Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Sunday, 10th December 2017
Martial arts enthusiasts who find themselves in central London may wish to visit the site of the original Bartitsu School of Arms and Physical Culture (a.k.a. the Bartitsu Club). The Club was the first commercial school in the Western world to teach Japanese martial arts and also the site of the first known experiment in deliberately blending Asian and European fighting styles, anticipating Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do by about seven decades and the modern MMA movement by about ninety years.
Above: instructors Pierre Vigny (left) and Hubert demonstrate stick fighting in one of the few known photographs taken inside the Bartitsu Club.
Above: Bartitsu founder E.W. Barton-Wright demonstrates one of his “heat and light ray” devices inside the Bartitsu Club’s electrotherapy clinic.
The Bartitsu Club operated from approximately April of 1900-January of 1902 and was originally located in the basement of #67b Shaftesbury Avenue in London’s Soho district.
#67 Shaftesbury very narrowly survived destruction during the London Blitz and today the exterior facade looks much like it did circa 1900, apart from the variety of modern shops at street level. It presently houses a large, modern Best Western hotel, which was known formerly as The Shaftesbury and currently as The Piccadilly (harkening back to the days of the Bartitsu School of Arms, when the building was called Piccadilly-Circus-Mansions). Note, however, that the basement which housed the Bartitsu Club gymnasium itself is off-limits to guests and visitors.
The Allen Room at St. Anne’s Church
In September of 2005, Tony Wolf launched the publication of the Bartitsu Compendium, Volume 1 via a function in the Allen Room, an oak-panelled meeting room in the St. Anne’s Church complex adjacent to #67 Shaftesbury. The exterior of #67 was shown in the 2011 feature documentary Bartitsu: The Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes and served as a rendezvous point for participants in the 2011 Bartitsu School of Arms symposium. The exterior and lobby were also featured in a 2014 mini-documentary on Bartitsu produced by the BBC:
St. Anne’s Churchyard
Pilgrims to #67 should also take time to explore the Soho neighbourhood, which features many attractions including superb West End theatres, restaurants, Victorian-era pubs and shops. Of particular note are St. Anne’s Churchyard, a small park immediately behind #67 Shaftesbury, where informal classes in martial arts from Tai Chi Chuan to kickboxing frequently take place; and nearby Cecil Court, a collection of some of the world’s finest antiquarian and specialist bookstores. Be sure to check out Storey’s Ltd., whose extensive catalogues of antique prints have been known to include rare illustrations of both Bartitsu and Captain Hutton’s historical fencing.
Above: Cecil Court Lane, a mecca for book lovers.
Finally, no Bartitsu pilgrimage is complete without a visit to James Smith and Sons, an establishment which has been manufacturing and selling fine walking sticks and umbrellas since the year 1830. The shop is only a ten-minute walk from #67 Shaftesbury and it’s been speculated that Bartitsu Club instructor Pierre Vigny’s special self-defence walking sticks may have been produced by the James Smith company. Although they no longer produce items overtly intended as weapons, the ornate Victorian-era signage still advertises “malacca canes, dagger-canes, life-preservers and swordsticks”.
Posted inBartitsu School of Arms|Comments Off on Visiting the Site of the Original Bartitsu Club
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Tuesday, 17th October 2017
Of the select group of Japanese judoka and jiujitsuka who pioneered their martial arts in the West at the turn of the 20th century, Mitsuyo Maeda is almost certainly the most famous. It was Maeda who settled in Brazil, beginning the legacy of Brazilian Jiujitsu that would eventually sweep the world during the 1990s MMA boom.
This article, however, will focus on Maeda’s relatively little-known activities in England, where – very much unlike most of the other Western countries he visited – the art of Japanese unarmed combat was already somewhat established. E.W. Barton-Wright had begun lecturing on and demonstrating jiujitsu in the English capital nine years before Mitsuyo Maeda arrived there.
In the interim, a number of Japanese jiujitsuka – Kaneo Tani, Seizo Yamamoto, Yukio Tani, Sadakazu “Raku” Uyenishi, Akitaro “Daibutsu” Ono, Taro Miyake and others – had all taught, demonstrated and competed in England. Instructional manuals such as Uyenishi’s Text-book of Ju-jutsu were widely available. Thus, English wrestlers, sporting journalists and wrestling fans were largely familiar with the conventions and some of the techniques of jiujitsu, to the extent that jiujitsu matches had lost a measure of their novel sheen by 1907.
Mitsuyo Maeda was born in Hirosaki City, Aomori Prefecture during November of 1878. By 1904 he had become a seasoned and respected judoka via intensive training at the Kodokan Institute in Tokyo.
In early 1905 he followed in the footsteps of Yoshiaki Yamashita, who had introduced Japanese unarmed combat to the United States two years earlier. Yamashita’s most celebrated student, incidentally, had been none other than President Theodore Roosevelt, who had a great enthusiasm for boxing, wrestling, singlestick fencing and other “manly pastimes”.
Maeda competed in a number of mixed-styles challenge matches in the US and even started a commercial judo school in New York City. By mid-1907, however, he had left America for London.
