Keeping a Safe Distance in Victorian London

The mid-19th century moral panic over garroting gangs (urban street muggers) reached its absurdist conclusion in this Punch Magazine cartoon, suggesting the invention of a reinforced hoop skirt frame to keep garroters at a safe distance.

Sadly, while scholars agree that the garroting panic was largely driven by newspaper sales, the threat of COVID-19 is all too real. Here’s a handy guide from the BBC on the daily practicalities of keeping safe distance:

Coronavirus: How far is 2m?

To help fight the spread of coronavirus, the UK government says whenever you leave the house, you should keep 2m apart from others.bbc.in/Coronavirus

Posted by BBC News on Friday, March 27, 2020

And here’s a short video on self-care during trying times and staying socially connected while physically apart:

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Andres Morales Demonstrates the Integrated Stick Method

Método Integrado de Bastón, haciendo sombra.

Posted by Andres Pino Morales on Saturday, March 28, 2020

Andres Morales of Santiago, Chile performs a solo drill exhibiting techniques from his Integrated Stick Method, which largely combines the Vigny and Bonafont styles.

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Bartitsu at Home: Tommy Joe Moore Teaches Cane vs. Multiple Opponents

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Bartitsu at Home: Tommy Joe Moore Teaches Pugilism and Atemi-Waza

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Bartitsu at Home: Tommy Joe Moore Teaches Savate Hand Strikes

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Yukio Tani in 1920

Former Bartitsu Club instructor Yuki Tani is shown executing a collar choke against wrestler Jack Madden in this photo from the Sunday Pictorial of January 4, 1920. Tani won the contest in a time of 14 minutes and 4 seconds.

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Introduction to the Bartitsu Lab

Posted by Tommy Joe Moore on Sunday, June 14, 2020

In this short video, Bartitsu Lab founder Tommy Joe Moore introduces his approach to reviving E.W. Barton-Wright’s “New Art of Self Defence”.

We have long argued in favour of pressure-testing conclusions via hard sparring and endorse this approach as the best way forward for the Bartitsu revival as a whole. It’s well worth noting that the same, pragmatic methodology can and should be applied from the HEMA-oriented perspective of recreating the original art as closely as possible on its own terms.

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Concerning the Bartitsu Compendium, Volumes 1 and 2

  • Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Tuesday, 11th September 2018

By Tony Wolf

This article offers a brief “history” of the Bartitsu revival movement, especially via the production of the two volumes of the Bartitsu Compendium in 2005 and 2008.

The advent of the Internet during the late 1990s facilitated contact and communication in innumerable special interest fields, very often among individuals and small groups that had been working in relative isolation for years. The newfound ability to “meet” fellow enthusiasts from all around the world online dramatically expanded and accelerated many of these fields; it was, to put it mildly, a heady time.

In the martial arts sphere, the esoteric practice of reviving previously extinct fighting styles received an especially strong boost during this period. The Bartitsu revival began as part of this new movement, originally via the Bartitsu Forum Yahoo Group email list, which was founded by author and martial artist Will Thomas in 2002, almost exactly one century after the original London Bartitsu Club had closed down.

Within about three years, members of the international Forum – which had quickly and informally morphed into the Bartitsu Society – had tracked down a vast quantity of archival information related to E.W. Barton-Wright’s martial art. Most notable were Barton-Wright’s article series for Pearson’s Magazine, which had been discovered by the late British martial arts historian Richard Bowen and which were first broadcast online via the Electronic Journal of Martial Arts and Sciences website.  Many of the characteristics of Bartitsu revivalism, including the concepts of “canonical” and “neo” Bartitsu and the essentially open-source nature of the revival itself, were likewise defined during this period.

By early 2004, we had so much information that it seemed fitting to try to get it into a publishable format, if only for the convenience of the (still) relatively few people who had taken a strong interest in the subject.  Also, though, there was a growing sense that E.W. Barton-Wright had not yet received due recognition.  The more we were learning about his life and fighting style, the more it seemed that he should be acknowledged as a martial arts pioneer and innovator.  Therefore, the decision was made to dedicate any profits from the book to memorialising Barton-Wright’s legacy.

Because the potential readership seemed so small and specialised, we realised that the Bartitsu Compendium was unlikely to appeal to traditional publishers.  Therefore, we  decided to take advantage of the then-relatively new POD (Print On Demand) technology, which would allow individual copies of the book to be automatically printed and shipped as they were ordered.

