Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beach has sometimes in this place celebrated Italian achievements in the Second World War; small footnotes against the prevailing tide of Italian incompetence and mediocrity in that conflict. Perhaps the area where the Italians most frequently and effectively proved their mettle was in intelligence work. Britain’s SIS (MI6) felt that the Japanese Kempeitai were incompetent, […]

Never seen the trench system like this…

In the famous nineteenth-century Belgian novel The Legend of Thyl Ulenspiegel and Lamme Goedzak there is a reference to an unexpected form of execution. ‘Since you do not like any of these,’ said the Stevenyne, ‘you shall be taken on to the king’s ships, and there condemned to be torn asunder by four galleys.’ The […]

Military Police reading all about it…

A busy day today as Beach is going to go and do five or six useless tasks. Here, then, is a fillip post, put tentatively in the urban legends file: surviving death by molten iron (or ‘molten metal’). This can’t be true can it? Can it? Drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com But few men have […]

Gerhard P. Gross, The Myth and Reality of German Warfare The Wehrmacht in action and inaction…

Prostitutes have sometimes chosen to mark themselves apart, the red light at the window, and sometimes they have been obliged to mark themselves apart. This was particularly evident in medieval Europe, where the arbiters of taste would have loved to have colour-coded all society. This was the same cookie-cutter mentality that put merchants in red […]

Erotic Book Plates, (ed) Drs Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen (New York 1970) A rather eccentric and intriguing book from what we will one day look back upon as the mid-twentieth-century sex revolution. Two radical Freudians, who would write half a dozen works on western sex habits, including an old favourite of this blog Walter, were able […]

Elizabeth Letts, The Perfect Horse I just love the idea of horse master race…

Sixtus V (the last of his name) was a grumpy counter-reformation pope who got mixed up with Philip II’s planned invasion of England: the invincible Armada. However, Sixtus, who hated Philip and saw the Spanish Empire as the greatest obstacle to the extension of his own power, made some strange conditions for lending money to […]

I’d love to know where this is. It was drawn in 1930

This is a haunting passage from the first volume of Cochrane’s Autobiography of a Seaman. The episode in question took place in 1794 while Cochrane was sailing on the Thetis. [63] The squadron sailed from Plymouth; and when about midway across the Atlantic an incident occurred worth relating… One night finding the temperature of the […]

Why elections are bad for democracy (if they don’t go your way). Perhaps not a typical history picture, but something special about this…

Two British sailors and friends in the fountains at Trafalgar Square

Beach previously tried to bring honour to the name of Johann Weyer who combined a skeptical attitude to witchcraft with and a believing attitude to the supernatural. His books, which are not unfortunately easily accessible in English, are full of gems. Here is a good one which combines a nasty solitary fairy and a witchcraft […]