Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

A counterfactual that has long fascinated Beach. In 1492 Columbus reaches the Caribbean and within a century Europeans have mapped and visited all coastal regions in the New World. So far so normal. But add a slight adjustment into the mix. The viruses that killed tens of millions of Amerindians have practically no effect: maybe […]

Boris Karloff has a cup of tea and tries to relax between scenes

The golden age of British children’s literature stretched from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the 1950s: in that period men and women of immense talent wrote for their sons, their daughters and in most cases for their atrophied child-like selves. Among these was the sad and sometimes wretched Kenneth Grahame. Like T.S. […]

The bosom serpent is the useful term to refer to the folklore notion that animals (particularly reptiles) find a way into the human body and cause illness there. Stories of this kind seem to be practically universal and to date back to the earliest times: we are dealing with a proto-myth or even part of the […]

Father Christmas with a British helmet walks through London, 1940

Pheidippides is a bit player in history. A fifth-century Greek who allegedly ran the original marathon. First, though some background to help situate one of the fastest men in the ancient world. In 490, perhaps in early September, Athens found itself in trouble. The Persian Emperor, Darius, resented the fact that Athens had helped the Ionian city states […]

From Natator’s defeat to the churlish Fish Man in the spring of 1871 it was all down hill, and the slope was steep and full of briars and stones: some readers might want to spare themselves the unhappy denoument and click away at this point. OK, well you’ve been warned. In June 1871, doubtless desperate […]

Appeasement is the policy of giving smiles, kisses and gifts to neighbours to prevent war. In some moments of history it has worked (Dane-geld and Roman bribery beyond the frontiers); in some periods it has failed. A conspicuous example of a failure is the attempt by Britain to stroke its European friends and enemies into […]

Dear Reader, Tortoises are now out, general celebration. Just a couple more weeks of class and onto summer research. Beach needs to apologise for not getting to all the emails yet, a visit from Beach mater from the Dominions meant that there were other more important things going on. Thanks, as always, to the multiple […]

Ah, the tolerant smile… Two friends with poor Marx on the wall behind: what would he have said about goons like this…

SJ has won this, spool down for the answer…. The Index Biography is a new form of biography pioneered by this blog and introduced in a previous post. The creator must find a biography of a famous individual from history, they must turn to the index and write down eight peripheral facts about the individual’s life. […]

Russian propaganda from WW1. Love the Russian thrashing the German soldier…

  In a previous post Beach outlined the early success of Natator, the frog man and Frank Buckland’s examination of this unusual specimen. The next chapter in Natator’s life is though a more traumatic one. Acts inevitably get old and Natator recognised this. By September of 1867, just three months after he had begun, Natator […]

They are angry, very angry….

Natator had no biographer: who would be equal to such a life! However,  10 August 1867 Frank Buckland the celebrated naturalist and son of a great British eccentric (who once ate a king’s heart) visited the Cremorne Gardens to examine Frog Man. We learn more from this account than from any other. First, the aquarium: […]