Bruce Lee before there was Bruce Lee

This is just brutally cool.

I first read the Holmesian "baritsu" bit years ago in a story...

Bartitsu - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Bartitsu is an eclectic martial art developed in England during the late 1890s and early 1900s.

In 1898, Edward William Barton-Wright, a British railway engineer who had been living and working in Japan, returned to England and announced the formation of a “New Art of Self Defence”. This art, he claimed, combined the best elements of a range of fighting styles into a unified whole, which he had named Bartitsu.

As detailed in a series of articles Barton-Wright produced for Pearson’s Magazine between 1899 and 1904, Bartitsu was largely drawn from various ko-ryu (“old school”) forms of Jiujitsu, with the addition of tactics and combat techniques from British boxing and wrestling, French Savate, and a combat stick fighting style that had been developed by Professeur Pierre Vigny of Switzerland.

...Although Barton-Wright continued to develop and teach his art at least until the 1920s, it never again returned to prominence. 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. In the Adventure of the Empty House (1903), Holmes explained that he had escaped the clutches of his enemy Professor Moriarty through his knowledge of "baritsu, or Japanese wrestling". Doyle mis-spelled the name of the art, and this was enough to intrigue and confuse Holmsian scholars for the best part of the next century.

...Bartitsu was probably 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 seventy years...

A similar philosophy was later to be embraced by Bill Underwood, William E. Fairbairn and others, who were charged with developing close combat systems for use by Allied troops during the Second World War... These systems became the basis for most military and police close-combat training throughout the Western world.

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 and Swiss svingen wrestler Armand Cherpillod, enjoyed considerable success in these contests, which anticipated the NHB/MMA phenomenon of the 1990s by a hundred years."