Volume 1 of the Bartitsu Compendium – which was eventually subtitled “History and the Canonical Syllabus” – was compiled as a group labour of love.  I volunteered to edit and generally steer the project and numerous others produced original articles, tracked down ever more obscure sources in European library archives and second-hand bookstores, manually transcribed print into electronic text (OCR technology was not then what it is now) and lent their talents to translations from various foreign languages (likewise re. translation software).

The compilation and editing process took about a year, and then the book was officially launched at a function held in an Edwardian-era meeting room in the St. Anne’s Church complex in Soho, London, literally a stone’s throw from the site of the original Bartitsu Club in Shaftesbury Avenue.  A simple table display included a bouquet of flowers, a straw boater hat and a Vigny-style walking stick, along with print-outs of the various chapters.  Ragtime music played quietly in the background.

I offered a short lecture on the history of Bartitsu and a demonstration of some of the canonical techniques, followed by a champagne toast to the memory of E.W. Barton-Wright.  Guests were then invited to mingle and peruse the print-out chapters (and, if they wished, take them as souvenirs).

To our surprise, the first volume of the Compendium sold well and, in fact, it was Lulu Publications’ best-selling martial arts book for a number of years. Funds from those sales supported the first three Bartitsu School of Arms conferences (in London, Chicago and Newcastle, respectively) and paid for a Bartitsu/Barton-Wright memorial that became part of the Marylebone Library collection, among other projects.

The Bartitsu revival proceeded and grew, with increasing numbers of seminars and ongoing courses being established. By 2007 it was clear that we needed a second volume, presenting resources that went beyond the canonical material and into the corpus of material produced by Bartitsu Club instructors and their first generation of students.

Volume 2 was a more complicated undertaking because it involved cross-referencing over a dozen early 20th century self-defence manuals, almost all from within the direct Bartitsu Club lineage, with the aim of synthesising a complete neo-Bartitsu syllabus. Individual techniques were gathered from multiple sources and carefully assessed, omitting redundancies and duplications while retaining useful variations. We also wanted to avoid developing a fully standardised, prescriptive curriculum, in favour of allowing individuals and clubs to choose their own “paths” through the various techniques and styles that went into the Bartitsu cross-training mix.  Further, the lessons of volume 2 were joined together by a set of technical and tactical principles or “themes” redacted from the writings of E.W. Barton-Wright.

Again, the production of the book was very much a team effort, requiring the locating, scanning, transcribing etc. of a wide range of antique self-defence books and articles.

The second volume of the Bartitsu Compendium (subtitled “Antagonistics”) was launched in 2008, and proved to be very nearly as popular as Volume 1. The Compendia have formed the backbone of the Bartitsu revival since then, especially during the “boom time” of roughly 2009-13, which was engendered by the massive popular success of the action-packed Sherlock Holmes movies and consequently by substantial media, pop-culture and academic interest in Bartitsu.

There are currently about 50 Bartitsu clubs and study groups spread throughout the world and many of the old Bartitsu mysteries have either been solved outright or satisfactorily mitigated through educated guesswork.  Although it will never be the “next big thing” in the martial arts world, all signs point to Bartitsu continuing as a niche-interest study for those who spend about equal time in the library and in the dojo.

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Miss Blanche Whitney, the World’s Champion Lady Wrestler (1911)

  • Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Saturday, 26th November 2016

This gallery of images from an article in the Oregon Daily Journal (April 30, 1911) showcases the combative talents of Miss Blanche Whitney.

Between 1908-11, the Philadelphian Miss Whitney travelled the US carnival and vaudeville circuit, taking on all comers as the “World’s Champion Lady Wrestler”. She challenged any woman in the audience to try their skill against hers, and would also grapple with any male wrestler weighing no more than 145 lbs (she herself weighed in at a muscular 155 lbs). She was also held to be a proficient boxer and foil fencer, and indeed an all-around athlete whose skills included bowling and gymnastics.

During April of 1910 she defied a police ban on “lady wrestling” contests in Chicago and took on Miss Belle Myers in an otherwise all-male wrestling card. She then moved on to performing tent-shows at the lakeside White City amusement park, where she proudly informed an interviewer that she was teaching up to four classes a day for “society ladies” desiring to learn how to apply half-nelsons and hammerlocks.

