This cartoon from the Penny Illustrated Paper of March 4, 1905 proposes a novel method for police constables to “move on” ne’er-do-wells in the streets of London. The technique is a bit curious in that kicks weren’t widely associated with jiujitsu at that time.
Images from the upcoming “suffrajitsu” display (courtesy of Charlotte Graham Photography) at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, England, and their Edwardian-era antecedents:
The following article describing a Bartitsu-like method of self-defence was first published in Pearson’s Weekly of January 26, 1911. The author’s name is given as Baron Albrecht von Knobelsdorff-Brenkenhoff, but archive searches have failed to bring up any further reference to that name, let alone in connection with teaching self-defence to the London police.
By Baron ALBRECHT VON KNOBELSDORFF-BRENKENHOFF, Who has been Appointed Official Instructor to the London City Police in Wrestling and Self-Defence.
When I was quite a boy my father, an officer himself, once remarked that I would never he a horseman. I made up my mind to prove the contrary, and when I was nineteen I joined a cavalry regiment, and during my ten years’ service in the German Army I became rather well known as a steeplechase rider.
A similar determination influenced me when I took up wrestling. At that time I was not very strong, and once I overheard Peter Gotz, the well-known wrestler, make the remark that I would never he a good wrestler. I determined to study not only wrestling, but also boxing and jiu-jitsu and the science of self-defence generally, and I planned a course of work and exercise to that end. I made such good progress that I was soon able to begin teaching my system to others, and it is this system of self-defence—a combination of wrestling, boxing, and jiu-jitsu—that I am teaching to the police in London.
Perhaps I might recall my first contact with the Metropolitan Police.
Some years ago I was over here on business, and one night I found myself in the neighbourhood of Spa Road, Bermondsey. As I turned a corner I came suddenly upon a struggling group; a policeman trying to beat off the attack of six men.
How the trouble had arisen, I do not know; probably the policeman had been arresting one of the men, and his friends had attempted to rescue him, and when I arrived on the scene things were looking very bad for the unfortunate constable. The men had knocked his truncheon out of his hand, and were pressing him so hard that he had no opportunity of blowing his whistle for assistance.
Whatever the rights or wrongs of the matter, six to one seemed to be unfair, so I took a hand in the matter myself. I succeeded in restoring his truncheon to the constable, and after a few minutes’ active “self-defence” we had half-a-dozen surprised and rather dazed ruffians spread out in the street. Other assistance arrived soon, and as I did not wish to be called as a witness I slipped away.
My system of resisting and overcoming attack is, to a certain extent, based on boxing and wrestling, but these two forms of exercise depend so much on the height and weight of a man that a short, light man has little or no chance in the ordinary way against a heavy opponent. It is obvious, then, that something more is needed than the mere ability to strike hard.
A straight, powerful blow with the left fist is an excellent thing, but often it is easier and quicker to put an adversary on his back by some swift, unexpected grip that at once disarms him and puts him at your mercy. This may seem difficult, but it can be done, and my policeman pupils are making excellent progress.
No great expenditure of strength is necessary. In fact, one of my first troubles in training a man is to get him not to exercise his utmost strength as he is usually inclined to do. The whole thing can be learned very easily if one makes up one’s mind to discard strength for swiftness. The blows of a man who trusts to his strength and weight are almost certain to be too slow in a fight against a swift, agile adversary, as shown many times in “the ring.”
Here are one or two hints on self-defence. If you are attacked by a taller man, get down instantly and grasp his legs. Then you can either jerk his legs towards you and throw him on his back, or lift him straight up and throw him over your head. If you are attacked by a smaller man, get hold of him and pull him up so that he has no chance to get hold of your legs.
When thrown on the ground, never let your feet get out of contact with the other man’s feet and legs. In this position even a light man can throw a heavy man. Leverage, not weight, counts here, and if the standing man should resit he runs the risk of getting his leg broken.
In all cases let your opponent get a firm hold. This may sound strange advice, but you will find that you have a bettor chance then to throw him because he cannot break away quickly enough, and is mostly at your mercy.
My pupils in the Metropolitan Police are all powerful men, but, as has unfortunately been proved lately, something more than strength and weight are required if policemen are to carry out their duties with any degree of safety in the rougher quarters of the East End of London.
By an extraordinary coincidence, on the night of the recent Houndsditch murders I happened to be at the police gymnasium, and my pupils were discussing how a man could defend himself against another with a revolver. One of them asked me: ” Supposing I were going to shoot you at fairly close quarters, what would you do?”
“Fall down at once,” I replied, “as though dead.” He laughed, and raising his arm, pretended to fire at me. But before he had got his aim I was down on the floor; then, in a flash, I twisted round, seized his ankles, and tipped him over. He was prostrate on the floor with myself on top of him before he knew what was happening.
