Thomas 'Boston' Corbett: Deranged Killer of Lincoln's Assassin

(1832 – 1894?)

Although little heard of today, Boston Corbett's infamous act was something of cause célèbre in his day. He was both famed and reviled by his contemporaries for killing John Wilkes Booth before he could be arrested and tried for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, but even his admirers had to admit upon meeting him that there was something rather peculiar about Boston.

MAD AS A HATTER

Boston's story is an unfortunate one tinged with sadness, madness and religious mania. Born in London, England in 1832, he moved with his family to New York at the age of 7. He was apprenticed as a hat maker, a profession which at the time, often had unfortunate consequences for those who followed it, as the mercury salts used in the manufacturing process often poisoned the minds as well as the bodies of those who worked with them over a period of time in poorly ventilated areas. To make matters worse for his sanity, his young wife died in childbirth in 1858 along with their stillborn daughter.

MATTHEW 19:12

In his grief-stricken and mercurial state, Corbett turned to religion for comfort. Having heard a charismatic preacher preach the word of the God whilst working in Boston, he became born-again. He began to wear his hair long in the style of Jesus Christ himself, and changed his first name from 'Thomas' to 'Boston' in honour of the town in which he found the Lord (or 'The Lord-er' as he would have said, having developed the evangelical preacher's habit of adding 'er' at the end of almost every word that left his mouth).

Still aged just 26 and by all accounts a handsome man, he still found the temptation to fornicate with women sorely trying. Although he was very outward in his religious devotion, he was no hypocrite, and he decided that the best way to avoid giving in to his sinful urges was to take a pair of scissors, slice upon his scrotum and snip off his own testicles.

Despite having literally cut his own testicles off, it could not be said that he lacked balls. As a diminutive preacher, standing at a mere 5'4” tall, he ventured fearlessly into the less salubrious parts of Boston and New York, preaching fire-breathing sermons to crowds of Catholic Irish labourers, who were, unsurprisingly, not particularly receptive to the wild-eyed, born-again rantings of a small-statured English Methodist preacher with long-hair, upbraiding them from a soapbox for their drinking and their swearing. On one occasion, he was roughed up and pushed of his soapbox by an angry Irish longshoreman, who threatened him with dire physical violence if he did not shut up and make himself scarce. Unfazed, Boston told the man:

“You may bring all Ireland with you, and it won’t frighten me in the least.”

Boston's reckless attitude was that of a man arrogantly convinced that he was God's instrument, and that his actions had the backing of the divine, an attitude which, although eccentric, was not particularly unknown in the mid 19th Century, on either side of the Atlantic. Given some of his later actions, there is no reason to doubt that Boston was anything but completely sincere in what he told the Irishman and anyone else who expressed dissatisfaction at what he said and did.

CIVIL WAR

The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 promised to give something of an outlet for Boston's penchant for crusading fearlessly against wrongdoers, in this case, the detestable rebels who had treacherously risen against their own country. He initially joined the 12th New York Militia, but was drummed out of that outfit, having come close to being shot for desertion for having laid down his musket on picket duty and tried to walk away at the stroke of midnight on his last day of enlistment.

He then joined the 16th New York Cavalry regiment. His constant moralising did not make him particularly popular amongst his more worldly fellow soldiers, or for that matter with his commanding officers, who were also astonished on occasion to find themselves on the receiving end of Boston's one-man verbal crusade against cursing and 'immoral' conduct.

Not suprisingly, Boston spent plenty of time in the guardhouse for insubordination. However, his courage in the face of the enemy won him the respect of many in his regiment who otherwise sneered at his self-righteousness 'God-bothering' and his sheer bloody-minded awkwardness with his superiors.

'God have mercy on your souls' he would loftily intone each time he fired in the direction of the enemy, in the manner of a righteous judge imposing a sentence of death upon a wicked miscreant.

In 1864, Corbett was involved in a skirmish with John Mosby's Raiders near Centreville. Cut off and surrounded with 13 other men from Company L, Corbett fought with his characteristic contempt for earthly danger. In spite of hopeless odds, he continued to fire his rifle, and then empty his revolver at the enemy, with an 'Amen! Glory be to God!' ejaculating from his lips every time a bullet found its mark. Having killed 7 raiders, he was only captured because he ran out of ammunition before his enemies were able to kill him in action. Only the personal intervention of the admiring Col Mosby himself prevented the furious Raiders from beating him up and summarily executing him for the bloody nose he had given them.

