The rear guard, also referred to by E.W. Barton-Wright as the “left guard”, is one of the signature defensive stances of the Vigny style of stick fighting. It was well-described by the anonymous author of “L’art de la canne”, an essay first published in the Revue Olympique of May, 1912:
The Vigny guard position is, in essence, a combat guard. The left arm is held in front as if bearing a shield; the right arm is raised at the rear, with the weapon held above the head, in a perpetual “spring hold.”
When you are being attacked, quickly retreat with a swift guard change and bring your cane down powerfully upon the opponent’s arm or hand. In doing this, you can be mathematically certain of reaching and damaging your target.
Immediately afterwards, you step towards him, turning your wrist rapidly and striking the steel tip of your cane into his eyes or under the nose. And here is very surprised man … !
In Barton-Wright’s “Self Defence with a Walking Stick” articles, the rear guard is consistently presented as a position of invitation, “baiting” an attack to an apparently exposed target so as to set up a devastating counter-attack via the “guard by distance” tactic.
To “guard by distance” means to avoid the opponent’s attack via footwork and body movement, as distinct from “guards by resistance” which include all defences in which the opponent’s weapon is blocked or parried by the defender’s weapon.
The following article from the Tuesday, 25 March 1902 edition of the Nottingham Journal is the most detailed report yet discovered on the short series of Bartitsu exhibitions held in that city.
… by engaging toughs I trained myself until I was satisfied in practical application.
– E.W. Barton-Wright, 1950
From the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News – Saturday 21 September, 1907:
Jiu-Jitsu was first taught in the Navy officially about a year ago to a selected number of officers and physical training instructors who, after they became proficient in the subject, taught it in turn to other officers and petty officers. Examinations of those who have undergone a course of the lessons take place at the School of Physical Training in Portsmouth.
It is not intended that Jiu-Jitsu shall be the system of physical training for the Royal Navy, but only as one of the numerous recreative forms of gymnastics.
Guests at the Pelikanvietel in Hanover, Germany can get their sweat on Sherlock-style in the “Baritsu Den” gymnasium.
The anonymous author of this March 15, 1899 To-Day Magazine satire wittily skewers E.W Barton-Wright’s “New Art of Self Defence” series for Pearson’s Magazine.
ONE of the monthly magazines which has been with us for a little time has in its current issue published an article on the “New Art of Self-Defence.”
Practical trial by the writer of the series, which To-Day now starts, has shown that it is possible for the exponent of the “New Art of Self-Defence” to do everything which he claims his art enables him to do, provided he can always find an opponent who will be good enough to use only one arm in attack or defence, and who will otherwise be amenable to the wishes of the exponent, and do nothing but what the system arranges that he shall do. The article published below, and those to follow, will show how far this system of self-defence will go, and what can be done with an opponent who has properly studied the “New Art of Self Defence,” and is determined to depart in no way from the lines laid down therein.
I AM no relation of de Rougemont, but I have learned from him that the up-to-date editor always looks coldly upon that which is probable, commonplace, or easy of explanation ; therefore with the view of getting the said editor to use his organ as the medium of supporting me, and placing my writings in the hands of the public, I have prepared a series of articles on Self-Defence, which deal entirely with carefully thought out improbabilities, which are by no means easy of explanation, and which I may at once state I don’t propose to explain.
My first interview with the editor, who accepted this series, will give some inkling of the methods of my system of self-defence. I had sent up my card and, as I expected, the editor, not knowing me, told the messenger to say he was out. I was prepared for this, and had taken the precaution of following the messenger into the room. I heard the editor’s statement, which he made without looking up.
“That remark, sir,” said I, “is a d____d lie!”
I reckoned on the man’s temper, and knew that I would immediately have an opportunity of exhibiting my art of self-defence, and so get right to the core of my business at once. I was not wrong in my calculations. He replied with a heavy metal ink, pot; I countered with the messenger, who received it full in the forehead. The ink-pot made a nasty hole in his head, and his face was splashed with ink. I would have wiped away the ink, but found he was dead, so it did not matter.
“That,” said I to the Editor, “brings us to business.”
“Your business?” he queried, as he hurled a solid ebony ruler at my head.
“Self-defence, a new system,” I replied, and I swung him in front of me with such lightning speed that he warded off the ruler. It caught him in the wind, but he recovered in about half an hour. I waited for him to speak, or to make some move. He seated himself, and pressed a button in his desk. A bell rang without, and another messenger entered, “Put that in the waste paper basket”—he pointed to the corpse—“and fill my ink-pot.”
