An early photo of a Barton-Wright era Bartitsu demonstration.
As previews for the new Sherlock Holmes movie continue to unfold, avid readers are excited to finally have “Baritsu” shown in a Holmes depiction and those only slightly familiar wonder what kind of martial art Holmes is performing in this movie. Tony Wolf is in the process of creating a documentary that may answer many of these questions.
What exactly is bartitsu? Bartitsu was what we'd think of today as a cross-cultural mixed martial art. It was founded over a hundred years ago by an Englishman named Edward William Barton-Wright, who had trained in boxing, wrestling, savate and fencing. He also studied Shinden Fudo Ryu jiu jitsu and Kodokan judo while he was working in Japan during the 1890s. He was one of the very first Europeans known to have trained in Japanese martial arts.
When Barton-Wright returned to London, he set up a full-time school called the Bartitsu Academy of Arms and Physical Culture, or just the Bartitsu Club for short. He hired experts in jiu jitsu, boxing, wrestling, savate and French stick fighting as instructors.
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Tony Wolf, Bartitsu practitioner and documentarian. Photo: Kathrynne Wolf
[Bartitsu’s] claim to fame in literature, is that Sherlock Holmes had used "baritsu" (a typo for Bartitsu) to throw his
arch-enemy Professor Moriarty off a cliff during their battle at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland.
In the late 1990s, martial arts historians who were curious about
"baritsu" re-discovered some of Barton-Wright's writings, which had
been gathering dust in library archives. They realized that he was actually a forgotten pioneer of many martial arts concepts that we tend to think of as being very modern and cutting-edge.
What was the inspiration for the documentary? My colleague, Ran Braun, proposed the idea of making a Bartitsu documentary early this year (2009). He brought me over to Italy to teach some Bartitsu seminars in August and September, and we started filming. We've been working really hard on it since then, collaborating with other enthusiasts from all over the world. The documentary will feature re-enactments, interviews, rare archival pictures, animations and modern seminar footage to tell the whole story of Bartitsu.
Have you studied Bartitsu yourself?
Yes, I teach both what we call "canonical" Bartitsu, which is based on
what Barton-Wright and his colleagues produced at the turn of the 20th century, and also "neo-Bartitsu", which is our attempt to keep his experiments going. Neo-Bartitsu uses a modern cross-training system,
applied to boxing, jiujitsu, some aspects of savate and self defence
with an umbrella or walking stick. We focus on those arts were practiced in London during the early 20th century, rather than how they're usually practiced today.
Do you believe bartitsu will regain the popularity it held at its original inception?
I don't know. There's a good deal of interest in it at the moment, and that will increase when the new Sherlock Holmes movie is released. We actually donated copies of our manuals, The Bartitsu Compendium, volumes 1 and 2, to the production, and the fight choreographer, Richard Ryan, is an old colleague of mine. However, Holmes' "baritsu"is not the same as E.W. Barton-Wright's Bartitsu, so we're not expecting to see historically accurate Bartitsu in the movie fight scenes. What the movie will do is introduce the idea of "Victorian MMA" into the popular imagination, and we'll happily ride that wave.
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