Although little is known about the logistics or circumstances of Maeda’s stay in England, it’s evident that he quickly joined forces with former Bartitsu Club instructor Yukio Tani and their fellow challenge wrestler Taro Miyake, who were then affiliated with the Japanese School of Ju-Jitsu.
The first record of Maeda’s activities in England comes from an article in the Cambridge Independent Press of June 14th, 1907, describing a demonstration by Maeda and Tani held in conjunction with the Cambridge University Boxing, Fencing and Jujitsu Club:
Demonstrations of the Japanese art of Ju-Jitsu formed the most fascinating items in an attractive programme, among those assisting being two of the best exponents in this country, Maida (sic) and Yukio Tani, from the Japanese School of Ju-Jitsu, in London.
With the assistance of Mr. G. T. Lemon, Clare, Maida demonstrated the art of disturbing the balance, as practised by the people in the country of the chrysanthemum, and Yukio Tani, with Mr. E. T. Busk, King’s, as a medium, illustrated methods of causing surrender by discomfort, or, in other words, of getting an opponent in such position that he cannot move without giving his rival an opportunity to inflict bodily injury.
Maida and Mr. Z. Horikiri, a Japanese Non-Collegiate student, gave an exhibition of Shobina Kata —the ancient art of disturbing the balance by fancy throws—and there were also exciting Ju-Jitsu encounters between Mr. Z. Horikiri and Mr. E. Morse, King’s ; Yukio Tani and Mr. E. A. MacNee, Clare ; and Maida and Yukio Tani. In the contests between Englishmen and Japanese, the former, although invariably the bigger men, were no match for the Japs in dexterity. The display between the two professionals was especially exhilarating, although it was explained to the company that the men were not putting forth their best endeavours, as, if they did so, they would be likely kill one another.
Two months later, the Dundee Courier offered advance notice of a Highland Gathering to be held in Market Park, Crieff. The main attraction was advertised as a “Grand Demonstration of Ju-Jitsu”, featuring:
(…) from the Japanese School, Oxford Street, London – Tarro Miyake, Champion of Japan; Yukie (sic) Tani, who has never been Defeated; Professor Maeda, Government Instructor; and Hirano, the Lightest and Cleverest Wrestler in the World.
Open Challenge to Any Wrestler in Great Britain. Military Display by a Detachment of the Scottish Horse. The Usual Athletic and Other Events. The Celebrated Kirkcaldy Trades Band will be in Attendance during the Day.
The Dundee Courier report was mostly notable for being one of the very few to spell Maeda’s name according to the modern conventions of Japanese/English transliteration.
In late January of 1908 Maeda competed in a massive international wrestling tournament held at London’s famed Alhambra music hall. By that time he had assumed the professional pseudonym “Maida Yamato”, possibly because people who had English as their first language had difficulty pronouncing his real given name.
A Sporting Life journalist commented:
Maida Yamato (Japan) is one of the favourites of the tournament. He is still “alive” in the middles and heavies, and is the most dangerous competitor in the lighter weight. Yamato has been champion of Japan in his native style, which he says is not unlike the catch-as-catch-can method. At any rate, he says a ju-jitsu wrestler can pick the English method quite easily. “I don’t like wrestling black men,” he said.
The unfortunate racial bias displayed here was not uncommon among athletes and promoters at the turn of the 20th century. Notably, when Bartitsu founder E.W. Barton-Wright was promoting his own mixed-styles wrestling contests, he had specifically welcomed all challengers, regardless of race.
In early February, Maeda offered a general challenge via Apollo’s Magazine, which was answered, as was the general custom at the time, by a counter-challenge in the pages of the Sporting Times. A Private P.W. Brocklehurst of the 1st Battalion, Cheshire Regiment, agreed to Maeda’s terms, noting that:
I will wrestle on the same conditions that (Maeda) offered Hewitt – that he forfeits £25 if he does not defeat within fifteen minutes. When will it be convenient to meet me the “Sporting Life” office to make a match?
A classified advertisement in the Sporting Life of 9 April, 1908, announced the Maeda would again be appearing on the same bill as Tani, this time in earnest competition rather than for display purposes. Tani would be challenging a boxer known as “Young Joseph” to a jiujitsu vs. pugilism contest, while Maeda would take on Alf Hewitt, the English wrestler referred to by Private Brocklehurst, in a jiujitsu match.
As it happened, it was not Hewitt but rather Jack Madden who wrestled with Maeda on Saturday April 11th, and the result of their match does not seem to have been recorded. The novelty of Tani’s contest with “Young Joseph”, however, did attract some notice from the press.
Shortly thereafter, Mitsuyo Maeda departed for Paris and then set off for Havana, then Mexico City, Cuba and finally Brazil, where his judo skills found much less jaded audiences.
Posted inJiujitsu|Comments Off on Mitsuyo Maeda in England (1907-08)
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Tuesday, 19th September 2017
By Tony Wolf
My friend Ran Braun, who is a fight choreographer and also a prominent stage director of operas in Europe, first proposed the idea of a Bartitsu documentary in early 2009. We developed some concepts via email, but then both became busy with other projects.