Boston, along with his fellow prisoners eventually found themselves at the notorious Andersonville POW camp in Georgia. For three months Boston lay surrounded by death in the form of disease, starvation and arbitrary cruelty. He managed to find many converts in that godforsaken place amongst the desperate, dying men who could feel their place on the edge of eternity, and this, in addition to his own survival in the hellish conditions of Andersonville (of the 13 men who were captured alongside him, only 1 survived), were further proof, if it were needed, of Boston's divine favour and calling.

Fortunately for Boston, he was exchanged after 5 months of captivity and following a period of recuperation, rejoined the 16th New York Cavalry, having been promoted to Sergeant.

'LINCOLN'S AVENGER'

The 16th New York Cavalry was stationed in Washington on the night of Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theatre, and set up a cordon that unsuccessfully attempted to snare John Wilkes Booth before he could escape. Upon hearing the news of the assassination, Sgt Boston Corbett prayed that he might be the hand of the Lord when he administered his divine vengeance upon the late President's treacherous assassin.

And so it proved, as on the 26th of April, 1865 John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirator, David Herold were tracked down to a barn in Caroline County, Virginia, by a detachment that included Sgt Corbett . Herold surrendered quickly, but Booth refused to come out. The barn was set ablaze in an attempt force him out, but before the fire had time to do its work, Corbett spotted the crippled assassin through a crack in the wall. Sensing his chance, he aimed through the gap and fired, hitting Booth in the neck. Booth was brought out of the barn mortally wounded, his spine severed by Corbett's bullet. He died two hours later.

FAME COMES AT A PRICE 

The authorities were incensed at Corbett's actions, as they had wanted Booth of all people to be taken alive and put on trial. Corbett was briefly placed under arrest for disobeying orders. However, to many members of the public, Corbett was a hero for bringing the Lord's vengeance upon the man who had committed the ultimate sacrilege of murdering the President of the United States. 'Divine Providence directed my hand' he proclaimed to those questioning him about the incident. He was eventually released and after some petulant foot-dragging by the US Government, was eventually awarded the princely sum of $1,653.84 for his role in bringing Herold and Booth to justice.

Corbett found himself very much in demand for interviews, photographs and autographs, but he eventually grew tired of his newfound fame. Upon being discharged from the army, he re-entered his civilian profession as a hatmaker.
However, the increased exposure to mercury salts, the pressures of fame and the trauma of his wartime experiences did nothing to enhance his already questionable sanity, and he took to carrying at least one pistol with him at all times, even to sleep. According to friends, he imagined that the ghost of Booth and all the other men he had killed where coming to get him, and his sense of paranoia was not helped by the hate mail he would often receive from Confederate sympathisers who swore that Booth's death would be avenged.
When asked for autographs, he would often write long, rambling religious passages instead of his own signature, and when asked to give talks on his role in Booth's death, he would often agree to give the talk, and then promptly refuse to say anything about either himself or the incident, instead taking the opportunity to rant about the perils of fornication, swearing and drinking and call upon the audience to repent their sins and live a good, clean Christian life.

LATER LIFE

By 1878, Boston Corbett was jobless and broke. He decided to move to Kansas and stake a claim to some farmland. Although he made a half-hearted attempt to farm the land, but spent most of his time wandering on the plains, occasionally taking time to preach a fiery sermon or two, whether his audience wanted to hear it or not. For much of the time, he lived in a hole in the ground that he dug for himself on the property, telling one local woman that he wanted it to be his grave. He also constructed a dugout with slits in so that he could fire upon any assailants he might find trying to sneak upon him as he slept.
On one occasion, he was brought before a court accused of threatening some young boys with a pistol for playing baseball on a Sunday. He angrily denied the accusation, screaming 'Thats a lie! Lie! Lie!' However, he rather undermined his own case by waving around the pistol in question at the people in the courtroom whilst trying to make his point.
Despite, the rather open and shut nature of the case, nobody had the heart to pursue criminal charges against poor Boston, and a sympathetic former soldier got him a job as a doorman at the Kansas State legislature. Predictably, given Corbett's increasingly unhinged behaviour, this proved to be a mistake, as Corbett finally snapped one day in 1887 and began threatening everyone in the chamber for a litany of sins, real and imagined, causing legislator's to duck for cover and run for the exits as he waved his pistol at all and sundry.
Corbett was eventually subdued and disarmed, declared insane and dispatched to an insane asylum in Kansas City. However, the following year, Corbett spotted an unattended horse in the yard whilst he and his fellow inmates where out exercising. Seizing his chance, the old cavalryman lept onto the horse and galloped away to freedom, cheered on by his fellow inmates. Having escaped to a safe distance, he left the horse with a livery stable and asked them to get in touch with the Kansas State Asylum in order to return the horse, not wanting to be thought of as a horse thief. From there, he dropped in at the house of an old comrade, where he stayed the night. When he left in the morning, he told his friend he would be traveling on to Mexico. He disappeared after this and was never seen again, although some believe that he began calling himself 'Thomas' again and settled in Hinckley, Minnesota.
In 1894, the Great Hinckley Fire burned the town of Hinckley to the ground, along with many of its inhabitants. One of the victims who disappeared in the conflagration was a certain Mr Thomas P Corbett. Whether this was the man who killed Booth or another Thomas Corbett is not known, but unconfirmed sightings of Corbett continued to be made for several years after this date.

