A century ago, if you were white and European and know a smattering of jujitsu, add in a dash of fisticuffs and preference for the gentleman’s cane as your weapon, and a new martial art named after yourself will flourish!
Meet Bartitsu, created by William Barton-Wright, whose railroad work took him to Japan for 3 years, where he studied at the school of Jigoro Kano. Once make in the land of limies, he quit being a railroad engineer and took up his new calling.
In 1899, Barton wrote an article in the London based publication, Pearson’s Magazine, entitled “A New Art of Self Defense.” In it he set out his system of self defense that he called “bartitsu,” an obvious melding of his name and jujitsu. While bartitsu was based mainly on jujitsu, Barton explained in his article that the system included boxing, kickboxing, and stick fighting.
Barton opened a school called the Bartitsu Club. He brought in some of the best martial arts teachers from around the world to teach at his new school. Via correspondence with Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of Kodokan Judo, and other contacts in Japan, Barton-Wright arranged for Japanese jujutsu practitioners K. Tani, S. Yamamoto and the nineteen year old Yukio Tani to travel to London and serve as instructors at the Bartitsu Club. K. Tani and Yamamoto soon returned to Japan, but Yukio Tani stayed and was shortly joined by another young jujutsuka, Sadakazu Uyenishi. Swiss master-at-arms Pierre Vigny and wrestler Armand Cherpillod were also employed as teachers at the Club. As well as teaching well-to-do Londoners, their duties included performing demonstrations and competing in challenge matches against fighters representing other combat styles. In addition, the Club became the headquarters for a group of fencing antiquarians led by Captain Alfred Hutton and it served as their base for experimenting with historical fencing techniques, which they taught to members of London’s acting elite for use in stage combat.
One journalist described the Bartitsu Club as “… a huge subterranean hall, all glittering, white-tiled walls, and electric light, with ‘champions’ prowling around it like tigers.” Unfortunately by March of 1902 the club was no longer active.
Bartitsu might have been completely forgotten if not for a cryptic reference by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in one of his Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. In 1901 Conan Doyle had revived Holmes for a further story, The Adventure of the Empty House, in which Holmes explained his victory over Professor Moriarty in their struggle at Reichenbach Falls by the use of “baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me”.
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I teased the old Englishness of Sir Barton but his mixing of all sorts of physical arts and physical treatments in a freeform manner is fantastic (though anyone who cares about actually practicing or recreating this in historical verisimilitude is being Anglophilistically arrogant). Its interesting what would have happened to it if he named it not after himself but after a method or principle, like Form Will Fist, 8 Changes, etc.
