An Illustrated Catalogue of Captain Laing’s Bartitsu Stickfighting

• Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Tuesday, 15th August 2017

For convenience, here follows a compilation of all of the drills and self-defence set-plays recorded in Captain F.C. Laing’s 1902 article, “The Bartitsu Method of Self Defence”.  As Laing did not illustrate these sequences – rather, simply describing them in more-or-less detail via prose – the following illustrated sets are presented as interpretations, employing photographs modified from E.W. Barton-Wright’s own “Self-Defence with a Walking Stick” articles for Pearson’s Magazine.

That said, as Laing was a keen student at the Bartitsu Club who learned directly from Barton-Wright and Pierre Vigny, his drills and set-plays constitute part of the Bartitsu canon and serve as a very useful supplement to Barton-Wright’s own writing on this subject.  In particular, Laing offers a simple progression of basic drills that were not illustrated in Barton-Wright’s essays.

First Practice #1

First Practice #2

First Practice #3 (with additional notes on the Second Practice, etc.)

Third Practice

An interpretation of the Fourth Practice

“Attacked by a man with a stick in his hand”

“A man without a stick rushes at you with his fist”