William Henry Grenfell, the 1st Baron Desborough, poses with a statuette of himself as a fencer in this Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News photo. The effigy was presented by Captain Alfred Hutton during early July of 1909, on behalf of the British fencing community and in recognition of Grenfell’s services to their sport during the 1908 London Olympics, for which Grenfell served as the primary organiser.
Both Grenfell and Hutton had been associates of the Bartitsu Club at the turn of the 20th century. Hutton had served as the chief fencing instructor and as a member of the Club’s committee, and Grenfell as the Club President and as a promoter of Bartitsu as a novel method of physical culture and self defence, after having witnessed the combined Bartitsu and historical fencing displays by Edward Barton-Wright and Alfred Hutton at the London Bath Club on June 10, 1899. It’s unknown as to why Barton-Wright did not maintain his association with the Bath Club, which might well have allowed his “Bartitsu experiment” to continue beyond early 1902.
William Grenfell (left) poses with fellow Bartitsu Club member Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon (right) as members of the English Olympic fencing team in Athens (1906).
William Grenfell’s own long list of athletic accomplishments included winning fencing championships in the epee style, twice swimming the rapids of the Niagara Falls, scaling the Matterhorn three times and rowing across the English Channel.
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Tuesday, 21st April 2009
Among the interests of the Bartitsu Society is the study of 19th century physical culture; the panoply of diverse exercise systems that were practiced in public and private gymnasia throughout Europe, North America and Australasia. E.W. Barton-Wright commented that Bartitsu included a “system of physical culture which is as complete and thorough as the art of self defence”.
The Hegeler Carus mansion in LaSalle, Illinois, features an extremely rare surviving example of a 19th century gymnasium. The Hegeler Carus gym remained virtually unchanged throughout the 20th century, and still contains numerous, some probably unique, items of exercise apparatus, including wooden dumbbells and Indian clubs, a “teeter ladder”, parallel bars and “Roman rings” suspended from the ceiling. The gym also features a climbing pole that D.T. Suzuki used as a “meditation pole” during his long stay at the mansion.
Posted inPhysical Culture|Comments Off on The Oldest Gym in America?
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Friday, 13th August 2010
Pieter M.C. Toepoel was, in a sense, the E.W. Barton-Wright of the Netherlands. A boxing and physical culture teacher and something of a free-thinker, attracted to novelties, Toepoel was the first man to teach Japanese martial arts in Holland. He eventually developed a Bartitsu-like method combining boxing, jiujitsu and even self defence with a walking stick.
In his 1910 book Het origineele jujutsu, Toepoel recalled that:
…in 1899 I read in an English Magazine about an international system of self defence which had used amongst others a couple of pins from jiujitsu.
This is obviously a reference to E.W. Barton-Wright’s Pearsons Magazine articles on Bartitsu. Thus inspired, Toepoel made his way to London and possibly Paris and seems to have picked up an eclectic jiujitsu education. His book name-drops former Bartitsu Club instructors Sadakazu Uyenishi and Yukio Tani as well as Koyama, Miyami, Re-nie (Ernest Regnier, who pioneered jiujitsu in Paris), Okashi, Saito and Apollo (strongman William Bankier, who became Tani’s manager after the Bartitsu Club era), but does not identify Toepoel’s (main?) instructor in the art.
Most puzzlingly, Toepoel refers to learning jiujitsu upon the thin carpet of a shabby old London boxing club, and described his teacher – introduced to him by some boxing acquaintances – as a “Japanised Englishman” who had trained daily for seven years with Taro Miyake. Toepoel further notes that they would stop practicing when others entered the club, implying that this was a security precaution so that others would not “steal” their techniques; he was also apparently made to promise that he would never teach jiujitsu himself in the UK.
This is all very curious; who was the “Japanised Englishman”, and why all the secrecy?
Toepoel refers to both Tani’s Oxford Street school and to Uyenishi’s Golden Square dojo, which would seem to date his training in London to the period of roughly 1904-1909. By that time, there were several books and numerous articles available on jiujitsu, not to mention two full-time schools and several rather marginal ones. Although Japanese wrestling was hardly being taught on every street corner, it was quite widely available and it’s odd that a jiujitsu teacher at that time would have been quite so secretive.
