Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

One of the great twentieth-century photographs. The four men who dominate Europe in late September 1938 stand side by side. On the left, looking as if he has an umbrella up his bottom, there is Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister and pioneer of Britain’s disastrous experiment with appeasement. Connoisseurs of the British national character will […]

Luftwaffe prisoners under British custody

Here is another in our series of the minor monsters of British mythology, the terrible child-eating ‘Tom Dockin’. The name ‘Tom Dockin’ was associated with Sheffield (in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire) and seems to date back at least to the late eighteenth century on the evidence of this intelligent-sounding correspondent, John […]

25, it was 1895.

One newspaper report includes this precious Victorian story, which Beach has been unable to track down elsewhere. It is satisfying so there must be other versions out there. There is an old story of a thief who, engaging the landlord of a country tavern a bet that he could not sit in front of clock […]

Sorry

In 1975 Jeremy Thorpe, the then leader of the British Liberal Party, lost his head. After a homosexual affair had gone wrong – and in a period where this would have lost him his job and his name – he had a friend, telephone a ‘heavy’, Andrew Newton, to go and threaten his ex-boyfriend, Norman […]

Hendrix on Carnaby Street, note the girls behind

A terminological problem that readers might be able to help with: drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com. Historians of witchcraft break down into two categories. The vast majority believe that the witch craze was essentially all a horrible misunderstanding and that the men and women found guilty of crimes were innocents. A small minority, but not […]

Mei Fong, One Child  Always been curious about this policy and its social effects…

A few weeks ago Beach had the very great pleasure of looking at the genealogy of various words with a root in bugge: these related to such monsters as bogeyman, boggles and boggins (all nasty fairies). That post was dedicated to following an almost pathetically inadequate trail of breadcrumbs through the Indo European forest. This […]

Martin Caidin, Black Thursday A disastrous WW2 raid

Invisible books are, as long time readers of this blog will know, books that have never existed save in the imagination. Beach has offered, over the years, many such invisible titles, most dreamt up or taken from books (where there are shelves and shelves of these non-existent volumes). However, a new sub-category of invisible book […]

The happy combination of imperial suns and swastikas…

The second in our Poetic Justice series (covered Molotov in Mongolia a year ago) is dedicated to George Blake, Donald MacClean, Kim Philby and Guy Burgess. Beach has treated these sorry four briefly on another occasion: Dealing with Double Agents. But for the uninitiated all were British spies whose night job was to work for […]