Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

What do you do if you really dislike someone? Hurt them, tax them, kill them obviously… But if you really hate them you salt their land… Confused? Let’s head back to mid eighteenth century Portugal. The Tavora executions were some of the bloodiest from the eighteenth-century west: even fifty years later the family would have […]

US Paras into Germany

Let’s hope that Google can’t read pictures 25 Oct 2016, Filip G comes back on Google: Well, when you process the photo with Tesseract OCR engine you will get: Emma W “‘1’ 176mg ISLlKE V FUCKINC‘FOK. ” Almost there… (at least for the F**KING). Tesseract OCR was created by Google, but I guess they use […]

Right through history castaways have been thrown up on foreign shores after a shipwreck, a storm or an argument on board (in many navies marooning was a form of punishment). For those of us interested in Wrong Place and Wrong Time phenomena these castaways are crucial. But how many were actually left behind. For example, how many […]

Love this from a Victorian novel. This is how the lovers meet in rough Lancashire…

Beach has neglected for some time the honourable pursuit of dumb duelling: duels where either the weapon or the motive or preferably both were absurd. Here is one from 1853 from France. It is reported in a contemporary English newspaper so it may even, say it quietly, be true. Enter the whip duel A singular duel […]

J. M. Adovasio and David Pedler, Strangers in a New Land The happy miles, the parts of America that had not yet then seen a human face….

Death by plane, the latest in the unusual execution series. Imagine, you are bundled, for a terrible crime, into a bomber bay and tied to a bomb. The bomb is, then, dropped, after a terrifying wait, from 10,000 feet on the enemy. Will you die by explosion or by falling? Some stories are so terrible that […]

Andrew Paciorek, Strange Lands OK not a new history book, but one that has just swum onto my radar. Heard good things and love the art samples…

Beach recently enjoyed Robert Hutchinson’s The Spanish Armada, particularly this short passage about an Elizabethan inventor, John Trew: Periods of national crisis often throw up the more eccentric among us. John Trew wrote to the queen in December offering his services for ‘her preservation and salvation… Though an old man, I desire to be employed […]

Personally Beach has always found the ‘coincidences register’ the most irritating of all genres. Typically, an historically illiterate conspiracy freak, notices some interesting parallels between two different events or more usually individuals. He or she, then, sends out a communication pointing out the ‘striking’ parallels. Then, other readers note other parallels (occasionally making them up) […]

Women rage against the hijab in 1979 in Iran: six months later no one would have dared…

Simon Bolivar was a Venezuelan troublemaker who would lead the Spanish Americas to freedom. Ferdinand VII was the cretinous Spanish monarch who would allow this to happen. What Beach had not known until recently was that Bolivar and Ferdinand actually met as boys in 1800 in extraordinary circumstances. Bolivar (right) was seventeen; Ferdinand (left) was sixteen. […]

Not quite clear what the scamps have done? Have they pinned something to his back?