((En proceso de Traducción de la Wikipedia en inglés por Bullkane))

Bartitsu
Archivo:Copy of Montage.jpg Collage compuesto de fotografías donde se presentan algunas de las técinas del Bartitsu
Especialidad	Artes Marciales Mixtas
País de origen	Reino Unido
Creador	Edward William Barton-Wright
Parentela	Jujutsu, Schwingen, Savate, Canne de combat, Judo, Boxeo
Deporte olímpico	No
Sitio web oficial	http://www.bartitsu.org/

El bartitsu es un arte marcial mixto y un método de defensa personal desarrollado originariamente en Inglaterra durante los años 1898–1902. En 1901 fue inmortalizado (como "Baritsu") por Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, autor de Las aventuras de Sherlock Holmes. A pesar de haber permanecido en el olvido durante la mayor parte del siglo XX, el Bartitsu ha experimentado un resurgimiento desde el año 2002.^[1]

Historia

En 1898, Edward William Barton-Wright, a British engineer who had spent the previous three years living in the Empire of Japan, returned to England and announced the formation of a "New Art of Self Defence".^[2] This art, he claimed, combined the best elements of a range of fighting styles into a unified whole, which he had named Bartitsu. The word was a portmanteau of his own surname and of "Ju jitsu", and Barton-Wright defined it as meaning "self defence in all its forms".^[3]

As detailed in a series of articles Barton-Wright produced for Pearson's Magazine between 1899 and 1901, Bartitsu was largely drawn from the Shinden Fudo school of koryū ("classical") jujutsu and from Kodokan judo, both of which he had studied while resident in Japan. As it became established in London, the art expanded to incorporate combat techniques from the Tenjin Shinyō, Fusen and Daito schools of jujutsu as well as British boxing, Swiss schwingen, French savate, and a defensive la canne (stick fighting) style that had been developed by Pierre Vigny of Switzerland. Bartitsu also included a comprehensive physical culture training system.

In 1902, Barton-Wright wrote:^[4]

Bartitsu Club

Between 1899 and 1902, Barton-Wright set about publicizing his art through magazine articles, interviews and a series of demonstrations or "assaults at arms" at various London venues. He established a school called the Bartitsu Academy of Arms and Physical Culture, known informally as the Bartitsu Club, which was located at #67b Shaftesbury Avenue in Soho. In an article for Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture vol. 6, (January 1901), journalist Mary Nugent described the Bartitsu Club as "... a huge subterranean hall, all glittering, white-tiled walls, and electric light, with 'champions' prowling around it like tigers."^[5]

Via correspondence with Professor Jigoro Kano, the founder of Kodokan Judo, and other contacts in Japan, Barton-Wright arranged for Japanese jujutsu practitioners K. Tani, S. Yamamoto and the nineteen year old Yukio Tani to travel to London and serve as instructors at the Bartitsu Club. K. Tani and Yamamoto soon returned to Japan, but Yukio Tani stayed and was shortly joined by another young jujutsuka, Sadakazu Uyenishi. Swiss master-at-arms Pierre Vigny and wrestler Armand Cherpillod were also employed as teachers at the Club. As well as teaching well-to-do Londoners, their duties included performing demonstrations and competing in challenge matches against fighters representing other combat styles.^[6] In addition, the Club became the headquarters for a group of fencing antiquarians led by Captain Alfred Hutton and it served as their base for experimenting with historical fencing techniques, which they taught to members of London's acting elite for use in stage combat.^[3]

In mid-1901, the curriculum of Bartitsu was further expanded to include breathing exercises under the tuition of Mrs. Emil Behnke.^[7]

As well as the combat gymnasium, the Bartitsu Club incorporated a well-appointed salon equipped with a wide range of electrotherapy machines.

The Club was organised on the model of the Victorian sporting club; prospective members submitted their applications to a committee, which at one time included both Captain Alfred Hutton and Colonel George Malcolm Fox, former Inspector-General of the British Army's Physical Training Corps.

Bartitsu Club membership included Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon, who was later to achieve notoriety as one of the few adult male survivors of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, as well as Captain F.C. Laing of the 12th Bengal Infantry, who subsequently wrote an article on Bartitsu stick fighting techniques which was published in the Journal of the United Service Institution of India.^[8] Other Club members included Captains Ernest George Stenson Cooke and Frank Herbert Whittow, both also members of the London Rifle Brigade School of Arms, under the direction of Captain Hutton; and William Henry Grenfell, the 1st Baron Desborough.

Barton-Wright later reported that, during this period, he had challenged and defeated seven larger men within three minutes as part of a Bartitsu demonstration he gave at St. James's Hall. He said this feat earned him a membership in the prestigious Bath Club and also a Royal Command to appear before Edward, Prince of Wales.^[9] Unfortunately, Barton-Wright then suffered an injury to his hand, due either to a fight in a Kentish country lane or a bicycling accident, which prevented him from appearing before the Prince.^[10]

Defensa Personal

It is unclear whether Barton-Wright ever devised a formal curriculum for Bartitsu as a self defence method. He encouraged members of the Bartitsu Club to study each of the four major hand-to-hand combat styles taught at the Club, each of which broadly corresponded to a different "range" of personal combat. The goal was to master each style well enough that they could be used against the others if needed. This process was similar to the modern concept of cross-training.

