BARTITSU - The original Bullshido?

**DdlR** · Posted On: 10/18/2007 4:48pm

"Embedding disabled by request" ... you can watch the clip at YouTube, just search for "Vigny Canne".

**satsuma** · Posted On: 10/28/2007 4:58pm

I think if it was bullshido, it was a very well built one. With all these masters i don't think they would like to participate in a farse, maybe i'm wrong, but at least they didn't steal a name of an exististing martial art like mister magliacano did with pa kua in argentina.

**Jay_W** · Posted On: 2/12/2008 12:02pm

Wasnt Sherlock Holmes suppost to be a practitioner of this ??

**DdlR** · Posted On: 2/12/2008 1:11pm

Yes, sort of. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote it in to one of his Sherlock Holmes stories to explain how Holmes had defeated his enemy, Professor Moriarty, in a fight to the death at the top of Reichenbach Waterfall in Switzerland. However, Doyle mis-spelled the name as "baritsu", probably following the example of a newspaper article about a Bartitsu demonstration that contained the same error.

Compounding the confusion, by the time Doyle's story was published in the USA his American editors felt that "baritsu" was too obscure so they substituted the word "jiujitsu".

All of this, plus the fact that Bartitsu was almost forgotten after WW1, was enough to confuse Holmes scholars throughout most of the 20th Century.