Fanny Adams: 1859-1867 The Little Girl Whose Tragic Murder Gave Rise to the Phrase 'Sweet F.A.'

Fanny Adams: 1859-1867 The Little Girl Whose Tragic Murder Gave Rise to the Phrase 

'Sweet F.A.'

8 Year old Fanny Adams, a labourer's daughter, lived in Alton, Hampshire during the 1860s. It was a hot summers day on Saturday, 24th of August 1867 when she went out to play with her sister, Lizzie, 8, and their friend Minnie Warner.

As they wandered down a lane down to a meadow (known to locals as 'Flood Meadow') to play, they encountered a man dressed in black frock coat and light coloured waistcoat and trousers, who offered them money to go and buy sweets, offering Fanny more if she came with him up the road to the nearby village of Sheldon. In their innocence, Minnie and Lizzie took the money and carried on down the lane, whilst Fanny accompanied the strange man in the opposite direction.

A couple of hours later, Minnie and and Lizzie returned and when asked by a neighbour, Mrs Gardiner, where Fanny was, told her about the encounter with the strange man. Mrs Gardiner ran to fetch Mrs Adams and together they began to search frantically for the missing girl along the lane to Flood Meadow. 
As they did so, they encountered a man matching the description given by the girls, and Mrs Gardiner demanded 'What have you done with the child?' The man admitted to having given money to the girls, as was his 'usual custom' with children, but denied all knowledge of Fanny's present whereabouts, insisting that the last time he had seen her, she was running back to her companions. 
He informed them that he was a solicitor's clerk in Alton on his way back to work. His respectable appearance and countenance carried a lot of weight with ordinary people in 1860s Britain, especially in areas where crime was rare, and this encouraged the women in the belief that he was not the type to do anything untoward and so they left him to carry on down his way into Alton.

As the evening wore on, Fanny was still missing, and so the neighbours formed a search party and combed the surrounding area for the little girl. It did not take them long to find her in a nearby hop field near a stream. She was dead. Without wishing to delve too far into the horrific details, it is necessary to relate that she had not only been murdered, but that her body had also been dismembered and scattered over a wide area around the scene. 
Upon the discovery, Mrs Adams ran to tell Mr Adams, who had been playing cricket some distance away. Upon being told of what had happened, Mr Adams, quite understandably, broke down and ran home to retrieve a shotgun in order to hunt down the man who had been described, fortunately, he was restrained and disarmed by his neighbours before the situation was made any worse.

ARREST AND TRIAL

The likely suspect was quickly identified, and the police arrested a 29 year old solicitor's clerk named Frederick Baker, who strongly protested his innocence. The identity of the suspect was no secret, and Baker had to be protected from a lynchmob that had formed outside the solicitor's office where he was arrested. 
The evidence was pretty damning. In addition to eyewitness accounts of him being in the area at the time of the murder, his clothes were still spotted with blood in spite of attempts to wash them, and when he was searched, he was found to be carrying a knife that was stained with blood. 
As if that wasn't enough, the police found his diary in his desk at work. For Saturday the 24th of August, a blasé entry simply recorded:

'Killed a young girl. It was fine and hot'

Baker was charged with murder. The defence team desperately tried to suggest that Baker had been misidentified, that the knife was too small to have been used to dismember the body and even that the diary entry had been incorrectly punctuated (it was suggested that Baker had forgot to put a comma after the word 'killed', and was therefore not a confession, but simply a statement of fact recording that a young girl had been killed).