In August of that year, Ran organized a three week Bartitsu and stage combat seminar tour for me in Italy. I arrived at the first venue, which was a brand new sports center in the middle of Rome, and was surprised to meet a professional film crew there along with the students.
Tony Wolf (right) demonstrates a Vigny stick fighting “guard by distance” during the Rome seminar.
An opportunity had suddenly come up, virtually while I was in transit, and Ran had contacted some cultural associations and production companies including the Digital Room, Cletarte and Broken Art. They offered the basic technical and logistical means to start producing a documentary about Bartitsu, but because it had all happened so quickly, we didn’t have a script nor even a storyboard prepared.
Ran Braun and Rocco M. Franco re-enact a private Bartitsu lesson circa 1900 in this sequence filmed at the Palazzo delle Clarisse in Amantea, Italy.
Without a script, everything was ad hoc; we started shooting sequences that we could organise in our downtime during the seminar tour, brainstorming and improvising shoots at various exotic locations. As the de facto on-camera host – which was not a role I would have chosen for myself, under normal circumstances – I remember standing on a balcony of the Palazzo delle Clarisse overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, facing the camera and beginning a monologue with the generic segue “… and so we find ourselves here …”, trusting that there would, eventually, be a script to justify the transition.
A spectacular location shoot in Amantea.
I also recall wandering through the streets of Amantea one warm evening, gazing up at the ancient castles on the hills and trying to figure out how to tie location shoots in this beautiful Italian seaside resort in to our then-scriptless documentary about an obscure Victorian English martial art. I realised that the best link was actually the Italian concept of rievocazion; the artistic revival of cultural heritage. That realisation inspired one of the major themes of the documentary.
Simultaneously, I realised that I was going to have to return to Europe in the near future, because it was clear that the nascent documentary would also have to feature location shoots in Switzerland and England.
A still from an animatic of Yukio Tani (left) throwing an English wrestler.
The next few months were a blur of activity, because at that stage we were hoping to release the documentary in late December to coincide with Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movie. I returned to the USA for about two weeks, wrote a script, bought video equipment and started organizing second-unit shoots and interviews, re-enactments, image archives, animations, etc.
The project quickly generated a lot of buzz, and many people were very generous with their time and talents. Second-unit location shoots were arranged in the UK and USA, including both martial arts demonstrations and interviews with luminaries such as speculative fiction author Neal Stephenson and mystery writer Will Thomas, both of whom were also Bartitsu enthusiasts. Ran arranged the musical score in collaboration with his colleagues, and we were also given permission to use instrumental tracks by the famed steampunk band Abney Park.
I then flew back to Europe and traveled with Ran to Meiringen in the Swiss Alps for a shoot at the famous Reichenbach Falls, where Holmes used his “baritsu” against Moriarty. I’d never driven through the Alps before – it’s a shattering, vertiginous landscape, with valleys full of massive boulders that have rolled down off the mountains.
We booked in to a Meiringen hotel late in the evening and were woken the next morning by somone in the vicinity practicing his yodeling – welcome to Switzerland! We then figured out how to get up to the Reichenbach Falls, which involves riding a terrific Victorian-era cable car a long way up one of the mountains. The falls are actually a series of cascades, with the biggest one – where Holmes grappled with Moriarty – perhaps half-way up the heavily-forested slopes.
We arrived at the cable car station, which offered a nice view, but it was at that point that we discovered that a local hydroelectric power company was channelling water from the river that feeds the falls. Apparently they regularly do this at at certain times of the year, including, unfortunately, when we were there. So, yes, it was still a large waterfall, but it was pretty far from the roaring, boiling chasm that Dr. Watson had so vividly described.
We had a long hike up, over and around the waterfall until we arrived at the “baritsu spot”, where Holmes and Moriarty (notionally) fought to the death. It’s at the end of a narrow path cut into the cliff face on the opposite side of the falls from the cable car station. Apparently the path used to extend almost within touching distance of the actual waterfall, but landslides have changed the topography over the past hundred-odd years. We shot our intro sequence there, then made our way back down the mountain into Meiringen township.
The town makes the most of its Sherlock Holmes connection – they have a great little Holmes museum and a fine bronze statue of the Great Detective. We spent the rest of the day doing pickup shots of Holmes-related Meiringen sights and scenic shots of the mountains.
The next day I flew to London to film further location shoots and interviews. The exterior shots in London were all “guerilla style”, of course, which was a great test of nerve and ingenuity. I visited the Holmes Museum in Baker Street, where an elderly actor playing Doctor Watson regaled me with an impressive in-character summary of the Final Problem plot. I wish we could have used part of that speech in the documentary.
Guerilla film-making: Tony Wolf addresses the camera in London.
