Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

This one actually appeared in a note to a previous mermaid post from 2011. Beach has since hunted down a slightly earlier account in English (Anon 1812). Note that we are in deepest Brittany, in a land where mermaids were still an important part of folklore in the early 1900s. On the 31st July, an […]

The rarest form of Victorian urban legend is the sexual one: it is not the Victorians did not tell racy stories, it is that generally speaking no one dared to publish them. Here is one that somehow slipped through the net. Beach’s favourite detail are the stripes. In a suburb of Dundee a golden discovery […]

The Mongol armies of the thirteenth century were among the most multi-ethnic in history. Koreans, Africans, Europeans and Persians fought together under the ‘prince of heaven’: a thuggish horse thief from the Steppes. Beach was recently particularly struck by one example of this that could stand for many less dramatic instances. When in 1258 Hulegu […]

Bureaucracy hell at the moment in Italy so here is a simple but marvelous stocking filler from 1870. Reminds Beach of one of his favourite ever posts, on a hare in a Manx courtroom. Perhaps not quite as good but almost… We are in northern Scotland near Inverness. The other evening, while two servant girls […]

Two fairies look down on stage fairies at the Garrick.

Beautifully colorised, New York Ants in the 1930s. All those hats…

1921, Suffragettes eat pizza, my file says ‘to annoy men’! Very early for pizza outside Italo-Americans in the US. 29 Jan 2018 Neil H writes ‘Although this picture often appears with the caption, “In 1921, early suffragettes often donned a bathing suit and ate pizza in large groups to annoy men.” Sadly they appear to be […]

Beautiful 1920s technology: GP 1920s-style.

Nothing about fairies is easy but Beach is getting more and more confused about one aspect of fairy life and that is their trees. In the Gaelic-speaking world (or what was the Gaelic-speaking world, RIP) thorns were commonly associated with fairies. These are the trees that workers are sometimes terrified about cutting down. In Wales […]

War over in New York. The false 1918 celebrations: a wrong report from Europe set off the celebrations prematurely.

Apologies for the absence of Mermaid Monday over Christmas. Here we are back with an account from Captain Stedman: seen previously in this blog tangling with a fairy. Stedman has been talking about tapirs. He, then, gives some interesting opinions from his peers about mermaids (II, 182-3). A Mr. Selefelder, of the Society service, at […]

Beach recently reach ran across this will in an early nineteenth-century publication, Kirby’s Wonderful Museum, vol IV, p. 259. Enjoy. I do hereby direct my executors to lay out five guineas in purchase of a picture of the viper biting the benevolent hand of the person who saved him from perishing in the snow, if […]

Here is an extraordinary description of George Catlin (obit 1872), American painter and ethnologist (before his time) among the Mandans, with the matching image above. The game is basically this: how many arrows can you shoot into the air before your first arrow hits the ground. What Beach finds extraordinary are the number of arrows […]

It is well known that there was a great deal of walking or pedestrian enthusiasm in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Usually, these races were a question of going from, say, London to York in x number of hours or of beating y over the same distance. However, Beach recently ran across the single weirdest race […]

A fairy queen from New Jersey, 1903