In these tutorial videos, members of Craig Gemeiner’s academy demonstrate the utility and versatility of the high front guard and the double handed guard in the Vigny stick fighting style.
A unique oil painting of former Bartitsu Club instructor Yukio Tani has been restored in commemoration of the London Budokwai’s centenary anniversary.
Tani was among the original group of three jiujitsuka who travelled from Japan to London in 1900, at the behest of Bartitsu Club founder Edward Barton-Wright. Although Kaneo Tani and Seizo Yamamoto only remained in England for a few months, Yukio – then aged nineteen – decided to remain in the English capital. There he was joined by Sadakazu Uyenishi, and the two young men served as unarmed combat instructors and challenge wrestlers on behalf of the Bartitsu Club until the Club dissolved in 1902. Thereafter, Tani joined forces with Taro Miyake in operating the Japanese School of Ju-jitsu and continued his successful challenge wrestling career.
In 1918, Tani became the first professional instructor at the newly-established London Budokwai. Founded by Gunji Koizumi, this was the first dojo in Europe to promote Kodokan judo, and Tani was accredited a nidan (second degree) black belt in that style by judo founder Jigoro Kano.
Sometime in the 1930s, Yukio Tani’s portrait was painted in oils by artist and judoka George Lambourne. Tani would have been about fifty years old at the time.
Although the portrait has hung in a position of honour on the walls of the Budokwai for many decades, time has inevitably taken its toll. It was, therefore, recently taken to be restored via The Repair Shop – a workshop established by the BBC at the Weald and Downland Museum in Singleton, West Sussex, which is used as a location for the television show of the same name.
The Tani portrait conservation is documented in The Repair Shop (season 3, episode 5), which is currently available here for viewers with access to the BBC iPlayer.
Members of the Aisle O’Var Backswording Club experiment with the “bayonette thrust” of Bartitsu cane fighting during a recent seminar.
As described by E.W. Barton-Wright in Self-Defence with a Walking Stick (1901):
It will be understood that it is quite impossible to swing a stick in a crowd, owing to want of elbow room; and so, in order to get elbow room and free scope to hit, you proceed as follows: —
Hold your stick, more or less in a line with your hips, and proceed, as in the second photograph, to lunge to your left, holding the end of the stick in your right hand, and letting it slide through your left, in order to be able to guide it with certainty.
Lunging at the body of the nearest man on your left, you disable him, and cause him to retreat precipitously. In doing so, he involuntarily forces back those in his immediate neighborhood. You then turn on your heels, and bayonette the nearest man on your right, this time holding the end of your stick in your left hand, and guiding it through your right. Directly you have bayonetted him, and caused him to force back others in his attempt to escape, you make a quarter turn on your heels, and bayonette the man behind you.
After this, seeing another man close to him with his legs slightly apart, you make a dive with your stick between his legs, and upset him. Take one step backwards, and you should now have sufficient room to swing your stick to right and left across people’s faces and heads until they disperse.
Hailing from the Alpine village of St. Crois, wrestler Armand Cherpillod was the last full-time instructor to join the staff of the London Bartitsu Club. According to Cherpillod’s memoirs, E.W. Barton-Wright sent Pierre Vigny to Switzerland with the express intention of bringing a wrestling champion back to London.
It’s likely that Cherpillod was approached because the then-current war of words between Bartitsu founder Edward Barton-Wright and the English wrestling establishment had reached a stalemate. The wrestlers refused to accept Barton-Wright’s challenge for them to compete with his club’s champions under jiujitsu rules, and Barton-Wright refused to allow Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi to compete under other rules.
Bringing Cherpillod in as a “ringer”, having him train with Tani and Uyenishi and then fight under catch-as-catch-can rules was a clever tactic on behalf of Barton-Wright. Representing the Bartitsu Club, Cherpillod won his match against the famous wrestler Joe Carroll during a highly-publicised Bartitsu tournament, and then continued into a successful career as a challenge wrestler both in England and on the European Continent.
