This YouTube channel offers a wide range of well-produced short documentaries, lectures, instructional videos and equipment demonstrations in connection with the grand tradition of 19th and early 20th century physical culture.
The Redgate Bartitsu Club has produced a useful series of instructional videos on the basics of Bartitsu as a holistic fighting style, progressing through the ranges of stick fighting, (kick)boxing and fundamental jujutsu/standing grappling.
In this photograph, from a January 1909 full-page advertisement for the Golden Square School of Jujutsu in Modern Man magazine, William Garrud (standing) and Sadakazu Uyenishi demonstrate a kugi-nuki (“pincers”) takedown against a boxer’s left-lead punch.
Edward Barton-Wright’s introduction of the Japanese style to Europe in the final years of the 19th century began an ongoing “boxing vs. jujutsu” debate, mostly among armchair theorists. Barton-Wright, Percy Longhurst and other self-defence practitioners tended to argue in favour of a union of boxing with jujutsu as self-defence, while William Garrud had a particular interest in devising jujutsu counters to boxing punches. This type of defence was the subject of a chapter of his 1914 book The Complete Jujutsuan, which was later republished in the second volume of the Bartitsu Compendium (2008).
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Although E.W. Barton-Wright recorded details of the stick fighting and jujutsu aspects of Bartitsu in his Pearson’s Magazine articles, it took many years of painstaking research and educated guesswork to piece together the Bartitsu Club’s take on (kick)boxing. This video is a decent representation of that style, as performed in a friendly, technical sparring match.
Back in 2005, the Bartitsu Society intended to dedicate funds raised through sales of the Bartitsu Compendium, Volume 1 to the creation of a memorial stone for Bartitsu founder E.W. Barton-Wright, who had died under humble circumstances in 1951 and was buried in a so-called “pauper’s grave” – an un-marked, communal plot – at Kingston Cemetery, near London. We discovered, however, that there was a cemetery policy prohibiting the placement of individual grave markers on communal plots because it’s impossible to precisely identify where an individual was buried. A temporary, symbolic marker was then placed at the site by Society member Phil Giles (see below):
We also pursued memorial plaque options at the site of the original Bartitsu Club in Shaftesbury Avenue, but Barton-Wright was not considered to be historically notable enough for the Blue Plaque scheme and the location wasn’t suitable for commemoration via Green Plaque. An effort to donate a permanent Barton-Wright display to the Self Defence Gallery at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds looked promising for a while, but became tangled in red tape.
Frank Jastrzembski – an author and historian who arranged for a grave marker in honour of Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery, the famous 19th century Danish-American duellist, soldier-of-fortune and self-defence instructor – has recently discovered that it is now possible to install permanent markers on communal graves at Kingston Cemetery. These markers are not full “gravestones” but can be of any design within the dimensions of 12″ cubed. In collaboration with Edward Barton-Wright’s descendants, a permanent stone marker and plaque is now being designed as a fitting memorial for the founder of Bartitsu.
In Barton-Wright’s second article in 1901, also titled ‘Self-defence with a Walking-stick’ [Barton-Wright 1901b], we see more use of guards, strikes, and parries, with a straight cane. However, we also see defences using a hooked walking stick, where the crook of the handle is used to pull an opponent off balance by either pulling round their neck, or round their ankle. In this article, we also see an interesting evolution, which is the appearance of jujutsu techniques applied with the cane. For example, technique number 7 shows the bent arm lock, ude-garami, applied after a parry (Figure 4 overleaf). Do these techniques show that Vigny and Barton-Wright, who trained intensively with jujutsu experts Tani and Uyenishi, started to hybridise use of the cane with jujutsu techniques?
As announced in January, work has begun on the production of the third volume of the Bartitsu Compendium, a series that began with the publication of Volume 1 in 2005 and continued with Volume II in 2008. After that the original Bartitsu.org website became our main communications outlet, but the catastrophic technical failure of that site in 2019 underscored the fragility of purely electronic media.
Volume III begins with a long-form, in-depth look back at the life of Edward Barton-Wright and the rise and fall of the Bartitsu Club, concentrating especially on the heady years between 1898 and 1902. Already numbering over 100 pages, this section will offer not only a truly comprehensive overview of the subject but also crucial and unique details that have not seen print (in any media) for about 120 years.
The second section serves as an archive and distillation of the very best articles published via Bartitsu.org (and now BartitsuSociety.com) between 2008 and the present day, plus “new” items on (among other topics) Pierre Vigny’s signature defence against a belt-swinging hooligan – here fully detailed for the first time in recent history – and a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the 1907 production of The Lady Athlete, or Jiu Jitsu Downs the Footpads, one of the first martial arts movies ever produced.
Section 3 is a vital supplement to all the technical material presented in the first two volumes of the Compendium. These items include key insights into precisely how Barton-Wright’s martial art combined – and distinguished itself from – the other “antagonistics” of its era, drawn from a fusion of hard-won historical data and the practical experience of the contemporary revival movement.
Finally, section 4 features a thorough sampling of more recent Bartitsuvian events, particularly in the realm of popular culture. Paralleling the media interest, this section also delves into the modern Bartitsu movement as an exemplar of grassroots, open-source martial arts revivalism.
The Bartitsu Compendium, Volume III is scheduled for release during 2022, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the opening of the original Bartitsu Club in London. Further updates will be offered here as the publication date approaches!
A heads-up that a number of rare French antagonistics manuals, most dating from the period immediately following the brief Bartitsu Club era, are now available in English translation via Amazon, courtesy of M.P. Lynch. All the translations are available for under US$3.00 each and are available free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
YE OLDE RUFF & TUMBLE: Romein De Hooge – a translation of de Hooge’s Klare Onderrichtinge der Voortreffelijke Worstel-Konst (“Clear Education in the Magnificent Art of Wrestling”) from 1674. The “magnificent art” in this case has less to do with gentlemanly grappling and more to do with winning an Amsterdam bar brawl if you happen to be unarmed when things kick off.
The Secrets of Jiu Jitsu – written by Ernest Regnier, a.k.a. “Re-Nie”, who had trained with Bartitsu Club instructors and went on to pioneer jujutsu in France.
HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF: CANE – FISTS – DIRTY TRICKS – by Georges Dubois, the well-known Parisian athlete and artist who had lost a savate vs. jujutsu encounter with “Re-Nie” but carried on the produce this excellent manual on street self defence.