Taro Miyake arrived in London in 1905, so it would seem to be impossible that any English jiujitsuka could have trained with him for seven years prior to 1910, unless that person had begun studying with Miyake in Japan.
On the face of it, and assuming that Pieter Toepoel was above adding in a bit of spurious detail for the sake of drama, there were only a few jiujitsu practitioners in London at that time who could conceivably have been described as “Japanised Englishmen”. Our candidates include:
E.W. Barton-Wright, who does not seem to have impressed anyone else as being “Japanised”, but who had spent three years in Japan and apparently spoke Japanese tolerably well.
William Garrud, who was teaching his own classes (in person and by correspondence) by 1905, but Garrud was possibly even less “Japanised” than was Barton-Wright.
“Professor Vernon-Smith”, who advertised jiujitsu classes at his Anglo-Japanese Institute of Self Defence (3 Vernon Place, Bloomsbury Square). The latter school seems to have employed Sadakazu Uyenishi as well as “a staff of expert instructors teaching gymnastics, boxing, wrestling, fencing, la savate etc.”; very little else is known about it, or about Vernon-Smith.
William E. Steers, a passionate Japanophile who travelled to Japan in 1903, studied jiujitsu there with fellow expatriate Englishman E.J. Harrison and returned to London in 1904, where he began training at Sadakazu Uyenishi’s school. Later, circa May 1912, Steers went back to Japan and studied judo with founder Jigoro Kano, who described him as being “the most earnest foreign student I have ever had”.
On the face of it, W.E. Steers seems to be the best candidate. The dates roughly match up and Steers’ huge enthusiasm for all things Japanese might well have led to his being characterised as a “Japanised Englishman”. The detail of Toepoel’s instructor training for seven years with Taro Miyake is still puzzling, in that Miyake was affiliated with Tani’s Oxford Street school, while Steers was enrolled at Uyenishi’s dojo at Golden Square. However, it is reported that Steers did study judo with the famous Mitsuyo Maeda from the year 1907, when the latter first arrived in London.
Shifting into pure speculation; assuming that W.E. Steers was Pieter Toepoel’s jiujitsu teacher, why would there have been such secrecy surrounding their lessons? Perhaps Steers felt that he was not really qualified to teach the art; I have found no other records of him as an instructor, though he was active and influential at the administrative level during the early years of the London Budokwai. As he was not a teacher in any official sense, though, Steers would presumably not have been concerned about Toepoel as a potential commercial rival, so why would he have required that the latter promise never to teach jiujitsu in the UK?
Also, Steers was evidently quite a wealthy man, so a shabby, thinly-carpeted boxing school seems an odd choice for a training venue, unless, again, Toepoel’s lessons were being “hidden” for some reason.
Research is ongoing …
Posted inJiujitsu, Mysteries|Comments Off on The Mystery of the “Japanised Englishman”
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Saturday, 4th March 2017
“… he was initiated into the Order of the Embok Kwai, the sole purpose of which is to teach, perpetuate and protect the secrets of jiu-jitsu.”
– The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1st June 1902
Although misfortunes had punctuated E.W. Barton-Wright’s early efforts to establish Bartitsu in London, his lectures and demonstrations had successfully conjured a general curiousity about the Japanese martial arts. By the time his three Japanese “champions” stepped off the steamer in September of the year 1900, the British press and public were eager to witness jiujitsu as performed in earnest and by experts.
After a short series of academic displays, the stage was set for their grand debut at the Alhambra music hall, which was scheduled for the last week of October. At the eleventh hour, however, misfortune struck again, as the two most senior jiujitsuka – Kaneo Tani and Seizo Yamamoto – abruptly refused to take part. This decision left their eager would-be audiences disappointed and confused, also causing no small amount of public embarrassment to Barton-Wright and Alhambra manager C. Dundas Slater.
