Members of Seattle’s Barton-Wright/Alfred Hutton Alliance for Historically Accurate Hoplology and Antagonistics, sketched during their demonstration for the 2013 Sherlock Seattle Convention.
Esfinges is the first female international HEMA network, created to unite and support women martial artists, and to encourage and assist more women to take up the practice of Historical European Martial Arts.
The Esfinges Shop now includes a number of t-shirts, sweatshirts and other items with logos inspired by E.W. Barton-Wright and the fencer/self defence instructor known only as “Miss Sanderson”. A wide variety of styles and colour choices are available.
Your purchase will also support Esfinges projects.
Lulu Hurst, also known variously as the “Little Georgia Wonder” and as the “Georgia Magnet”, was a music hall sensation during the mid-late 19th century. Claiming to possess a supernatural power of electrical or magnetic force, but in fact skilfully exploiting subtle principles of physics, anatomy and the ideomotor effect, the apparently frail “Magnet” was often matched against heavyweight strongmen, boxers and wrestlers in carefully controlled “tests” using simple props such as pool cues, wooden chairs and umbrellas. The results were often both spectacular and amusing to the “Magnet’s” many fans.
Later, Bartitsu founder E.W. Barton-Wright was to produce a written expose of the “magnetic act”, including many of the feats first popularised by Lulu Hurst.
There follows an account of one of the “Georgia Magnet’s” New York performances, pitting her skills against the strength of sumo wrestler Sorakichi Matsuda (misspelled as Matsada in the report):
There was the usual overflowing, shouting crowd in the Brooklyn Theater last night, and the cues and canes and chairs, with the fifteen or twenty assorted men who martyred themselves for the cause of science, went waltzing across the floor with the customary mad dance. The usual exciting scenes with wrecked umbrellas, canes and cues took place until the feature of the evening was introduced, the struggle over the chair by the Georgia Wonder and the celebrated Japanese wrestler, Matsada.
The Oriental Orlando struggled and tugged, and did his level best, while Lulu, calm and smiling, dashed the Japanese around the stage amid the shouts and plaudits of an excited house. The audience went wild in their wrought up enthusiasm over this wonderful and exciting scene.
Then Matsada and four helpers clinging to the chair could not force it to the floor, and when the almond-eyed son of the East came back to his box he was heated, tired, panting and exhausted, while his fair antagonist was apparently as cool and fresh as ever.
Although Bartitsu founder E.W. Barton-Wright once announced plans to introduce his “New Art of Self Defence” to the United States, that was never to be. However, some of his articles for London magazines and newspaper reports on his activities were re-published in the USA, possibly inspiring something of the American self defence boom that took place during the first decade of the 20th century.
The modern Bartitsu revival is very much an international effort, with clubs and study groups about evenly spread between Europe and North America. One of the newest groups is the Bartitsu Club of New York City (you can “like” them on Facebook here), recently instrumental in hosting the very successful Antagonistics Weekend event with Bartitsu instructor Mark Donnelly (reviewed here).
Organised by the indefatigable Rachel Klingberg, the New York club meets monthly in Central Park. Lessons may include:
* Intros, warm-up with Victorian/Edwardian calisthetics, pugilism shadow boxing with attention to proper form and structure
* Savate kicks, coup de pied bas
* Vigny cane – footwork and posture, proper form and stances with solo movements, drills
* Safe falling, Ju Jutsu locks and defense against grabs, “How to Put a Troublesome Man Out of the Room”, grabs to wrists, coat lapels, etc.
* Parasol defense, bayonetting with parasol, locking with cane or parasol, drills from “Self Defence with a Parasol” 1901 article
* Basic fencing
* Cool-down and debriefing
The 2011 (and inaugural) Bartitsu School of Arms symposium was held over the weekend of August 27-28 in London, England. The symposium represented a landmark in the revival of E.W. Barton-Wright’s “New Art of Self Defence”, founded 110 years ago in the same city. 18 participants attended the event, including Bartitsu enthusiasts from the USA and Germany as well as throughout the U.K.
The theme of the 2011 School of Arms was to continue Barton-Wright’s radical experiments in cross-training between various martial arts and combat sports, which were abandoned as a work-in-progress when the original Bartitsu Club closed down under mysterious circumstances in early 1902.
The event began on Friday evening outside the doors of the Shaftesbury Best Western Hotel, the building that once housed Barton-Wright’s club. At precisely the time the group gathered, sheltering from a torrential downpour, the clouds parted and the sun shone through, which was generally taken as a good omen. The group then made its way to the back bar of the Salisbury inn, a classic late-Victorian London pub.
