Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Urban type visits the countryside. Love the children inspecting his socks…

Readers of this blog will now have to excuse Beach for possibly the single most boring post in strangehistory history, but the following has been rankling inside for some time. 1880s or 1880’s? This might seem unimportant, but if you spend several hours a day reading books about the past it starts to matter. How should […]

Seabrook, Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Fort Pillow Bit late with this one (!), but looking forward to getting a copy…

Yesterday we offered the best nineteenth-century writing on Irish fairies. Today the best of the twentieth century: 1911: In this year W. Y. Evans-Wentz changed fairy writing for ever by publishing his brilliantly bizarre The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. Evans-Wentz offered a collection of fairylore for all the Celtic nations (Cornwall, Man, Scotland, Brittany, […]

Paolo Morisi, The Italian Folgore Parachute Division Morisi on one of Italy’s few achievements of WW2.

So you have decided to become an expert on fairies. Your eyes wander over the map of western Europe and after some consideration of the different regional varieties you settle on Ireland: English fairies too pompous; Dutch fey MIA; Icelandic elves aloof; Scandinavian trolls stupid… But where do you begin? There follows a list of […]

May 1945 (just) ahead of the Red Army…

A golf duel from the US picked up by a British newspaper in 1927 and so dating to that year? From America comes an account of a strange duel – a combat with golf clubs and balls as ‘the weapons’ wherewith two disputants went out to seek satisfaction. A St. Louis man and a visitor […]

From Quo Vadis, the lyre is magnificently outsized…

Beach offered, just the other day, a Wandering Jew story. Here is another encounter, this time from Tunis: incidentally how can the WJ live in both Tunis and Monte Carlo, perhaps he got the boat over once a year? Canadian movie star Matheson Lang meets a fan, after he produces a play, The Wandering Jew. […]

Village games, late 18C

Beach once before ran a post on missing Sherlock Holmes stories in the Invisible Libraries series: books that do not exist save in the imagination. However, he missed a trick. There are not just missing Sherlock Holmes stories there are also missing Sherlock Holmes publications. On several occasions in the canon Sherlock refers, en passant, […]

There is a book, admittedly a very small book to be written about sightings of the wandering jew: the man cursed by Christ to walk all over the earth for refusing a drink on the road to crucifixion. Here is one of the most curious of these myths. This one was first attested 18 Jan 1902 and […]

The world’s first pretzel…

Whoops, lost my note on this one, but I think this is Puck of Pook’s Hill introducing himself and British history to Kipling’s children.