Based on Barton-Wright's writings upon this subject, contemporary researchers believe that Bartitsu placed greatest emphasis upon the Vigny cane fighting system at the striking range and upon jujutsu (and, secondarily, the "all-in" style of European wrestling) at the grappling range. Savate and boxing methods were used to segue between these two ranges, or as a means of first response should the defender not be armed with a walking stick. These sports were also practiced so that Bartitsu students could learn how to defend against them through the use of jujutsu and Vigny stick fighting. Barton-Wright was reported to have modified the techniques of both boxing and savate for self defence purposes, as distinct from academic and fitness training or sporting competition.^[3]

According to interviewer Mary Nugent, Barton-Wright instituted an unusual pedagogical system whereby students were first required to attend private training sessions before being allowed to join class groups.^[10] It is evident that Bartitsu classes included pre-arranged exercises, especially for use in rehearsing those techniques that were too dangerous to be performed at full speed or contact, as well as free-sparring and fencing bouts.^[3]

Many Bartitsu self defence techniques and training sequences were recorded by Barton-Wright himself in his series of articles for Pearson's Magazine. The specific details of other Bartitsu stick fighting training drills were recorded in Captain Laing's article.

Declive

Despite his enthusiasm, Barton-Wright seems to have been a mediocre promoter and the fame of his associates and their jujutsu quickly eclipsed that of Bartitsu. By 1903, the Bartitsu Club had closed its doors for the last time; subsequent speculation by former Club member Percy Longhurst suggested that both the enrollment and tuition fees had been too high.

Most of Barton-Wright's former employees, including jujutsuka Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi and Swiss self defence expert Pierre Vigny, established their own self defence and combat sports gymnasiums in London. After breaking with Barton-Wright, purportedly due to an argument and a fight, Tani also continued his work as a professional music-hall wrestler under the shrewd management of William Bankier, a strength performer and magazine publisher who went by the stage name of "Apollo". Bankier's promotional efforts helped to spur an international fad for jujutsu, which included the publication of numerous books and magazine articles as well as the establishment of jujutsu schools throughout the Western world. This fad lasted until the beginning of World War I and served to introduce jujutsu into Western popular culture.^[9]

Although Barton-Wright was rumoured to have continued to develop and teach his martial art at least until the 1920s, it never again returned to prominence.

"Baritsu"

Bartitsu might have been completely forgotten if not for a chance mention by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in one of his Sherlock Holmes mystery stories. By the 1890s, Conan Doyle had become weary of chronicling the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He had actually killed Holmes off in his 1893 story, The Adventure of the Final Problem, in which Holmes apparently plunged to his death over a waterfall during a struggle with his arch-enemy, Professor Moriarty.

However, such was the public clamour for the fictional detective’s return that Conan Doyle capitulated and revived Holmes for another story, The Adventure of the Empty House, in 1901. As Holmes himself explained his apparently miraculous survival:

In fact, "baritsu" did not exist outside the pages of the English editions of The Adventure of the Empty House. It is uncertain why Conan Doyle had Holmes refer to baritsu, rather than Bartitsu. It is possible that Conan Doyle, who, like E.W. Barton-Wright, was writing for Pearson’s Magazine during the late 1890s, was vaguely aware of Bartitsu and simply mis-remembered or misheard the term; it may even have been a typographical error or a concern about copyright. It should also be noted that a newspaper report on a Bartitsu demonstration in London, published in 1900, had likewise misspelled the name as baritsu.^[11]

In any case, "baritsu" was considered to be too esoteric by Conan Doyle’s American editors, who further added to the confusion by substituting the word "jiujitsu" in the American editions of the story.

This confusion of names persisted through much of the 20th century, with Holmes enthusiasts puzzling over the identity of baritsu. It was not until the 1990s that scholars including Y. Hirayama, J. Hall, Richard Bowen and James Webb were able to positively identify the martial art of Sherlock Holmes.^[12]

Later life

E.W. Barton-Wright spent the remainder of his career working as a physical therapist specialising in innovative (and sometimes controversial) forms of heat, light, and radiation therapy. He continued to use the name "Bartitsu" with reference to his various therapeutic businesses.^[3] In 1950, Barton-Wright was interviewed by Gunji Koizumi for an article appearing in the Budokwai newsletter, and later that year he was presented to the audience at a Budokwai gathering in London. He died in 1951, at the age of 90, and was buried in what the late martial arts historian Richard Bowen described as being "a pauper's grave."^[13]

Legado

In many ways, E.W. Barton-Wright was a man ahead of his time. He was among the first Europeans known to have studied the Japanese martial arts, and was almost certainly the first to have taught them in Europe, the Commonwealth of Nations or the Americas.

