Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Netherlands, a Protestant, Catholic couple divided in death…

Ancient mounds and barrows evoked mixed feelings in your average yokel in the medieval and modern period. On the one hand you, might find treasure: gold, silver and coins from the Empire or even before. On the other, though, you were likely to get flattened by whatever dragon or spirit guarded the hole in question: […]

Beach ran several years ago a series of spying commandments from the end of the Great War. He thought he would follow this up today with some espionage commandments from the Second World War. These come courtesy of Bernard James Barton or (aka ‘Killer’ Barton or John Barton), a twenty-four year-old British major who, in […]

By far the best Einstein picture I know…

  ***Dedicated to KMH who came up with this link*** A recent post looked at Bible sandwiches, the idea of eating the Bible to cure yourself from ills or poison. The average reader might raise their eyebrows and wonder what the scriptural basis for that is. This was Beach’s residual-protestant reaction but, then, to his shock, […]

Zanjeer was a detection dog who saved tens of lives at Mumbai in 1993. He is honoured here with a full state funeral at his death in 2000.    

19 January 1919, a wonderful moment where Lenin almost got offed by the forces he had created. On this day, Lenin, Chabanov, his bodyguard, and Maria, Lenin’s sister were driving with bourgeos ostentation on the outskirts of Moscow. At a railway bridge they were stopped, however, by three armed men, that Lenin and Chabanov assumed were […]

Sharing a tea?

Would you eat a Bible? Unless under duress probably not. However, the Bible has long been resorted to as food particularly in charms. Bede, in the early eighth century, may give us the earliest version of this idea in the first chapter of the first book of the Ecclesiastical History. Noting that snakes cannot dwell […]

GIs paraded by Dutch children in national dress at liberation

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