Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The hopeless fight in Rhodesia… Enter Mugable left stage. Wessels, A Handful of Hard Men  

A bit of Star Wars nostalgia

Beach really, really, really doesn’t like ceremonial magic, creepy pentagrams and casual acquaintances with books by the ‘Beast’ Crowley on their shelves. But he recently steeled himself to read The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett, mainly to see what the alchemists and magi had to say about fairylore. There is a lot of material as it […]

The queen in front of her truck (note ‘L’)

The following was a written answer given in a written exchange in the British parliament 13 March 1962. At this date Nyasaland (aka Malawi) was a British territory and would be for another two years. (In the postwar period the British government was often put under pressure over the question of responsibility for colonial possessions […]

This particular swindle should have gone in the post on British provincial swindles, but Beach loves it so much that he kept it apart to do honour to its creator, Mr Hartley, somewhere still picking oakum in purgatory. First, though a little background on the subscription system. If, in the nineteenth century, a striving author wanted […]

Celebration of victory in WW1: helmets stacked into a pyramid.

With a gun? London? Anon X writes in: this is not 1930, its rather 1960, and the city is Bern, Switzerland. The street is called “Kreuzgasse“…

In previous posts Jeffrey has been explained by this blogger as a product of life in a strictly regulated religious setting, where adolescent girls were yoked to Samuel Wesley’s strict high Anglican ideals. There is a very good chance that this is the key to understanding the poltergeist events and that some sort of poltergeist […]

This has to be a put up? 30 Dec 2015: Nathaniel: According to the this site, the “Lips That Touch Liquor…” photo is “a still from an [Thomas] Edison motion picture produced around 1910”. See the comment posted by Andrea Grimes about halfway down the linked page: So no, apparently not a photo of an actual […]

***Thanks to Stephen D for bringing this book to my attention*** Most anthropologists choose an exotic destination and then head off to live with the Kwang or the Baiga for a couple of years, subsequently using the material they gather there for their doctorates. In the 1980s Tanya Marie Luhrmann, instead, headed from Cambridge in […]

10 March 1890 one of the worst mining accidents in British history* took place in Morfa in South Wales. 87 miners were killed. A gas explosion had been set off, probably by an unfastened lamp. Interestingly the local community had had forebodings before the explosion. This article came out almost two months later in the […]

Chrisian Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions Another one I’ve been looking forward to: parallels between Christian and Islamic hells are fascinating…

From the 1920s to the 1940s Britain had perhaps the best spy agencies in the world: this was particularly true of its foreign spy agency, SIS or MI6. Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and even John Le Carré’s fiction carry the distilled essence (albeit sometimes shifted to later times) of British triumph against Nazi Germany, Imperial […]

Grundstein, Naked in the Woods Ah, Hippies. Can’t wait for this one…