Primed by over a year’s worth of Barton-Wright’s hinting about the wizardry of Japanese close-combat, London’s sporting journalists succumbed to a fever of speculation as to why the promised show had not taken place. Barton-Wright was prevailed upon to explain, and so he did, to the effect that the jiujitsu men belonged to a society whose code of honour forbade the public performance of their art for commercial gain.
Barton-Wright insisted that he had instructed his agent in Japan to explain his expectations to the jiujitsuka before they set sail, but apparently the agent had not done so. The two senior wrestlers had, therefore, not realised what a London music hall performance would entail until they’d arrived at the Alhambra.
Worse still, they had now decided to leave England altogether. The only silver lining was that the youngest wrestler – 19 year old Yukio Tani, Kaneo’s kid brother – had confirmed that he’d be happy to remain and to compete on the stage as required. The promised display, therefore, would have to be delayed again until a suitably skilled and amenable sparring partner could be imported from the Land of the Rising Sun.
This was the “official” story as published in various newspapers. An anonymous journalist from the London Daily Mail, however, had a slightly more colourful take on the situation. His report included several unique details, most notably references to a mysterious organisation called the “Embok Kwai”:
So – what was this Embok Kwai?
The phrase is as meaningless in Japanese as it is in English, but to be fair, there was no standard system of spelling Japanese words via European alphabets circa 1900, so writers were left to do as best as they could with phonetics. The context, however, clearly indicates that the journalist believed Embok Kwai to be the name of the honour-bound martial arts society that Barton-Wright had alluded to.
It is known that Professor Jigoro Kano’s martial arts institute, the Kodokan – which may well have had some hand in choosing the Japanese fighters and in arranging their travel to England – disapproved of professionalism in sports. A large part of Professor Kano’s mission was to refine traditional Japanese martial arts into a respectable, codified method of physical and spiritual education. Although he would have had no direct experience of London music halls, it’s very unlikely that he would have considered the rowdy, rough-and-tumble Alhambra to be a suitable venue for jiujitsu contests.
There seems to be no record of Barton-Wright referring to Kano’s institute by any name during this period. Allowing that he may have spoken it in passing, though, it’s possible that the Daily Mail reporter garbled “Kodokan” into “Embok Kwai”; similarly, several papers had rendered Kano’s first name as “Jiyataro” rather than “Jigoro” and mispellings of “Bartitsu” were very common. It’s also conceivable that Barton-Wright or one of the jiujitsuka had used the Japanese word embukai, which means a public demonstration – that word is still used to describe displays of jiujitsu and other martial arts – and that the journalist confused the meanings of two different terms.
A few months after the Daily Mail ran its Embok Kwai article, 20 year old Sadakazu Uyenishi arrived in London from Japan. His collaborations with Tani, alongside the efforts of Barton-Wright, savate and canne master Pierre Vigny and wrestler Armand Cherpillod put Bartitsu firmly on the cultural map, and thereafter no more was heard in England of Embok Kwai.
In the United States, on the other hand …
During April of 1901, an anonymous short story variously titled “Did He Kiss Her?” and “A Fight Over Catullus” was published in several American newspapers. The tale concerns the escalating rivalry between two men – the studious Norton and the strenuous Sterling – who first come to blows as university students, over a disagreement about the affections of a young lady and (ostensibly) about the value of the writings of the Roman poet Catullus.
Over the course of the next five decades, Norton and Sterling obsessively train in increasingly diverse and exotic fighting skills in order to get the better of each other via a series of ferocious unarmed combats that take place whenever and wherever they meet. Incidentally, if this premise sounds familiar, you may well be thinking of Ridley Scott’s 1977 cinematic masterpiece “The Duellists”, which was itself based on Joseph Conrad’s 1908 novel “The Duel: A Military Story”. It’s tempting to speculate that Conrad may even have been inspired by the fictional rivalry between Norton and Sterling.
