William Comyns Beaumont (1873-1956) was a Scots journalist and author. He was frequently referred to as an eccentric and not without good reason. Alfred de Grazia summarises Beaumont's main ideas as follows:

1. The geology of the world's surface is largely catastrophic.
2. The catastrophe was caused by a cometary collision.
3. All geological formations were shifted as a result.
4. Cosmic lightning played a major role.
5. Hydrocarbons were present in cometary tails.
6. Ancient chronology was several hundred years too old.
7. The Ancient calendars had to be revised because of the catastrophe.
8. Many species were extinguished catastrophically.
9. Religion was born in cometary worship and tied to phallic forms because of the shape of comets.
10. Fear of cometary collisions is inherited by mankind.
11. Vermin were deposited by comets which also provoked plagues.
12. Deities from Egypt, Greece, Meso-America, and elsewhere were identified with planets.
13. Pyramids were both astronomical observatories and 'air-raid shelters' for nobility and kings.
14. Planet Saturn, as a comet, caused the Noachian Deluge.
15. The Atlantis date (c. 9500 BC) given by Plato had to be shortened.
16. Extensive legendary evidence pictures the 'hairy', 'bearded', 'blazing stars' that were comets.
17. Stonehenge, Avebury Circle and similar monuments were astronomical instruments.
18. Central American legends (and cultures) were contemporaneous with those of the Old World.
19. The intercalary 'five evil days' were cursed because they coincided with a world disaster and the ending of an age.
20. The serpent, dragon, winged-globe, caduceus, and other ancient symbols are traceable to cometary catastrophes.
21. Religious festivals are dated by cometary catastrophes.
22. Cometary conflagrations are the origin of coal deposits.
23. The ancients had a true 360 day year.
24. The planet Venus underwent great changes in color, diameter, figure, and orbit in the time of Ogyges.
25. Quetzalcoatl (Coculkan-Hurakan) commemorated the cometary dragon for the Meso-Americans.

Between 1946 and 1949, Comyns Beaumont astonished the world with the following extraordinary revelations:

Jesus of Nazareth had been crucified just outside of Edinburgh, Scotland – the site of the ancient city of Jerusalem.

Satan was a comet that collided with Earth and causes Noah’s flood.

The ancient Egyptians were in fact Irishmen.

Hell is to be found in western Scotland.

The Greek hero Achilles spent his childhood on the Isle of Skye.

Galilee, birthplace of Jesus, was in Wales.

Ancient Athens was in reality, Bath, England.

He also believed Shakespeare’s plays were written by Francis Bacon and accepted the existence of giants based on British folklore.

He started his radical revision of history with the belief, innocuous enough, that the lost island of Atlantis might be Britain. According to the legend, Atlantis had vanished beneath the waves around 9000 B.C.

He further claimed that the native Celts had colonized many countries of the world, notably in Europe, the Middle East, and South America. Then he said a comet had collided with the Earth destroying a huge landmass in northern Britain. The survivors spread the news of this calamity to the Celtic or Atlantean colonies, and so today we find the legend of a cataclysmic flood in many widely scattered cultures.

Comyns Beaumont had done little more than add another eccentric book to the pile of speculation about the location of Atlantis.

He then noticed the similarities between modern British place names and those in the ancient world, and concluded that many of these places had in reality, been in Britain itself. Loch Carron in Scotland, for instance, and the nearby village of Erbusaig sounded to his ears strangely like Acheron, the Greek river of Hell, and mythical purgatory Erebus. Achilles, the Greek hero, grew up on the island of Skyros which could be none other than the Isle of Skye. Bath had to be Athens; the names of the two cities were too similar to be otherwise.

Then reasoned Comyns Beaumont, if the Flood had occurred in northwestern Europe, it was surely likely that Noah and every other Biblical character had lived there too. The British Isles were the true cradle of civilization.

Once inspired with that idea, he was not distracted by the facts. For his theory to be consistent, all other peoples and places of the classical world had to be in or near Britain. With unending energy he redrew the map so that the ancient countries of the Mediterranean and North Africa fit neatly into the map of Britain. It was irrelevant that Athens or Jerusalem, Crete or Ethiopia persisted in occupying their habitual sites in modern times.

Some Excerpts:

The Flood, to the world generally a vague and nebulous tradition, really conceals the most appalling visitation and its ravages in the British Isles and Scandinavian lands may be retraced to more considerable extent by the effects of what geologists term the “Drift” Age. It was no mere ice drift. It was sudden and terribly swift and violent.

It permanently affected the world’s climate towards greater extremes of cold and damp, lengthened the solar year by enlarging the world’s orbit. It shaped world history by compelling the flight of survivors to other less inhospitable climes and led in considerable degree to the dispersion of the Aryans. It inundated the British Isles for a period to a great extent except the higher lands. It was the drowning of Atlantis. The Flood immortalizes the collision of a fallen planet, later termed Satan, actually a cometary body, with our earth.

The British Isles and Scandinavia admittedly comprise one of the oldest land surfaces of the world, and, as there is reason to believe from archaeological and other evidence, one of the first inhabited by primeval man. They form part of an ancient continental surface...and at no considerable distance of time Britain was separated from Norway by no more than the width of a river estuary...Formerly this region of Old Red, later called Hyperborea by the ancients, enjoyed a wholly delicious climate …

The land we now call Egypt was colonized...and was originally peopled by fair Celts from the shores of Britain. This was the Exodus of the Aryans, some of whom returned later to their primeval homes …

The impeccable illogic of Comyns Beaumont insisted that historians had distorted the truth in order to glorify their own countries. It was clear from a “true reading” of the records that Ethiopia was Ireland, Sodom was Bristol, Crete was another name for the Shetland Islands. As for Edinburgh and Jerusalem, the unique vision of Comyns Beaumont found many parallels. The Dung Gate in Edinburgh was the King’s Stables Gate in Jerusalem. Edinburgh Castle was the Pool of Bethesda. Both cities had streets called Water Gate. The Mount of Olives was just a hill outside of Edinburgh named Arthur’s Seat.

All of this was consistent with Comyns Beaumont’s lifelong belief in the innate superiority of all things British. His career as a journalist has been dogged by his frustration with newspaper owners and editors who, he believed, failed to represent British interests adequately. His new theory of history restored the balance, to his satisfaction at least and to the amazement and entertainment of all those who read his books.

The Riddle of the Earth (written under the name of Appian Way), Chapman & Hall, London (or Brentano's, New York), 1925.

 The Mysterious Comet: Or the Origin, Building up, and Destruction of Worlds, by means of Cometary Contacts, Rider & Co., London, 1932.

The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain, Rider & Co., London, 1946 (Kessinger Publishing Co., 1997.

Britain, the Key to World History, Rider & Co., London, 1947.

The Private Life of the Virgin Queen, self-published, 1947.

A Rebel in Fleet Street, Hutchinson & Co., London, 1948 (or 1944) (his autobiography) .

The Great Deception (hitherto 'lost' and referenced as After Atlantis: the Greatest Story Never Told in Eccentric Lives, Peculiar Notions.

Sample book PDF:

https://hotk.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/britain-key-to-world-history.pdf

Sources:

Facts and Fallacies pgs 222-223

http://www.truthcontrol.com/comyns-beaumont

http://www.velikovsky.info/Comyns_Beaumont