Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

What are the most telling WW2 statistics? Here are ten that stand out for Beach. Send any others in: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com or correct at will. 1) The population of the first world Allied nations was approximately half a billion, the population of the first world Axis powers was approximately one hundred and fifty […]

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  Priests and monks have long considered to be unlucky in European folklore. If you met a priest in 1400 walking down a Derbyshire or Pyrenean road you would straight away do something to ward off bad luck: touch wood, your testicles etc etc. Priests and monks understandably got quite testy at being treated as albatrosses, […]

The elephant survived… Quite why anyone would put an elephant on a mono-rail I’m not sure but this picture captures the moment it jumps. 19 Sep 2015: Gary V writes in. There is a wikipedia page! ‘On 21 July 1950 the circus director Franz Althoff had Tuffi, then 4 years old, take the Schwebebahn in […]

OK this is weird little game. Beach has spent many hours in the last two months looking at nineteenth-century OS maps, that is maps produced by the Ordnance Survey, the government body that is responsible for charting Britain, and back in the day, Ireland. The maps are beautiful, they lack the gaudy colours of today […]

British troops surrender in Crete to German paratroopers. (May have been New Zealanders).

A simple question today. Are witch’s broomsticks dangerous? Well, anything that takes human beings out of the natural element, namely the earth and places them with the birds could go wrong and depending on how high witches were flying, horribly wrong. The greatest in flight danger that witches faced was accidentally saying a Christian name […]

Anti-lynching demonstration

Did Churchill allow Coventry to be bombed to save the Enigma secret?

Picture of the month? I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. Marlene Dietrich kisses a serviceman coming home, 1945.

For many years this blog has run a weird wars tag, some of the most bizarre story from humanities adventures on the battlefield. Beach has recently got a sniff of one story that has greatly excited him, but he can’t track down the details. He throws open the problem to readers hoping that someone will […]

E.R. Bills, Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror (Eakin Press Aug 2015). ‘From 1891 to 1922, Texans burned an average of one person of color at the stake a year for three decades. These burnings typically featured carnival atmospheres with thousands in attendance, including men, women and children who later […]

‘I’ve… seen things… you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate… All those… moments… will be lost, in time, like… tears… in… rain.’ Famous lines from Bladerunner. But what if instead of an exotic replicant at his death, we […]

  A. G. Lewis DFC, July 1940 in the middle of the Battle of Britain. Dominion pilot (South Africa) who came, fought and survived the war.  

Beach is not sure why he finds this meal so appealing, but it is probably something to do with the disregard for frontier law and the ability of Texans to improvise entertainment out of a goose, a shack and some eggs. Sherman is and was the capital of Grayson County in Texas. In 1858 a […]