The following article, translated from the Revue Olympique of January, 1905, highlights Cherpillod’s take on jiujitsu atemi-waza (striking and nerve pressure techniques). It’s both interesting and unusual in that, although Barton-Wright’s own original articles for Pearson’s Magazine had included a variety of atemi-waza, that class of techniques was not emphasised in the books later produced by Tani and Uyenishi.
Atemi methods were, however, also detailed in some of the books written by second-generation instructors, such as W. Bruce Sutherland. The British Jujitsu Society – which largely consisted of instructors who had been trained by Tani and Uynenishi – later produced a pamphlet detailing the same branch of skill, titled “The Art of Ju-Jitsu: Nerve Pinches and Fatal Blows”, which is reproduced in The Bartitsu Compendium.
The translated Revue Olympique article follows:
Among the first European followers of jiu-jitsu is the world champion of freestyle wrestling, A. Cherpillod, who arrived in London during the year 1901 as a teacher at the Bartitsu Club, where he met with the Japanese masters Uyenishi and Tani. An exchange of teaching took place between these athletes, as they began to introduce each other to the beauties of their arts.
Returning to Switzerland, Cherpillod taught some colleagues about the principles of jiu-jitsu and, when in charge of a wrestling course at the Royal Naval Officers at Portsmouth, he joined them in performing demonstrations of the Japanese method. He perfected his own skill and acquired some good pupils. Finally last year, Cherpillod, assisted by his friend, the distinguished Professor E. Richème, of Neuchatel, prepared his little practical manual of jiu-jitsu, which enjoyed considerable success.
Mr. Cherpillod considers that jiu-jitsu and European freestyle wrestling have a common origin and that the former is only a particular style of freestyle wrestling, starting from the initial common principle of seeking defeat of the adversary without any regard for convention, every technique being good provided it tends to the desired result. In ancient Greece, writes the author, “freestyle wrestling became the object of public competitions. The progress of civilisation and certain sporting considerations gradually softened the brutality of these matches. Thus, over the course of centuries, conventions emerged, mainly leading to the recognition of the touch of the shoulders to the ground, or a similar position, as the end of the fight.
It follows from this that freestyle European wrestling would have lost, by becoming civilized or sporting, all that the Japanese style has gained in science and in virtuosity by its independence and freedom. It is this virtuosity which gives jiu-jitsu the appearance of a mysterious art, thanks to the success that those who practice it invariably win over all the athletes constrained by modern (i.e. Western) conventions and incapable of realizing the scope of an art which systematically ignores the outdated rules of which they are imbued.
This judgement is interesting; it seems a little sketchy, perhaps, in disregarding some of the fundamental originality of the Japanese method. The latter recommends itself in two points which do not appear to him to be common with any other kind of free wrestling; the role played by the fingers and the whole hand – and also through the intervention of scientific anatomy.
But, of course, Mr. Cherpillod did not fail to appreciate the importance of these two points when he himself became a jiu-jitsu expert and that is why it is astonishing that he has not emphasized them by giving in his textbook a general overview of the Japanese style; on the other hand, when it comes to what might be called the preliminary preparation in jiu-jitsu, the famous Swiss athlete ascribed to the first rank the exercises of the hand and anatomical study.
The general gymnastic method he indicates does not call for any comment. Certain movements are hardly different from those which are customarily taught to obtain relaxation of the whole body. The author has no preference; he says so overtly. We even take note of this clear theory, so contrary to the excitement of the day, and for which we express our warm sympathy; “All systems are good, provided they are applied consistently.” There is no master of gymnastics who can not apply a rational training program capable of developing the strength of the limbs, the flexibility and resistance of each part of the body. To arrive at a determined result, it is enough to create a system and to practice it every day with perseverance.
That being said, Mr. Cherpillod comes to the preparation of the hands and the indication of the vulnerable points of the human body; these are essential elements of jiu-jitsu. A trained Japanese fighter can, with a single stroke of the edge of the hand against the neck, dislocate cervical vertebrae and bring death. There are not many ways to train in this regard. It is necessary, with the hand well open, the fingers held tightly, to strike or slice at a very hard object as violently as possible, with a percussive blow; you must not only repeat this exercise a very large number of times, but vary it by striking from top to bottom, from bottom to top, from right to left and from left to right.