We managed some quick “talking head” presentations in front of #67 Shaftesbury Avenue, where the original Bartitsu Club had been headquartered. The building now houses the Shaftesbury Best Western Hotel, but it’s much the same as it was back in Barton-Wright’s day, having been narrowly missed by a German bomb during the Second World War. Additional shoots took place at locations including the exterior of the Surbiton flat where Barton-Wright had spent his final years, and – soberingly – at Surrey’s Kingston Cemetery, where Barton-Wright was interred in an un-marked “pauper’s grave”. Sadly, because it is impossible to pinpoint exactly where an individual is buried in one of these communal plots, local ordinances do not allow memorial markers to be placed there, so instead I laid a small bouquet of white flowers at the base of a nearby tree.
Then I took a train to the Northern English village of Haltwhistle, near the Scottish border, to record some additional interviews and, during a free afternoon, navigate through a wandering herd of cattle en route to walking along a section of Hadrian’s Wall.
After I returned to the US, however, it quickly became obvious that, even given the terrific run of enthusiasm and luck that carried us through that initial production period, there was simply no way we could produce the entire documentary before Christmas. We were, however, able to develop a successful trailer for the project:
Early and mid-2010 were marked by a series of false starts and technical problems. These issues are typical of most media projects, but they were compounded by the fact that we were producing an independent multi-media documentary, staffed entirely by volunteers spread between several countries. There would be intense bursts of activity – including filming a re-enactment of a circa 1914 suffragette jiujitsu training session in Chicago – followed by long delays as DVD packages of raw footage went missing in transit, personnel left the project, etc.
During post-production my father, Michael, and wife, Kathrynne – who were both professional actors and voiceover specialists – were prevailed upon to record in-character narration for the documentary, all taken verbatim from speeches and articles written during the heyday of the Bartitsu Club. Kat provided the voice of Mary Nugent, the Edwardian-era journalist whose article “Barton-Wright and His Japanese Wrestlers” offered shrewd insight into E.W. Barton-Wright’s character. My father performed the voices of Barton-Wright, Dr. John Watson, an anonymous c1900 newspaper reporter and Captain Alfred Hutton, giving each of them different accents and delivery styles – a significant feat of vocal gymnastics!
We regained our momentum in September. In Rome, our colleagues and co-producers at Broken Art, Paolo Paparella and Angelica Pedatella, collaborated with editor Emanuele Pisasale during post-production, and there was a very great deal of communication back and forth between Italy and the USA. Meanwhile, I had arranged an art contest that produced some lovely cover art for the DVD, and a publishing deal with the Freelance Academy Press, while continuing to gather seminar footage from the US and Italy to represent the Bartitsu revival.
Co-producer/director Ran Braun checks camera angles while filming a Bartitsu stick fighting demonstration in Italy.
The documentary DVD finally launched in March of 2011. It gathered some great reviews, which were very gratifying to those of us who had been working so long and hard behind the scenes. With permission of the producers, Bartitsu: The Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes has subsequently been publicly screened at a number of libraries, Western martial arts conferences and similar events. It is available on DVD from the Freelance Academy Press.
Posted inDocumentary, Editorial, Video|Comments Off on A Memoir of the Production of “Bartitsu: The Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes”
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Friday, 23rd June 2017
By Tony Wolf
Recent History
The modern Bartitsu revival is now fifteen years old and, like all teenagers, it’s undergoing some significant changes.
Most of the original cadre of Bartitsu revivalists, dating back to circa 2002, were members of the Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) movement, which coalesced out of many disparate sources including modern fencing, historical re-enactment, stage combat, Asian martial arts and various combat sports.
Communicating via the Bartitsu Forum established by author Will Thomas, they set about recreating E.W. Barton-Wright’s cross-training system in the manner of numerous other “extinct” fighting styles, from Medieval German longsword fencing to the use of the rapier and dagger, polearms, abbracciare (Italian unarmed combat), etc., which were being similarly revived at that time.
In most cases, likewise, the challenge of the reconstruction was its own justification; the object being to revive the original style, as closely as possible to the way it was originally practiced, via a combination of academic scholarship and intensive martial pressure-testing.
As such, the original Bartitsu revivalists comprised a small and relatively cohesive “fringe of a fringe” interest group, whose collaboration produced both volumes of the Bartitsu Compendium (2005/08) and established most of the characteristics of modern Bartitsu training, including the essentially “open-source” nature of the revival and the concepts of canonical and neo Bartitsu.
Individualism and diversity are inherent to Bartitsu revivalism and, therefore, attempts to “police” that revival are instantly doomed to failure. People are free to do exactly as they want to do. That understanding is why the Bartitsu Society has always been, and remains, a basically informal association of colleagues rather than a hierarchical, bureaucratic “governing body”.
In more recent years, and most especially since the explosive success of the Sherlock Holmes movies (2009/11) firmly embedded an awareness of “Victorian English martial arts” in the popular consciousness, the number of Bartitsu clubs and study groups has grown significantly and a new generation of enthusiasts has emerged.
“To create again”: recreational Bartitsu
While Bartitsu was, literally, the reality-based self-defence of its own time and place, and certainly can be undertaken purely for entertainment at pop-culture conventions and so-on, I would argue that its greatest value today is something quite different, by virtue of the many decades that have passed since its brief heyday at the turn of the 20th century. Therefore, the remainder of this essay simply advocates for a “recreational Bartitsu”.
