Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

A longtime reader (CS) has written in with this question: if you could get rid of Hitler or Stalin in their youth, who would you choose for the butcher’s block? It is a really easy question and the answer is, of course, Hitler. There is no question that the Nazi and Soviet governments were two […]

In the eye…

One of the great British catastrophes of the Great War was the death of Lord Kitchener on the HMS Hampshire in the North Sea 5 June 1916, not a month before the Battle of the Somme began. Kitchener, famous  as British Secretary of War was a ruthless and effective warleader and understandably British public opinion […]

This blog has long championed the lost books of antiquity and the middle ages. But there have been few greater tragedies for the bizarrist, surely, than the disappearance of an early Greek volume entitled On the Power and the Nature of the Chameleon. The chameleon is to be found through large part of the Mediterranean […]

Tim Parks, Teach Us to Sit Still Tim Parks is an acerbic and to this blogger’s tastes over-intellectualised British writer based in Verona northern Italy. He writes novels and, much more enjoyably, books explaining Italy to Anglo-Saxons: TP is one of those very rare foreigners who neither patronises nor idealises the bel paese.  Teach, however, […]

OK cinema, but what an amazing scene: Stalker, final scene. The girls moves the cups off the counter as the international plays! ‘From each according to his psychic abilities…’

Beach tries not to exaggerate – at least in this place* – but of his forty odd flight stories this is perhaps his favourite. Not a mean feat given that those stories include flying Anglo-Saxon monks and Chinese kite men. We are in Paris in 1840 A man, carrying a large bundle, applied some days […]

Those trousers, those beards, that hair…

There is a long tradition of witches having familiars, animals who act as a source of power, or perhaps the medium between the witch and the devil. Britain has rather few references to sabbats and witch orgies compared to continental witch trials: but it arguably has more familiars than French, German and Polish witch investigations. Here […]

Seems remarkably insincere… ‘So, Bill,…’

BFF

22 April 1903 a British column was attacked at Daratoleh (Somali) by dervishes: the British, as so often happened in Africa, were vastly outnumbered and the Imperial troops did the only sensible thing they could in these circumstances. They formed into a square and put their maxims to best use. Superior weapons did for superior […]

In 1906…

This little tale appears in a vaguely sceptical Aulus Gellius, whose Attic Nights provides some very enjoyable reading for those wishing to travel back into the ancient world. that which Archytas the Pythagorean [obit 347 BC] is said to have devised and accomplished ought to seem no less marvellous, but yet not wholly absurd. For […]

Beach has recently been searching for records of bodies within trees. There is a lot ill-informed nonsense about such tree burials (in a living tree) as being part of a British magical tradition. Here is one quoted reference from the Gentleman’s Magazine, 30 (1760), pp. 346. The problem is that the text does not live […]