WDS Bartitsu sampler

Image: R T Catling,  Bartitsu 2018

For our last session of the year, the Okehampton group undertook a wee sampler from the Bartitsu canon of E.W. Barton-Wright. Edwardian costume wasn’t compulsory – in fact only the instructor decided to add some colour for the occasion.

As described in a previous post, Bartitsu is an early British mixed martial art combining pugilism, jujutsu, kick-boxing and stick-fighting as a form of self defence.

With only a short session to tackle an introduction to the art, we concentrated on the stick fighting elements of armed versus unarmed and similarly armed stick fighters, with the additional entertainment of the round-ended hooked sticks. We even managed to break one.

Image: WDS Bartitsu December 2018

We used as our source materials two of the articles written by Barton-Wright himself for Pearson’s magazine, The New Art of Self Defence (PDF, 3.6MB) and Self Defence with a Walking Stick (PDF, 1.6MB).

WDS resumes in the new year.


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