One martial art which won't be featured in this year's Olympics is suffrajitsu. Just as well, perhaps, since it mostly seems to have involved tossing police officers through the air, and the gendarmerie of Paris are a notoriously humourless lot.
On this date a plaque was unveiled in the London borough of Islington to commemorate a former resident: Edith Garrud (1872-1971). Among martial arts enthusiasts she is still revered as one of the greatest British pioneers of their sports, one of the first people in this country to study and teach jujitsu. She was four feet eleven inches tall, small with it, and an active supporter of votes for women. Fed up with seeing her comrades getting duffed up by coppers, she taught them how to fight back.
Edith was born in Somerset and raised in Wales, but not much else is known about her early life. She trained as an instructor in "physical culture" (a keep fit cult of the time), and that's presumably where she met the man she married, William, who was also an instructor. They ended up in London, where, around the turn of the century, they saw a jujitsu demonstration. A few years later they opened their own dojo.
They key feature of jujitsu which the couple stressed to their students was that it enabled people to defend themselves against much larger, stronger assailants by redirecting the attacker's own force against him. This core philosophy was crucial later, when middle-aged women were trying to protect themselves from big men (in those days, Metropolitan Police constables had to be at least 5 foot 10; suffragettes didn't.)
In the years immediately before World War One, battles between the police and the suffragette wing of the suffrage movement became increasingly violent. The authorities were determined to smash the uprising using the full physical force of the state. It became routine for women to be beaten, and even sexually assaulted, by police and vigilantes, during protests and meetings.
At some point, Edith and William began giving demonstrations of jujitsu techniques to members of the WSPU, the suffragette organisation run by Emmeline Pankhurst. There is a classic photo of the couple, in which he's dressed in the uniform of London bobby, while she plays the part of a suffragette who has the hapless rozzer in a humiliating and plainly agonising armlock after he's tried to arrest her.
When she started running special classes for suffragettes the press thought they'd discovered the funniest thing ever: a tiny feminist, in a respectable hat, teaching a discipline which was not only violent, but also Japanese. That was when some word-playing journalist or sub-editor came up with the name "suffrajitsu." Edith became the subject of cartoons in Punch and elsewhere. She was only "a little dot of a woman," as one overconfident cop described her, but she could literally throw large men over her head from a prone position.
It was during the last months before the war began that the WSPU found it necessary to set up an elite force - known as the Bodyguard, trained by Edith - to protect their leader, Pankhurst, from being taken by police snatch squads when she was on the run. Armed with Indian clubs as well as their jujitsu training, these women went into action many times: Pankhurst would make a surprise appearance as a speaker at a rally, the police would spot her and the cry would go up "There she is, lads! Grab her!" and the Bodyguard would somehow spirit her away from their yearning handcuffs and hungry truncheons.
One one occasion, the police overpowered the Bodyguard and managed to drag Pankhurst back to the cop shop - only to discover that they'd been conned; they'd arrested a decoy in disguise, while the real Mrs P was in the wind.
That violent era of the suffrage campaign ended with the declaration of war, as the pro-imperialist Pankhurst threw her weight behind the government. Edith and William continued to teach martial arts at least into the 1920s. They both lived long lives, but Edith Garrud was a widow when her fame was briefly reignited by a magazine interview in 1965, during which she recalled the occasion when a policeman outside Parliament had ordered her to move on as she was causing an obstruction. She politely explained to him that, in fact, he was the one being obstructive and then casually chucked him across the pavement.
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Sources:
https://thornhillsquare.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/celebrate-the-life-of-edith-garrud-on-saturday-30-june/
www.richmondandtwickenhamtimes.co.uk/news/10961324.metropolitan-police-in-twickenham-could-this-be-the-mets-shortest-ever-officer/
www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34425615
www.historyoffighting.com/edith-garrud.php
https://shorturl.at/Lthex