Consider that the word “recreation” means “an activity done for enjoyment” and that it is derived from the Latin re-creare, meaning “to create again” – the latter definition being especially appropriate when applied to the activity of reviving an extinct martial art.
Although both self-defence and performance/LARP-oriented revivalisms could also be described as “recreational” in certain senses, I’m using that term to refer to a third approach; that which prioritises the notion of “art for art’s sake”. Recreational Bartitsu, therefore, is primarily geared towards recreating Barton-Wright’s original art, embracing the canonical and lineage materials as cultural artifacts of intrinsic historical value.
In other words, the primary value of the canonical material is, precisely, that it is canonical; it is our most direct link to the original cross-training system that was being developed at the Bartitsu Club circa 1901. From this perspective, modern self-defence applications are of secondary or tertiary priority, alongside demonstration of the canonical material for public display.
Further, the close and serious study of the canonical and lineage material reveals just enough of the tactical and mechanical principles behind Barton-Wright’s original system to enable practitioners to make truly educated deductions about the rest of the system. That study must include not only the Pearson’s Magazine article series, but also the panoply of supplementary sources that have been unearthed by researchers over the past fifteen years, offering crucial context to the modern revival.
Is this recreational approach any different, then, from “living history”? Does it simply result in martial arts museum pieces, beautifully preserved but lacking real utility?
No. A martial art worthy of that name must be functional, and so the aim of recreational Bartitsu is to first reassemble, and then to prove by pressure-testing, the original system on its own terms, as a method of cross-training between, specifically, c1900 boxing and kicking, the eclectic “British jiujitsu” of the Edwardian era and the Vigny style of stick fighting.
As with any martial arts reconstruction project, the aim is to get as close as possible to the original methods. Some of this reassembly is verbatim (from the canon) and some is speculative, referring to the great corpus of Bartitsu lineage materials produced by the Bartitsu Club instructors and their first generations of students, as outlined in the second volume of the Compendium.
The Japanese concept of takemusu, implying “martial creativity”, is inherent to this recreational approach. The process is collaborative and on-going. Rather than attempting to complete Barton-Wright’s abandoned work-in-progress, recreationalists are engaged in a continual state of “combat lab” experimentation.
“All-in” sparring in an identifiably “Bartitsu” style is the apex of this form of recreation. The acid test is simple – if you can fight successfully in a manner that’s closely evocative of the original method, then your recreation is good. If not, keep testing and experimenting until you can.
Posted inAntagonistics, Editorial, Video|Comments Off on Art for Art’s Sake: the Value of Recreational Bartitsu
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Friday, 12th May 2017
Aside from the curious demonstrations of “baritzu” by Australian soldierscirca 1906, E.W. Barton-Wright’s martial art may have inspired at least one other Aussie enthusiast during the early 20th century – although the latter took pains to deny any such influence.
Above: calisthenics at the Ballarat Amateur Athletic Club (1904)
Starting in May of 1902, members of the then-newly formed Ballarat Amateur Athletic Club began to perform exhibitions of a “new art of self defence” that was claimed to have been devised by the Club president, Mr. John Trekardo. During a packed and diverse athletic display that included gladiatorial tableaux and interludes of song alongside the more standard boxing, fencing and wrestling bouts, Mr. Trekardo and his assistant took the stage to demonstrate:
(…) first, “a new way to cope with a footpad” and, second, “a new art of self-defence.” In the first it was demonstrated how easily the staid citizen, who is accosted by a garrotter or rough on his way home, might by the exercise of a little ingenuity and physical force capsize his would-be assailant before the latter could attack him, while in the second part an entirely new method of stopping the rush of an assailant in the street was cleverly demonstrated.
Mr. Trekardo performed several similar displays throughout the remainder of 1902, always to extravagant praise if the newspaper reviews are to be believed. During a demonstration in August, the Trekardo system was introduced by his student Captain Olden, who claimed that:
(…) the system had been invented by Mr. Trekardo before the introduction of the Barton-Wright system in London.
Records indicate similar self-defence exhibitions in connection with the Ballarat Amateur Athletic Club’s annual displays between 1903-09. There do not, however, appear to be any records of Trekardo actually teaching the “new art”.
The last records of exhibitions of Trekardo’s system are from 1909, during which his associate, a Mr. Lazarus, remarked that Mr. Trekardo had “instituted the teaching of grips in 1899, long before the jiu-jitsu of the Japanese was spoken about here”.
It’s probably true that jiujitsu per se was not known in Australia during 1899; in fact, that word appears in Aussie newsprint for the first time in February of 1904. Granting that it’s possible that Trekardo invented his own system independently, it does, however, seem highly likely that it was inspired by, if not actually copied from, Barton-Wright’s first series of articles for Pearson’s Magazine. Those articles were published in England during March and April of 1899 and were widely available in Australia during that year.
A takedown from Barton-Wright’s second article for Pearson’s.
Notably, Barton-Wright’s articles did not refer to jiujitsu by name, but clearly do describe and illustrate Japanese unarmed combat – under the title “The New Art of Self Defence”.
