Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Iceland has often featured on this blog for two reasons: first, because it is a part of the formula by which the thuggish Vikings made it to the New World five centuries before Columbus; and, second, because it retains in its traditions some particularly old pagan customs, customs that have been absorbed or overlaid by […]

Ignore the movie star, Kim Nowak, as she sits and look at the faces in the dining car, 1956

The story is a simple one. A Roman and a Persian arrive by boat at the same time in a foreign port. Both are taken off to see the king (suggesting that the visitors were actually dignitaries) and the king decides to provoke them ‘Which of your kings is the greater and the more powerful?’ Of course, […]

HMS Vanguard goes on its last voyage towards the scrapyard, 1960. It took two years to break her up.

Caroline Rance set up her website, The Quack Doctor, in 2009 as a way of cataloguing historical medical advertisements and stories of health fraud. Since then, her book The Quack Doctor: Historical Remedies for All Your Ills has been published by The History Press and she also recently compiled a pocket trivia compendium, What the […]

It is remembered as ‘the King and Country Debate’, the most famous student debate in history. 9 February 1933 Oxford Union (the students of Oxford University in contentious mode) undertook to discuss the proposal ‘that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’. The expectations were that the proposal would be brushed […]

German soldiers being stripped as they begin prison life in France

Unknown medieval manuscript: Watership Down goes horribly wrong as an executioner rabbit takes out a knight in slow motion

First of all, thanks to all those who wrote wishing the baby and mother happy times. Mrs Beachcombing’s main concern was that ‘she’s a scorpioo’ whereas now that seems to have subsided in the general love in. Thanks to all those who sent in multiple links: Amanda, Chris, Chris S, Joan, Ricardo, Wade and others. […]

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. We offered up previously here Sheridan le Fanu and Joseph […]

Churchill, 1920s?

Beach has been much struck by two separate accounts that seem to suggest that people from one side of Euro Asia made their way to the other side of that landmass by sea: one of the accounts is Roman and one is early Medieval and Arab. Now there are very simply speaking three possibilities for […]

  But don’t tell the king! 12 cent?? [actually late medieval!!!!] 30 Dec 2014: Typhon to the rescue: Concerning the picture you put up(the Dragon in bed with the queen) I have seen it before and I think it is from Les faize d’Alexandre, a French translation of the Historia Alexandri Magni done by Vasco da […]

The organ gun, also known as the ribadulequin, was one of those crude innovations in military technology that shifted humanity towards the ‘elegant’ killing of the machine gun arc. Organs were basically guns with many barrels and one trigger and were as liable to explode in the gunner’s face as to blast away the opposition. Beach recently […]

Historians have made a great deal between that all-too often drunk British genius Churchill and his abstemious German rival, the murderous Hitler. The two gradually came to loathe each other. Hitler loved to blame Churchill for many of the disasters of the war (sometimes correctly); while Churchill went on the record as saying that when […]