Men filled the doorway. An invisible gun roared and a piece of the ceiling flaked down. Steve spun his stick and charged the door. The light from the lamp behind him glittered and glowed on the whirling wood. The stick whipped backward and forward, from left to right, from right to left. It writhed like a live thing — seemed to fold upon its grasped middle as if spring-hinged with steel. Flashing half-circles merged into a sphere of deadliness. The rhythm of incessant thudding against flesh and clicking on bone became a tune that sang through the grunts of fighting men, the groans and oaths of stricken men. Steve and the girl went through the door.

Between moving arms and legs and bodies the cream of the Vauxhall showed. Men stood upon the automobile, using its height for vantage in the fight. Steve threw himself forward, swinging his stick against shin and thigh, toppling men from the machine. With his left hand he swept the girl around to his side. His body shook and rocked under the weight of blows from men who were packed too closely for any effectiveness except the smothering power of sheer weight.

His stick was suddenly gone from him. One instant he held and spun it; the next, he was holding up a clenched fist that was empty — the ebony had vanished as if in a puff of smoke. He swung the girl up over the car door, hammered her down into the car — jammed her down upon the legs of a man who stood there — heard a bone break, and saw the man go down. Hands gripped him everywhere; hands pounded him. He cried aloud with joy when he saw the girl, huddled on the floor of the car, working with ridiculously small hands at the car’s mechanism.

The machine began to move. Holding with his hands, he lashed both feet out behind. Got them back on the step. Struck over the girl’s head with a hand that had neither thought nor time to make a fist — struck stiff-fingered into a broad red face.

The car moved. One of the girl’s hands came up to grasp the wheel, holding the car straight along a street she could not see. A man fell on her. Steve pulled him off — tore pieces from him — tore hair and flesh. The car swerved, scraped a building; scraped one side clear of men. The hands that held Steve fell away from him, taking most of his clothing with them. He picked a man off the back of the seat, and pushed him down into the street that was flowing past them. Then he fell into the car beside the girl.

Pistols exploded behind them. From a house a little ahead a bitter-voiced rifle emptied itself at them, sieving a mudguard. Then the desert — white and smooth as a gigantic hospital bed — was around them. Whatever pursuit there had been was left far behind.

Presently the girl slowed down, stopped.

“Are you all right?” Steve asked.

“Yes; but you’re — ”

“All in one piece,” he assured her. “Let me take the wheel.”

“No! No!” she protested. “You’re bleeding. You’re — ”

“No! No!” he mocked her. “We’d better keep going until we hit something. We’re not far enough from Izzard yet to call ourselves safe.”

He was afraid that if she tried to patch him up he would fall apart in her hands. He felt like that.

She started the car, and they went on. A great sleepiness came to him. What a fight! What a fight!

An extensive feature article on Bartitsu (in the German language) is available in the 2011 edition of Schwert & Klinge Magazine.

Author Will Thomas was the founder of the Bartitsu Forum email list (where all the cool kids hang out) and was among the interview subjects in the recent documentary Bartitsu: the Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes. Cyrus Barker, one of the protagonists of Will’s “Barker and Llewellyn” series of Victorian mystery novels was partially based on Bartitsu founder Edward Barton-Wright. You can read a new interview with Will here.

A theatrical baritsu demonstration by participants in a recent stunt fighting workshop with Ran Braun in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

Canterbury Earthquake Appeal

The New Zealand Salvation Army has relaunched its Canterbury Earthquake Appeal in expectation of great humanitarian need in the aftermath of today’s devastating earthquake.

You can donate online (PayPal or credit card) via the Canterbury Earthquake Appeal website. Please specify that your donation is for the ‘Canterbury Earthquake Appeal’.

Your donation will strengthen New Zealand’s response to help those in need. Thank you for your support.

This unique Bartitsu-inspired artwork, incorporating a page from an 1880s book on gentlemanly etiquette, is available from this site.

The preview trailer for our upcoming documentary, Bartitsu; The Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes:

Click here to preview and order either volume of the Bartitsu Compendium.

Here is the three-part essay, Sherlock Holmes and Bartitsu, which details the crucial role played by the Great Detective in developing Mr. Barton-Wright’s “New Art of Self Defence”; and click here to read the two-part essay, The Fighting Arts of Sherlock Holmes.

The Bartitsu Society forum is available here.

Any help towards our locating the following two articles will be most gratefully received:

Judson, Ralph, The Mystery of Baritsu: A Sidelight Upon Sherlock
Holmes’s Accomplishments, The Baker Street Journal: an irregular quarterly of Sherlockiana: Volume 8, Issue 5 (1958)

Bowen, Richard, Further Lessons in Baritsu, The Ritual: Review of the Northern Musgraves Sherlock Holmes Society 20: 22–26. (1997)

A pictorial report on a Bartitsu Club exhibition from Caras y caretas (1902)

The Spanish text reads:

International Concourse in the Arts of Self Defence

On the 23rd of November was held in the School of Arms in London an interesting tournament and demonstration of the various self defence methods that have been adapted into the “Bartitsu” system which has, as with many other Japanese trends, been adopted easily in Europe.

The Japanese champions were there along with wrestlers and boxers from Britain and from the European continent. Part of what one might describe as a match of over-riding interest was an encounter between a professional wrestler who represented the Cornish and Devonshire style and a champion of Osaka (Japan) named Uyenishi. The Japanese wrestler won each of the three rounds of this contest.

A professional boxer contended against the school’s champion of the French savate, and the result was indecisive. Several of the competitors explained aspects of the Bartitsu system, and through their exhibitions much interest was sown in the employment of the walking stick as a defensive weapon.

Our pictures reproduce the main scenes of this interesting tournament in which, overall, the Japanese dominated, and if partially, in some of the European exercises, failed, they were not truly defeated since with the methods of their own country they were victorious against all attempts to dominate them.