It should be noted that, during this period, it was quite common for “colonial” entertainers and athletes to jump on the bandwagon of novel, popular trends originating in Europe and the United States. Vaudeville acts and so-on were regularly undertaken by performers who had no actual connection to the “real thing” but whose experience allowed them to pull off a more-or-less convincing imitation.
By 1909, of course, jiujitsu had become internationally famous, and Australians were even able to witness the art performed by an expert in earnest. The jiujitsuka Ryugoro Shima (1885-1958) had arrived in the Land Downunder during 1905, and four years later he was well-established on the wrestling challenge circuit. Possibly Mr. Trekardo took that opportunity to retire his own system; in any case, he went on to some success in local politics, serving as the mayor of Ballarat between 1937-38.
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Friday, 5th May 2017
May 4th of 1891 is recognised as the date of consulting detective Sherlock Holmes’ fateful hand-to-hand battle with the Napoleon of Crime, Professor James Moriarty. Their fight took place at the suitably forboding and dramatic brink of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, described here by Dr. John Watson:
It is, indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening, coalblack rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring for ever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing for ever upwards, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour.
Although neither Holmes nor Moriarty appeared to have survived their final encounter, we now know that Holmes had, in fact, defeated his nemesis through his knowledge of what Dr. Watson recorded as “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling“, then took the opportunity to fake his own demise to throw his other enemies off his trail.
The baritsu moment as envisioned by artist Sidney Paget.
In more recent years, the encounter between Holmes and Moriarty has frequently been dramatised in media including the 1979 Russian TV series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (click here for a detailed memoir by fight choreographer Nikolay Vaschilin):
… and the classic 1980s Granada Sherlock Holmes series:
… in comic books – most notably Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
– and in movies such as Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows:
The opening sequence of the 2011 feature documentaryBartitsu: The Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes was shot at the brink of the Reichenbach Falls and in the adjacent Swiss town of Meiringen, which still celebrates its association with the famous fight scene:
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Wednesday, 21st September 2016
By Tony Wolf
The HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) blogosphere and social media networks have recently caught the edge of the prevailing cultural debates about political correctness, social justice, cultural appropriation, racism and related issues. Inevitably, Bartitsu (as a fringe-of-a-fringe interest) has now been referenced in that context, so I hope you’ll indulge this “editorial” commentary from one who has been, it’s fair to say, closely involved in Bartitsu revivalism from the outset.
Above: Tony Wolf (right) teaches a Bartitsu seminar at the 2006/7 International Sword and Pen workshops in Banff, Canada.
Nearly ten years ago – well before the “Bartitsu boom” generated by the recent Sherlock Holmes craze, at a time when any online reference to Bartitsu by “outsiders” was noteworthy to those very few of us who were paying attention – I came across a discussion on a martial arts message board in which one of the correspondents had described E.W. Barton-Wright as a “racist”. I was curious because I couldn’t recall anything in B-W’s own writings that might justify such a description, so I contacted that person and asked for proof.
Above: some of the photographs illustrating Barton-Wright’s “New Art of Self Defence” articles.
There was none, as it happened – the writer had simply bought into the modern stereotype of “Victorian Englishmen” as being irredeemably imperialistic and racist, and then assumed that to have been a historical fact in the case of E.W. Barton-Wright. Similar assumptions have occasionally been made by others in subsequent discussions, most recently just a few days ago, when a short mainstream media video item on Bartitsu re-surfaced on a message board and was met with an anonymous comment charging cultural appropriation.
(So far, so much a tiny tempest in a very slightly larger teapot.)
Above: Herman Ten Kate
In fact, the accusation that Barton-Wright had “misappropriated” jiujitsu was first made by one of his close contemporaries. That case is instructive, so here’s the gist of it; Herman Ten Kate was a Dutch anthropologist who had trained at the same Kobe Shinden Fudo-ryu jiujitsu dojo as Barton-Wright and who later came across B-W’s New Art of Self Defence articles, in which B-W first referred to “Bartitsu” by name.
Because Ten Kate apparently had not, however, seen any of Barton-Wright’s other articles, which demonstrated that Bartitsu was a “new” art because it combined jiujitsu with other systems, the anthropologist believed that B-W had simply had the gall to re-name jiujitsu after himself. Thus, lacking crucial context, Ten Kate had jumped to a mistaken and unfair conclusion, which he published in his own article for De Gids, a popular Dutch magazine, during 1905.
Back to the present day and to more immediate concerns; there is an individual who has, periodically over the past several years, offered a series of Bartitsu-related posts on the Stormfront “white power” forum. These posts have obviously been calculated to encourage an interest in Bartitsu among white supremacists, although they have failed in that attempt.
Recently, a screen capture of one of those posts has appeared on a Tumblr page dedicated to exposing racism within the HEMA community. That particular post quotes the introductory text from the Wikipedia page on Bartitsu and then ends with the words “the Bartitsu Society”, the latter taken out of context.