I took a seat while his instructions were being carried out, and when the messenger had retired we discussed my business, and came to terms. Before I give any particulars (I refuse explanations) of my art of self-defence, perhaps it will not be amiss to make a few introductory remarks as to the general conception of self-defence.
In foreign countries, when a foreigner fights, he has only one goal, and that is to get the better of his adversary, and any means is considered justifiable to obtain this end. Of course his idea of honour differs from ours, so that, whereas with us Nature’s weapons are considered the only honourable method of settling a dispute, a foreigner will not hesitate to use a wardrobe, a beer barrel, a knife and fork, or, in fact, anything that comes handy.
It is to meet eventualities of this kind that my system has been devised. The general principles may be thus summed up. (1) To get an opponent whom you can trust to do as you wish; (2) to surprise your opponent by the strangeness of your movement, and their infinite variety.
Some of the feats which I shall now describe may, perhaps, seem difficult, but if my instructions are carefully followed, and everything requisite is kept conveniently at hand, I feel sure that steady practice will make them quite easy of performance.
Feat No. 1. I will suppose now that you are walking along a silent street at night and you are attacked by a man with a knife and fork. It is always well at night to wear your overcoat hung on your shoulders without passing your arms through the sleeves. This will facilitate the mode of defence needed for the knife and fork attack. When the man approaches you, throw off your coat and give it to him, mention that you will return, and hurry off to the nearest butcher’s shop. (If all the shops are closed have no compunction in knocking up a butcher, seize the toughest steak you can find and return to the scene of action.)
If the man is gone, you have lost your overcoat, but your defence has been successful, and you are a steak, albeit a tough one, to the good. If the ruffian is still there approach him swiftly and impale the steak on his fork. While he is wrestling with the steak, take hold of him by the right leg, jerk it quickly forward, push your head into the pit of his stomach and he will lie down. Then you can recover the steak and your overcoat, and if you feel so inclined you will be able to take the knife and fork and any valuables he may have.
Feat No. 2. Here is an excellent method of forcing an undesirable person to leave a room. Say, for instance, he is a big man and overawes the policeman you may feel it necessary to call in, the best thing to do then is to immediately hire or buy a windlass, have it firmly fixed somewhere outside the room, test the chain, procure a padlock with a Yale lock and then enter the room again with the end of the chain and the padlock held in the left hand, which it will be as well to conceal behind your back.
Walk straight up to the undesirable person, seize him by the left leg, bring forward your chain, and, without telling him what you are going to do, lock the chain carefully round his ankle. Return then without loss of time to the windlass, turn the handle quickly but firmly, and in a very short time the undesirable person will leave the room. While performing this feat it will be well to keep so far out of your opponent’s reach as to make it impossible for him to hit you or retaliate in any way.
In case any one should fight shy of the practical use of this trick, it may be added that the person thus treated would, should he resist the action of the chain, feel such pain as to compel him to submit meekly long before any serious injury could be done to him.
It will not be necessary to impress upon the reader the importance of knowing how any undesirable person may be promptly ejected from a room. Thousands of cases have occurred in which a knowledge of this method would have been of inestimable service. No one could resist the treatment I have suggested, as the reader will be able to understand for himself by testing it on his friends.
Colonel Nathaniel Newnham-Davis, who wrote a popular column for the Sporting Life newspaper under the “Dwarf of Blood” pseudonym, was clearly a connoisseur of antagonistic novelties. Of all the English journalists who covered the heyday of the Bartitsu Club between 1899 and 1902, Col. Newnham-Davis was perhaps the most enthusiastic and carefully critical.
Written in October of 1898, this report on Georges d’Amoric’s savate exhibition coincides with Barton-Wright’s earliest displays of jiujitsu in London, prior to his incorporation of Pierre Vigny’s savate and walking stick combat system.
I have been studying M. Georges d’Armoric’s book on the French method of the noble art of self-defence, which begins with a pat on the back to the average Englishman. “He will not,” says M. d’Armoric, “stop at the argument of points; he will offer practical demonstrations, for who does not think himself a crack in the noble art of self-defence and the use of Nature’s weapons?”
Then M. d’Armoric, pleading for le Chausson, goes on to point out, with fine eye to a topical allusion, how good for the Hooligans a little of the noble order of the boot would be.
“Let a good number of these fellows receive their deserts at the hands” – surely it should be feet—“of their would-be victims; let a few get the treatment they delight to inflict upon the unwary and unoffending; let them feel what the weight of well and scientifically administered Coup de Chausson on the side of the face is like, or the sensation of an upper cut off the knee may be; favour your pet elect with more sport, if not yet contented, and add the lead off from the left foot, or a rounded hit off the right, accompanied by a fair concentrated arm fist blow, in the ‘mark,’ and your attacker will not ask or even wait for more.”
