel and the dumb duel. Here is a doubtful sounding example reported in a British newspaper in 1890. The date of the duel itself should be about 1875, which means that an argument between provincial army officers had a lot of time to be exaggerated into […]

Ben Montgomery, The Leper Spy BM continues with his excellent WW2 monographs…

In Plymouth, in the Second World War, a strange idea evolved, among the bombed out population: Plymouth, as an important port, was all too frequently visited by the Luftwaffe. The population came to believe that Herman Göring, the head of his Luftwaffe, personally took part in the attacks on the city. Plymouth folk even claimed […]

Norwegian king returns to his country after liberation in 1945…

No double chin here. The glorious Henry VIII at Trinity, Cambridge.

James MacLachlan, British pilot who flew from 1941 to his death in 1943 with just one natural arm and an artificial limb…

Beach has long considered himself duty bound to investigate all references to fairies, however strange and however obscene, and there have been, for a while, two references to London fairies that have irritated him because he can’t track them down: or at least he can follow them only into unattractive cul-de-sacs. First, from Carol Silver’s […]

A Julius Caesar pencil holder…

William Paget (1506-1563) was a quintessential Tudor politician. He worked for Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I: in short, he survived. He, also, like many of the best Tudor politicians, owed his office to his ability rather than his blood, which was not very blue. He had his share of peccadilloes, of course, but […]

Brits just released from one of the Stalags. Gloriously recoloured.

Busy day here so Beach will just offer this short piece about the origin of the word ‘canard’. If true this is really a late eighteenth-century urban legend; if false it is a canard about a canard. First the basics, canard, the French for duck, came to mean any false story in nineteenth-century English. But […]

Anne Sebba, Les Parisiennes Been reading up on liberation Paris, this is the natural complement…

Marshal Ney was Napoleon’s greatest general and even those who, like Beachcombing, loathe old Boney, feel some regret when they read of how Ney was executed 7 Dec 1815. The great man stood in front of the firing squad and himself gave the order to fire after telling his soldiers: ‘I have fought a hundred battles […]

Stanley Nelson, Devil’s Walking Racial murders in the deep south…