Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Sunday, 22nd April 2018
The international historical European martial arts and stage combat communities mourn the recent passing of John Waller, who was a modern pioneer in both fields.
Possessed of a life-long fascination with arms and armour, Mr. Waller founded the Medieval Society in 1963 and, a few years later, he also became a founding member of the Society of British Fight Directors. His long association with the Royal Armouries Museum likewise began during the late 1960s, when he owned an antiques and archery shop adjacent to the Museum, which was then housed in the Tower of London.
As a stage combat instructor, John Waller was responsible for training generations of young actors via the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Arts Educational School and the Drama Studio.
During the 1970s and ’80s he was involved in the production of a number of educational videos by and for the Royal Armouries, notably including Masters of Defence which was among the first videos to present historical European fighting styles as martial arts in their own right. He also served as the fight director for numerous plays, films, TV series and commercials.
When the Royal Armouries moved from the Tower of London to its new, purpose built facility in Leeds during the early 1990s, Mr. Waller also relocated and went on to become the Museum’s Director of Interpretation, training the fight demonstration team in the performance of numerous historical combat styles. In 2002 the R.A. Museum became the site of the first public Bartitsu demonstrations in a century, based on the then-recently republished “Self-Defence With a Walking Stick” articles by E.W. Barton-Wright.
Above: Royal Armouries Fight Interpreters Keith Ducklin (left) and Rob Temple demonstrate Bartitsu stick fighting.
Mr. Waller was proud to have met the Queen when she visited the Royal Armouries on three occasions. He retired in 2006 but continued to serve as a consultant for the Museum and, in 2009, was featured in the HEMA documentary Reclaiming the Blade.
Our condolences to Mr. Waller’s friends and family at this difficult time.
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Tuesday, 24th April 2018
Above; the characteristic “inverted grip” of the Bonafont cane defence style, applied to a disarming strike.
The first decades of the 20th century saw a marked shift in approaches to the use of the walking stick as a weapon of self-defence. Whereas cane manuals had appeared intermittently during the preceding era, they tended to be closely based on sabre fencing and, indeed, to treat the stick as a substitute sabre. Innovators, notably including Bartitsu Club stick fighting instructor Pierre Vigny, observed the flaws in that approach and developed more diverse and sophisticated methods of their own, geared less towards the conditions of gentlemanly stick play in the salle d’armes and more towards the unpredictable, high-stakes circumstances of street fighting.
Vigny’s method was promulgated beyond his personal reach via E.W. Barton-Wright’s famous 1901 article series for Pearson’s Magazine and then by Police Superintendant H.G. Lang’s 1923 book The Walking Stick Method of Self-Defence. During the intervening period, several other authors produced their own works on the subject, including Andrew Chase Cunningham, whose 1912 book The Cane as a Weapon was a uniquely American entry into the canon of early 20th century stick fighting manuals.
Possibly the last, but by no means the least interesting nor valuable, was Nuevos Modos de Defenderse en la Calle con un Baston (New Methods of Street Self Defence with a Cane), which was published in Buenos Aires, Argentina during the year 1930. Author Arturo Bonafont was clearly an experienced instructor and, like Vigny and Cunningham before him, his idiosyncratic method represented a departure from the orthodoxy of sabre-based stick fighting. Reading between the lines a little, it seems that his intended audience may have been young “swells” on slumming excursions in and around the brothels of the Argentinian capital.
The Bonafont method relies on a simple and flexible strategy based on two primary grips of the cane. One, for use at closer quarters, is the double-handed grip familiar to Bartitsu enthusiasts as the “bayonette”, while the other is a single-handed “inverted” grip; a position almost unique to Bonafont’s system. From these two primary grips, the system encompasses a comprehensive arsenal of jabs with both the steel ball “pommel” and the ferrule as well as slashing strikes delivered to the opponent’s most vulnerable targets.
Original copies of the Bonafont manual are extremely rare and it’s international appeal has been limited by the fact that it was written in Spanish. Now, however, an excellent English translation has been made available by Darrin Cook of the BigStickCombat.com website.
The new translated ebook edition covers the entire system in exacting detail and is available for only US$3.00 from Amazon.com.
