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Long before Jon Bluming, Donald ‘Donn’ Frederick Draeger and Robert W. Smith—all martial artists who helped to introduce Asian fighting styles to the West—there was the Englishman Edward William Barton-Wright.

Born in 1860, Barton-Wright (a civil engineer by trade) went to Japan when aged thirty-three, where he stayed for four years. There he trained in a number of different jujitsu (there are various spellings) styles in Kobe, Yokohama, and Tokyo, and was so impressed by what he learned that he made the rather confident claim that ‘…(any) man who attacks you with a knife or other weapon can be easily disarmed’.

But even before his trip to Japan, Barton-Wright was an expert in several Western fighting styles, including boxing, fencing, wrestling, and savate . In order to test the practical application of such arts, he was apparently in the habit of ‘engaging toughs’ (i.e. picking fights) in various seedy places, such as inns and music halls.

Upon his return to England, Barton-Wright found that many questioned whether this strange martial art he’d brought back with him was actually any good. The simplest way to prove that it was, decided Barton-Wright, was to challenge his doubters to a fight. Though even then he couldn’t really win: soundly thrashing a wrestling champion called Mr Chipchase, he was subsequently accused of cheating—the mysterious throws, locks and holds of jujitsu being classed as ‘unsporting’. (Mr Chipchase himself, however, was gracious in defeat, and positively gushing about jujitsu declared that its ‘…system of defence and retaliation is so much more scientific than my own style’.)

Barton-Wright went on to found his own dōjō (Japanese for ‘training hall’) within England, where he mixed jujitsu with the other fighting arts he also knew—such as boxing and fencing—resulting in his own,unique style that he labelled ‘Bartitsu’. (So popular did Bartitsu prove—if only fleetingly—that it was mentioned in the 1903 Sherlock Holmes’ short story The Adventure of the Empty House. In this, the resurrected Holmes informs Doctor Watson that his victory over his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls was due to his ‘…knowledge of baritsu [sic], or the Japanese system of wrestling’. Note here the accidental misspelling of Barton-Wright’s style.)

Unfortunately, Bartitsu’s popularity had quite declined by around 1920; and by the time Barton-Wright died in 1951, aged ninety, he was all but a pauper. However, he can certainly be remembered as being one of the true pioneers of ‘mixed’ or ‘hybrid’ martial arts—having demonstrated the idea that techniques from various different styles can, and should, be put together to form the most efficient way of fighting.