At worst, this juxtaposition may leave casual visitors to the Tumblr page with the impression that the Society somehow endorses a racist point of view. That impression is itself encouraged by the Tumblr author’s comment that “The white supremacists of Storm Front include fans & practitioners of Bartitsu and wider HEMA”, which allows the casual reader to imagine any number of “fans and practitioners” as opposed to the one individual who has, in fact, been responsible for those threads.
In a similar vein, there have been recent “incursions” into Bartitsu-oriented social media by a few proud bigots; people whose religious, racial and cultural prejudices are clear to anyone who bothers to look. And here we must be very careful. Obviously, the fact that someone is, for example, a virulent anti-Semite, or that they may indiscriminately hate and fear members of the Muslim faith, has no intrinsic bearing on their interest in/contributions to martial arts, history nor other subjects. The same person may also be congenial company over dinner.
We who are fortunate enough to live in intellectually free societies regularly navigate these tricky waters – hence the conventions that certain contentious topics are best not broached in “polite company”. But as social media are changing those conventions, at a certain point, it pays to do the contextual homework and, if so moved by one’s own conscience, to draw a line in the ethical sand.
With that in mind:
Bartitsu was originally, and now is again, an ongoing experiment in inter-cultural martial arts cross-training. At least one third of the art is of eclectic Japanese heritage via the jiujitsu styles of Barton-Wright, Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi; another third is Swiss/French via Pierre Vigny’s stick fighting system; the remaining pot-pourri of European boxing, kicking and wrestling techniques exist mostly in the “neo” realms of modern revivalism because they weren’t detailed in the canonical sources.
Above: instructors in action at the original Bartitsu Club.
Thus, in the racialist language of the late 19th century, Bartitsu itself could be described as “miscegenated”; it is, incontrovertably, the product of deliberate inter-cultural blending. English boxing and Vigny stick fighting are strengthened by tests against, as well as amalgamation with Japanese jiujitsu, and vice-versa. This is necessary progress towards the utopian ideal of martial arts cross-training pioneered by Barton-Wright and his Japanese and Swiss colleagues at the turn of the 20th century, later taken up by many others (famously including Bruce Lee) and most recently proven in the MMA arena, in Dog Brothers gatherings and in many other venues.
As such, Bartitsu intrinsically refutes both the PC notion of “cultural appropriation” and the segregationist stance beloved of racial supremacists.
Further, although we know precious little about the private life of Edward Barton-Wright, the scattered evidence of his social and political leanings indicate a decidedly progressive direction. The original Bartitsu Club offered classes for women and children at a time when it was extraordinary for “antagonistics” training to be given to anyone other than adult males. All of the politicians who were members and supporters of the Bartitsu Club were affiliated with the Liberal Party. Notably, during a period when it was common for combat sports athletes and promoters to bar challengers on racial grounds, Barton-Wright specifically invited challengers of all races. By his own example and by the ethos of his Club and system, E. W. Barton-Wright encouraged an approach to martial arts training that rewarded curiousity, rational skepticism and a willingness to think (and fight) “outside the box”.
Therefore, far from the “fear of the foreign” sometimes assumed to characterise the people and institutions of Edwardian England, the Bartitsu Club was a melting pot of intensive competition, experimentation and collaboration between wildly diverse individuals and martial arts styles.
For the past fifteen years, the Bartitsu Society has succeeded as an exemplar of individualistic, “open-source”, grass-roots martial arts revivalism within an informal “community of colleagues”. We have consistently resisted the temptation to create a bureaucratic, hierarchical organisation, in favour of offering the fruits of our research to everyone who has an interest in this (still) rather obscure martial art. The result is that there are as many different “Bartitsu” approaches as there are clubs and study groups that have taken up the revivalist challenge – about fifty groups, at present.
Fortunately there is, to date, no evidence of any serious attempt to co-opt Bartitsu by misogynists, racial supremacists, religious bigots nor any other xenophobes on the wrong side of history. I’m very confident that the vast majority of Bartitsu revivalists would be repelled by any such attempt, as history indicates Barton-Wright would have been.
Above: attendees at a Bartitsu seminar by instructor Mark Donnelly (kneeling, second from right), hosted by the Bartitsu Club of New York City.
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Wednesday, 9th October 2013
Highlights from several rounds of recreational medium/hard contact sparring at the Bartitsu Club of Chicago.
The object of this type of sparring is to pressure-test one’s skills while (re-)discovering the most combat-efficient blend of the methods that went into E.W. Barton-Wright’s original Bartitsu system, via experimentation. Thus, the sparring repertoire is deliberately anachronistic; while there is room for spur-of-the-moment improvisation, the techniques are largely restricted to the canonical and lineage material, dating from 1899 into the early 1920s.
Most significantly, these “style points” include:
Predominant use of single and double-handed high guard positions in stick fighting.
Almost exclusive use of “hanging” or “roof”-style parries, in which the weapon-wielding hand is held higher than the point of impact between the two weapons, rather than the orthodox fencing parries in 3 and 4.
