Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

The Auld Lord was a creepy monster associated with Lowther in Westmorland (the old English county between Lancashire and Cumbria). The Auld Lord spent most of his time spinning around the countryside with headless outriders and running his coach down impossibly steep inclines. But when back at home at Lowther Hall his dark side would […]

Finnish Plane, note the Finnish swastika

How our great grandmother’s spoke…

Beach recently offered up the gem of a story that Göring, of all people, had hidden out in a British bomb shelter in the second world war. At that moment he alluded to the fact that in a previous period the British had been convinced that Napoleon himself had visited Britain on the eve of his […]

German soldiers sit on a downed spitfire near Calais

There is a post to be written and perhaps, when his file is big enough, Beach will attempt it of puerile acts of revenge carried out against defeated nations. Limiting ourselves here to the Second World War there is, for example, Hitler’s insistence that France’s surrender be signed in the same railway car, where German […]

American planes in China with Chinese guard

A story from the depths of East Anglia (1843), one of the more isolated parts of the English countryside in the 19 Century. A rather amusing and novel occurrence was related to us the other day. A young man, the son of Mr. Elsden, a respectable tradesman of Soham, was walking from that place to […]

Extraordinary medieval wood carving.

Beach was so moved to discover that Marshal Ney  had not really been killed in 1815 that he went out looking for other unlikely survivors. This is one he dredged up from, of all places, Leeds Times (19 Apr 1873), 8. Napoleon III it will be remembered had come to Britain in 1871 after being […]

John R. Bruning, Indestructible Taking war back to Japan…  

Queen Victoria, like Shakespeare’s cowards, died many time before her death in 1901. Beach has, in his career as a nineteenth-century voyeur, often stumbled over references to one or other corner of the Empire convincing itself that Victoria had died before time. You can well imagine how it happened. A misunderstanding in a tiny village, […]

Beach recently revived one of his favourite tags, the duel and the dumb duel. Here is a doubtful sounding example reported in a British newspaper in 1890. The date of the duel itself should be about 1875, which means that an argument between provincial army officers had a lot of time to be exaggerated into […]

Ben Montgomery, The Leper Spy BM continues with his excellent WW2 monographs…

In Plymouth, in the Second World War, a strange idea evolved, among the bombed out population: Plymouth, as an important port, was all too frequently visited by the Luftwaffe. The population came to believe that Herman Göring, the head of his Luftwaffe, personally took part in the attacks on the city. Plymouth folk even claimed […]