Needless to say, it would have taken a pretty credulous jury to believe the case for the defence. Baker's only hope was that he might be found not guilty by reason of insanity, and the judge suggested to the jury that there was a good legal case for returning such a verdict, as Baker's family had a history of mental illness. His father had attempted to kill Baker and his siblings on several occasions during their childhoods, his cousin had been locked up in an asylum, his sister had died of a brain fever and Baker himself had once attempted suicide following a failed love affair.

Nevertheless, the jury, having been forced to endure the full sickening details of the crime during the course of the trial, was in no mood to be merciful, and they returned with a verdict of guilty within 15 minutes of retiring. 

Baker was inevitably sentenced to death, and was subsequently hanged on Christmas Eve, 1867 outside Winchester Prison, in front of a 5,000-strong crowd which had gathered to watch him die. He was notably the last man in Hampshire to be publicly executed, as public executions were abolished in May the following year.

SWEET FANNY ADAMS

The gruesome details of the murder and the subsequent trial had been widely reported in the national press (filling a contemporary public obsession with lurid stories of ghastly murders, especially ones committed against innocent young girls, a fine old Victorian tradition that the tabloid press has preserved down to the present day). 

The story was therefore very well known to most people in Britain at the time. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy was introducing a new type of tinned mutton ration for use at sea. This tinned mutton was not well regarded by the sailors, one of whom suggested that the tinned rations were not mutton at all, but the butchered remains of Fanny Adams. This anonymous sailor was evidently not the only jack with a sick sense of humour, and the phrase was widely adopted within the Navy, and the phrase 'Sweet Fanny Adams' came to be used as shorthand for something that was undesirable, and later, 'nothing at all'. The phrase itself evolved into 'Sweet F.A, which was said to stand for 'Sweet F*** All' or simply 'f*** all'. This slang phrase spread from the Navy to the British public at large, where it still remains in popular use. 

Not the most tasteful tribute to a dead little girl, especially one who had died in such tragic and horrendous circumstances. Hopefully her parents remained ignorant of the phrase, or at least the origins of its later incarnations. No doubt they would have been far from impressed to discover the manner in which their daughter had been immortalised by introducing a new phrase into the English lexicon.

A more fitting tribute was provided thanks to generosity of members of the Victorian public, whose contemporary enthusiasm for memorialising the dead ensured that a suitably elaborate tombstone would stand at the grave of Sweet Fanny Adams, which can still be seen at Alton Cemetery, and is still well cared for by sympathisers who are probably well aware of the story behind the phrase 'Sweet F.A.'

Madness and King George. George III's Would-Be-Assassins and their Diminished Responsibility

George III is famous chiefly for two things: Losing the American Colonies and for going mad. George III's mental illness is now thought to have been caused by porphyria, a blood disorder known to cause psychiatric as well as physical symptoms, such as the urine turning an appropriately royal purple. 
However, George III's encounter with madness was not limited to his own symptoms, on two separate occasions, he was the victim of assassination attempts by two people equally or even more unhinged than he was.

Mrs Margaret Nicholson (c. 1750 - 1828)

The first of these is the aforementioned Mrs Margaret Nicholson, who was in fact a spinster (The 'Mrs' was a courtesy title often extended to unmarried women who had already past the age at which society deemed it wise to have been married by). 
Margaret Nicholson was a former maid and needleworker who was originally from Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham. She had moved down south to find work as a maid at the age of 12, and had in her time worked at several notable households, including those of Tory Peer Lord Coventry, and the Anglo-Irish soldier Sir John Sebright.
However, things seem to have gone downhill for her in 1783, when she was dismissed from her employment as a maid for having been discovered engaging in an illicit affair with another servant. Her lover subsequently abandoned her, and poor Mrs Nicholson was left to fend for herself in London, where she got by scratching a living as a needleworker. 
Nobody seems to have seriously taken notice of her deteriorating mental state until one day in August 1786, when, on the pretext of presenting the king with a petition (which was common in those days), Mrs Margaret Nicholson lunged forward with a desert knife in a feeble attempt to stab him as he alighted from his carriage at St James' Palace.
As assassination attempts go, it was a pitiful. The knife was blunt and was attempted at such a distance that George III easily dodged the the effort. Mrs Nicholson was quickly seized by the King's bodyguards, supported by furious onlookers. Fearing that she might be lynched or otherwise mistreated, the King called out “leave her alone, the poor creature is mad! Do not hurt her! She has not hurt me”. A wondrously enlightened attitude for an 18th Century monarch, who probably already had reason to empathise with her plight, having suffered a number of mild episodes of the illness which would eventually consume him.