Stick fighting tactics are heavily weighted towards invitations (for example, by lowering and/or widening the guard position to tempt an attack to a specific area), pre-emptive striking/feinting and “guards by distance” (simultaneous evasion and counter-attack)
Active integration of armed and unarmed combat
Predominant use of linear punches and linear, low kicks; in strictly unarmed combat, fighters employ the classic erect or backward-leaning fisticuffs stance and the “mill” pattern of vertically rotating fists.
When coming to grips in jacketed unarmed combat, the posture remains erect.
Deliberate exclusion of low-line grappling attacks (double-leg takedowns, etc.)
The minimum protective equipment for this type of sparring consists of fencing masks, hockey or lacrosse gloves and groin cups. The weapons shown are 3/4″ diameter, 36+” rattan sparring canes made by Purpleheart Armory, tipped with standard rubber cane ferrules at one end and with solid rubber “ball” handles at the other, simulating the steel ball handles of classic fighting canes. The asymmetrical balance of the cane is a key factor in this style of stick fighting.
Fighters offer a simple salute with the stick or touch gloves to indicate the commencement and conclusion of a match.
Fighters may acknowledge points verbally and/or gesturally but the emphasis is on continual action. A bout that goes to the ground may feature a successful submission hold/tapout but that does not necessarily represent the end of the match; by mutual accord, the fighters may simply recommence from a standing start if they wish.
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Friday, 7th December 2012
The famous Bath Club features significantly in the history of Bartitsu. Founded at #34 Dover Street in 1894, the Club was named for its large indoor swimming pool, which was a great novelty at the time. The pool featured several diving boards and a “Newman’s water-chute” for sliding, as well as a flying trapeze and a set of “travelling rings” suspended from the ceiling, challenging the most athletic Club members to traverse the length of the pool without getting wet.
The Club building was also equipped with a fencing salon and a gymnasium as well as steam-rooms, showers, an opulent dining room and “overnight rooms”. A comparatively progressive institution, membership was available to both men and women; the latter had their own dedicated entrance, a gesture which might be read either as condescension or as extravagant courtesy, or possibly both at once.
In March of 1899 the Bath Club was the venue for one of E.W. Barton-Wright’s jiujitsu demonstrations. He later noted that he had been awarded a membership in the Club due to his feat of defeating seven larger men within three minutes at a previous display. The Bath Club demonstration was, notably, the first time Barton-Wright had collaborated with the famed historical fencing revivalist, Captain Alfred Hutton, who later joined the teaching staff at Barton-Wright’s own Bartitsu Club.
This event may well also have been Barton-Wright’s introduction to Hutton’s rapier-and-dagger fencing partner, William Grenfell, the 1st Baron Desborough. A notable athlete and a prolific public servant, Grenfell was the president of the Bath Club and he was to go on to become the president of the Bartitsu Club. Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon was another famous Bath Club member who subsequently also joined the Bartitsu Club.
The Bath Club was the venue for several other unusual sporting displays, including a peculiar spectacle organised by Alfred Hutton two months after the Bartitsu display. “Water tilting” was a one-off revival of a type of aquatic jousting, which had apparently been amongst Henry VIII’s favourite sports. According to a newspaper report:
A large and gaily dressed assemblage watched the pair of old-fashioned-looking warriors tilt at one another in the waters of the bath, one of them holding a long spear (with padded point) and a stout leather buckler, the other paddling behind him in the cranky craft, which only just held both when both were evenly balanced. The two shallow boats put out from their respective ends at the word ‘Go,’ and one pair were soon struggling in the water, amidst the merriment of the audience.
The new sport of water polo was also a great attraction:
In 1910, the Club hosted an exhibition of a “novel and exciting aero-swimming game” in which competitors equipped with elaborate kite-like gliders leaped off one of the diving platforms, endeavouring to soar a short distance before their flight came to an inevitably wet end:
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Editorial note: several years ago I had the privilege of traveling with my adult son and my teenage nephew to a boxing gym in the Bronx, NYC and meeting with Daniel Marks, who had, over the previous decade, done much to popularise the hitherto little-known fighting art of the 52 Blocks. Mr. Marks had produced documentaries on the 52s and also spearheaded an initiative to use the art to turn young men away from drugs and gang culture.
The 52s include all the hallmarks of sophisticated body mechanics and fighting tactics associated with more formal, mainstream methods, applied with an almost uniquely personal, improvisational flavor. The method is also characterised by its range of “destructive defence” techniques – blocks that don’t simply redirect or stop an opponent’s punches, but are designed to do damage.
Although the technical details of the “secret style of boxing” developed for Bartitsu by E.W. Barton-Wright and Pierre Vigny remain frustratingly vague, their style also emphasised the principle of destructive defence. Barton-Wright wrote that the guards of “Bartitsu boxing” were “much more numerous” than those of the orthodox style then being taught in London gyms, and that those guards would “make the assailant hurt his own hand and arm very seriously”, as demonstrated here by Pierre Vigny:
In this video series, Bartitsu instructor Tommy Joe Moore teaches a number of 52 Hand Blocks techniques that are – probably – as close as we’ll get to Barton-Wright and Vigny’s “secret style”.