The only criticism that might be made is that, while the new edition faithfully preserves the picture/text placement of the original book, that inevitably means that it’s often necessary to flip back and forth between pages to check Bonafont’s instructional photographs against his text.
That very minor quibble aside, Mr. Cook’s translation will, hopefully, help lead to an international revival of the Bonafont cane system comparable to that of the Vigny method, Irish bataireacht and other styles.
Posted inAntagonistics|Comments Off on Arturo Bonafont’s 1930 Cane Defence Book Now Translated and Available!
Although E.W. Barton-Wright’s seminal Bartitsu articles were published in the US editions of Pearson’s Magazine, further references to Bartitsu in the American media were scattershot and Barton-Wright’s martial art certainly didn’t impact US popular culture to anything like the extent that it did in the UK. Likewise, although Barton-Wright mentioned a plan to tour his system through the United States, that never came to pass. The closest thing to an “American Bartitsu” during the early 20th century was probably the mysterious Latson System of Self Defense, of which there are few records other than a short series of articles that were probably written by the ill-fated Dr. Latson himself, but published posthumously.
It can be argued, though, that Barton-Wright’s articles did newly popularise illustrated self-defence features in newspapers and magazines, which had previously been rare but which became quite common during the first decade of the 1900s.
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Saturday, 28th April 2018
Yukio Tani (right) circa 1903.
This article from the Leicester Daily Post of October 7, 1905, details a court case involving former Bartitsu Club instructor Yukio Tani. Partly at issue was the practice of pre-arranging the results of apparently spontaneous challenge matches, which was known in Edwardian-era wrestling slang as “swanking” – i.e., contrived showmanship rather than “straight” or “shoot” competition.
Yukio Tani, the famous exponent of jiu-jitsu methods of wrestling, and John Madden, a tall, lean Bermondsey labourer, met as opponents on Thursday; not on the mat and in the full glare of the footlights, but in the Westminster County Court, before Judge Woodfall.
The trouble centred round an unrehearsed incident in June at the Lyceum, when Madden, a labourer at Tower Bridge Wharf, challenged Tani. The Bermondsey man said that after the wrestling bout, in which he was thrown, the Jap severely mauled him outside the dressing-room. He claimed £8 for physical pain, incapacitation from work through injured legs, and damage to his trousers, which he now brought with him to show the judge.
Madden was cross-examined by Mr. Whiteley, on behalf of Tani.
“You are one of those men who are always coming forward with challenges?” Mr. Whiteley asked.
“Provided I am paid for it,” was the answer.
“Is it not always an arrangement that you shall be thrown in a certain way?”
“Yes.”
“Of course you know you are going to be thrown?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Is it not a fact that you asked Tani to give you a seven minutes’ show, so as to make a good display?”
“I never asked him at all. It’s like this. I am supposed to be one of those who makes the best show, and excites the audience. There is a ‘dud’ – he gets thrown in two minutes. When I tapped the floor three times he (Tani) was to release me. He put the lock on me in five minutes. I resisted, and got away; and then when I tapped the floor three times he would not leave off. He put pressure on me and hurt me. I had to shout; and when he did let go I wanted to have it out in my own style.”
“You offered to fight him on the stage with your fists?”
“Yes.”
William Bankier, known as Apollo, the strong man, said that Madden came to the stage-door, said he was hard up, and asked to be showed to try what he could do against Tani. Seeing one of his friends in the front row, and being anxious to impress him, Madden asked to be allowed to stand against the Jap for eight or nine minutes. Four or five minutes was all Tani took to throw his opponents and he would not allow any man to play about longer than necessary.
As timekeeper, Apollo saw that Tani had got Madden fixed in about four minutes, and seeing that the Bermondsey man would not accept the inevitable and that there was a likelihood of his getting hurt, the wrestle was stopped. Madden was very angry at the abrupt end of the bout and struck Tani on the side of the head. Afterwards they were induced to shake hands before the audience, but on leaving the stage Madden called Tani all sorts of names, including “a Japanese swindler” … and Tani, rushing out from his dressing-room, got Madden on the floor in quick time.