It may have been at the White City that she assembled her troupe of “Lady Athletes” – wrestlers, boxers, ball-punchers and gymnasts – with whom she later toured to perform at the great Appalachian Exhibition.

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Goldie Griffith, one of Miss Whitney’s Lady Athletes, strikes a pugilistic pose.

The “Americanised jiujitsu” featured in these pictures may not be strictly traditional – it may, in fact, represent something more in the nature of catch-as-catch-can wrestling plus a couple of half-learned tricks from a jiujitsu manual. Nevertheless, while Miss Whitney was self-professedly not a suffragette (“I can take care of myself without a vote”), she had no qualms about promoting her contests and classes as exemplars of women’s self-defence.

If a husband is cross and disagreeable, “advises the stalwart Miss Whitney, “just put him on his back as fast as he can get up. It will make a gentle man out of him in no time.

This clinging vine stuff is alright, but, believe me, the woman is a winner who can look her husband in the eye and say, ‘what about the coin for that new dress? Do you come across like a little man, or do I throw you down and sit on you while you make up your mind?’

Think how different the world would be if such scenes were common. The stranglehold might be useful in case hubby came home late at night.

Miss Whitney reported that she herself had applied some of these lessons one night in a Chicago alley:

(…) a tall man halted her in the semi-darkness and said something which, in her surprise, she took to be the words of a “hold up. ” Whether it meant robbery or flirtation, she didn’t waste time inquiring. She merely gripped him by the coat lapel, the simplest trick in Americanized jujitsu, and yanked him forward and downward . At the same instant she swung a clenched fist upward – the simplest blow in sparring – and landed on his jaw. The combination of descending head and ascending fist came within an ace of being a knockout. Her accoster reeled, dazed, for the instant she needed to brush past him and reach the full streetlights.

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“Engaging Toughs”: Pressure Testing and Sparring in Neo-Bartitsu Training

  • Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Monday, 2nd September 2013

“I learned various methods including boxing, wrestling, fencing, savate and the use of the stiletto under recognised masters, and by engaging toughs I trained myself until I was satisfied in practical application.”

– E.W. Barton-Wright, 1950

Sparring

The Bartitsu revival has gathered real momentum over the past several years, spurred on by the success of the Sherlock Holmes film franchise and by the continuing popularity of steampunk. New clubs and study groups are forming and Bartitsu presentations have become fixtures on the pop-culture convention circuit, especially at steampunk conventions.

The association with Sherlock Holmes and “fantastic Victoriana” means that Bartitsu now holds some appeal for people who might not otherwise take much of an interest in martial arts training, perhaps via taking a “taster” class or just watching a demonstration at a convention. Thus, their first exposure to Bartitsu is often in a basically ironic, playful or academic context that is geared towards people with no, or very little, prior background in martial arts training.

Going through the motions …

Under these circumstances, the overriding requirements are that the experience should be safe and enjoyable for all concerned. Thus, in taster classes, techniques are typically taught and rehearsed slowly and carefully, with some attention to correct form but little emphasis on realistic application against a determined, resistant opponent.

Demonstrations at these events can vary widely, from closely researched presentations of authentic Bartitsu techniques, through to slapstick displays that bear little actual resemblance to the c1900 art.

Engaging toughs …

Participants in an ongoing Bartitsu course, however, can expect to go beyond the rote rehearsal of pre-arranged techniques, and to be progressively introduced to the crucial element of spontaneous, active resistance. In so doing, they may join in the spirit of E.W. Barton-Wright and Pierre Vigny “engaging toughs”, or Bartitsu Club jujitsu instructors Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi, who regularly took on all challengers on the stages of London music halls.

The cliched “sport vs. street” or “sport vs. martial art” argument posits an artificial either/or duality between self-defence/combat training and active competition. Understanding that it’s impossible to safely spar or compete using the totality of techniques from a combat-oriented style, it certainly is possible to spar within a rule-set that draws as much as is safely practical from that style.

It can easily be argued that the benefits of actually being able to test those techniques – as well as, more generally but also importantly, fighting attributes such as endurance, courage and the ability to improvise under pressure – against active resistance out-weigh the objection that one is only using a limited range of techniques.

The case can also be made that it is in the crucible of athletic pressure-testing, via hard sparring or any other form of spontaneous, genuinely resistant training, that the art initiated by Barton-Wright in the late 1890s is really brought back to life.

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