A sad and sobering reminder of the risks inherent in even friendly wrestling, from the Nottingham Evening Post of 22 February, 1909:
The Westminster’s Coroner’s Coart on Saturday, Mr. J. Troutbeck held an inquest concerning the death of Arthur Charles of 21 Margharetta-terrace, Chelsea. The deceased was practising wrestling at the Fulham Baths on Tuesday last with Frederick Knight, who won the 1st. Olympia Championship as “catch-as-catch-can” at the Stadium last year, when he received injuries to the spine, and died later at St. George’s Hospital.
Evidence was given by Harry Mackenzie, who said he was watching a friendly wrestling bout between Knight and the deceased. They had wrestled for some minutes without a fall, when Charles buttocked Knight. He was trying to press his shoulder down, but could not succeed. Knight wriggled clear and both men got up. Knight then secured a crutch-hold and threw Charles, whose head seemed to twist round. There was nothing unusual in the way the men were wrestling, and good temper was shown. There was nothing one-sided about the match.
Frederick Bush, a gymnastic and swimming instructor at the Baths, said that Charles came down on the back of his head and shoulders. Instead of his legs shooting out in the usual way they doubled up, and the witness thought that deceased was not prepared for the throw.
Wrestling was carried out under the rules of the Amateur Wrestling Association, and the contests were allowed by the borough Council. Any persons could enter on the payment of a small fee and wrestle. There was nobody appointed to see that the rules were carried out. Witness (said he) would at once prohibit anything of a rough or unusual nature.
Benjamin Arthur Few, friend of the deceased, who witnessed the bout, said the neck and crutch hold which Knight employed was perfectly legitimate. It was not, however, a common hold and throw, as it was most difficult to make. The body would be lifted to a perpendicular position, and the hold would be retained until the shoulders were pressed on the mat. The head and shoulders usually reached the ground simultaneously, but in this instance the bead seemed to touch the mat first.
Percy W. Longhurst, of Wallington, a wrestling expert, expressed the opinion that the hold and throw as explained was perfectly legitimate. He thought that the deceased had failed to grasp the situation when be was seized. Had he arched his neck and done other necessary things this would not have happened. Witness thought that the better practice would be for a person always to be present at the practice of wrestling bouts. Witness had refereed perhaps 20 bouts in which Knight had taken part, and his opinion was that he was fair, clean, honest, and skilful wrestler who would not make use of undue strength in order to obtain a fall.
After the accident, it was stated that the deceased had remarked to a policeman; “don’t blame him (Knight) for the accident.” At the hospital it was discovered that Charles’s spine had been dislocated. Death took place on Thursday morning, and was due to the injuries.
Frederick William Knight, of New Malden, bantam-weight amateur champion of England, said that Charles showed considerable skill. Witness described how he threw the deceased, and said that he had beaten 16 men in open competition by the same methods. The Coroner said it was notorious that wrestling was not dangerous sport, and as far his experience went, he had never known a fatality resulting.
The jury returned a verdict of “accidental death” and exonerated Knight from blame.
The “sacrifice throw” in which a wrestler drops to the ground, using his own falling weight to throw his opponent, was almost unknown in Europe during the late 19th century. Although earlier European systems of unarmed combat had employed this principle, the rules of late-Victorian wrestling styles generally asserted that “the man whose back touches the ground first loses”, and so those styles concentrated, by default, on standing throws.
In 1917, Sir Arthur Pearson – the publisher of Pearsons’ Magazine – reminisced about his first meeting with Bartitsu founder E.W. Barton-Wright, which had taken place in 1899:
He stood before me in a most casual attitude and invited me to throw him down. I have always kept myself very fit, and was in those days rather proud of my strength. Without any further ado I essayed the apparently simple task of putting the little man on the floor. What really happened was that in less time than it takes to dictate these words I struck the wall some 15 ft. away with quite enough force to be unpleasant! Mr. Barton-Wright had sunk before my assault and, as its violence upset my balance, had delicately poised me upon the soles of his feet and shot me into space.