Training began at 9.00 a.m. on Saturday morning at our venue, the ground floor of a Victorian era warehouse in Bermondsey, which roughly made up in 19th century ambiance what it lacked in amenities. The large, white-walled space was divided into 10′ squares by a grid of iron pillars, with enormous wooden beams in the ceiling and a sturdy old wooden floor. A wall display featured a portrait of E.W. Barton-Wright, rare photographs taken inside the original Bartitsu Club and other inspirational images. Rubber-tipped rattan training canes were propped against the pillars and one section of the floor was covered with thick rubber jigsaw mats.
Mornings began with various warm-up exercises, including American wrestler and physical culturist “Farmer” Burns’ upper-body routine. The remainder of the mornings were spent alternating between circuit training, in which small groups rotated between instructors teaching 5-10 minute mini-lessons/drills in savate kicking, boxing, jujitsu and stick fighting, and team-taught sessions in which pairs of participants experimented with self defence scenarios incorporating elements of each of the lessons they’d just learned. The aim was to practice Bartitsu as a holistic art, smoothly transitioning between techniques, styles and ranges as required by the needs of the moment.
After the lunch break, the afternoon sessions featured longer, whole-group classes in each of the specialist subject areas, taught by James Marwood, Tony Wolf, Allen Reed, Stefan Dieke and George Stokoe. These classes covered practical self defence, neo-Bartitsu drills inspired by the canonical stick fighting and unarmed combat sequences, fencing theory applied to Vigny stick fighting and tactical kicking.
The final session on both days was allocated to “break-out” time, a chance for participants and instructors to explore areas of special interest in a less formal environment. In one corner a group would be debating and demonstrating the “garotting” attack of 19th century muggers, in another a pair of stick fighters would be sparring and a submission grappling match would be taking place on the mats.
Evening events included drinks and socialising at the Sherlock Holmes pub on the banks of the Thames and a meal at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub and restaurant dating back to the 1700s that was once the haunt of Charles Dickens and, later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The 2011 Bartitsu School of Arms was a great success and plans are already underway to make it an annual event.
Dutch journalist Erik Noomen’s well-researched article on the history and revival of Bartitsu has been featured in the Volkskrant, one of Holland’s largest daily newspapers. Touching on Bartitsu’s connection with the Steampunk subculture and the Sherlock Holmes mythos and featuring comments by Dutch Bartitsu instructor John Jozen, Mr. Noomen’s article is an excellent introduction to the subject for Dutch readers.
An English translation of the article is now available here:
Everyone thought that ‘baritsu’, the magical martial art of Sherlock Holmes, was a figment of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination. Until, suddenly, yellowed articles showing moustachioed martial artists were found under a century of dust. Now the first ‘mixed martial art’ is the subject of international attention.
Fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories know that the Master Detective threw Professor Moriarty from a rocky precipice with his knowledge of “baritsu”. In the story The Adventure of the Empty House, baritsu is described as being a form of Japanese wrestling; the word appears nowhere else. Many readers thought, therefore, that the fighting style was invented by the author, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Just over ten years ago two English researchers proved the contrary, when they found hundred-year-old articles with sketches and photographs of jacketed Englishmen with straw boater hats and handlebar moustaches, fighting each other with bare fists, umbrellas and vicious whipping canes.
Doyle’s “baritsu” was actually called “Bartitsu” and was developed by Edward William Barton-Wright, an eccentric engineer who had learned various martial arts during his travels throughout and beyond the British Empire. Returning home to London after having lived for three years in Japan, he decided to combine his knowledge of Jiu-Jitsu with English boxing, wrestling and the Swiss/French la canne, in which the cane was used to hold malodorous Apaches (Parisian street thugs) at bay. The result was the world’s first mixed martial art combining Asian and European fighting styles. With no undue humility, in 1898 the Brit coined the term “Bartitsu”: a contraction of Barton-Wright and jiu-jitsu.
The new trend lasted only four years, then jiu-jitsu took the torch and Bartitsu disappeared rapidly into oblivion. However, that time is over. Since 2009, you may even speak of a modest craze, thanks to the Sherlock Holmes film, starring Robert Downey Jr., which managed to make a street fighter out of the cerebral Victorian sleuth, armed against the dregs of the London underworld with decisive punches and Barton-Wright’s stick tricks.
