Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Armchair anthropologists (such as this blogger) often thrill over the stories of mutilated and better still murdered kings and the rituals described by Frazer and his heirs in the tropics and reconstructed (ahem imagined) in European history. The king is the land, and as he becomes old and frail he must be sacrificed so life […]

East German Troops

Those eyes…

The whole question of where pumpkin heads or Jack o’ Lanterns come from is fascinating. No one has been able to drag the date convincingly back beyond the nineteenth century and the point of origin is very generally: ‘Britain’ or ‘Ireland’ with constant references to ‘the Celtic areas’, with the implication that the tradition is […]

Edwardian pic? 25 Feb 2015, Nathaniel writes in ‘According to this site, “New York circa 1921. Stage actress Marilyn Miller in the driver’s seat.”

This particularly forgotten kingdom was to be found in a small area of medieval northern Syria near Antarados (marked on white on the map above). At its height it included ‘ten strong castles with the villages and environs’ and perhaps 60,000 citizens: its real centre was at Kadmous and Masyad. So what, thinks the reader, […]

Blackfoot mother and child, Alberta?

He knocks at doors wheer new-born babs Hev kaled him throo t’ black heawrs o’ dark; He knocks wheer deoth stalks in an’ grabs, Or age hes thrown fooak eawt o’ wark. He knows heaw mony raps ‘ll rouse Young lusty Dick, or sleepy Nan. He knocks ’em eawt o’ t’ second snooze, ‘Rat-tat, rat-tat, […]

Supposedly a British family greeting the troops out of Dunkirk

Love or hate Gandhi, and God knows there are plenty of reasons for both, there is something remarkable about this abortive correspondence between he and Hitler (see below the post): ‘correspondence’ might not be the right word as Hitler never wrote back. The first letter dates to late July of 1939 when the world was […]

Giles Milton, When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain, History’s Unknown Chapters I’m always a sucker for these books…

This is a one of these stories where the problem is not with the facts but with interpretation. As it involves human facts it is not a very happy story: be warned a little girl dies. We are in 1871 in Ashton-under-Lyne just outside Manchester. Mr F. Price is the coroner and he held his […]

Laura Cumming’s The Vanishing Man: by all accounts ‘a great detective story’.

You are living in the middle of the nineteenth century and, man or woman, you have failed to get your mate for life. Perhaps you regret, saying, ‘no’ to the third son of a duke: or perhaps you regret asking twelve daughters of men in ecclesiastical offices. The point is that, tick toc, time is running […]

Beer Day in Iceland, end of prohibition, 1989