Bartitsu
During the 1890's, articles about jujitsu began to appear in English and outsiders' were able study it. An English engineer named Edward W. Barton-Wright publishes an article called "The New Art of Self Defence" in Pearson's Magazine. Barton-Wright had studied jujutsu while living in Japan, and he called this "New Art" as Bartitsu from his own name, which combined jujutsu with boxing and savate. The principles of this new art he summed up as: (1) To disturb the equilibrium of your assailant; (2) To surprise him before he has time to regain his balance and use his strength; (3) If necessary to subject the joints of any parts of his body, whether neck, shoulder, elbow, wrist, back, knee, ankle, etc. to strains that they are anatomically and mechanically unable to resist.
That said, Sherlock Holmes was Bartitsu's most famous practitioner. In "The Adventure of the Empty House," published in Strand Magazine in October 1903, Holmes told Watson that how his knowledge of Bartitsu saved his life from the attack by Moriarty: "[Moriarty] rushed at me and threw his arms around me. He knew that his own game was up, and was only anxious to revenge himself upon me. We tottered together on the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu [sic], or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds and clawed the air with both his hands. But for all his efforts he could not get his balance, and over he went".
Barton-Wright also invited Yukio Tani (who trained Fusen-ryu and other Ju-jitsu school in Japan) and Sadakazu Uenishi as his instructors and to establish the Bartitsu style, but success was somewhat mixed. Barton-Wright's venture eventually failed, and Yukio Tani split with Barton-Wright and went into the music halls under the management of William Bankier. Tani's stage name was "the pocket Hercules", and here he took on challengers and staged elaborate stunts.
Like other wrestlers and strong men performing in the halls, Tani and Bankier had to offer a public challenge, and for the record it read (from Sporting Life, December 1904): "Paragon Theatre of Varieties. Mile End Road. Special Engagement of Apollo's Wonderful Japanese Wrestler Yukio Tani. �100 to any man who can defeat him. Notwithstanding the physical disadvantages against heavier men (for Tani weighs 9 stone only), Apollo will pay any living man twenty guineas who Tani fails to defeat in fifteen minutes: Professional champion wrestlers specially invited".
This was a long way from the gentlemen's sports clubs which had been envisaged but Tani's reputation, and the reputation of jujutsu, was really made in the boisterous world of the music hall, where he worked for years. He had to be ready to meet all comers, regardless of weight, so the worth of jujutsu was proved night after night, in town after town, throughout Britain. When Gunji Koizumi founded the London judo club known as the Budokwai in January 1918, Yukio Tani was member number 14, and much of his free time was spent at the dojo. Therefore he helped form the first generation of British judoka. In 1920 when he and Gunji Koizumi affiliated with the Kodokan, Jigoro Kano awarded him a second-dan in Judo.
Gunji Koizumi learned Tenshin Shinyo-ryu Ju-jitsu in his youth. To realise his ambition of studying electricity, he decided to work his way to the West in a series of "hops": Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, Wales, and finally arrived London in 1906. He took a job as a teacher at a jujutsu school in Golden Square, Soho, which had been set up a few years earlier by Sadakazu Uenishi. In 1907, he sailed for the United States to learn electricity, and returned to London in 1910.
By 1917, married and with a thriving business, he felt that he had to make some contribution to help his adopted country (when asked why he never became British he would give a gentle laugh and, pointing to his face, remark, "The face is wrong!" ). Koizumi Gunji establishes the Budokwai at 15 Lower Grosvenor Place in London. This was not Britain's first Ju-jitsu club. That was probably Barton-Wright's school. It was not even the first Kodokan Judo school. That was the Cambridge University Jujutsu Club, which was organized about 1906. However, it was the first British judo club open to the general public that continued to operate into the 21st century.
Sadakazu Uenishi opened the Ju-jitsu school in Golden Square, Soho, as mentioned before. When he left Britain, the school was taken over by one of his students, William Garrud, who was also the husband of Edith Garrud. Ms. Garrud was a well-known militant suffragette, who instructed members of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in the martial art of jiu-jitsu during the early years of the 20th century. From her dojo at No. 9 Argyll Place, London, Ms. Garrud trained a bodyguard of women to protect Emmeline Pankhurst from police brutality whenever she spoke in public.