Mrs Margaret Nicholson's actions technically constituted High Treason, a crime for which, even in those late times, could have earned her a gruesome death by burning at the stake*. However, when her lodgings were raided following her arrest, it was discovered that she had written many rambling entries and letters in which she claimed, amongst other things, to be the true heir to the throne of Great Britain, as well as the mother of several prominent figures of the day, some of whom were older than she was, despite the fact that she also claimed to be a virgin.

It was plainly obvious to all that the would-be-assassin was a few pence short of a shilling, and she was never put on trial (perhaps in part due to George III's humanitarian attitude towards mental illness), instead, she was confined to a lunatic Asylum (the Royal Bethlehem Hospital AKA 'Beldam'). Her confinement in an asylum was controversial to both Whigs and Tories however. Many Whigs sniffed that detaining Nicholson without any semblance of a trial was yet another example of George III's tyrannical impulses, whereas those on the Tory end of the spectrum where rather more disappointed that they were to be deprived of the gratifying spectacle of seeing a traitor and would-be regicide being brutally executed, only three years after the loss of the American colonies and only a few months after suffering the sight of the author of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson strutting around in the streets of London earlier in the Spring, not only as a free man but also as the citizen of a new nation forged in the furnace of treason and rebellion against the Crown.
Nevertheless, Maragaret Nicholson spent the remaining years of her life confined in Bedlam, dying in 1828, 42 years after her assassination attempt.

James Hatfield (c. 1771 - 1841)

James Hatfield, the other of George III's would-be assassins, was a former soldier with the 15th light dragoons, who had fought at the Battle of Tourcoing in 1794, and survived to become a prisoner of war despite the best efforts of a French cavalryman to hack his head open like a coconut. With 8 separate sabre wounds to the head, James Hatfield lived, but the injuries to his brain challenged his grip on reality. Upon returning to Britain, he joined a bizarre millennial cult and came to believe that the second coming of Christ would be brought forward if he could get himself executed by the British Government, and what better way to do this, than by trying to assassinate the King himself? 
And so, on the 15th of May 1800, during the performance of a play at the Drury Lane Theatre at which George III was present, James Hatfield waited until the National Anthem was being played before standing up, pointing a pistol at the Royal Box and opening fire. The bullet missed the King, and Hatfield called out “God bless you your Royal Highness (sic)** I like you very well! You are a good fellow!” Remarks which call into question whether he really intended to kill the King, or merely intended to make sufficient show of it to get himself arrested, tried and hanged for treason. 
Whatever the case, the King himself appeared unfazed by the attempt, and even fell asleep during the course of the play, which continued after the incident. 
The King earned much praise and popularity for his cool demeanour, but considering his own often tenuous grip on reality by this time, it can only be speculated how much of this was down to stone-cold courage on his part, rather than an inability to comprehend the seriousness of what had just happened.

On this occasion, a trial was held and Hatfield was defended by no less a man than Thomas Erskine, future Lord Chancellor and one of the greatest barristers of his day. During the course of the trial, it was established that since returning from France, Hatfield had demonstrated to many of those around him that he had lost his sense of reason. Although previously, the insanity defence worked along the premise that a defendant was so far gone as to be completely incapable of reasoned planning for his actions, Erskine and the testimony of two eminent surgeons asserted that madness did not necessarily mean that a patient was entirely incapable of planning, despite his or her delusions and further asserted that insanity “unaccompanied by frenzy or raving madness [was] the true character of insanity”. 

The Judge, Lloyd Kenyon halted the trial and ordered the jury to acquit the defendant, but stipulated that for his own sake, as well as that of wider society, he should not be discharged, and instead confined to an asylum, and so Hatfield found himself confined to the very same hospital in which Margaret Nicholson had been confined to some 14 years earlier. 
Parliament subsequently passed two acts, the Criminal Lunatic Act 1800, which made it easier for the state to confine those who were certified to be dangerously insane, and also the Treason Act of 1800, to make it easier to prosecute people who attempted to harm the monarch. 