Vulnerable points in the human body are not all affected by the same techniques, nor in the same way. Some are sensitive to torsion, others to pressure; others again must be assailed by a sharp blow of the hand. Here is the enumeration furnished by M. Cherpillod:
1. Points sensitive to torsion or reversal ending at the same time by the disarticulation of the grasped member:
2 – Sensitive pressure points:
3 – Points sensitive to strikes with the hand:
It will be noticed that, practically, there is a ranking to operate between all these points; many of them, while they might be excellent attack points upon the naked body, are usually protected by clothing.
It will also be noted that they are not all easy to determine, other than in theory. First, there are the individual physiques to be taken into account, the real anatomy of men differing considerably from one to the other; but, even on a normal man, a strike may not invariably land upon its target, especially if it is a quick and sudden movement.
Now, in Jiu-Jitsu, as in every other form of fighting, accuracy in partnership with speed leads most surely to success. Hence the precision exercises to which the Japanese attribute real importance, but which the Swiss champion seems to leave a little aside. It is said that, in Japan, one sometimes uses the following process: a man draws upon a table a series of small circles in pencil, then he steps away from the table first one pace, then two, then three, and he suddenly lunges and places his finger in one of the circles. We can do the same thing with a piano keyboard, aiming to depress this or that key.
There is, of course, no equivalent exercise that can be performed upon the body of an adversary, and, to tell the truth, we do not believe that, without an adversary, one can acquire even a summary knowledge of jiu-jitsu.
On the other hand, it is always good to study etudes (formal exercises) and any work in physical culture should more or less start with those. The jiu-jitsu etudes are exercises aimed at hardening the slice of the hand, the strength and agility of the fingers, as well as the knowledge of the points of attack and in the way to use this knowledge both quickly and precisely.
This six-minute Bartitsu featurette recently screened on the Japanese television show Sekai Kurabete Mitara (“See the World in Comparison”).
Playing to the pop-culture notion of the “gentlemanly martial art” via the Sherlock Holmes and Kingsman movies, the segment still manages to communicate some of the essential details such as Edward Barton-Wright’s travels in Japan and the eclectic boxing/kicking/jiujitsu/Vigny cane nature of Bartitsu.
Kudos to the Bartitsu Lab of Warwickshire, UK and to their instructor Tommy Joe Moore.
This anonymous letter to the editor of the St. James’s Gazette was originally published on March 9th, 1905. The author’s objection to submission wrestling on moral and nationalistic grounds was fairly common during this period, and indeed had originally been levelled against E.W. Barton-Wright, circa 1900. Barton-Wright’s displays of Japanese unarmed combat had been decried by some critics as being “un-English” and “comprised of absolute fouls“.
Via his lectures and comments offered in Bartitsu displays, Barton-Wright replied that the object of testing the Japanese style via sport was to train for actual self-defence, wherein the traditional conventions of English sportsmanship were moot.
Much the same objection had been made against English-style boxing in Japan, where traditional sentiment was set against the idea of striking another person in the face – and, particularly, of drawing blood from their nose – for the purpose of sport.
Sir, —Jujitsu seems to be the fashionable graven image of the moment before which the whole athletic world is bowing down. English wrestling is abasing itself before this foreign god nightly at the Lyceum Theatre, where the best of our English wrestlers are being used for dusting scenery and wiping the floor.
Is it, or is it not, a fact, that all the holds and tricks which the Ju-jitsu experts beat our wrestlers, and compel them to hammer the floor in agonised token of defeat, should properly be called “fouls”? English wrestling knows nothing of these tricks; but it is not hard to imagine that English wrestlers could invent a few that would have the same effect on Japanese wrestlers as Ju-jitsu has on English experts. The Jap gets a twist on the Englishman’s arm of a sort that gives intense pain, and would result in a fracture if the victim did not at once give in.