Without calling Tani, Judge Woodfall said that the plaintiff had evidently invited all he got, and there would be judgment for the defendant, each side to pay his own costs.
Posted inEdwardiana, Jiujitsu|Comments Off on “Wrestlers in Court: Labourer who Wanted to Use his Fists” (1905)
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Saturday, 5th May 2018
The climactic fight between Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey, Jr. and Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong), in which Holmes appropriately wields a cane against Blackwood’s devilish blade:
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Sunday, 13th May 2018
Captain Sydney Temple Leopold McLaglen (1884-1951) was one of the most colourful “characters” of the early 20th century jiujitsu scene. Charismatic, moustachioed, broad-shouldered and towering at 6’7″ in height, McLaglen looked every inch the dashing British soldier, and had, in fact, been photographed with his brothers for an army recruitment campaign poster, billed as “the Fighting Macks”.
Reminiscent, however, of Sir Harry Flashman – the fictional protagonist of George Macdonald Fraser’s popular historical novel series, The Flashman Papers – Leopold McLaglen’s stalwart stature concealed the heart and mind of an adventurous con-artist.
McLaglen claimed to have studied Japanese unarmed combat from boyhood with a family servant who was proficient in the art, rapidly advancing to the point where he was able to defeat his instructor. He also claimed to be the Jiujitsu Champion of the World, based on his highly dubious defeat of a Japanese fighter named Kanada in British Columbia during 1907, here summarised by a local reporter:
For two hours the spectators saw nothing but Kanada crouching on the mat with McLaglen on top of him and there was little, if any, jiu-jitsu to the performance. It was apparent to everyone that McLaglen’s knowledge of the game could be covered with a pinhead.
McLaglen’s enthusiastic self-promotion was, thus, inspired by an essentially meaningless title, as – even if he had won a clear victory over Kanada – there was neither a governing body nor a recognised format of international jiujitsu competition during this period.
During late 1911 and early 1912 Leo McLaglen was again in the newspapers, this time for having been caught impersonating his own younger brother, Victor, who was by then making a name for himself as a boxer and as an actor. While working as a doorman at a Milwaukee movie theatre, Leo began calling himself “Victor Fred McLaglen” and publicly claimed a storied past as a decorated hero of the Boer War, a former British intelligence agent and member of King Edward’s bodyguard corps, and a soldier of fortune who’d chased down criminals in Canada. He also said that he had fought heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson in Vancouver during 1909.
Riding on local media notoriety, McLaglen then challenged a fencing instructor to a broadsword match with what appear to have been live blades – the resulting contest was an appalling bloodbath – and shortly thereafter challenged the boxer “Fireman” Jim Flynn, only to be knocked down several times within three rounds. At that point his brother Victor caught wind of Leopold’s shenanigans and sent a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Free Press, denouncing Leo as an impostor but pointedly not mentioning that the two of them were, in fact, related.
Leopold left Milwaukee in disgrace and turned up about a year later in South Africa, where he teamed with strongman Tromp van Diggelen in a touring jiujitsu act. Van Diggelen later wrote that he was surprised to discover that McLaglen’s “paralysing” nerve grips did not actually work, but he was happy to feign being immobilised for the sake of showbiz.
During one performance, however, McLaglen was challenged by a member of the audience who turned out to be a well-known local boxer. As the boxer climbed onto the stage and began removing his jacket, McLaglen unaccountably punched him in the face, causing the pugilist to go berzerk. Van Diggelen then watched bemusedly as his partner was pummeled off the stage and up a flight of stairs leading to their dressing room.
Nevertheless, Leopold McLaglen successfully parlayed his “Jiujitsu Champion” claim into a reputation as a military close-combat expert. By 1913 he was touring India, China, the Philippine Islands, Australia and New Zealand, teaching and demonstrating his version of jiujitsu and also an unusual system of bayonet fighting, which he also claimed to have invented. The McLaglen Bayonet System was notable for its incorporation of extreme close-quarters techniques such as trips, disarms and throws.
Trainee soldiers practice tripping opponents during one of McLaglen’s bayonet combat courses.
