- Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Saturday, 18th January 2014
From the Manchester Evening News, April 1899:
Two or three recent cases have served to draw attention to the dangers of London streets after dark. It is seldom that the victim of violent robbery is able to being his assailants to justice, and as vigilant as they are the police cannot provide a uniformed Sherlock Holmes to walk in the footsteps of every (indecipherable) citizen in the West End. If the said citizen has been dining too enthusiastically, he is far more likely to meet a policeman than to be pounced on by a gang of desperate thieves. Mr. Barton-Wright declares that, by studying his Anglo-Japanese system of self-defence, the least muscular and most timid may dispose of several enemies, but so far the highway robbers have escaped from the dodges of Bartitzu (a feature of the system mentioned); the latter are, moreover, likelier pupils at that school than the man in the street whom they convert into the man in the gutter.