In 2006 there was only one school that frequently regularly offered Bartitsu lessons. In the year 2011, over twenty clubs and courses are devoted to the sport. At “Steampunk” conventions (where 19th-century machines and fashions are mixed with a modern sensibility), Bartitsu demonstrations are given in late-19th century clothing.
The Netherlands remains a little behind the trend: a total of six of our countrymen practice Bartitsu. And that includes instructor John Jozen of the Shizen Hontai martial arts association in Veldhoven, the only place in the Netherlands where, every week, Bartitsu-style self defence with a walking stick is practiced. Jozen: “Bartitsu is not very practical if someone is threatening you with a gun. You’d do just as well throwing a ball to distract him as waving a walking stick or throwing a coat over his head.”
At the basis of this Bartitsu revival is Tony Wolf, the “Cultural Fighting Styles Designer” who trained the orcs and elves to fight for the Lord of the Rings movies. In 2005 he started organising Bartitsu reconstructions, using self-made rattan canes with a steel ball handles. The Holmes film and the stylish BBC-TV series last year, which sees Holmes solve his cases in modern London, have made Bartitsu cool again, says Wolf.
Both projects will have sequels later this year. As seen the trailer for the movie Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the film will show lots of “Bartitsu-style” punch-ups.
The steady renaissance of Bartitsu during the 21st century stands in stark contrast to the explosive growth of the sport during the late 19th century. Shortly after his return to London, Barton-Wright presented self-defence demonstrations in men’s clubs and for charitable benefits, with great success. Jozen: “Between 1880 and 1920, carrying weapons such as swords in cities was forbidden, hence gentlemen switched en masse to sturdy walking sticks. Not only as fasionable accessories, but for fear of infamous street gangs such as the “Hooligans” in London and the “Apaches” of Montmartre, stories about whom filled the newspapers of the day.” An additional benefit of the cane as a weapon was that, as Barton-Wright said, it was possible to defeat scoundrels “without getting one’s hands dirty”.
In 1899 his company opened the London Bartitsu Club: “a huge underground hall with gleaming white tiles and electric light, with champions stalking around like tigers”, according to an excited journalist in 1901. Most members were soldiers, athletes, actors, politicians and aristocrats. The teachers that Barton-Wright had brought to London were also impressive. From Japan came the jiu-jitsu legend Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi, from Switzerland, the heavyweight wrestler Armand Cherpillod and the famous master-at-arms Pierre Vigny, an expert in savate (French kickboxing) and inventor of the remarkable cane fighting.
Although Bartitsu was subtitled the “gentlemanly art of self defence”, not all its practitioners were real gentlemen. Among the soldiers, athletes, actors, politicians and aristocrats who joined Barton-Wright, for example, was Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon. This Olympic fencer would later acquire infamy as one of the few male passengers to survive the sinking of the Titanic, allegedly because he had bribed sailors in his lifeboat not to rescue others in the water (E.N. – Duff-Gordon was later cleared of these charges after an extensive inquiry).
Women also practiced Bartitsu. Feminist Edith Garrud later started her own dojo, which was used as a refuge for the “suffragettes”, revolutionary fighters for women’s voting rights. It was also there that they trained “The Bodyguard”, a secret society of women that physically protected speakers at their meeting against attacks by conservative Londoners. Their jolly nickname: the “Jiu-jitsuffragettes”.
Training at the Bartitsu Club must have offered a spectacular sight. Articles of the period reveal how you can prevail if armed only with your umbrella, or even while riding a bicycle. Photographs show a prosperous lady in a long dress with a huge, flowery hat riding primly on a country lane. She is pursued by a villain, also riding a bike, whom she defeats by suddenly braking, causing him to crash to the ground. In the next picture you see her pedalling away and waving back with an affable smile.
In 2011, however, John Jozen parks his bike every Saturday just outside the dojo in Veldhoven. He limits his Bartitsu training to walking sticks or umbrellas. “Although I must admit my wife is not happy that I have now beaten four or five umbrellas to shreds. Therefore I now buy old canes in charity shops, and sometimes even bamboo canes from the hardware store. These don’t cost so much.”
Barton-Wright was not so frugal. Three years after its establishment, he had to close the Bartitsu Club. Arguments with his famous jiu-jitsu teacher and the small number of Londoners willing or able to pay the extensive fees, made him decide in 1902 to seek his fortune in electric health equipment. This, too, was a mixed success. The ultraviolet lamps and heat rays which he imported were perhaps beneficial, but other inventions such as the Nagelschmidt Apparatus (an electric chair intended to stimulate muscle growth and reduce fat) sometimes made rheumatic patients go from bad to worse.