I would strongly advise the authorities to arm the police with revolvers–and the sooner the better –if it is only to frighten those dastardly scoundrels who will never dare to fight an even match.
The Comedy Channel’s hit series Drunk History, in which interesting past events are related by inebriated comedians, has followed in the footsteps of the UK version of the show by featuring the jujitsuffragettes of the Edwardian English women’s rights movement. “Civil Rights” was the title and theme of Drunk History’s episode 5, season 5 show, which screened in the US on Feb. 20, 2018.
The suffrajitsu segment is narrated by Kirby Howell-Baptiste and stars Tatiana Maslany as Emmeline Pankhurst, who is introduced leading the ill-fated “raid on Parliament” on November 10, 1910. This raid was the fourteenth attempt by the Women’s Social and Political Union to present a petition to Parliament and developed into a near riot in which many protestors complained of police brutality; the event later became known as “Black Friday”.
The Drunk History episode exerts some dramatic licence in stating that Mrs. Pankhurst’s sister was killed during the protest. In reality, she died about a month later (possibly as the result of an accident while she was being force-fed in prison).
Actress Maria Blasucci plays martial arts instructor Edith Garrud and several scenes are set in her opulent dojo, where she is shown training the new suffragette Bodyguard team in the womanly art of jiujitsu. Gert Harding, played by Kat Dennings, is portrayed as Mrs. Garrud’s star pupil; in reality, Harding did study martial arts with Garrud and also led the Bodyguard team.
The show also offers fairly accurate representations of two key WSPU rallies in which the Bodyguard clashed with the police. The Campden Hill (Camden) rally, which was also portrayed in the Drunk History UK episode on the same theme as well as the 2015 feature film Suffragette, shows how the Bodyguard tricked the police into arresting a body double while the real Mrs. Pankhurst made her escape.
The second re-enactment is of the famous “Battle of Glasgow”, when the Bodyguard openly confronted and fought with the police on the stage of St. Andrew’s Hall, in front of some 4500 shocked witnesses. Although the show implies that this event turned the tide of the radical suffrage movement and led directly to the enfranchisement of women, the real history is (of course) vastly more complicated.
In reality, the First World War broke out shortly after the Glasgow brawl, at which point Mrs. Pankhurst suspended all militant suffrage activities and supported the government throughout the crisis, especially by organising and encouraging women to “do men’s work” while their husbands, sons and brothers were fighting overseas. It’s generally conceded that the suspension of WSPU militancy, in combination with the work done by women during wartime, tipped the balance in favour of “votes for women” as the conflict drew to a close.
The “Civil Rights” episode of Drunk History also includes interesting segments on the Birmingham Children’s March and the disability rights activists who organized America’s longest sit-in of a federal building. Note that the dialogue does include some swearing and mildly raunchy slang and so may not be safe for work.
If you enjoy Drunk History’s take on the suffragette Bodyguard story, keep an eye out for the upcoming full-length documentary No Man Shall Protect Us, which will cover the same subject in much greater depth, albeit with much less drunken hilarity, and check out the graphic novel Suffrajitsu: Mrs. Pankhurst’s Amazons, written by Bartitsu instructor Tony Wolf.
Although we don’t have a full catalogue of the atemi (striking and nerve pressure techniques) practiced at the Bartitsu Club circa 1901, analysis of the writings of E.W. Barton-Wright and his associates reveals a preponderance of attacks targetting the opponent’s face and throat. The trachea (or “tonsil”) appears as a pressure target in three of the fifteen atemi methods represented in Barton-Wright’s “New Art of Self-Defence” articles (1899). Journalists and other observers frequently (and somewhat alarmedly) referred to these methods of unarmed Bartitsu as “fiendish science” and “foul play”.
While throat attacks were, indeed, counted as fouls in European wrestling styles, Japanese jiujitsu was concerned with practical self-defence rather than manly sport. As Barton-Wright himself had pragmatically noted,”no method was too severe” to be applied in defence of one’s own life.
With your left hand firmly grasp his right wrist. Then seize his throat with your right hand, forcing your thumb into his tonsil. This will cause intense pain, and he will bend his head and body backwards in order to avoid it. In this position he is standing off his balance and you take this opportunity of placing your right foot behind his right knee, and then proceeding to throw him as before.
In this video, nightclub bouncer and bodyguard Scott Pilkington demonstrates the direct stopping power of a trachea hold:
Bartitsu instructor Alex Kiermayer (above) and pugilist Christoph Reinberger are teaming up for a seminar in Victorian and Edwardian antagonistics. The two-day event will cover fisticuffs, jiujitsu, Bartitsu stick fighting and more and will take place between June 30 – July 1 2018 in the Bavarian municipality of Garching an der Alz. For all details (in the German language) please visit this site.
