Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Let us, first, introduce Fort Douaumont. The mightiest of the Verdun forts, Douaumont was captured by the Germans early in the battle for Verdun, 25 February 1915, just four days after fighting had begun. The fort was taken (with hardly a shot being fired) because of unbelievable French carelessness in garrisoning the jewel in their Verdun […]

German propaganda poster about what the allies would do should they win the Great War: it may have been wise…  

There are few things as entertaining as a power struggle in the upper echelons of a totalitarian state. What could be better than glimpses of profoundly unpleasant people, with an endearing lack of boundaries, doing profoundly unpleasant things, to slightly or momentarily less powerful unpleasant people? Perhaps it is the closest we get to an […]

Gypsy ceremony to ward off bear bite in Romania  

Roman coins turn up in the wildest places: Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Iceland… But who would have ever guessed the discovery of a Roman coin in sub-equatorial western Africa? The reference was first given Italian Rivista of Numismatica (vi, 1893, 45). However, the passage quoted here is a digest from Mouvement Géographique (26 Nov 1893): En […]

Dated to 1923 (1943?? see below), white angst in (West Coast?) America 10 Feb 2015: Leif writes ‘The photograph is from 1942 or 1943, not 1923. What is a poorly dressed woman doing with a professionally painted sign on her house? In the prewar era a woman would wear nice clothes for a photograph, assuming […]

Dimitar Peshev was a middle ranking interwar Bulgarian politician of conservative persuasion. He served briefly as Bulgarian minister of Justice in the mid 1930s, then returned to the back benches with an honorific position in parliament. He survived the Second World War and, miraculously, the communist purges that followed, though he spent a year in […]

Tennis, one of the most dangerous games ever created, at least if you are a royal… Beach does not have the exact figures for how many royals ruled Europe from 1000-2000 but an approximate calculation brings up 1200. Of those twelve hundred three died from tennis, a small amount admittedly, a mere quarter of a percent, […]

Yikes, this is Hugh Dispenser having a very few unpleasant minutes. He was lowered down onto the ladder to be castrated and then his bowels were slowly removed…

  ***Some might like to listen to the very topical Strange History theme song while reading this, thanks to Chris S for the tip*** The night of 28 May 1453 the Emperor of Byzantine, Constantine, ‘the eleventh of his name’, went for a ride with his friend, George Sphrantzes, on the city walls of Constantinople, […]

‘Boggart’, it will be remembered, is a British north(-western) word meaning ‘bogey’: it was a promiscuous word and covered everything from a ghost to a troll (and sometimes a scarecrow). Individual settlements in Lancashire, northern Cheshire and northern Derbyshire, parts of the Ridings (particularly the West) and surprisingly Nottinghamshire had boggart haunted areas. Sometimes they were glades, […]

Crying woman says goodbye to a small boy at the point where the Berlin Wall is about to be built: 1961.

This time making vellum? Source

***Thanks to Mike Dash and Penne for sending reports in*** This site has pioneered an oral transmission tag and particularly claims that human beings can transmit information over tens, even hundreds of generations without any recourse to writing: these range from hints of memories from the early Neolithic at Newgrange to impossibly old memories of […]

The six counties, probably Belfast, two IRA women privates stop and search a man