Barton-Wright died in 1951, almost penniless and forgotten, and was buried in an anonymous “pauper’s grave”.
Today, the sport of mixed martial arts is a billion-dollar industry. Fights promoted by the Ultimate Fighting Championship are watched by tens of millions of fans via pay-per-view and MMA fighters like Anderson Silva, Georges St. Pierre and Matt Hughes earn big money every year.
One would hope that modern fighters would respect the legacy of eclectic martial arts training from yesteryear, but this is not always the case. When John Jozen shows them historic photos of fighters in the Bartitsu Club, their responses are often rather condescending. Jozen: “They ask if you can tell what degree the Bartitsu fighter has gained by the size of his moustache, or whether he wears suspenders.” He must laugh himself. Jozen quickly stresses quickly that he and his students usually practice in modern sportswear, not quaint 1900s-style leotards.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous rendering of Bartitsu as “baritsu” is now understood to have been due to a simple mistake. It’s most likely that Doyle, searching for an exotic way to explain how Sherlock Holmes had flung Professor Moriarty from the brink of Reichenbach Falls, had copied the word “baritsu” verbatim from a London Times newspaper review of a Bartitsu exhibition, which had made the same spelling error. At roughly the same time that The Adventure of the Empty House was published, E.W. Barton-Wright’s London Bartitsu Club closed its doors for the last time, thus prematurely ending Barton-Wright’s innovative martial arts experiments.
It would probably, therefore, have nonplussed both Doyle and Barton-Wright to learn that something called “Baritzu” would be practiced five years later by members of the Australian Armed Services.
Between June and December of 1902, soldiers of B Company (10th Australian Infantry Regiment) including Privates Marshall, Emery, Weeks and Verner, performed a series of “Baritzu” demonstrations alongside displays of Indian club swinging, bayonet fighting and sabre fencing. All of these items (apart from the mysterious Baritzu) were typical of military Assault at Arms exhibitions, in which various soldierly feats and skills were performed as public entertainment, often in aid of charitable causes.
In a preamble to one of their first Baritzu exhibitions, a Mr. W.B. Wilkinson addressed the audience and explained Baritzu by means of an almost verbatim quote from Barton-Wright’s 1899 article, The New Art of Self Defence:
He said that Baritzu, or the new self-defence, was composed of 300 methods of attack and counter-attack. This system had been devised with the purpose of rendering a person absolutely secure against any method of attack. It was not intended to take the place of boxing, fencing, wrestling, or any other recognised forms of attack and defence. It was claimed for it, however, that it comprised all the best points of these methods, and that it would be of inestimable advantage when occasions arose where neither boxing, wrestling, nor any of the known modes of resistance was of avail. The system had been carefully and scientifically planned; its principle might be summed up in a sound knowledge of balance and leverage, as applied to human anatomy.
Applying Occam’s razor, the simplest explanation would seem to be that a member of B Company had come across or saved a copy of Barton-Wright’s article, and that the Company used that as the inspiration for their novel Baritzu demonstrations. If so, then Marshall, Emery, Weeks and Verner must have been among the first Bartitsu revivalists, active only five years after the actual art had, for most practical purposes, ceased to exist. It’s diverting to imagine them poring over Barton-Wright’s articles, much as Bartitsu revivalists do today.
It’s even more diverting to speculate as to how the art came to be known to B Company as Baritzu. Barton-Wright’s first article for Pearson’s Magazine (quoted above by Mr. Wilkinson) had not actually referred to Bartitsu by name; the word was, however, used in the introduction to the second article. Doyle’s “baritsu” had, of course, gained some pop-culture currency by 1906. Perhaps the simplest explanation here is that there was a confusion between Bartitsu – the real, but then all-but-extinct self defence method – and baritsu – the entirely fictional fighting style of Sherlock Holmes – by soldiers who were vaguely aware of the connection but even less particular than Doyle was about spelling.
A very peculiar case of life imitating (martial) art ..
Congratulations to Alexander Nels Elofson, whose extremely manly fisticuffs pose won the Art of Manliness website’s pose photo contest.
Spanish illustrator Luis Miguez’s renditions of Sherlock Holmes in various Bartitsu-inspired “attitudes of defence”:
