Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The whipping boy needs little introduction. He was the child, brought up with a prince or with a young king, and punished on his behalf, when the prince or king was naughty: crucially the royal and his proxy were friends so any pain was vicariously felt. And why not just hit the royal in question? […]

Leni Riefenstahl’s coming face to face with Nazi brutality as 22 Polish civilians butchered, 1939.

Reading anomalous material there is sometimes an overlap of tiny details that are perplexing. Consider this description of three different North American wild men (who would certainly be called Big Foot today). In 1905 an article in the Washington Post described a Maryland wild man: ‘When it shrieks it sounds much like ‘Ya-ho! Ya-ho! Ya-ho!’ […]

  the Devil carries (a plaster cast?) Christ away

Some sad news via email today. Ray Girvan, a very old friend of this blog, died 30 June 2015, after a three-year fight with lung cancer. He was 59 (a victim of these speedbumps that hit 15-20% of us in late middle age), witty, knowledgeable, and had, of course, never smoked, something that tempts me […]

1868 the inhabitants of a London slum alley gather together for a portrait.  

This was one that really got the curiosity going. Samuel Drew was an early nineteenth-century author who have we visited a couple of times on this blog: once while describing a Cornish bear monster (about 1500 years after bears had disappeared from Cornwall) and once being set up as the author of a fictional sky […]

This is the most bizarre aircraft carrier story of them all. It involves suitably enough a Japanese and an American aircraft carrier. May 7 1942 American and Japanese forces are fighting in the Coral Sea. Both American and Japanese planes have been flying off the flat-tops, hoping to hunt down the enemy’s ships. It was […]

On her way up…

Death of a Princess, a modest British television documentary, turned out to be the most expensive film ever made. It cost perhaps  a billion pounds and this was in 1980 when that kind of money could buy your three or four aircraft carriers. The piece, made for British television, tells the story of a nineteen-year-old Saudi […]

Dear Reader, A hard but fun month of work, looking out over a garden in a blaze of flowers. Audit hell continues. Thanks, as always, to the multiple linkers: Amanda, Chris, Chris S, Joan, Ricardo, Wade and others. I’ve put the very best contributions below to the posts from this month. Thanks for all emails too […]