Instructor Christoph Reinberger (in the knee breeches) and a student demonstrate 19th century pugilistic sparring. Notably different from modern boxing, “classic pugilism” may include:
The so-called “secret style of boxing” developed by Edward Barton-Wright and Pierre Vigny was never explicitly detailed in Barton-Wright’s writing on Bartitsu. However, it likely resembled the generic 19th century style with the confirmed addition of parries designed to injure the opponent’s attacking limbs, and with the confirmed tactical aim of entering to close quarters and finishing the fight with jiujitsu.
Master magician, actor, magic consultant/historian and martial arts aficionado Ricky Jay has passed away at the age of 70.
Although Jay’s fame was due to his extensive accomplishments as a scholar and performer, his long-term involvement with the martial arts dated back to the 1970s, when he took up karate. He later admitted that, as a professional sleight-of-hand artist, the danger of hand injuries from intensive martial arts training had been a foolish risk.
After karate came aikido – a style that shares more than a few principles with the art of legerdemain. His aikido sensei was Fred Neumann, who would recall challenging Jay to repeat a particularly confounding sleight of hand trick while Jay was showering after a training session. Without missing a beat, and with no evident means of preparation, Jay casually performed the feat again, stunning his sensei.
Ricky Jay’s 1977 book Cards as Weapons quickly became an underground cryptohoplological classic, purporting (with a fairly straight face) to teach a unique method of self-defence via card-scaling; the venerable magician’s feat of hurling playing cards with great accuracy and force. The book combined absurdist humour, quirky historical scholarship and practical instruction, also featuring “guest appearances” by some of Jay’s acquaintances, including singer Emmylou Harris and scientist Carl Sagan.
Twenty years later, when he was cast as a villain in the James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies, Jay was asked to exert his card-throwing prowess in a scene with Pierce Brosnan as Bond:
At one point, they wanted me to throw cards as weapons to attack Bond, but the first time they asked me to do it in rehearsal, I was an enormously long distance away from Pierce Brosnan, and I warned them that the cards went very, very hard and fast, and they said no no, they had someone in front of it to block the shot, and I again said, “I don’t think you should do that,” they said, “No, no, it’ll be okay.” And Pierce seemed to be fine with it.
So I whaled a card, I don’t know how far, 50 or 75 feet away, and they said, “Just throw it at his face,” and I hit him right above the eye, and realized that I almost ruined the most lucrative franchise in the history of film. Suddenly that scene was no longer in the movie. [Laughs.] So in a way that was horribly disappointing, but the rest of it was fun.
Here’s the master himself, performing a number of his “cards as weapons” stunts:
In 2002, Jay playfully scaled cards at action movie star Jackie Chan during a mutual appearance on a talk show hosted by Conan O’Brien.
Throughout his career, the magician frequently drew parallels between the disciplines of close-up magic and martial arts, and likened the mentor/mentee relationships of traditional magic apprenticeship to those of a sensei and his students. Although he “retired” into more sedate and academic pursuits later in life, Jay’s involvement in the martial arts continued via his close friendship with playwright, screenwriter and jiujutsuka David Mamet. Mamet cast Jay as an unscrupulous fight promoter in his peculiar, cerebral martial arts movie Redbelt (2008):
And finally, here’s Jay reciting a poem written for (and about) him by the late Shel Silverstein, encapsulating the arcane dangers of a life lived in the service of deception:
Rest in peace, Ricky Jay – man of mystery, scholar of the obscure and sworn enemy of the mundane.
Compiled by members of the Bartitsu Society, volumes 1 and 2 of the Bartitsu Compendium are availablein print from Lulu.com.
Volume I collates most of the canonical Bartitsu material and features over two hundred and seventy pages of original essays, rare vintage reprints and never-before-seen translations, illustrated with hundreds of fascinating photographs and sketches.
Volume II provides resources towards continuing Barton-Wright’s martial arts experiments. It combines extensive excerpts from fifteen classic Edwardian-era self defence manuals, including well over four hundred illustrations, plus a collection of long-forgotten newspaper and magazine articles on Bartitsu exhibitions and contests; new, original articles on Bartitsu history and training; a complete course of Edwardian-era “physical culture” exercises; personality profiles, essays and more besides.
At the end of the Victorian era, E. W. Barton-Wright combined jiujitsu, kickboxing, and stick fighting into the “Gentlemanly Art of Self Defence” known as Bartitsu. After Barton-Wright’s School of Arms mysteriously closed in 1902, Bartitsu was almost forgotten save for a famous, cryptic reference in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Empty House.
In this fascinating 54-minute documentary shot in Switzerland, Italy, the UK and the USA, host Tony Wolf reveals the history, rediscovery and revival of Barton-Wright’s pioneering mixed martial art.
Bartitsu: The Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes is available from the Freelance Academy Press.
London, 1914: The leaders of the radical women’s rights movement are fugitives from the law. Their last line of defense is the secret society of “Amazons”: women trained in the martial art of bartitsu and sworn to defend their leaders from arrest and assault.
After a series of daring escapes and battles with the police, the stakes rise dramatically when the Amazons are forced into a deadly game of cat and mouse against an aristocratic, utopian cult…
The Suffrajitsu graphic novel trilogy is available as e-books from Amazon and comiXology – we strongly recommend comiXology’s Guided View system for a fluid, intuitive online reading experience – as well as in print form as part of the Blood and Honor anthology.
German Bartitsu instructor Alex Kiermayer has collaborated with Agilitas.tv in producing this new instructional video series on the art of Vigny stick fighting, as incorporated into the original Bartitsu curriculum at the turn of the 20th century.
The series runs to 2 hours and 53 minutes and the German-narrated version is now available as a streaming download via Vimeo and on DVD via this site.
