Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Some of the most horrific stats from WW2 are the survival rates of Russian and German POWs in each other’s camps. Adelbert Holl’s After Stalingrad is now available in English.

Beach was very excited to find this reference yesterday from the works of al-`Udhri an eleventh-century Arab writer in Spain (thanks to Caitlin Green). Al-‘Uhdri was quoted by another author (al-Qazwini) in the thirteenth-century. This passage allegedly shows a glimpse of Ireland through Arab eyes. The Norsemen have no capital in all the world save […]

Renwick is a pretty Cumbrian village with one bizarre episode in its past: a duel between a local and a deadly cockatrice in the first decade of the seventeenth century. There are a good many references to this legend in the nineteenth century. But the earliest written version appears as an aside in  Hutchinson’s History of the […]

Lori Clune, on the demise of Mr and Mrs R: Executing the Rosenbergs: Death and Diplomacy in a Cold War World, perhaps the book I’m most looking forward to this month…

This is a heartbreaking notice from one of the Irish papers, 1862. First a little background. The Irish countryside had literally hundreds of ‘fairy trees’ (particularly thorns) and ‘fairy bushes’, which were associated with ‘the good people’: one such Fairy Bush appears here, though Beach has found no trace of it in other records. Second, […]

From Wooden Crosses, the French film, one of the most moving Great War images.

Beach ran across this guide to seduction while searching for proof about the ancient science of mole divination. The date is apparently Regency (early 1800s?). There is some nonsense about marriage not debauchery, but then we get down to the sexual brass tacks and there isn’t a vicar or congregation in sight. First, your likely […]

The last 19C lottery.

Many moons ago, Beach began the long search to find the last witch killing in history. He quickly narrowed down to Western witch killing, because of course, there are many killings in Africa and Asia to this day. Every so often he thinks he has come close, but then another inconvenient and later murder falls […]

Love the bodies emerging from the waves, how many shipwrecks?

Sergeant Monday was a festival in the north-western English town of Kendal for the installation of a new mayor. Basically this was a Saturnalia for the children of the town: and by ancient convention any students in school would be ‘battered out’ by older boys, who would intimidate teachers into silence. Hundreds of kids would then […]

Not sure why but found this charming…

Life expectancy is a tricky thing. Every demographer knows that, in the modern world, the difference between a national life expectancy of 40 in country A and 70 in country B is predominantly about how many children die in their early years of life. If you look at life expectancy for fifteen year olds then […]

I hope the kangaroo won

Joshua Rubenstein, The Last Days of Stalin, another promising summer book…