Most of McLaglen’s trainees were soldiers and police officers, many of whom were recruited as performers in large public Assault-at-Arms exhibitions starring McLaglen himself, supplementing his jiujitsu and bayonet displays with feats of strength, horsemanship and swordsmanship.
By this time, Leo McLaglen’s jiujitsu claims included purported defeats of a veritable who’s who of (notably obscure) opponents, including:
(…) T. E. Hiria, M. Tani and Prof. Yamagata, one of the best men in Japan, who was engaged by President Roosevelt to teach the American police jiujitsu. Captain McLaglen broke the professor’s arm. Prof. Fukamuchi (Los Angeles), Watanalu, Rondo, Saku, Prof. Shimura and [Henry] De Raymond all sustained defeat, the last named, a man of 350 lbs., retiring with a broken shoulder blade. In Calcutta, January 1913, Capt. McLaglen defeated Prof. Yamasaki and Prof. Toda (…)
Even allowing for the vagaries of transliterating Japanese names into English during the early 20th century, this is a highly dubious list. “Professor Yamagata” is clearly a garbled reference to Yoshiaki Yamashita, who actually was President Theodore Roosevelt’s personal judo instructor, but there appear to be no records of McLaglen and Yamashita ever having met, let alone to the former breaking the latter’s arm.
In the years during and following the First World War, Leo McLaglen produced a series of jiujitsu and self-defence training manuals, including books on his bayonet system and on self-protection for women. His greatest notoriety, however, was to come during the 1930s, when he arrived in Hollywood.
Attempting to break into show business as an actor and director – though his only previous experience seems to have been a supporting role in the British drama Bars of Iron (1920) – Leopold quickly again ran afoul of his brother Victor, who was, by this time, a successful member of the Hollywood establishment. Their feud led to Leopold suing Victor for $90,000, charging slander and defamation of character. The trial judge rejected the lawsuit, and it was reported that Leopold refused Victor’s offer to shake his hand afterwards.
Leopold McLaglen (seated, front left) poses with Nazi sympathisers in a private Los Angeles home.
The years 1937 and 1938 proved to be Leopold McLaglen’s nadir. Still based in Los Angeles, he became involved with the American Nazi underground and apparently masterminded a plot to assassinate twenty-four prominent “Hollywood Jews”, including Charlie Chaplin, Al Jolson, Jack Benny, Eddy Cantor and Samuel Goldwyn. This scheme, which involved planned assassinations by machine gun and explosives, was to have been funded by millionaire sportsman Philip Chancellor, who had originally hired McLaglen as a jiujitsu instructor.
When the assassination plot was uncovered and defused by a network of private investigators hired by Hollywood studio heads, Leo McLaglen attempted to extort $20,000 from Chancellor, which led to his arrest. In his own defence, McLaglen claimed that he had, in fact, been working as a secret agent attempting to expose Chancellor as a Nazi spy, but his evidence did not convince the jury and he was offered the choice of either leaving the United States for five years, or spending that time in prison. Victor McLaglen, by this time an Academy Award-winning actor, paid for Leopold’s boat fare back to England.
Leopold McLaglen died on January 4th, 1951, leaving an intriguing but very deeply tarnished legacy.
Posted inBiography, Jiujitsu|Comments Off on The Martial Shenanigans of Leopold McLaglen
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Tuesday, 12th June 2018
Under “Bar-titsu ” I comprise boxing, or the use of the fist as a hitting medium, the use of the feet both in an offensive and defensive sense, the use of the walking-stick as a means of self-defence in such a way as to make it practically impossible to be hit upon the fingers.
– E.W. Barton-Wright, “Ju-Jitsu and Ju-Do”; Transactions and Proceedings of the Japan Society, London (1901)
Bartitsu founder E.W. Barton-Wright’s articles and presentations repeatedly highlighted the Vigny system’s innovative guard structure, which was geared around protecting the defender’s weapon-wielding hand.
The basic combative logic of this style of guarding was clearly explained by Barton-Wright in 1901:
It must be understood that the new art of self-defence with a walking-stick, herewith introduced for the first time, differs essentially from single-stick or sword-play; for a man may be a champion in the use of sword or single-stick and yet be quite unable to put a walking-stick to any effective use as a weapon of defence.