Widely used by members of the Bartitsu Society, these rattan training canes are recommended for both drills and sparring applications.
Combining a stylish, low-profile appearance with superb dexterity and great strength, the BlackSwift Raven is especially recommended as a “carry” cane for self-defence purposes.
Developed by Thomas Kurz specifically for self-defence applications, Unbreakable Umbrellas are available in a variety of styles including ball-handle, crook-handle and telescopic models. All Unbreakable Umbrellas are capable of withstanding extreme stress and impacts that would destroy regular umbrellas.
Embedded here for your convenience, the 2018 documentary No Man Shall Protect Us details the origins and exploits of the jiujitsu-trained Bodyguard Society who protected the radical suffragettes of England just before WW1. The documentary refers to Bartitsu and offers a special focus on Bodyguard martial arts instructor Edith Garrud, who was one of the most prominent self-defence teachers in England during the early 20th century.
Here’s a newly-discovered Bioscope playbill for the short silent film Ju-Jitsu to the Rescue, which starred former Bartitsu Club instructor Yukio Tani and which played widely throughout England during late 1912-early 1913.
The film itself is sadly lost, but scarce and scanty reviews indicate that it began with a technical demonstration – possibly as part of a scene in which Tani was instructing a student – and then closed with a dramatic fight sequence in which Tani rescued a third party who was being unfairly set upon. One reviewer mentioned that “the villain is defeated by Tani by means of his well-known arm lock”, which almost certainly refers to the extended jūji-gatame lock by which Tani won many of his music hall challenge matches.
Tani was actually the second Bartitsu Club affiliate to star in a film, as Edith Garrud had famously appeared in a short subject called The Lady Athlete, Or, Jujitsu Downs the Footpads, which was produced in 1907. A number of other very early short films also featured Japanese unarmed combat, including Juvenile Ju-Jitsu and A Lesson in Ju-Jitsu (both released in 1909) and the slapstick comedies Charlie Smiler Takes Up Ju-Jitsu and Nobby’s Ju-Jitsu Experiments (both 1914). None of these films are known to have survived, although it’s worth noting that the great majority of items in the British film archive have not yet been catalogued.
Here’s another take on “classic pugilism” sparring, this time by participants at the 2018 HEMAC event in Dijon, France. In contrast to the recently-posted video of a generic mid-late 19th century style, the specific style here is inspired by that of Daniel Mendoza, a famous champion of the late 1700s who is sometimes referred to as “the father of scientific boxing”.
A full-page, colour ad for a 1918 film starring the notorious Captain Leopold McLaglen, whose martial arts misadventures are detailed in this article (note that his name was frequently spelled “McLaglan” in publicity releases, etc.)
Going by the rifle/bayonet theme, the now-lost film probably featured a demonstration of his bayonet fighting system, which he taught to numerous national militaries during the First World War. Giving credit where it’s due, it’s possible that the McLaglen method, which included an emphasis on jiujitsu-like close-combat techniques, may have been better-suited to the grim realities of trench warfare than the more orthodox, “charge and stab” systems taught in most boot camps of the period.
The “Secret Science of Warra” may, conceivably, have been a garbled version of yawara – a term which generally refers to short fist-load stick weapons, but which was also sometimes used synonymously with jiujitsu. Exactly what Leopold McLaglen may have meant by it is anyone’s guess.
An ingenious solution to the problem of finding (or simply wearing out) sparring partners is detailed in this short article from the Scientific American of July 7, 1906.
To accommodate the needs of the professional boxer, as well as to instruct the novie in the “noble art of self-defense”, Mr. Charles Lindsey, of New Britain, Conn., has invented an automatic sparring machine.
This machine is really a formidable fighter, and has already gained quite an enviable reputation in the many encounters it has had with local talent. Not only does it deliver straight leads and counters, but it varies these with an occasional uppercut, and its blows are rained with a speed and power that are the envy of the professional boxer.
The machine does not “telegraph,” that is, it does not give a warning of a coming blow by a preliminary backward jerk, which is so common to all but the best of boxers. Nor can the opponent escape these blows by side-stepping, because the automaton will follow him from one side to the other. At each side of the opponent is a trapdoor, connected with the base of the machine in such a way that when he steps on one or other of these doors, the machine will swing around toward him.
The arms of the mechanical boxer are fitted with spring plungers, which are connected with crank handles turned by machinery. Separate crankshafts are used for the right and left arms, and they carry pulleys between which an idle pulley is mounted. These pulleys are connected with the main driving pulley by a belt which is shifted from side to side, bringing first one and then the other of the boxing arms into action. The belt-shifter is operated by an irregular cam at the bottom of the machine, and this gives no inkling as to which fist is about to strike.
Aside from this, the body of the boxer is arranged to swing backward or forward under the control of an irregular cam, so that the blows will land in different places on the opponent; for instance, a backward swing of the body will deliver an uppercut. The machine is driven by an electric motor, and can be made to rain blows as rapidly as the best boxer can receive them, or it may be operated slowly for the instruction of the novice. As the machine is fitted with spring arms and gloves, an agile opponent can ward off the blows and thus protect himself.
By 1939 a simplified version of the mechanical pugilist, employing trigger-activated pneumatic pistons, was being touted by its inventor, Frederick Westendorf:
C.F. also the various contrivances of boxing armour produced by eager pugilist/inventors around the turn of the 20th century.
An English-language version of the instructional DVD Bartitsu: Historical Self-Defence with a Walking Stick is now available via this link and will become available to the US market via the Freelance Academy Press. The DVD was produced by Agilitas.tv and features Bartitsu instructor Alex Kiermayer assisted by Christoph Reinberger.
The new English-language version is also expected to become accessible as a paid streaming video series via Vimeo in the near future.
We will be offering a review of the entire lesson series soon!
