From the Grenadier to the Beer Shop (via Mickey Mouse and Pussy Cat) February 5, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern***Thanks to Mike L for drawing my attention to this classic series*** In Henry Carey’s Namby Pamby published in 1726 there is the following verse Now he acts the Grenadier, Calling for a Pot of Beer: Where’s his Money? He’s forgot: Get him gone, a Drunken Sot. Now consider, instead, this rhyme collected two hundred […]
A Scottish Earthquake Remembered? December 29, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernDavid Murray Rose was a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historian and, a far nicer word, an antiquarian. This comes from a letter he wrote in 1930 to the Inverness Courier and relates to an obsession of this blog: the degree to which information can be transmitted orally through time. First, the legend. Many years […]
Men Wearing Mirrors: Portuguese Conquistador in Northern Australia? December 8, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernThe Portuguese ‘discovery’ of Australia is one that has excited Australians and Europeans for most of the last century, since, in fact, it was first realized that there was a very real chance that Portuguese ships could very easily have headed south from their base at Timor and have run smack-bang into ‘the lost continent’. […]
Okinawa and Three Dead Marines August 28, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, ***Dedicated to Christopher, who signaled this story*** An episode of memory and death in a closed community, this time over a mere 55 years, but that is interesting simply as a point of comparison with the death of three of Cromwell’s soldiers in Scotland and a 200 year-old memory span there. In 1998 the […]
Two-Hundred-Year-Old Memories of Dunbar? August 15, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernBeach did a horrible thing yesterday and made fun of the supposed oral transmission of information across four millennia. Even at New Grange that sort of thing seems unlikely. But he does have a lot of sympathy with the possibility that stray details might make it through two or three centuries in a rural community, […]
The Golden Ghost of Mold #2: Walter Johnson Debases Gold August 14, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern, PrehistoricBeach has frequently enjoyed before the power of oral transmission: information skipping across the centuries like a flat stone spun over a pond. Here is a supposed memory of oral transmission concerning the Golden Ghost tomb from Mold in northern Wales. This time the account comes from Walter Johnson’s Folk Memory and Archaeology (1907) A […]
Halley’s Comet and the Generations! May 12, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Medieval***Dedicated to Larry who got me interested in this and provided, through his emails and forwards, much of the information*** It recently struck Beach that Halley’s comet would be a perfect measure of the continuity of knowledge in ancient and medieval civilizations. After all, here is a comet that returns every 75 (and a bit) […]
Frobisher’s Missing Five February 7, 2013
Author: Beach Combing | in : ModernThere is a fascinating episode in Frobisher’s 1567 first trip to the North West Atlantic. Five of his men vanished in the most extraordinary circumstances while on Baffin Island (Arctic Canada). But these foolish men, being five of them in all in the bote, having set on land this stranger at the place appointed: the […]
Viking Family Memories December 5, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : MedievalBack to families and remembering. This time though in the Northern Isles with the last of that cursed breed the Vikings… Occasionally there are examples of writing in stone, which under special conditions, survive beautifully through the centuries. This is true of the several sheltered runic inscriptions found in the Maeshowe megalithic tomb on Orkney, […]
Families and the Durability of Memory November 22, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : Actualite, Contemporary, ModernHow long can memories remain in a family? We have played these games before, of course. Just a couple of weeks ago Beach was imagining his daughter telling his great great grandchildren about the time their great, great, great, great grandfather survived an Italian attack in the Mediterranean, a hundred and fifty years after the […]
The Last Survivor of the Second World War November 15, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryStrange History put up a melancholy post a couple of weeks ago marking the day that the last Battle of Britain pilot died. And this is only the beginning… On that very day the newspapers ran with another story commemorating not the last but the oldest Auschwitz survivor’s death. Now the Battle of Britain and Auschwitz involve […]
Newgrange and a Hundred Generations November 2, 2012
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Medieval, PrehistoricNewgrange, standing near the Boyne, is one of the great treasures of Ireland and, indeed, of Europe. Built some four thousand years ago by the first Gaels it is mysterious and, when the mist comes in, vaguely malevolent. It is also exclusive. Each year a tiny group of fortunate men, women and children – chosen […]
Ancient Beliefs in Modern Egypt June 8, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : Ancient, Contemporary, ModernTime brings its chopper down on generation after generation, annihilating almost all memory. How little we know of our grandparents’ lives, how very little of our great grandparents’: while most people living in the west today have no idea where their great grandparents lived or, indeed, their names. Yet every so often history gives evidence […]
The Meson del Fierro April 15, 2011
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern, PrehistoricThe Meson del Fierro was a huge piece of iron in the depths of the Chaco in the badlands of South America (modern Argentina). Eighteenth-century estimates claimed that it weighed about fifteen tons. And, in 1783, Michael Rubin de Celis, A Spanish naval official who had approached the lump of ore with some two hundred […]
The Treasure Message: A Challenge September 18, 2010
Author: Beach Combing | in : ContemporaryBeachcombing has a long-standing interest in the reliability of oral legend. Over how many decades can a piece of information be passed from mouth to mouth – without recourse to writing – and yet survive intact? So an example: a young Athenian fights in that city’s golden year, 490 BC, against the Persians. For how […]