The simple and sufficient reason to account for this is that both in single-stick and sword-play a cut is always taken up by the hilt of the weapon, whereas if you attempted to guard a blow with a walking-stick — which has no hilt — in the same way as you would with a sword, the blow would slide down your stick onto your hand and disable you.
Therefore, in order to make a stick a real means of self-defence, it has been necessary to devise a system by which one can guard a blow in such a way as to cause it to slide away from the hand instead of toward it, and thus obviate the risk of being disarmed by being hit upon the fingers.
After some fifteen years of hard work, such a system has been devised by a Swiss professor of arms, M. Vigny. It has recently been assimilated by me into my system of self-defence called “Bartitsu.”
– Barton-Wright, “Self-defence with a Walking-stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself with a Walking-Stick or Umbrella when Attacked under Unequal Conditions (Part I)”, Pearson’s Magazine, 11 (January 1901)
Within the scheme of Vigny’s style, protecting the weapon-wielding hand was accomplished by:
1) Guards by Distance
Like many martial arts and fencing instructors, Vigny favoured “guards by distance”, i.e. avoiding an opponent’s attack while simultaneously counter-attacking:
2) High Guard Positions
Vigny’s implicit critique of more traditional stick fighting systems was that these styles essentially treated the cane as if it were a substitute sabre. Crucially, that meant that they included the standard sabre-style parries of tierce and quarte, in which the weapon-wielding hand is held lower than the point of impact, leading to the risks referred to above by Barton-Wright:
Above: a mid-level parry in tierce.
Students in more traditional cane defence classes wore heavily padded gloves to mitigate the chance of injuries to their hands and fingers in training, but of course these items, like hilts, are not present in spontaneous street altercations. Therefore, Vigny eliminated tierce- and quarte-style parries from his own system, which was specifically designed for self-defence rather than academic fencing.
Similarly, being further spatially removed from the opposing weapon, the characteristic high guard positions of the Vigny style – particularly the Rear Guard, shown in the centre above – reduce the chances of the weapon-wielding hand being targetted and “sniped” by an alert opponent.
Casual perusers of Barton-Wright’s articles on stick fighting are sometimes confused by the incidence of fighting stances in which the defender’s cane appears to be held in tierce/quarte. Those stances, however, fall into two specific categories:
representations of the (presumably not Bartitsu-trained) “opponent” assuming a tierce/quarte-type guard stance for purposes of demonstration, as Pierre Vigny (right) does here:
representations of the Bartitsu-trained defender assuming a position of invitation, in which the defender deliberately lowers, widens or otherwise modifies his front guard stance in order to “bait” the opponent’s attack to an apparently exposed target, as Vigny does here:
The defences that emerge out of those positions include hanging guard parries, pre-emptive strikes and closing in to grapple with the opponent at close quarters. They never include actual parries in the tierce or quarte positions, which contradict the basic strategy of the Vigny style.
3) Hanging Guards
“Hanging” guards are those in which the defender’s weapon-wielding hand is positioned higher than the point of impact between the two weapons at the moment the attack is parried. This position has the effect of deflecting or “shedding” an attack downward along the shaft of the cane:
The combination of the “guard by distance” tactic, the default to high guard positions and the options of hanging guards as backup defences represents the combative ideal of “striking without being struck” and offers the optimal chance of avoiding disarms and hand injuries in a stick fight.
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Wednesday, 20th June 2018
Written, co-directed and co-produced by Bartitsu instructor Tony Wolf, the 50-minute documentary No Man Shall Protect Us: The Hidden History of the Suffragette Bodyguards explores the origins and exploits of “The Bodyguard” – a secret society of women who trained in jiujitsu and defended the leaders of the radical suffragette movement in England.
Posted inDocumentary, Suffrajitsu, Video|Comments Off on Suffrajitsu Documentary “No Man Shall Protect Us” Now Freely Available Online
Originally published on the Bartitsu.org site on Saturday, 23rd June 2018
Bartitsu demonstrations will be part of the festivities at the second Sherlockon Poland convention, taking place between June 30-July 1 2018 at the Ursynów Culture Center in Warsaw, Poland.