As for George III himself, his own mental condition steadily declined to such an extent that by 1811 his insanity was considered to be permanent, with only brief and occasional glimpses of lucidity. His Royal Powers were taken up by his eldest son, who became Prince Regent (and later George IV). From then on, George III was largely confined to Windsor Castle, out of public sight, until he died in 1820. 
His would-be-assassins, Mrs Margaret Nicholson and Mr James Hatfield died 8 and 21 years later respectively, albeit in far less luxurious conditions. In fact, such were the appalling conditions of the Bedlam, and of lunatic asylums in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries generally that many have speculated whether having them executed might not have been the more humane thing to do in the long run, but the legal precedents established by finding them not-guilty of serious crimes by reason of their insanity helped to establish the concept of diminished responsibility much more firmly. 

*Catherine Murphy was the last British woman to suffer this horrific fate. She was burned at the stake in Newgate Prison in 1789, for the ostensibly far less serious crime of coining (forging counterfeit coins), which was at that time considered to be a form of high treason. 

**As the King, the correct term of address should have been 'Your Majesty' rather than 'Your Royal Highness', a common mistake made even today, even by people who aren't mad...

Edward William Barton-Wright 1860-1951: British Martial Arts Pioneer
E.W. Barton-Wright was born in Bangalore, India in 1860, as one of six children William Barton Wright, an English mechanical engineer, and his Scottish wife Janet. Having been educated in France and Germany, he got a job as a railway clerk, before training as an engineer and travelling the world working for various railway and mining companies.

Barton-Wright stated in an interview towards the end of his life that he had always been interested in self-defence, and had, during the course of his education and work, learned many forms of martial arts, including Boxing, Single-Stick, Savate (French kickboxing) and western wrestling, often putting these into practice, particularly during a 'long period of residence' in rough part of Portugal, where he claimed to have been compelled to defend himself on several occasions from assailants wielding clubs and knives.

In 1895, Barton-Wright arrived in Japan as an employee of the EH Hunter Company as an antimony smelting specialist. 

Whilst living in Kobe, B-W learned Jiu Jitsu under Sensei Terajima Kuniichiro (of the Shinden Fudo Ryu School) and occasionally, under Sensei Jigaro Kano (the founder of Judo, which was derived from Jiu Jitsu). 

Meanwhile, in England...

In the late 19th century, England's cities were plagued with violent gangs. 'Hooligans' (named after a possibly apocryphal London-based Irish criminal named Patrick O'Hoolihan) plagued the rougher parts of London, whilst 'Scutlers'* did the same in Manchester and Salford, engaging in violence and thuggery for its own sake as well as for the purposes of theft. 'Garroters' (or 'Thugs') also roamed the streets of Britain's cities, mugging people by half strangling their victims whilst accomplices relieved them of their money and valuables. Along with the usual mixtures of 'ruffians', 'footpads' (pedestrian muggers) and other scoundrels, There was a widespread perception in British cities that a respectable citizen must take precautions against predatory violence perpetuated by the lower orders.

Many respectable people protected themselves through the simple expedient of carrying around a swordstick or a pistol, or if those were unaffordable, clubs, brass-knuckles, knives or other nasty implements (Britain's laws on the carrying of dangerous weaponry in public in those days was even more permissive than those of modern-day Texas!)**

There was however, a large strand of thought amongst some Englishman that the carrying of weapons to defend oneself was somehow unmanly, unsporting and quite frankly, despicably foreign. Not fit for the civilised subjects of the World's mightiest Empire living in the epicentre of civilisation itself (or so the theory went anyway). Barton-Wright himself alluded to this 19th Century view of Anglo-Saxon moral superiority in one of his earlier articles, in which he stated:

“In foreign countries people never fight for amusement or diversion, as is often the case in England and the United States. Bearing this fact in mind, it will be more easy to understand that when foreigners fall out and fight, they recognise one goal only, and that is to overcome and defeat their adversaries, and any means is considered justifiable and is resorted to, to attain this end.
Of course, what constitutes honour in this sense is entirely a matter of early training and education. In this country we are brought up with the idea that there is no more honourable way of settling a dispute than resorting to Nature's weapons, the fists, and to scorn taking advantage of another man when he is down.
A FOREIGNER, however, will not hesitate to use a chair, or a beer bottle, or a knife, or anything that comes handy, and if no weapon is available the chances are he would employ what we should consider are underhanded means.”***
Barton-Wright proposed a new system of self-defence, an eclectic mix of Eastern and Western styles, as a means to combat beastly sorts, foreign or otherwise."