Thus, Sir Arthur Pearson may well have been the first gentleman in Victorian England to fall victim to a jiujitsu tomoe-nage or “stomach-throw”. Thereafter, via Barton-Wright’s articles and lectures and the challenge matches of Bartitsu Club champions Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi, the art of “giving in to get your way” in hand-to-hand combat was re-introduced to the Western world.
A parallel is drawn between the no-holds-barred ethos of Bartitsu and the military tactics of the Boer War in this article from the St James’s Gazette of 18 January, 1900.
Our army leaders might draw excellent moral from that Japanese “noble art self-defence” just imported, for which a London school is about to started. It disregards the traditional rules of boxing and of wrestling (in which many foreigners think us absurdly conservative), and fits the student for an altercation with, say, a Turkish assassin or an armed Hooligan.
We are fighting with what has occasionally shown itself, however brave, to be a Hooligan army. It may be as courageous to marchup to the cannon’s mouth in quarter column, or to wear a shining sword and despise cover, as to wait for a kick a la savate without guarding.
A general can explain that he was cut up, not by the regulation field gun, but by grossly unscientific guns of position, as a wrestler, that he was put down by an agonizing “lock” instead of a fair throw — but he goes down all the same. The Boer mounted infantry may be unsuited to a big European war, and the Hooligan’s knife to a professional boxing-match (and even a novelty therein), but both have their uses.
We are not, of course, arguing in favour of shelling either the white flag or the Red Cross. But fighting, after all, vulgar and rough-and-ready though it be, is the chief end of military training, not circus riding or playing conjuring tricks with the rifle. Not even showing how fearless we are.
Exhibitions of kobudo (weaponed martial arts) by members of the London Budokwai during 1919, 1922 and 1924 included displays of combat with a highly unusual weapon – the nabebuta or “pot lid”. Described by one journalist as resembling “wooden cymbals”, the nabebuta are rare even in koryu bujutsu (“old-school martial arts”), being particularly associated with the Takenouchi-ryu.
For almost all practical purposes, Bartitsu – as a defined combination of martial arts and combat sport styles – ceased to exist after the closure of the Bartitsu School of Arms in early 1902. Sadakazu Uyenishi, Yukio Tani and Armand Cherpillod continued their successes as music hall challenge wrestlers; both Uyenishi and Tani also opened up their own jiujitsu dojo, while Cherpillod became instrumental in introducing Japanese unarmed combat to the European continent.
Thus, E.W. Barton-Wright’s experiment in self-defence cross-training became fragmented. Of all of the former Bartitsu Club instructors, however, Pierre Vigny came closest to perpetuating Barton-Wright’s ideals via Vigny’s “Combined System”, described in the following article from The Sportsman of 8 October 1906. Although frustratingly little is known about the details of Vigny’s system, it clearly included jiujitsu as well as boxing/savate, fencing and his proprietary method of stick fighting; albeit that the jiujitsu content appears to have been de-emphasised in comparison with Barton-Wright’s approach.
At about the same time, self-defence specialist Percy Longhurst published the first edition of his book Jiujitsu and Other Methods of Self Defence, which is certainly the closest thing to a “Bartitsu manual” to have been written in English during the early 20th century.
Uniquely, the Sportsman article also refers to a challenge by Vigny to pit his system against jiujitsu, although there seems to be no record of that challenge being taken up.
Fighting for the vote, the Suffragettes have planted an explosive device. As they attempt to make their escape, a husband sells out his wife’s cause to the special constables …
Hats off to the team at London’s Fight Rep for this Suffrajitsu-inspired tribute to Edwardian ass-kickery, which was rehearsed and shot in a mere eight hours. Bartitsu aficionados will appreciate the use of signature techniques from E.W. Barton-Wright’s Pearson’s Magazine articles and Marguerite Vigny’s (“Miss Sanderson’s”) demonstrations of parasol and umbrella self-defence.