The past week of production on No Man Shall Protect Us: The Hidden History of the Suffragette Bodyguards has included black-screen studio action scenes performed by a very talented pair of stuntpeople. Rather than shooting long, elaborate fights, the aim was to create about twenty short, diverse sequences that will be edited together to illustrate key moments of the suffragette Bodyguards’ story.
Both the Bodyguards and the London police were streetwise, experienced tusslers, but – jiujutsu lessons notwithstanding – few of them were experts in a formal fighting style. Therefore, the challenge was to keep the action within the bounds of plausibility, while still ensuring that each “fight” told its own story. That meant that the fights had to look scrappy and relatively realistic, with the Bodyguard and the constable occasionally staggering off-balance in the heat of the action or succeeding as much through luck as through skill.
Likewise, unusually for fight scenes, the characters were not necessarily trying to hurt each other. The suffragette’s objective was more often simply to get past or escape from the constable, whereas the constable was attempting to block or arrest the suffragette.
When clubs and truncheons were drawn, though, most bets were off …
The production has now also filmed a number of prop inserts, including demonstrations of the circa 1909 boardgame Suffragetto, to help illustrate the complex tactics of suffragette vs. police street skirmishes.
No Man Shall Protect Us is now entering the final stages of production. Once the documentary is edited, it will be made freely available as an educational resource via Vimeo.
Andres Morales of Chile (in the white-trimmed fencing mask) demonstrates the quick, deceptive Vigny canne style, as incorporated into Bartitsu circa 1900.
As described by a journalist from The Sporting Life newspaper in July of 1899:
(Vigny) first proceeded to demonstrate the use of the stick by showing the different attacks and guards, displaying wonderful wrist work, in which great strengths and suppleness were combined. He grasps a stout Malacca cane about six inches from the end, and does all the movements with the wrist only, and not with the fingers. He passes his stick from right hand to left and vice versa without the slightest trouble, using right-hand and left-hand alternately with equal dexterity.
This photo published in the Italian journal La Stampa Sportiva (November, 1903) shows former Bartitsu Club instructor Sadakazu Uyenishi wheeling out an old favourite. The “bamboo pole trick” had been a feature of some of the earliest exhibitions of jiujitsu in London, and a prone variation on the same principle was even mentioned in the memoir of Dutch anthropologist Herman ten Kate, who had trained in the same Shinden Fudo Ryu dojo in Kobe as had Bartitsu founder E.W. Barton-Wright.
As a test/demonstration, the “bamboo pole trick” legitimately does show off the performer’s ability to withstand pain and discomfort and to manage the direction of pressure against their throat. Subtle shifts of position change the angle of pressure from “straight into the trachea” to “downward against the collar-bones”, which, though still uncomfortable and somewhat risky, is a less actively dangerous than trying to resist a pole shoved directly into the sensitive throat area.
That said, it’s really more of a carnival sideshow stunt than an exhibition of martial arts skill, and that point was not lost on some early observers of the trick in London. According to a report published in the Sporting Times of October 20, 1900:
Then the talking began, for a gentleman of ripe years, alluded to affectionately by most of the audience as “Charley,” was not quite satisfied with the pushing experiment of arm against throat, and had something to say as to leverage and the Georgia Magnet. Whether he wanted make a match between the little American lady and the big Jap, we in the stalls could not quite catch; but when the discussion was at its height, Mr. Barton Wright appeared from behind the scenes with a message from the big Jap*. He (the big Jap) would stand against the wall, and let the doubting gentleman push with the pole as hard as be could against his throat, if afterwards the doubler would wrestle a fall with him.
It’s a little ironic that “Charley” should have cited the Georgia Magnet in his objection to the bamboo pole trick, given that E.W. Barton-Wright himself had published an expose of Georgia Magnet-style leverage tricks presented as feats of “supernatural” strength.
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Antagonistics V – Tactical Principles of Victorian Self-Defense
with Professor Mark P. Donnelly
Saturday, April 21, 2018, 1:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
440 Lafayette Street, Room 3D
New York, NY 10003
Mark P. Donnelly (Professor of Arms), an internationally-recognized expert on historical combat, will teach this five-hour “gentlemanly antagonistics” workshop.
– Explore the tactical principles of Bartitsu, and how they are still relevant today.
– Learn to use a walking stick, parasol, and other Victorian accessories to maintain “preservation of person and property when beset upon by ne’er-do-wells of nefarious intent.”
– For the first time ever, we’ll be exploring the history and use of the swordstick or sword-cane as commonly carried in Victorian and Edwardian Europe.
This workshop is a rare opportunity to study martial arts, combative theory, and obscure history in a safe, controlled, welcoming and civilized atmosphere with some of the top practitioners in the world. Open to gentlemen and ladies over 18. All experience levels welcome and all equipment provided.
Visit www.nycsteampunk.com to register. Places are limited.