Bartitsu
In 1899, EW Barton-Wright returned to England and established a dojo in Shaftesbury Avenue, London, where he taught a brand new system of self-defence, inspired by all the various fighting styles he had learned on his travels. He rather modestly referred this new system as 'Bartitsu', a portmanteau of 'Barton' and 'Jiu Jitsu'. 
Despite its obviously Japanese-inspired name, Bartitsu was a fusion of Eastern and Western styles of fighting. In addition to Jiu Jitsu and Judo, Bartitsu also incorporated western-style boxing and wrestling, as well as French Savate and single-stick fighting, the latter of which played a particularly significant role in this system. 

EW Barton-Wright eschewed the use of firearms, blades and other purposely designed weapons as self-defence tools, instead emphasising the use of ones own body, as well as incidental weaponry (such as walking sticks, hats, umbrellas and even bicycles) to use against an aggressor.****

Barton-Wright wrote many articles in Pearson's Magazine, an Anglo-American periodical, expounding on the techniques and methods of Bartitsu, in order to promote his martial art. Another contributor to Pearson's Magazine, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle famously incorporated Barton-Wright's system into his Sherlock Holmes series, whose protagonist used a form of 'Japanese wrestling' which he called 'Baritsu' to defeat his arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty at Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. 

As a multi-discplinary self-defence system, B-W employed specialist instructors to assist him in teaching the different aspects of Bartisu. Among these were Yukio Tani, Sadakazu Uyenishi from Japan, and Pierre Vigny, a Swiss stick-fighting expert and Savate practitioner. 

In addition to using the principles of Bartitsu to promote self defence, B-W also made a concession to contemporary western sensibilities by showing his readers how to show off to their friends and members of the opposite sex by using martial arts as well as mechanical principles to perform feats of apparently amazing strength by utilising core strength and balance. 

Following the appearance of his articles in Pearson's Magazine, Bartitsu came to the attention of many notables, including as mentioned, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, and also Herbert Gladstone (William Gladstone's youngest son), Lord Alwyne Compton and Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon*****

Barton-Wright was probably particularly gratified however, thanks to the ringing endorsement given to Bartitsu by a certain Col. George Malcom Fox, the recently retired Inspector-General of the British Army's Physical Training Corps, who stated:

I have no hesitation in pronouncing Mr. Barton-Wright’s system as absolutely sound in theory, exceedingly practical and very scientific. I was much impressed with the extremely easy and graceful way in which he seemed to disturb the balance of his opponent and render him helpless. And although Mr. Barton-Wright repeatedly allowed his opponent to choose his own hold and take him at the greatest possible disadvantage, he never seemed to be at a loss what to do, and how to throw his opponent instantaneously. I am quite certain that if our police were to learn some of his throws and grips, they could cope much more successfully with every kind of resistance." 

Barton-Wright later recalled that Edward VII, whilst still the Prince of Wales, had once requested an audience with him to demonstrate his skills, but had to drop out when he broke his hand at a demonstration. 

Decline and Obscurity

Sadly for the world of martial arts, B-W's school of Bartitsu only lasted 3 years. A series of disastrous and poorly managed public demonstrations (at which unseemly public disagreements between B-W and his fellow instructors were reported in the press) led to a decline in its image of respectability and effectiveness. 

A disagreement between Ukio Tani and Barton-Wright allegedly descended into physical violence, and although B-W later claimed to have won the fight, Tani nevertheless left B-W and set himself up as a strongman and wrestler, later establishing his own school teaching Japanese Jiu-Jitsu, as did Sadakazu Uyenishi.
The fees demanded from members proved too high for most, and as members dropped away, a shortage of money forced him to close the Bartitsu Club permanently in March 1902. Most of Barton-Wright's instructors went on to become travelling showmen and/or set up their own self-defence schools, catering to people interested in learning martial arts but for a more sensible fee. 

Following the collapse of his martial arts school, Barton-Wright turned his attention to another of his interests, the use of electricity and magnetism as a form of therapy, and operated a clinic out of his flat in London to treat people with various ailments including arthritis and rheumatism with electro-magnetic machines of his own invention. 
Not surprisingly, his treatments were little more than quackery and were widely discredited by qualified medical professionals. Towards the end of his life, Barton-Wright remained largely forgotten, and spent his old age in virtual destitution holed up in a small flat in London.

