The list of things given to the human race by Queen Victoria’s London is long and, like a letter to Santa written by Wednesday Addams, largely grim. Victorian London may have seen itself as the ‘heart of civilization’.
There is, however, a source of pride that emerges from this maelstrom of Victorian London—perhaps inevitably, since the city stretched its claws halfway around the globe—was also the birthplace of the first mixed martial art, and home to some of the original Ultimate Fighters.
A whole technological revolution before Royce Gracie cemented the superiority of his family’s style of jiu jitsu by slaying the giant Shamrock at the first UFC, Edward Barton-Wright, a colonial engineer, was shocking and impressing London society in equal measure with his new combat system, which he called ‘Bartitsu’. His martial art combined jiu jitsu, Savate, bare-knuckle boxing and street fighting techniques to create a style which, in Barton-Wright’s own words, ‘should enable a man to defy anything.’
Like Gracie, Barton-Wright was a slight, unassuming man. Which must have made it all the more galling for the professional pugilists and wrestlers at St. James Hall in London when, fresh off the boat from Japan, he strode into their hangout and challenged the whole lot of them to a fight. ‘I overcame seven in succession in three minutes,’ he recalled in an interview given shortly before his death. ‘All,’ he added with satisfaction, ‘were fourteen stone.’
When Barton-Wright arrived in London at the end of the nineteenth century the city was in the grip of a mighty panic, thanks largely to the efforts of the nascent tabloid press. The Ripper had made such good copy that they decided to fill the back-alleys of London with a hundred more like him. Garrotters, Thugs, Footpads, and Scuttlers loomed menacingly from the front pages, put there by cynical newspaper editors hoping to part gullible readers from their money, and it was this wave of fear that Barton-Wright hoped would bear him all the way to the bank.
Bartitsu was never meant for popular consumption and, sadly, with the exception of a few public spectacles, it never really made it into the ring. Barton-Wright may have been the first mixed martial artist, but he was also an arch capitalist. More interesting to him than the creation of a new sport was the prospect of using his system to tease open the purse strings of the upper classes. He pitched Bartitsu to the cash-splashing man-about-town who longed to be able to swagger through the East End in a silk top hat without having to worry about having his teeth kicked in. With techniques that demonstrated how to fend off armed assailants with nothing but an opera cape, walking stick, and ‘the superior intelligence of the better classes’, Barton-Wright promised them all this and more.
With a little clever PR—and a few words of encouragement from the Prince Regent—he had soon generated enough interest from the moneyed classes to establish the Bartitsu Academy of Arms and Physical Culture in the heart of Soho. The Academy was lush—one visitor described it as “a huge subterranean hall, all glittering, white-tiled walls, and electric light, with ‘champions’ prowling around it like tigers”—and entry was only for the few.
Continue reading at Fightland.The Mixed Martial Arts of Victorian London | FIGHTLAND
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