Why not invent an English art of Ju-jitsu which might include such holds as, say, seizing the opponent’s car in the teeth, or thrusting the fist in his mouth and retaining it there; sitting firmly in the face; pressing tightly on the wind-pipe with the knee? A little imagination will supply no end of victory-compelling holds. I don’t know, but a sort of patriotic pride makes me wonder how the Ju-jitsu experts would shine in a wrestling contest according to English rules—all fouls, English or foreign, barred.
The anonymous writer would not have to wait long for his answer to that question, as some Japanese fighters, notably including Yukio Tani and Taro Miyake did, in fact, compete successfully in English-style matches, most especially in the catch-as-catch-can style.
Test your general Bartitsu knowledge with these ten questions (answers given below):
1: In his lecture for the Japan Society of London, E.W. Barton-Wright defined Bartitsu as
A) “the new art of self defence”
B) “self defence in every form”
C) “the manly art of self defence”
D) “self defence for ladies and gentlemen”
2 – What name did Sadakazu Uyenishi assume when competing in music hall wrestling challenges (clue – it’s the same name he used when writing The Text-Book of Jujitsu)
A) Kazu
B) Ishi
C) Raku
D) Sada
3 – Pierre Vigny’s wife was known professionally as “Miss Sanderson”. What was her real first name?
A) Marie
B) Mirabelle
C) Madaleine
D) Marguerite
4 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes describe “baritsu” as
A) “the Japanese system of wrestling”
B) “a secret style of Japanese wrestling”
C) “the art of Japanese wrestling”
D) “the Japanese style of wrestling”
5 – To avoid an attack while simultaneously counter-attacking is described by Barton-Wright as a
A) “Guard by Resistance”
B) “Guard by Distance”
C) “Guard by Evasion”
D) “Guard by Deception”
6) Against which of the following tools-as-weapons did Barton-Wright not claim to have had to defend himself during his travels overseas:
A) Crowbars
B) Sledgehammers
C) Scythes
D) Spades
7 – Which style of jiujitsu did E.W. Barton-Wright study while living in Kobe, Japan?
A) Asayama Ichiden-ryū
B) Kashima Shin-ryū
C) Shindō Yōshin-ryū
D) Shinden Fudo-ryū
8 – In which year did Barton-Wright return to England from Japan?
A) 1897
B) 1898
C) 1899
D) 1900
9 – During Yukio Tani’s career as a music hall challenge wrestler, he was nicknamed:
A) The Pocket Hercules
B) The Little Samson
C) The Small Apollo
D) The Compact Ajax
10 – Which one of the following nicknames was not given to Emmeline Pankhurst’s jiujitsu-trained security staff?
A) The Jiujitsuffragettes
B) The Amazons
C) The Suffrajitsus
D) The Bodyguard
ANSWERS
1 – B
2 – C
3 – D
4 – A
5 – B
6 – B
7 – D
8 – B
9 – A
10 – C
A video memoir of fisticuffs/savate, French wrestling, self-defence and Bartitsu classes at the December, 2016 Toulouse Historical Martial Arts gathering:
Members of the Club L’Extreme Est of Warsaw, Poland exhibited Bartitsu at the Polish War Museum on Saturday, September 23. The demonstration was based on the martial arts journey of Edward Barton-Wright in combining techniques from Japanese jiujitsu with English boxing, French kickboxing and the Vigny style of stick fighting.
Thanks to Iza Szypulska for these photographs:
A six-minute item on the gentlemanly mixed martial art of Bartitsu, as featured on a recent episode of BBC2’s Celebrity Antiques Road Trip and including demonstrations by the Manley Academy of Historical Swordsmanship:
For the sake of strict historical accuracy, there’s no evidence that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle actually studied Bartitsu (in fact, the evidence suggests that he wasn’t even especially familiar with it). That said, it’s great to see another precis treatment of the art and its intriguing history in the mainstream media, and media doesn’t get much more mainstream than the Celebrity Antiques Road Trip.
Also worthy of note is that the show benefits the BBC’s charity Children in Need, which funds a wide range of projects helping children and disadvantaged young people throughout the UK.