As a practical exposition of these kindly sentiments M. d’Armoric trotted out his professors early this week at a press performance, and they are now whacking each other with canes, butting each other in the stomach, and putting their toes in each others ears nightly at the Alhambra. That the savate is useful in street row there can be no doubt, and the question as to whether a foot was only made to stand on when there is a row forward is a question of national taste.
I recall a story of a little row in Julian’s studio in Paris. There was pugnacious young British student who yearned to make mincemeat of an equally pugnacious French student, and each was encouraged by his compatriots. Suggestions as to a duel with sabres, pistols, or mitrailleuses were put on one side, and it was decided to turn the two men loose in courtyard with only the weapons that nature had given them. The Britisher squared up in the customary style, and while he was deciding whether he would knock the Frenchman’s teeth out or put him out of his agony at once by a solar plexus blow, the Frenchman nearly cut one of his ears off with the edge of his bootsole, and then caught him a kick well below the belt, a kick that sent him running round the yard doubled with agony.
When the Britisher was able to face again the Frenchman, who had been doing pas seul in the centre of the court, he remembered some wrestling tricks he had learned in Cornwall, and closing with the Frenchman brought him to ground with a throw meant to hurt. It did hurt the Frenchman – hurt him so much that his friends came into the yard and carried him out; but the Frenchmen hold to this day that the Britisher fought unfairly, and the Britons can scarcely contain their wrath now when they discuss the Frenchman’s tactics. It was in small way a forerunner of Fashoda.
Some Frenchmen came over here and boxed at the Pelican Club the old days of its existence in Denman Street. O’Donoghue, I think, was the bhoy put up against the best of the Frenchmen, and at first the gentleman from across the channel seemed to be getting very much the best of the deal; but somebody, The Mate, I think, told the Irishman to get to close quarters and keep there, and the character of the fight changed at once. It was on this occasion that Jem Smith, asked why he would not take on one of the Frenchmen, replied that he did not want to be prosecuted for manslaughter.
But this is straying away from the Press view of the “boxeurs.” The stage, set with palace scene, was decorated with tricolour flags, and M. d’Armoric, a genial and excellently-mannered Frenchman, described to us in very tolerable English all that was going to take place. The exponents of the noble art a Francaise were two muscular-looking young Frenchmen, with small moustaches and heads closely clipped, clothed in dark blue armless jerseys and dark blue tights, with a tricoloured sash at the waist.
First they went through the outs and parries that are recommended for battle with canes. Neither shouted “A bas les Juifs!” nor Conspuez Brisson!” Vive l’Armee!” nor “Vive la Republique!” which are the cries that seem to be inseparable from cane combat in the Paris of to-day; but after the cuts and guards, and review exercise or “salute,” differing very little from single-stick exercises as know them, except that before a cut is made the cane is given a preliminary twist, the two professors a set-to with the canes, their sole protection being masks and a glove on the right hands. They were very quick with cut and parry, but occasionally one caught the other whack which sounded and must have stung.
Then they put on the gloves and went through slowly the various punches, and butts, and kicks, and the parries for them—all very interesting from a scientific athlete’s point of view, but all little wearying to the layman. This done with we came to business. The two professors sat down in two chairs, had their arms wiped by two young gentlemen, who in frock coats and faultless ties looked as different as could be to the seconds we are used to on the British platform.
M. d’Armoric called “Time,” and after the hand-hold, which does duty for a handshake, the two went at it with will. Unfortunately they were rather unevenly matched. With their hands they were more or less on an equality, but in toot play one had undoubtedly the best of the game. One professor did little more than offer to kick the other’s shins, or the worst dislocate his knee, while the better man got in a corkscrew kick in the right ear, flicked off a bit of the left eyebrow, disarranged the folds of his opponent’s sash, and hurt his ankle all in one comprehensive chahut. In the third round the better man got in a kick on his opponent’s right breast that sent him to ground, and as nearly as possible knocked him out.
I believe that Mr. Slater is going to pit, or has pitted, English boxers against the Frenchmen, and it will be interesting to see the result. A man who knows as much about boxing as any amateur in this country was sitting in front of me at this press rehearsal, and his opinion was that Lancashire lad would be the best man to set against a Frenchman, for up North they are handy with feet as well as hands. If the evening show is what was put before us, we should say that the preliminary work is tedious, the actual contest decidedly interesting.