At one point we learn that Norton (by then a physician of some reknown as well as a highly trained and seasoned brawler) has ended up in “Yeddo” (Edo, i.e. Tokyo), Japan:
Clearly, the unknown author of “Did He Kiss Her?”/”A Fight Over Catullus” had chanced to read the London Daily Mail article from the previous year and incorporated the Embok Kwai motif into his story verbatim.
About a year later, during March of 1902, the short story received a second round of publications via US newspapers. Very shortly thereafter, the Embok Kwai saga took another strange turn, this time involving none other than President Theodore Roosevelt:
We may never know how the Embok Kwai became embroidered into John J. O’Brien’s personal myth, though it’s entirely possible that a mischievous journalist or promoter may have simply decided to spice the story. The best evidence is that O’Brien actually did learn jiujitsu from officers of the Nagasaki police force, but they most definitely weren’t members of the Embok Kwai Society, whose progression from garbled Japanese/English transliteration into outright fiction and then back into reported “truth” serves as an object lesson in misinformation.
In any case, O’Brien’s association with the President gained him some degree of notoriety via the newspapers, ensuring that the legend of the Embok Kwai would be passed down to the present generation.
What we may choose to do with it, only time can tell …
Generation X and Y is a generation of Lost Boys. We live in a Never-Never-Land where boys stay boys and never become men. More and more males today are putting off college, family, and adult responsibilities in order to play video games and do keg stands. The Art of Manliness is dedicated to helping men uncover what manliness means in the 21st century. What skills and knowledge should a 21st century man acquire? What traits should they develop? This book will have the answers.
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Monday, 14th June 2010
The first patented suit of boxing armour was registered with the US Patent Office in 1895. Joseph Donovan’s invention offered protection to the most vulnerable parts of the boxer’s anatomy and included an inbuilt electrical scoring system.
At last electricity has been brought to the direct aid of boxers, and the followers of the manly art of self defense will hail with delight the device just patented by Mr. Joseph Donovan of Chicago. We will let Mr. Donovan describe his invention in his own language, as follows:
It is well known that sparring or boxing is one of the most health-giving exercises in the whole range of athletics, developing endurance, stability of physique, a quickness of eyesight and action, and tending to bring out in its finest and quickest form every muscle of the body. Unfortunately, however, with all these good qualities there is a roughness and a brutality with it, which has thrown it almost entirely outside the pale of legitimate athletics, and to eliminate these rough and objectionable features entirely to those practicing boxing by padding over all the vulnerable points above the belt and providing each and all of these points with a registering device, so that all blows shall be rung up and registered automatically, thus reducing boxing to a simple test of quickness and endurance, and nothing more, is the principal object of my invention.
A form of pneumatic armour for boxers was tested in 1897. Unlike Donovan’s suit, the pneumatic armour did not offer any form of scoring function; it was intended simply to preserve the sparring partners of would-be champions in training.
By 1913, another entrepreneur – Dr. Otis Brewster – was promoting his own boxing armour, designed especially so that youngsters could train in boxing safely.
With the outbreak of the First World War, Dr. Brewster patented a heavy-duty suit of steel armour to protect soldiers against small arms fire and in close-quarters bayonet combat.
Although trials proved that the soldiers could kneel, lie down, run and even jump while wearing Brewster’s armour, and that it was proof against both rifle bullets and sledgehammers, it was never adopted by the War Department. This may have been due to the fact that Brewster wanted $600,000 for his invention.
Posted inBoxing, Edwardiana|Comments Off on The Eccentric Evolution of Boxing Armour
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site Saturday, 23rd August 2008
E.W. Barton-Wright, the founder of Bartitsu, died in 1951 at the age of ninety and was buried in what the late martial arts historian Richard Bowen described as a “pauper’s grave”, an unmarked, communal plot.
In 2007 Bartitsu Society member Phil Giles located Barton-Wright’s final resting place. The site of the grave is in Kingston Cemetery in Surrey, about ten miles from central London.
