Revealed: The Deadly Fighting Art of Sherlock Holmes and Yitzhak Rabin!!! (sort of).

Here’s the problem – what to do when you love a good punch up, but public brawling is incompatible with your image as an amenable, if damp-stained, man of letters? The answer is “Bartitsu,” a nineteenth-century martial art developed specifically to transform the upright classes into killing machines, and whose unusual history has been revealed in an excellent new documentary produced and presented by my friend, Tony Wolf.

Bartitsu was the brainchild of an eccentric ex-patriot named Edward William Barton-Wright, who took to fighting in the 1880s as he worked in various benighted mining camps where it paid to be able to handle oneself. As an adept student, Barton-Wright quickly picked up the rudiments of boxing, fencing, wrestling, knife-fighting, and savate – a style of French combat were competitors in strong-man leotards balletically knocked the garlic out of each other, and which (incidentally), should be made compulsory for all students of Comparative Literature.

When his business took him to Japan, Barton-Wright added jiu-jitsu to his talents before returning to Britain in 1898 to synthesize his skills into a coherent system of self-defence that he began to advertise amongst the genteel classes via periodical articles and music hall demonstrations.

The market was particularly ripe for exploitation, as the fear of violent crime was exceptionally high thanks to the social frictions produced by the rapid expansion of cities and a pervasive terror of the urban poor. In matters of self-defence, however, the nineteenth-century bourgeois was at a discrete disadvantage. The carrying of swords and pistols on public highways had long been obsolete, and, as the widespread panic induced by the “garroting” craze of the 1850s and ‘60s, had shown, those men who had invested in anti-garroting collars and pistols were widely ridiculed for their effeminacy (hence this cartoon lampooning the "anti-garroting skirt"):

Into that gap stepped Barton-Wright, demonstrating the many ways in which gentleman and ladies might employ everyday objects - hats, coats, walking sticks, bicycles - in the service of self-defence, while also introducing his “scientifically planned” system of punches, kicks, locks and throws. A Bartitsu club was opened at 67b Shaftsbury Avenue, which in addition to martial arts instruction offered a range of alternative therapies such as ultra violet ray-lamps and thermo-penetration machines. During its short life, the club counted amongst its patrons a variety of well-heeled bruisers, including the expert in historical swordsmanship, Alfred Hutton, and Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, who later became notorious as one of the few men to survive the sinking of the Titanic, enduring a long afterlife of rumours that he had bribed his way onto a lifeboat and then prevented it from taking on more passengers.

Yet the Bartitsu club failed to flourish, due partly to a strict committee structure and exclusive membership rules that reflected Barton-Wright’s own aspirations as a social-climber, but also to his evidently fractious demeanour. In 1802, the club dissolved amidst scuffles and rancour.

But while Barton-Wright turned his back on martial arts training, the spirit of Bartitsu lived on, not only in a cross-training philosophy that spooled out across the world of physical culture, but also in the early-twentieth century enthusiasm for the jiu-jitsu which Barton-Wright had pioneered in Europe. Policemen, boy scouts, and even suffragettes began to study it, the latter, under the formidable figure of Edith Garrud, using it to train a bodyguard of women who protected their leaders from arrest during demonstrations. Similarly, the stick-fighting method that was taught at Barton-Wright’s club under the auspices of a Frenchman named Pierre Vigny, came to form an important part of training for both the Indian Police Force and the the “Haganah” Jewish self-defence forces in Palestine, where it was studied by none other than the future Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin (pictured here in training):

Yet by far the most famous of Bartisuka was Sherlock Holmes, who relied on the system (albeit getting the spelling wrong) to save his life in the definitive struggle of his career. Having tracked his nemesis Moriaty to a precipitous footpath by the Reichenbach Falls, the two men endure a brief and uneasy stand-off: 

When I reached the end I stood at bay. He drew no weapon, but he rushed at me and threw his long arms around me. He knew that his own game was up, and was only anxious to revenge himself upon me. We tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds and clawed the air with both his hands. But for all his efforts he could not get his balance, and over he went. With my face over the brink I saw him fall for a long way. Then he struck a rock, bounced off, and splashed into the water.