He was however, briefly plucked from obscurity one last time in 1950, when he was tracked down by Gunji Koizumi, the 'Father of British Judo', who interviewed him for a contemporary martial arts magazine, and then introduced him to an audience at the Budokwai Judo club as the 'Pioneer of Japanese Martial Arts in Europe'. In spite of this valedictory act of kindness by a fellow martial arts legend, when William Barton-Wright died the following year, aged 90, he was largely forgotten unmissed, buried in an unmarked grave in Kingston Cemetery, Surrey. 

EW Barton-Wright remained in posthumous obscurity until the 1990s when martial arts scholars and Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts began to reveal the origins of the mysterious 'Baritsu' used by Conan-Doyle's fictional detective. The articles Barton-Wright had written, as well as the lectures given to the Japanese Society, and accounts of demonstrations were rediscovered and allowed modern martial artists to recreate the techniques described and re-establish a martial art that had lain dormant for almost a century. 

Legacy

Although Barton-Wright's martial art ultimately failed to flourish in his lifetime, he was, as Koizumi himself acknowledged, instrumental in introducing Japanese martial arts into Britain. The instructors he invited over from Japan, chiefly Yukio Tani and Sadakuzi Uyenishi, helped to establish Jiu Jitsu in Britain and provide a foundation upon which the adoption of other styles and schools (including Judo) could be based. 

Yukio Tani went on to teach Bill Underword, the British-born Canadian who eventually established the arts of 'Combato' and 'Defendo' and who played a prominent role in training US and Canadian soldiers in unarmed combat during World War II. 

Barton-Wright was also notable as a pioneer in promoting martial arts to women as well as men. For women to learn violent sports like boxing or wrestling was considered unladylike and unseemly, and something that should remain an exclusively male preserve.

However, as a man who was always chiefly interested in the 'self-defence' aspect of martial arts (rather than competition), B-W took the view that it was important for women to know how to defend themselves as well as men. He believed that his system, geared as it was towards the use of technique, rather than strength, was ideally suited to women as well as weaker men and his articles in Pearson's Magazine frequently featured scenarios involving women defending themselves from insalubrious male characters bent on doing unmentionable things to them, clearly aiming his art at more than just men seeking new forms of showing off their manliness and sporting prowess.

Edith Garrud, a former student of Bartitsu, continued her studies by learning Jiu Jitsu under Sadakazu Uyenishi, who eventually left the club in charge of Edith's husband, William Garrud when he returned to Japan in 1908. Edith Garrud would later play a prominent part in the Women's suffragette movement, training an elite group of physically robust suffragette's known as 'The Bodyguard' to defend suffragette meetings from violence meted out by the police and hostile members of the public.

Today, Edward William Barton-Wright's defence system is undergoing something of a revival thanks to martial artists from around the world with an interest in history, and clubs teaching Bartitsu have been established in New York, London and Vancouver amongst other places, making the style much more successful and widespread than it ever was during it's founder's lifetime. But its legacy, and the impact of EW Barton-Wright on the development of martial arts in Britain and the West, has long been woefully under-recognised and unappreciated. 

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*The foundation of Manchester City FC in 1880 by the Rev Arthur Connell was part of an initiative to give the Manchester boys who typically became scuttlers something more wholesome to do with their time, 'A gentleman's game played by thugs' indeed...

** Large sections of the British public were in fact often better armed than the police, who have always been routinely unarmed. In fact, during the 1911 siege of Sydney Street, the police apparently resorted to asking members of the public if they could borrow their guns! Despite the existence of street violence in Victorian/Edwardian Britain, the fact that the existence of a citzenry that was better armed than the police themselves and yet still allowed itself to be policed without too much trouble testifies to the fact that Britain back then had much more civilised mindset than is the case today. 

*** A quaint perception, to say the least!! 

**** Today, even more so than back then, the legal emphasis remains on the use 'incidental' rather than 'purposeful' weaponry in the context of self-defence in Britain. However, even in the 1890s, B-W indicated that using a gun to defend yourself from even a knife-wielding assailant might have unpleasant legal consequences that might be better avoided by using his system instead. 

***** Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon was later notorious for being a prominent male passenger who managed to survive the wreck of the Titanic when many women and children died for lack of lifeboats.