It’s well-known that the method of walking stick defence taught at the Bartitsu Club circa 1900 was devised by Pierre Vigny. Vigny himself instructed Bartitsu students in his system, and then taught it for some years thereafter at his own London self-defence school. Curiously, however, there are only sporadic records of Vigny teaching walking stick self-defence after he returned to his home city of Geneva in mid-1908.
The next major development of his style occurred during the early 1920s. Madras, India police superintendant Herbert G. Lang drew very substantially from the Vigny system in writing his book The Walking Stick Method of Self Defence, which was published in 1923. Although Lang’s book was only a modest commercial success, for many years thereafter it remained, effectively, the only comprehensive manual on the subject of stick fighting available in the Western world.
During the early years of the Second World War, when members of the Haganah paramilitary organisation required a systematic method of stick fighting, they began to work from Lang’s Walking Stick Method. Translated into Hebrew, it became one of the foundations of Haganah close-combat training, which also included instruction in jiujitsu, boxing, fighting with knives and short sticks and even stone throwing. Ironically, few at the time were aware of the system’s actual provenance, the assumption being that, since Lang’s book has been published in India and included many photographs of Indian police officers in action, the system itself must have been of Indian origin.
The walking stick method – known in Haganah circles as the “long stick” style – was practiced without any protective equipment, which was simply unavailable to its practitioners. The numerous minor injuries, especially to hands and heads, that resulted from this training were seen by the Haganah leaders as an effective test of courage and stamina.
Eventually, many thousands of Hanagah trainees were taught the Lang system, forming what was, in essence, the first generation of Vigny stick fighting revivalists, positioned some forty years after the Vigny style’s heyday in London and about sixty years before the current revival got underway.
Israeli martial arts historian Noah Gross has located this extremely rare film of Haganah members training in the “long stick” style. Although it’s very short, the film offers a fascinating glimpse back to a time when the walking stick method was studied in deadly earnest:
Although E.W. Barton-Wright had been lecturing upon and demonstrating jiujitsu since his return to England from Japan in late 1898, it was not until September of 1901 that London music hall audiences saw the Japanese art applied in full earnest against a European wrestling style. Barton-Wright’s “New Art” was represented by Yukio Tani, while Percy Longhurst of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Amateur Wrestling Society championed the English school.
Longhurst was, in fact, the first British wrestler to accept Barton-Wright’s challenge to compete under his rules, which declared that a bout would continue until one grappler signalled submission to the other. The concept of submission wrestling was entirely novel at that time and place; the extant regional British and European wrestling styles were predicated upon throwing an opponent onto his back, or wrestling to a pin fall position in which the shoulders were pressed to the mat. The closest analogue to jiujitsu in the early 20th century European canon was the Lancashire catch-as-catch-can style, which employed some holds that could force the opponent into a pin position through pain as well as leverage.
Thus, Percy Longhurst was at the considerable disadvantage of playing Tani’s game and it is neither surprising, nor to his discredit, that he lost every “test”. Afterwards, a newspaper reviewer expressed distaste for the spectacle of a wrestler being forced to submit to joint-locks, describing the techniques as “weird and somewhat horrible”, while admitting that jiujitsu seemed ideal for true self-defence against Hooligans.
Thereafter, London’s wrestling fraternity remained wary of the Japanese style, despite Barton-Wright’s inducement of £100 – a very substantial sum of money – to any challenger who could defeat the Bartitsu Club champions.
One would-be challenger, who claimed to be an exponent of “the Russian style” of wrestling, made it as far as the stage wings before his courage seemingly deserted him. A few more amateurs did consent to square off against Tani or his colleague Sadakazu Uyenishi, but none came close to winning the prize money. Barton-Wright struggled to get any of the established champion wrestlers to compete under jiujitsu rules and, by October of 1901, he had resorted to advertising his challenges in the pages of the Sporting Life, as seen here:
There followed some vehement arguments, both via “Letters to the Editor” columns and in person during Barton-Wright’s music hall displays, with many challenges and counter-challenges being bandied about. It would still take some time, however, before wrestling vs. jiujitsu contests became fully established in England.
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