Bartitsu—The Compendium Approach to Martial Arts

Bartitsu is the martial art your weird Uncle Archibald practices every evening after he’s watered his collection of rare orchids, and fed his Azawakh, which he’s named Eunice, after his long-dead wife, because she has Eunice’s winsome looks.

It’s hard to take Bartitsu* seriously. There’s a Pythonesque quality about the surviving photos of men in boaters practicing the martial art. It looks as if it might have emerged from the Ministry of Silly Walks. And yet, in the early years of the twentieth century no less a person than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of the Sherlock Holmes stories) championed the art.

There’s something quintessentially English about it. Just as the language itself borrows from and re-invents every language with which it comes into contact, so Bartitsu borrowed from and re-invented a number of martial arts: boxing, savate (French kick-boxing), judo, jujitsu and fencing among them.

It was the brainchild of one Edward William Barton-Wright, an English engineer who had spent some time working in Japan. On his return to England in 1898 he announced that he had invented “a new art of self-defence.” The name is a rather clumsy fusion of Barton-Wright’s surname with jujitsu.

Barton-Wright founded a Bartitsu club in London to teach the martial art to wealthy gentlemen, but it seems he had misjudged his market. By the summer of 1902 the club was wound up. According to William Garrud (husband of Edith Garrud), the enrollment and tuition fees were too high.

It seems unlikely that Nikola Ferdinand (best friend of Algernon Quasley-Botham-Squyre, the infamous Alchemist of Slaithwaite Hall) ever studied under Barton-Wright, as he was not in England at that time, although he did claim to have knowledge of Bartitsu (perhaps through the other martial arts he studied).

Note:

* There is some confusion over the proper spelling of the name Bartitsu, owing to a typographical error in a report carried by the Times of London in 1901. It seems Conan-Doyle must have replicated this error in his 1903 story, The Adventure of the Empty House. The proper spelling was not reestablished until the 1990s.

X.T. Pfuffenstoffel.

Previous post
Pank-A-Squith: The Board Game of the Political Movement

Next post
A short, esoteric history of eye protection down the ages

Comments are closed.

Sunglasses are a relatively modern phenomenon. They were popularized by movie stars in the 1920s. But protecting our eyes from the harmful effects of the sun is something humans have been doing for thousands of years. Oddly (or, perhaps, predictably) it wasn’t in the sun-kissed regions of the Earth where the practice first arose, but in the Arctic. The Inuit developed flattened Walrus ivory goggles with narrow slits to block reflected sunlight.

The top hat was not always the go-to headgear for the elite. It replaced the tricorn and bicorn hat in the late eighteen century. Shortly after its introduction, it became popular with all social classes. Even the common labourer could be seen sporting one.

Strictly speaking the term Suffragette should only be applied to the more militant members of the women’s suffrage movement, especially the members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The name was penned as a term of derision by Daily Mail writer Charles E. Hands, but Christabel Pankhurst embraced it. She pronounced the word suffra-GETs because, she said, women were determined to GET the vote.

Ever wondered why it took us so long to invent the bicycle? On the face of it, it’s not a very complicated machine: a couple of wheels mounted on a frame. But a number of technologies and developments had to come together before the bicycle became a feasible, comfortable alternative to walking. The invention of vulcanization made the bicycle’s tyres possible, while the advent of tarmac as a road surface made for a smoother ride. But arguably the key component was the smallest, most invisible part in the bike: the humble ball bearing. Until we had a way to reliably manufacture ball-bearings of regular size and roundness the bike was simply an eccentric novelty.

The Victorian railway magnate Sir Edward Watkin planned and started to build a tunnel under the English Channel in 1880. To promote his venture (and raise funds) he held lavish parties underground, in the tunnel workings. Champagne was served. Guests were transported down a 163ft shaft to the tunnel bottom in metal skips. Watkin built over of mile of tunnel before the government of the day shut the venture down on fears that invaders from Europe’s mainland could use the tunnel to storm England.

Bartitsu—The Compendium Approach to Martial Arts

Related