Bartitsu was the first martial art to have deliberately combined Asian and European fighting styles towards addressing the problems of civilian/urban self-defence in an "unarmed society". In this, Barton-Wright anticipated Bruce Lee's Jeet Kune Do approach by over seventy years. Barton-Wright's philosophy of pragmatic eclecticism was taken up by other early 20th century European self-defence specialists, including Percy Longhurst, William Garrud and Jean Joseph-Renaud, all of whom had studied with former Bartitsu Club instructors.^[3]

A similar philosophy was later to be embraced by Bill Underwood, William E. Fairbairn and others charged with developing close combat systems for use by Allied troops during the Second World War. Underwood had actually studied jujutsu with Yukio Tani and another jujutsuka, Taro Miyake, in London during the first decade of the 20th century. The systems founded by Underwood, Fairbairn, and their contemporaries became the basis for most military and police close-combat training throughout the Western world during the 20th century.

E.W. Barton-Wright is also remembered as a pioneering promoter of mixed martial arts or MMA contests, in which experts in different fighting styles compete under common rules. Barton-Wright's champions, including Yukio Tani, Sadakazu Uyenishi and Swiss schwingen wrestler Armand Cherpillod, enjoyed considerable success in these contests, which anticipated the MMA phenomenon of the 1990s by a hundred years.

The Bartitsu Club was among the first schools of its type in Europe to offer specialised classes in women's self defence, a practice taken up after the Club's demise by students of Yukio Tani and Sadakazu Uyenishi including Edith Margaret Garrud and Emily Watts. Mrs. Garrud established her own jujutsu dojo (school) in London and also taught the art to members of the militant Suffragette movement, establishing an early association between self defence training and the political philosophy of feminism.

Resurgimiento e interés en la actualidad

In 2001, the Electronic Journals of Martial Arts and Sciences (EJMAS) web site[7] began to re-publish many of Barton-Wright's magazine articles that had been discovered in the British Library archives by Richard Bowen.^[14] Almost immediately, the "Self Defence with a Walking Stick" articles attracted a minor cult following and the illustrations were reproduced, often with humorous captions or other alterations, on a number of other sites.

Conan Doyle's "baritsu" developed a life of its own during the latter 20th century, and it was duly recorded that fictional heroes including Doc Savage and the Shadow had been initiated into its mysteries; the latter two characters were established as knowing baritsu in a DC Comics crossover that spilled over into The Shadow Strikes. Baritsu was also incorporated into the rules of several role-playing games set during the Victorian and Edwardian eras.^[15]

In 2002, an international association of Bartitsu enthusiasts, known as the Bartitsu Society, was formed to research and then revive E.W. Barton-Wright's "New Art of Self Defence". The Bartitsu Society divides Bartitsu research into two related fields, those of canonical Bartitsu (the self-defense sequences that were detailed by Barton-Wright and his assistants between 1899-1902) and neo-Bartitsu (modern, individualised interpretations drawing especially from the training manuals produced by former Bartitsu Club instructors and their students between 1905 and the early 1920s). Associated interests include social phenomena such as street gangsterism at the turn of the Twentieth century, the martial training of the militant Suffragette movement, and the study of the martial arts as Victorian and Edwardian social history. The Bartitsu Society communicates via an email group established by author Will Thomas and individual members occasionally offer practical seminars in Bartitsu fighting techniques.

En agosto de 2005, the Society published a book, The Bartitsu Compendium, which was edited by Tony Wolf.^[3] The Compendium details the complete history of the art as well as a technical curriculum for canonical Bartitsu.

The second volume^[16] was published in August 2008, comprising resources for neo-Bartitsu drawn both from Barton-Wright's own writings and from the corpus of self defence manuals produced by his colleagues and their students, including Yukio Tani, William Garrud, H.G. Lang, Jean Joseph-Renaud, and R.G. Allanson-Winn.

Articles on various aspects of Bartitsu have been published in journals including "Classical Fighting Arts", "Western Martial Arts Illustrated", "The Chap" and "History Today".

En septiembre de 2006, Bartitsu Society member Kirk Lawson released a DVD entitled Bartitsu - the Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes, which is a presentation of Bartitsu techniques as demonstrated at the Spring '06 Cumann Bhata Western Martial Arts Seminar.

En octubre de 2006, the Bartitsu Society launched the Bartitsu.org website, which includes information on the history, theory and practice of Barton-Wright's martial art.

En julio de 2008, Bartitsu Society member Kirk Lawson officially announced the first ongoing Bartitsu/Neo-Bartitsu training commitment at his club, Cumann Bhata Dayton.

Proceeds from the sales of the Bartitsu Compendium, the Bartitsu Compendium II, and the Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes DVD have been dedicated to creating a memorial for E.W. Barton-Wright.

Ensayos de Barton-Wright

• "The New Art of Self-defence: How a Man May Defend Himself against Every Form of Attack," Pearson's Magazine, March 1899, v. 7, pp. 268–275.[8]
• "The New Art of Self-defence," Pearson's Magazine, abril de 1899, v. 7, pp. 402–410.[9]
• "Self-defence with a Walking Stick," Pearson's Magazine, febrero de 1901, v. 11, pp. 130–139.[10]

Documental

"Bartitsu: the Gentlemanly Art of Self Defence" [11]

Referencias