Proceeds from sales of Bartitsu Society books and other media have been dedicated to erecting a permanent grave marker at the site. A temporary marker is currently in place, as seen here:
The Royal Borough of Kingston has been informed of Barton-Wright’s unique position as a martial arts pioneer and plan to include his gravesite as part of a historical heritage trail which is due to be established in Kingston within the next two years.
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Saturday, 29th May 2010
Eager would-be students of jiujitsu in early Edwardian England had limited options to learn the mysterious Japanese art of self defence. During the period 1899-1902 they might have trained at the Bartitsu Club in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue. By 1906, however, there were several more dojo operating in the UK, with greater or lesser degrees of legitimacy.
Some seekers (there’s one born every minute) sent away for the correspondence course advertised above, which purported to represent the Kara Ashikaga School of Jiu-jitsu in Liverpool. Not only did this course offer an infallible method of self defence “as taught at the Yoshimosa School in Japan”, but other advertisements promised that the practice of jiujitsu would cure all manner of ailments, including constipation.
The best current evidence suggests that Kara Ashikaga, the stern-looking sensei depicted in the Liverpool school’s magazine ads, did not actually exist. Rather, he was a promotional gimmick devised by the actual proprietor of the correspondence course, an Englishman named Thomas.
There appears to be no evidence that the Yoshimosa School of Jiujitsu ever existed either. The name “Yoshimasa Ashikaga” was, however, featured prominently in Lafcadio Hearn‘s book, “In Ghostly Japan”, first published in England in 1904. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Thomas simply picked out a few names that he liked the sound of and proceeded to sell his customers a bill of goods. Adding insult to injury, the four-volume correspondence course, “Jiu-jitsu the Japanese Method of Attack and Self Defence by the Kara Ashikaga School” was, in fact, a direct plagiarism of “Jiu-Jitsu the Japanese Method of Attack and Self Defense” by Captain H. H. Skinner.
By a strange twist of fate, for a brief time in early 1906, the Ashikaga School did feature instruction by a genuine jiujitsu sensei. Liverpool was the first British port of call of the famous Gunji Koizumi. In Koizumi’s “My Study of Judo” (1960) he mentions having taught jiujitsu at the Kara Ashikaga School.
It’s tempting to imagine a Remington Steele scenario in which Mr. Thomas, having invented a Japanese martial arts master as a figurehead, suddenly and unexpectedly found himself in the position to employ a real one. Sadly, the historical record does not reveal whether Koizumi played along with the charade (although it seems unlikely), nor whether Thomas had to scramble to create an actual dojo at his Electric Building address to accommodate his new instructor and, presumably, paying students. Koizumi, sensibly enough, spent only a short time at the Liverpool school before before travelling south to London, where he collaborated with former Bartitsu Club instructor Sadakazu Uyenishi at his Piccadilly Square dojo.
Caveat emptor …
Posted inJiujitsu, Mysteries|Comments Off on The Case of the Imaginary Sensei
This remarkable site has been restored as a museum and Hall of Fame commemorating the sports of wrestling and bare-knuckle pugilism. According to ESPN.com:
What remains are the painstakingly restored barns (…) that house the gloves, medicine balls, plaques, rings, weights and other paraphernalia that define the world of boxing. Many of the pieces were used by Sullivan as he trained for the championship fight.
Rooms include a lounge — what Sullivan called his “room of repose,” complete with ornate woodwork in the ceiling — in which the fighter cooled down from exercising and which still contains Muldoon’s chair and some of his books. The barn also contains an upstairs space used by Muldoon and Sullivan for wrestling (…) Visitors are welcomed by a life-sized white marble statue of Sullivan in the front yard.
Congratulations to the organisers for rescuing and restoring this priceless piece of combat sports history.
Posted inBoxing|Comments Off on The Bare Knuckle Boxing Hall of Fame
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Sunday, 13th May 2018
Readers of a certain vintage may fondly recall the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer buddy comedies of the 1970s, which were best known for their paper-thin plots and gleefully inventive fight scenes. In this scene, the hulking brawler Spencer does what he does best, while the agile, fast-talking Hill discovers a new slapstick weapon in the form of the gentlemanly cane.
