Bartitsu

Bartitsu Club

Between 1899 and 1902, Barton-Wright publicised his art through magazine articles, interviews, and demonstrations at various London venues. He established the Bartitsu Academy of Arms and Physical Culture, known as the Bartitsu Club, at 67b Shaftesbury Avenue in Soho. A journalist described the club as a huge subterranean hall with white-tiled walls and electric light, where champions prowled like tigers. Through correspondence with Jigoro Kano, founder of Kodokan Judo, Barton-Wright arranged for Japanese jujutsu practitioners Kaneo Tani, Seizo Yamamoto, and the nineteen-year-old Yukio Tani to travel to London as instructors.

Kaneo Tani and Yamamoto soon returned to Japan, but Yukio Tani stayed and was joined by Sadakazu Uyenishi. Swiss master-at-arms Pierre Vigny and wrestler Armand Cherpillod also taught at the club. Their duties included teaching well-to-do Londoners, performing demonstrations, and competing in challenge matches against fighters of other styles. Tani, Uyenishi, and Cherpillod fought on the music hall wrestling circuit, and the Japanese athletes consistently defeated much larger opponents, establishing jujutsu's efficacy.

Some critics complained that jujutsu's submission rules were unsporting because they allowed choke holds and joint locks banned in European wrestling. The club also became a headquarters for fencing antiquarians led by Captain Alfred Hutton, who experimented with historical fencing techniques and taught them to London's acting elite for stage combat. In mid-1901, the curriculum expanded to include breathing exercises under Kate Behnke. The club also incorporated a salon equipped with electrotherapy machines.

Self-defence

Barton-Wright encouraged club members to study each of the four major hand-to-hand combat styles taught at the club, each broadly corresponding to a different range of personal combat. The goal was to master each style well enough to use them against the others if needed, a process similar to modern cross-training. Bartitsu placed greatest emphasis on the Vigny cane fighting system at striking range and on jujutsu (and secondarily European wrestling) at grappling range.

Savate and boxing methods were used to segue between these ranges or as a first response if the defender was not armed with a walking stick. These sports were also practised so students could learn to defend against them through jujutsu and Vigny stick fighting. Barton-Wright modified boxing and savate techniques for self-defence, referring to guards that would cause an attacking boxer to injure his own fists and defences that would cause an attacking kicker to damage his own leg.

The unarmed Bartitsu practitioner mounted an aggressive defence using damaging variations of standard guards, then finished the fight with jujutsu, which Barton-Wright viewed as a secret weapon. This fusion of aggressive boxing/savate defences with jujutsu was an innovation of Bartitsu.

Contemporary interest and revival

The modern revival of Bartitsu began in 2001, when the Electronic Journals of Martial Arts and Sciences website started reprinting magazine articles by E.W. Barton-Wright that Richard Bowen had uncovered in the British Library. The series on walking stick self-defense quickly gained a small cult following, and its illustrations were copied onto other websites, often with humorous captions. That same year, the Royal Armouries in Leeds incorporated Bartitsu stick fighting into their educational demonstrations.

In 2002, an international group called the Bartitsu Society formed to study and bring back Barton-Wright’s “New Art of Self Defence.” The Society divides its work into two areas: canonical Bartitsu, which covers the self-defense sequences Barton-Wright and his associates published between 1899 and 1902, and neo-Bartitsu, which takes modern, personal approaches based on both that canon and training manuals written by former Bartitsu Club instructors and their students up to the early 1920s.

The revival aims to preserve the known canonical material while continuing Barton-Wright’s experiments in cross-training among boxing, jiujitsu, and stick fighting as they were practiced around 1901, treating these as an unfinished project left when the original club closed. This effort is seen as deliberately anachronistic, collaborative, open-ended, and open source. Related interests include studying martial arts as part of Victorian and Edwardian social history.

From 2003 onward, Society members began teaching seminars at stage combat and martial arts conferences globally. Bartitsu training programs have since started at places like Cumann Bhata Dayton, Academie Duello in Vancouver, Alte Kampfkunst in Wuppertal, Briercrest College and Seminary in Saskatchewan, and Forteza Fitness and Martial Arts in Chicago.

Bartitsu and "baritsu" in popular culture

The fictional martial art "baritsu," introduced by Conan Doyle, gained its own momentum in the late 1900s. In a DC Comics crossover that extended into The Shadow Strikes, characters like Doc Savage and The Shadow were shown to know baritsu, with both implied to have been taught by Sherlock Holmes. This fighting style has since appeared in many Sherlock Holmes-inspired novels and short stories, as well as in the rules of several role-playing games set in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

The manga and anime series Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler), Dantarian no Shoka (The Mystic Archives of Dantalian), and Kengan Ashura each include characters skilled in baritsu. In Will Thomas' Barker and Llewellyn mystery series, the protagonist Cyrus Barker is partly based on E.W. Barton-Wright, while the villain Sir Callum Fielding-Shaw in Adrienne Kress' young adult novel The Friday Society is similarly inspired. For the 2009 film Sherlock Holmes, fight choreographer Richard Ryan described the "neo-Bartitsu" as a mix of Wing Chun, swordplay, and Brazilian Jujitsu.

Director Guy Ritchie called baritsu a form of Jujitsu that uses locks, chokes, throwing hats at eyes, and striking with a walking stick. The film's choreography featured double-handed walking stick thrusts and using an overcoat to distract an opponent. The 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, had fight choreography that more closely matched historical Bartitsu.